The Barefoot Queen (29 page)

Good gypsy!
she told herself just as laughter from the settlement, prompted by the discussion over the King’s supposed mule, brought her back to reality. Before giving María a quizzical look, she checked that the sun had already passed its peak.

The old woman shrugged at the sound of laughter, paradoxical under such circumstances.

“You hear them? They’re laughing. They can’t keep us down,” she declared.

THE VILLAGE
of Camas was barely half a league from where they were hiding; however, in the night, walking slowly in the moonlight, being startled by and hiding from even their own noises, it took them more than an hour to reach the outskirts.

“Where are we going?” whispered Milagros.

María tried to get her bearings in the night.

“There is a small farmhouse nearby … That way.” She pointed with her atrophied finger.

“Who are they?”

“An unhappily married couple, with more kids in their house than fruit trees on the land they’ve leased.” The healer now walked with firm, decisive steps. “I made the mistake of taking pity on them and refusing a couple of eggs they wanted to give me the first time I cured one of their runny-nosed kids. I think that every time they’ve called me since then, they’ve offered me the very same eggs.”

Milagros answered with a forced laugh. “That’s what you get for doing favors,” she said.

Should I tell her that it was her grandfather Melchor who begged me to go cure that boy?
wondered the old woman.
And that his skin was of a darker shade than his siblings?
In any case, she laughed to herself, there weren’t many resemblances to be found among any of that peasant woman’s other children either, and she was known for her exuberant flesh and loose ways.

“Mistakes like that are common,” she chose to answer. “I don’t know if you know but something similar recently happened to me, with a young gypsy girl who had got herself into a bind. The council of elders was about to banish her.”

María didn’t want to see the expression the girl’s face twisted into. “There it is,” she said instead, pointing to a couple of small buildings that could barely be seen in the darkness.

They were greeted by some barking dogs. Instantly, a faint light appeared in one of the windows. A piece of canvas that was the only thing separating it from the night was pushed to one side. The figure of a man was silhouetted inside of what was nothing more than two shacks together, as miserable if not more so than the ones in the gypsy settlement.

“Who’s there?” shouted the man.

“It’s me, María, the gypsy.”

The two women continued advancing, the now calm dogs trotting between their feet, while the farmer seemed to be consulting with someone inside the shack.

“What do you want?” he asked after a little while, in a tone that didn’t please María.

“From your attitude,” answered the healer, “I think you already know.”

“The law has threatened to jail anyone who helps you. They have arrested all the gypsies in Spain at once.”

Milagros and María stopped a few steps from the window. All the gypsies in Spain! As if wanting to accompany the bad news with his presence, the man came out into the light. He was gaunt with thin hair, a long messy beard and bare torso that clearly showed his ribcage, proof of his hunger.

“Maybe you’d be better off in jail, Gabriel,” spat out the healer.

“What would become of my children, crone?” he complained.

Let their fathers take care of them!
she was tempted to reply.

“You know them, you’ve cured them; they don’t deserve that.”

She knew them, of course she knew them! One squalid little abandoned girl, her large eyes sunken in their sockets, had begged her for help over the two long days it took for her to die in her arms; she could do nothing for her. “All the thankless sons of bitches like you should be in jail!” she answered, remembering the girl’s eyes.

The man thought for a few seconds. Behind him appeared two boys who had been awoken by the conversation.

“I won’t turn you in,” assured the peasant farmer. “I swear! I will give you something to help you continue on your way, but don’t ruin my life, crone.”

“Now he’s going to offer you those two eggs again,” whispered Milagros. “Let’s go, María. We can’t trust this man, he’ll sell us out.”

“Your life is already in ruins, you wretch,” shouted the old woman, ignoring the girl.

They couldn’t continue walking. It was pitch black. They had no money: the little they’d had was left behind in the settlement—for the soldiers, lamented the healer, including the lovely medallion and pearl necklace that Melchor had given them.
All the gypsies in Spain,
the farmer had said. She was tired; her body could take no more … She needed to think, to organize her thoughts, find out what had happened and where those who had escaped were.

“Are you going to refuse help to the granddaughter of Melchor Vega?” she said all of a sudden.

Milagros and the farmer were both surprised. Why had María mentioned Grandfather? What did he have to do with it? But the healer knew what she was doing: she knew that those who knew Melchor—and in that house he was well known—grew to appreciate him as much as they feared him.

“Do you know what would happen to you if Melchor finds out?” insisted María. “You’ll wish for the worst of jails.”

The man hesitated.

“Let them in!” It was a woman’s voice.

“The gypsy must have been arrested,” he tried to oppose his wife.

“El Galeote arrested?” The woman laughed. “You’ll always be an idiot! I said let them in!”

And what if they arrested him in some other gypsy settlement?
wondered Milagros then. It had been four months since anyone had heard from him; no news had reached them although both she and her mother, and even Caridad, had asked every gypsy who showed up in Triana. No. Melchor Vega couldn’t have been arrested.

“But tomorrow at daybreak, without fail, they will leave.” The farmer gave in, interrupting Milagros’s thoughts, before disappearing from the window.

The two women waited for the man to remove the planks he used to
close the shack. Amid the sounds of wood moving and muttered insults, Milagros felt she was being watched: the two boys who had appeared behind their father were now by the windowsill, and they undressed her with their eyes. Instinctively, the girl, feeling the weight of their gaze, moved closer to María.

“What are you looking at?” The old woman scolded them as soon as she noticed what Milagros was doing. Then she took her by the arm and led her inside, kneeling to enter through a space that the farmer had managed to open.

María knew the shack but Milagros grimaced at the penetrating odor that hit her as soon as she entered and at what she could make out in the light of a guttering candle: three or four sweaty children slept on the floor, on straw, between the legs of an emaciated donkey who rested with its neck and ears drooped; it was probably the only possession those people had.
There’s no need for you to hide the burro,
thought Milagros.
Not even a starving gypsy would go near it.
Then she turned her head toward a broken stool and what used to be a table where a candle rested atop a twisted mountain of wax, both near the straw mattress where a woman lay. After squinting her eyes to try to make out some trace of Melchor in the girl’s features, she indicated with a halfhearted sweep of her hand for them to settle in wherever they could.

Milagros hesitated. María pulled her toward the donkey, getting it out of the way with a slap to the rump, and they sat against the wall with the children. The peasant, now that he’d put the door planks back up, didn’t lie down with his wife. Despite the summer heat he curled up next to a little blonde girl who grumbled in her sleep at his touch. María sucked her teeth in disgust.

“Get out of here,” she said later, when the boys from the window, dirty and in rags, tried to lie down near Milagros.

Before they decided where to lie, the farmer’s wife extended her arm and snuffed out the candle by pinching the wick with her fingertips; the sudden darkness made Milagros better able to hear the murmur of the two older boys’ complaints and stumbling.

Shortly after, the only sounds heard in the shack were the slow and deliberate breathing of the children and the donkey, occasional coughing, the peasant’s snores and his wife’s sighs as she tried to get comfortable, time and again, on the straw mattress amid the shadows visible in
the moonlight that entered through the worn canvas on the window. All those sounds and images were unfamiliar to Milagros. What were they doing there, beneath the miserable roof of some
payos
who had only reluctantly taken them in? Their law forbade it; Grandfather would say: you shouldn’t sleep with
payos.
Would María sleep? she wondered. As if she knew what was passing through the girl’s head, the old woman searched out her hand. Milagros responded, grabbing it and squeezing it tightly. Then she sensed something more in those thin atrophied bones: María, plunged into the unknown just as she was, was also looking for solace. Fear? Old María couldn’t be frightened! She had always, always been a bold, resolute woman. Everyone respected her! Nevertheless, the gaunt hand that jabbed her palm clearly showed the opposite.

Far now from the shots, the commotion of the settlement and the need to flee, surrounded by unfriendly strangers in a disgusting shack, in the darkness and gripping a hand that suddenly had turned old on her, the girl understood her true situation. Nobody would help them! The
payos
had always repudiated them, so now, when they were threatened with jail, it would be even worse. Nor would they find gypsies they could take shelter with; from what that man said, they’d all been arrested, and the few who had managed to escape would be in the same situation they were. A tear, long and languid, ran down her cheek. Milagros felt it brushing against her; its slow sliding seemed to want to drown her further into vulnerability. She thought of her parents and of Cachita. She yearned for her mother’s embrace, to be close to her, wherever she was, even in a jail. Her mother had always known what to do and she would have consoled her … Old María was already sleeping. Her hand was limp now, and her labored breathing and snores told Milagros that she was alone in her desperation. Milagros gave in to sobs. She didn’t want to think anymore. She didn’t want …

A blow to her thigh stopped even the tears in their tracks. Milagros remained stock-still while the possibility that it had been a rat ran through her head. She reacted when she felt fingers clawing at her inner thigh, over her clothes.
One of the sons!
she said to herself, violently releasing Old María’s hand and searching in the darkness for the scoundrel’s head. She found him on his knees by her side. The boy pressed and pinched her pubis hard, and when Milagros tried to scream he silenced her by covering her mouth with his other hand. His panting stopped abruptly when
she pulled out some locks of his hair. His pain gave Milagros the chance to get free of the hand covering her mouth; she pounced on him, drove her teeth into the skin beneath one of his ears and scratched his face. She heard a repressed howl. She tasted blood just as he lifted her skirt and petticoats. She twisted, without letting go of her prey, at the stab of pain she felt when he reached her vulva. She had never been touched there by anyone … Then she bit him viciously until he left her privates alone because he had to use both hands to defend himself from her bites, which was when Milagros took the opportunity to push him away with her foot.

The sound that the peasant farmer’s son made when he fell didn’t seem to disturb anyone in the shack. Milagros was sweating and panting, but above all trembling with an uncontrollable shivering. She heard the boy moving and knew for certain that he would attack her again: he was like an animal in heat, blind.

“I have a knife!” she shouted as she tried to find the one the old woman used to cut plants in María’s apron pockets. “I’ll kill you if you come near me!”

María woke up, startled by the shouts and agitation. Confused, she stammered out some unintelligible sounds. Milagros finally found the knife and bared it, with a trembling hand, to the rat who was once again at her side; the blade shone in the moonlight that entered the shack.

“I’ll kill you!” she muttered in rage.

“What … what is going on?” Old María managed to ask.

“Fernando.” The voice came from the mother’s bed. “She will do it, she will kill you, she’s a gypsy, a Vega, and if she doesn’t, her grandfather surely will. But before he does, Melchor will castrate you and rip out your eyes. Leave the girl alone!”

With the knife trembling before his face, Milagros saw him back up like the animal he was: on all fours. Then her hand fell like a dead weight.

“What happened, girl?” insisted the old woman even though she was pretty sure of the answer.

SHE HAD
never been touched there, and she never imagined that the first time would be a disgusting, pathetic
payo.
The dawn found the two women awake, just as they had been the rest of the night. The light gradually revealed the poverty and filth inside the shack, but Milagros paid
no attention to that; the girl felt dirtier than her surroundings. Had that bastard stolen her virginity? If so, she could never marry a gypsy. That possibility had obsessed her through the long hours of the night. She went over and over in her mind a thousand times the confused scenes and a thousand times she scolded herself for not having done more to keep it from happening. But she had kicked, she remembered that; maybe it was in that moment … surely that had been when the boy was able to reach her virtue. At first she hesitated, but later she confided in María.

“How far did he get?” the old woman questioned her in the darkness, not hiding her concern.

María was one of the four women who always took part, for the Vega family, in checking brides’ virginity. Milagros shrugged, her palms up, which the old woman couldn’t see. What did she know? How far did he have to get? She only remembered the pain and terrible sensation of humiliation and helplessness. She felt unable to define it; it was as if in that very instant, just a mere second, everything and everyone had disappeared and she was facing her own disgraced body insulting her.