The Barefoot Queen (30 page)

“I don’t know,” she answered.

“Did he dig inside of you? For how long? How many fingers did he stick in?”

“I don’t know!” she shouted. Milagros shrank back at the light that was starting to enter the shack.

“When it’s light,” the healer whispered to her, “check to see whether your petticoats are stained with blood, even if it’s only a few drops.”

AND WHAT
if they are?
The girl trembled.

Gabriel, his wife and children began to get up. Milagros kept her head bowed and made sure to avoid eye contact with the two older boys. She did look at a small dark-skinned boy with blond hair who didn’t dare to come over to her but who smiled at her with strangely white teeth. María’s expression soured again when the little blonde girl the farmer had been embracing in his sleep showed tiny budding bare breasts when she stretched in front of her father. She had treated Josefa, that was the girl’s name, a few months earlier for some tapeworms. The girl, flustered, hid from the healer when she realized she was there.

The peasant farmer, scratching his head, went over to the planks he
used to close the door, followed by the tetherless donkey. María gestured toward the door with her chin.

“Go,” she said to Milagros, who got up and waited beside the animal.

“Where do you think you’re going?” growled the farmer.

“I have to go out,” answered the girl.

“With those colorful clothes? You’d be recognized a mile away. Forget about it.”

Milagros sought the old woman’s help.

“She has to go out,” María affirmed, already by the girl’s side.

“Not a chance.”

“Cover yourself with this.”

Gabriel and the gypsies turned toward his wife. The woman, standing, her hair messy, dressed in a simple shirt beneath which you could see large hips and immense fallen breasts, tossed a blanket at Milagros that the girl caught on the fly and threw over her shoulders.

The peasant farmer swore under his breath and let them through the door when he had finished with the last plank. The first to go out was the donkey. Then Milagros, and as María was about to follow her, the two older boys tried to get ahead of her.

“Where do you think you’re going?” inquired María.

“We need to go out, too,” answered one of them.

The old woman saw the wound beneath his ear and stationed herself in the doorway, small as she was, with her legs open and her penetrating gypsy gaze in her eyes.

“Nobody leaves here, is that understood?” Then she turned toward Milagros and indicated that she should head off toward the fields.

It took the young gypsy girl some time to check whether she had lost her virtue. She took so long that Old María, aware of the lust oozing from the boy who had attacked her during the night, understood how serious a predicament they were in: they had made it through the night but they would only get through this moment if the young man, who was shifting restlessly from foot to foot, didn’t push her over and run out to force himself on Milagros again. Nobody would be able to stop him.

Suddenly she knew she was vulnerable, tremendously vulnerable; it wasn’t like among her people, she wasn’t respected here. A father who slept with his young daughter? He wouldn’t do anything to stop it—he might even join in happily. She watched the wife: she was distractedly
tearing off bits from a crust of bread, detached from it all. If they killed them, Melchor would never find out … If they survived this morning, what would happen the next day, and the next? How could she protect Milagros? The girl was beautiful; she emanated sensuality with every movement. They wouldn’t even be able to walk a couple of leagues before men started pouncing on her, and she would only be able to respond with shouts and insults. That was the crude reality.

A noise from behind her back made her turn her head. Milagros’s smile confirmed that she was still a virgin, or at least she thought so. Old María didn’t let her come any closer.

“Let’s go,” she ordered. “The blanket is instead of the eggs you owe me,” she added to the peasant woman, who just shrugged and continued picking at the crust.

“Wait,” requested Milagros when the old woman was heading toward her. “Did you see that blond boy with the brown skin?” María nodded as she closed her eyes. “He seems smart. Call him over. I thought he could do something for us.”

FRAY JOAQUÍN
observed the warm embrace that united Caridad and Milagros.

“Thank God you are all right!” exclaimed the priest when he reached the peripheries of the solitary chapel of the Virgen del Patrocinio, nestled in the fertile valley, on the outskirts of Triana, before Milagros and Caridad ran to each other.

“Leave God out of it!” exclaimed María then, which made the friar’s face fall as he turned to her. “The last time your reverence spoke of God you told me that he was going to come to my house and instead the King’s soldiers showed up. What God is this who allows women, old people and innocent children to be arrested?”

Fray Joaquín stammered before opening his arms helplessly. From then on the friar and old woman remained silent, ignoring each other as Milagros showered questions on Caridad, who was barely able to respond.

The dark peasant boy from Camas ran his alert gaze over both couples, nervous at the healer’s startling reaction and his anticipation of the silver bracelet that Milagros had promised him if he brought Fray Joaquín, from San Jacinto—the girl had repeated it several times—to the chapel of
the Virgen del Patrocinio. Old María didn’t like the clergy, she distrusted them all, the secular ones and the regular ones, the priests and the friars, but she gave in to Milagros’s wishes.

“What about my mother? And my father?”

“Arrested,” answered Caridad. “They took everybody, tied with a rope, escorted by soldiers. The men went one way, the women and children the other. Your mother asked me about you …”

Milagros stifled a sigh, imagining proud Ana Vega being treated like a criminal.

“Where are they?” she asked. “What are they going to do with them?”

Caridad’s round face turned toward the friar in search of help.

“Tell them what your God has in store for them,” muttered the healer.

“God has nothing to do with this, woman,” said Fray Joaquín, this time defending himself. He spoke in a low voice, however, without confronting the old gypsy. He knew that what he’d said wasn’t true; there was a rumor that the confessor of King Ferdinand VI had approved the raid on the gypsies to calm the monarch’s conscience: “The King will be making a great gift to Our Lord God,” answered the Jesuit to the question posed, “if he manages to wipe out those people.”

But the words caught in the friar’s throat, with Milagros and Caridad listening, one afraid of knowing, the other afraid she knew.

“What is going to happen to our people?” pressed Old María, convinced that he would give her an answer.

And he did, the words tumbling out of him.

“The men and boys over seven years old will be sent to forced labor in the arsenals, the Sevillians to La Carraca, in Cádiz; the women and others will be locked up. They are planning to send them to Málaga.”

“For how long?” asked Milagros.

“For life,” stammered the friar, sure that his revelation would bring on a new outburst of tears. He hated to see Milagros cry, yet he also felt close to tears himself.

But, to his surprise, the girl gritted her teeth, moved away from Caridad and planted herself right in front of him. “Where are they now? Have they taken them already?”

“The men are in the royal jail; the women and children in a shepherd’s shed, in Triana.” They were both silent. The girl’s sweet eyes were now irate, steady, penetrating, as if blaming the friar for her misfortune.
“What are you thinking, Milagros?” he inquired, besieged by guilt. “It’s impossible for them to escape. They are guarded over by the army. There isn’t a chance.”

“And Grandfather? Does anyone know anything about my grandfather?”

Grandfather will know what to do,
she thought.
He always
 …

“No. I have no news of Melchor. None of the tobacco men have seen him.”

Milagros lowered her head. The boy from Camas approached her, anxious over the turn the situation was taking and about the bracelet he’d been promised. Fray Joaquín was about to push him aside, but the girl stopped him.

“Here,” she whispered after removing the bracelet.

The boy had come through. What did a bracelet matter now? she concluded when the boy ran off with his treasure without even saying goodbye.

The three women and the friar watched him go, each immersed in the whirlwind of worries, hatred, fears and even desires that hung over them.

“What are we going to do now?” asked Milagros when the boy disappeared among the fruit trees.

Caridad didn’t answer, nor did Old María; they both kept their eyes on the distant horizon, where the boy must still be running. Fray Joaquín … Fray Joaquín had to jab the fingernails of one hand into the back of the other and swallow hard before speaking.

“Come with me,” he suggested.

He had thought it out. He had decided it as soon as the boy from Camas had come to him with the message from the girl. He had weighed it during the walk to the chapel and his steps had lightened and he’d smiled at the world as he convinced himself of that possibility, but when the moment arrived his arguments and desires sank under the weight of the surprise jolt he saw in Milagros’s shoulders, who didn’t even turn, and the shouts of the old woman, who pounced on him like a woman possessed.

“Wicked dog!” she barked into his face, on her tiptoes, still gesticulating wildly with her arms.

The young friar wasn’t listening to her, he didn’t see her; his attention
remained fixed on Milagros’s back, until she finally turned with confusion on her face.

“Yes,” insisted the friar, taking a step forward and away from the healer, who stopped shouting. “Come with me. We will escape together … To the Indies if need be! I will take care of you now that—”

“Now that what?” interjected María from behind him. “Now that her parents have been arrested? Now that there are no gypsies left?”

The old woman continued to curse him while Milagros’s gaze met the friar’s and she shook her head, upset. She knew that he liked her, she had always been aware that he was attracted to her, but he was a friar. And a
payo.
She went to stand by Caridad, who was watching the scene with her mouth agape, for support.

Then: “My grandfather would kill you,” Milagros managed to say.

“He wouldn’t find us,” the friar let slip.

He instantly understood his mistake. Milagros stood tall, her chin lifted and firm. Old María stopped growling. Even Caridad, waiting for her friend, turned her face toward him.

“It is impossible,” the girl declared.

Fray Joaquín sighed deeply. “Flee, then,” he said, trying to feign a serenity and a composure he didn’t feel. “You can’t stay here. The soldiers and constables of every kingdom are looking for gypsies that escaped arrest. They have declared pain of death on the spot, without trial, for those who don’t turn themselves in.”

Two gypsies, Old María thought then, one a lovely, desirable young one, the other an old woman unable to remember when was the last time she had run like that little boy from Camas, if she had ever been able to. And with them, walking the roads, a Negro woman, so pitch black she would attract attention from leagues away. Flee? She sketched a sad smile.

“First you want to run away with the girl and now you’re trying to get us killed,” she spat out cynically.

Fray Joaquín looked at his hands and pursed his lips at the four small, long cuts that showed on the back of his right one. “Would you rather turn the girl over to the soldiers?” he suggested, switching his gaze from the old woman to Milagros, who remained defiant, as if her mind had frozen at the possibility of never seeing her grandfather again.

A silence followed.

“Where should we flee to?” asked the old woman after a while.

“Portugal,” he responded without hesitation.

“They don’t want gypsies there either.”

“But they’re not arresting them,” alleged the friar.

“They just banish them to Brazil. Does that sound welcoming to you?” Old María regretted her words as she realized they didn’t have many alternatives left. “What do you say, Milagros?”

The girl shrugged her shoulders.

“We could go to Barrancos,” proposed the healer. “If there is any place we can find Melchor or get news of him, it’s there.”

Milagros started: she had heard that name from her grandfather’s lips a thousand times. It was a nest of smugglers on the other side of the Portuguese border. Caridad turned toward the old healer with her eyes bright: finding Melchor!

“Barrancos,” Milagros confirmed.

“And you,
morena
?” asked María. “You’re not a gypsy, no one is after you, would you come with us?”

Caridad didn’t hesitate for even a second. “Yes,” she said emphatically. How could she not go in search of Melchor? And with Milagros, besides.

“Then we’ll go to Barrancos,” decided the old woman.

As if trying to cheer each other up, María smiled and Milagros nodded her head. Caridad seemed euphoric. She looked at Milagros beside her, and draped an arm over her friend’s shoulders.

“I will pray for you,” intervened Fray Joaquín.

“Do so if you desire,” replied Milagros before Old María had a chance to blow up at him. “But if you truly wish to help me, keep an eye on what happens to my parents: where they are taken and what becomes of them. And if you see or hear of my grandfather, tell him that we will be waiting for him in Barrancos. We will also try to send that message through the smugglers; everyone knows Melchor Vega.”

“Yes,” the friar whispered then, focusing his attention on the wounds on the back of his hand. “Everyone knows Melchor,” he added with a voice that trembled between regret and irritation.

Milagros slipped out from under Caridad’s arm and went over to the friar; she was sorry to have hurt his feelings. “Fray Joaquín … I …”