The Barefoot Queen (34 page)

Along with two large dogs who rushed to greet Nicolasa, they climbed the hill to the hut. It was a small, circular stone construction, windowless, with a single low, narrow door, and a conical roof made of brushwood over a framework of logs. Inside you couldn’t take more than four steps in a straight line.

“My husband was a pig herder …” Nicolasa started to say as she put down the grain she’d bought in Aracena on top of a stone bench beside the hearth.

Melchor didn’t let her continue; he squeezed her hard from behind, wrapping his arms around her and reaching for her breasts. Nicolasa remained still and trembled at his touch; it had been a long time since she had had relations with a man—her husband’s blunderbuss, always at the
ready, convinced those who might think to try anything—and she had long ago stopped touching herself on the lonely nights: her crotch was dry, her imagination destitute, her spirit frustrated. Had she made a mistake by inviting him? She didn’t have time to answer as the gypsy’s hands were already running all over her. How many years had it been since she had taken care of her body? she berated herself. Then she heard passionate whispers, erratic from Melchor’s accelerated breathing, and she was surprised to realize that the pace of her own breath matched that almost silent panting. Could it be true? He desired her! The gypsy wasn’t faking it. He had stopped at her thighs, curved over her, squeezing and caressing them, sliding his hands to her pubis and then down her legs again. And as her doubts began to dissolve, Nicolasa gave in to forgotten sensations. The “devil’s knob,” she smiled to herself as she rubbed her large buttocks against him. Finally, she turned and pushed him violently to the straw mattress on which she had squandered her nights in recent years.

“Call the devil, gypsy!” she almost shouted out when Melchor fell onto the mattress.

“What?”

“You’re going to need his help.”

NICOLASA WAS
humming as she worked in the pigsty, a small enclosure to the rear of the hut. She had four good breeding pigs and some piglets that she fed farm-bought acorns, plus herbs, wild bulbs and fruits. Like many people in Jabugo and the surrounding areas, she lived off those animals, off their ham and cured pork, which she made in a ramshackle salting room, opening or closing its windows to the mountain air as dictated by her years of experience.

As she worked, Melchor let the days slip by, sitting in a chair at the door to the hut, smoking and trying unsuccessfully to frighten off the two large woolly dogs that insisted on staying beside him, as if they wanted to thank him for the shift in mood he had brought on in their owner. The gypsy glanced at them with a frown.
It doesn’t work on these animals,
he said to himself over and over, remembering the effects his furious looks had on people. He also growled at them, but the dogs wagged their tails. And when he was sure that Nicolasa couldn’t see him, he gave them a
kick, softly so they wouldn’t yelp, but they just took it as a game. “Damn beasts,” he muttered then, remembering how Nicolasa had punched him the first time he really tried to kick them hard.

“You won’t see a single wolf anywhere around,” the woman explained afterwards. “Those dogs protect me, me and my pigs. Be very careful about mistreating them.”

Melchor hardened his features. He had never been hit by a woman. He made as if to return the blow, but Nicolasa spoke first.

“I need them,” she added, sweetening her tone of voice, “as much as I need you and your knob.” The woman brought her hand to the gypsy’s crotch.

“Don’t ever do that again,” he warned her.

“What?” inquired the woman in a syrupy voice, searching in his drawers.

“Hit me.”

“Gypsy,” she said just as sweetly, noting how Melchor’s member began to respond to her caresses, “if you mistreat my animals again, I’ll kill you.” She gripped his testicles harder. “It’s simple: if you can’t live with them, continue on your way.”

Sitting at the door to the hut, Melchor kicked at the air again, and one of the dogs responded by getting up on his hind legs and prancing about. He had no doubt that Nicolasa would make good on her threat. He liked that woman. She wasn’t a gypsy, but she had the character of someone hardened by the solitude of the mountains … And, at night, she pleased him with a wild passion he never could have imagined when he saw her there in front of the used-clothing stall. He just missed one thing: Caridad’s singing in the dark silence of the night.
That
morena,
she’s a good woman.
Some nights he imagined her offering him her body the way Nicolasa did, demanding more and more, as he had wanted when he woke up holding her in the gypsy settlement. Except for those songs for which he had renounced enjoying Caridad’s body, he couldn’t ask for anything more. He had even come to an agreement with Nicolasa when she demanded he work.

“As long as the knob you’ve got between your legs keeps up its end of the bargain,” she said, standing in front of him with her hands on her hips, “my body is free … but you have to earn the food.”

Melchor looked her up and down, displeased: short, with wide hips and shoulders, exuberant flesh and a dirty face that made her look friendly when she smiled. Nicolasa tolerated the inspection.

“I don’t work, woman,” he spat out.

“Well, go hunt wolves. In Aracena they’ll pay you two ducats for every one you kill.”

“If it’s money you want …” Melchor searched beneath his sash until he found the bag that held what he’d stolen from El Gordo. “Here,” he said, throwing a gold coin at her. She caught it in midair. “Is that enough for you to stop pestering me?”

Nicolasa was slow to answer. She’d never had a gold coin before. She handled it and bit it to make sure it was real. “It’s enough,” she finally admitted.

Since then Melchor had been free to do what he pleased. Some days he spent sitting at the door to the hut, drinking the wine and smoking the tobacco she brought him from Jabugo. Nicolasa would often sit with him, after she finished with the pigs and her other chores. She sat on the ground—they only had one chair—and respected his silence, letting her gaze wander around a setting she had never imagined she would enjoy again.

Other days, when Nicolasa hadn’t been to Jabugo in some time, Melchor went out and checked the mountains to see for himself if El Gordo was approaching. That was the only information he had given Nicolasa.

“Every time you go into town,” he told her, “find out if anyone knows about any large group of smugglers. I’m not interested in the little backpackers who cross the border and load up in Jabugo.”

“Why?” she asked.

The gypsy didn’t answer her.

And that was how they spent the rest of the spring and part of the summer. Melchor felt the days growing long. After the initial weeks of passion, there had since been times when Nicolasa had rejected him with a vehemence equal to that of her lust. The woman’s ardor was replaced by affection, as if the relationship the gypsy considered temporary was for her permanent. So that was why, when the news of the gypsy roundup reached the town, Nicolasa decided to keep it to herself. Not only to protect
him, but also because she was afraid, and rightly so, that the gypsy would leave in search of his family as soon as he found out.

Every time he went out onto the road, Nicolasa watched him worriedly, with a distress she didn’t try to hide, and ordered one of her dogs to follow him, but Melchor didn’t go near the town. The gypsy had come to accept the canine company, which warned him with low growls when there was a person or animal on the deserted mountain paths.

Nicolasa had given him an old army dress coat with epaulettes and gilding that still had some of their original yellow. Melchor smiled gratefully, touched by her childish nervousness when she handed it to him. “Casimiro told me what you were looking for at his stall in the Aracena market,” she confessed, trying to hide her anxiety behind a forced smile. The two dogs witnessed the scene, tilting their heads from one side to the other. Melchor put on the jacket, which was huge on him and hung from his shoulders like a sack, and adopted an expression of approval, pulling on the lapels and looking at himself. She asked him to turn around so she could see him. That night it was Nicolasa who sought out his body.

But time continued to pass and Nicolasa shook her head every time she came back from Jabugo. Melchor, who knew the contraband routes, only came across a few miserable backpackers transporting merchandise from Portugal to Spain by foot, under cover of night. “Where are you, Gordo?” he muttered whenever he went out. The dog, glued to his calf, let out a long howl that broke the silence and made its way through the trees; he had heard that new master mention the name El Gordo many times, with a hatred so bitter it could cut through stone. “Where are you, you son of a bitch? You’ll come. As sure as the devil exists, you’ll come! And on that day …”

“I brought you cigars,” announced Nicolasa on her return from Jabugo, almost a week later, as she extended a small bundle of
papantes
tied with their characteristic red string: the medium-size cigars made in the factory in Seville, considered among smokers to be the best.

She kept her eyes hidden, looking at the floor. Melchor furrowed his brow and grabbed the bundle, still seated at the door to the hut. Nicolasa was about to go inside when the gypsy asked her, “You have nothing more to tell me?”

She stopped. “No,” she answered.

That time she was unable to avoid his gaze. Melchor saw that her eyes were watery.

“Where are they?” he asked.

A shiny tear slid down Nicolasa’s cheek. “Near Encinasola.” She didn’t dare to lie about that. Melchor had asked her to inform him if she found out anything, so she added with a shaky voice, “Some of the men from Jabugo have gone to join them.”

“When are they expected in Encinasola?”

“One, two days at the most.”

Standing in front of him, her legs together, her hands intertwined over her belly, with her throat seized and tears now running freely down her face, Nicolasa saw the transformation of the man who had changed her life: the wrinkles that lined his face grew tense and the sparkle in his gypsy eyes, beneath their furrowed brows, seemed to sharpen as if it were a weapon. All the fantasies of a future that the woman had naively entertained faded as fast as Melchor got up from the chair and pulled on the tails of his yellow jacket, his gaze lost in the distance, all of him lost.

“Keep the dogs with you,” he said in a whisper that to Nicolasa sounded deafening. Then he searched in his sash and pulled out another gold coin. “I never thought that the first one I gave you was enough,” he declared. He grabbed one of her hands, opened it, placed the coin in her palm and closed it again. “Never trust a gypsy, woman,” he added before turning his back on her and beginning his descent down the hill.

Nicolasa refused to admit the end of her dreams. Instead, she focused her blurry gaze on the bundle of
papantes
with their red strings that Melchor had forgotten on the chair in front of the hut.

IT DEPENDED
where they decided to spend the night. There were barely two leagues between Encinasola and Barrancos, and Melchor knew that El Gordo—if it was his party—would do everything possible to get to Barrancos. Unlike Spain, in Portugal there was no government tobacco store. There the trade was leased out to the highest bidders, who, in turn, opened two types of establishments: those that sold to the Portuguese and those devoted to selling to Spanish smugglers. Melchor remembered the large building in Barrancos with warehouses for the smoking tobacco from Brazil, rooms, places for the smugglers to rest and many well-appointed
stables. Méndez, the owner, didn’t charge for all those comforts he lavished on his customers, especially if they were large parties like those from Cuevas Bajas and the surrounding area, although he didn’t charge the modest backpackers either, and sometimes he even financed their shady dealings, or gave them tobacco on credit.

Yes, El Gordo is going to try to reach Barrancos to fill up his belly with good food, get drunk and lie with women, well sheltered from those inept but always annoying royal patrols,
concluded Melchor as he sat on a tree stump halfway between Encinasola and Barrancos. The two towns seemed to be having a distant face-off, both located on bluffs, with their castles, the one in Encinasola in the town itself and the one in Barrancos at a slight distance, rising high to overlook the valley that separated them: a valley that had little in common with the wild nature of Jabugo and its surrounding area.

It was past midday and the sun was beating down. Melchor had got far enough ahead of the smugglers and he’d been sitting on that uncomfortable stump since dawn, by the shore of the Múrtiga River, where he’d found a grove of trees that protected him from the sun. Sometimes he looked toward the town, even though he knew there was no need: their uproar would precede them. It wouldn’t even take much noise, since the silence was so absolute that Melchor could hear his own breathing. A few country folk paraded past him on their way to their fields and labors. Melchor barely moved his head in reply to their frightened greetings in the local dialect. They already knew how close the smugglers were, and that gypsy with large hoops hanging from his ears and wearing a faded yellow jacket could only be one of them. Meanwhile, between fleeting glances toward Encinasola and evasive nods to the peasants, Melchor remembered Uncle Basilio, young Dionisio and Ana. His daughter had never blamed him for anything before, no matter what he had done! What would he do when El Gordo’s party arrived? He tried not to worry; he’d decide that later. His blood was boiling. Nobody was ever going to say that Melchor Vega, of the Vega family, hid from anybody! They would kill him. Perhaps El Gordo wouldn’t even let him challenge him: he would order one of his lieutenants to shoot him right there and then continue along his way with a smile on his lips, maybe a laugh. He would probably spit down on his corpse from way up on his horse, but Melchor didn’t care.

A small group of women loaded down with baskets of bread and
onions for El Gordo’s men passed by him in silence, their heads downcast. He had lived too long, he thought, gazing at their backs. The gypsy gods—or maybe the priests’ God—had given him a few years. He was living on borrowed time. He should have died in the galleys, like so many others, but he hadn’t perished rowing in the King’s service … He pursed his lips and looked at his hands, covered in dark spots that stood out even on his dark gypsy skin. He tried to get comfortable on the stump but all his muscles hurt, stiff from the hours of waiting; perhaps he was nothing more than an old man, like the one who had given up his bed in the settlement for a lousy coin. He felt an eerie itching in the scars left by the galley slave driver’s whip on his back. He sighed and turned his head toward Encinasola.