The Barefoot Queen (38 page)

That day ended with Milagros confused but with Caridad and Old María convinced that the girl would be able to pour her feelings out into the songs.

And so she did. The first time that Milagros tore at their emotions with a song, the group of gypsy kids who tagged along at their lessons broke out into applause.

Milagros was caught off guard and stopped singing.

“Go on, keep going until your mouth tastes of blood!” Old María spurred her on, scolding the kids with a harsh look, who scampered off behind the trees.

From that point on it was all easy. What up until then had been nothing more than upbeat ditties, sung with a misunderstood passion, became pure pain and heartbreak: for the imprisonment of her parents and her love for Pedro García; for her grandfather’s disappearance; for Caridad’s rape and Alejandro’s death; for the constant fleeing amid the
payos’
gobs of spit; for the hunger and the cold; for the injustice of the rulers; for the past of her persecuted people and their uncertain future.

That night, camped on the outskirts of the town of Niebla, Caridad and Old María, sitting beside each other around the fire, experienced conflicting feelings as they witnessed Milagros’s new way of dancing, lascivious yet filled with joy, and the depth of emotion in her songs of gypsy hardship.

Niebla, the town that gave its name to the county then belonging to the House of Medina-Sidonia, had been an important Arab and medieval military enclave. It was surrounded by strong, high walls and defensive towers and it had an imposing castle with its tower keep. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, it had lost its original importance and its population had dropped to little more than a thousand inhabitants. Yet, it still maintained its tradition of three festivals a year: San Miguel’s, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and All Saints’ Day, all three devoted to the buying and selling of livestock, sackcloth and leather.

The festivals had followed the same path as the town and no one hesitated in describing them as “fallen on hard times.” They were used mostly for supplying old animals for the nearby city of Seville. Santiago headed there with his group of gypsies. On the first of November, All Saints’ Day, Diego and Milagros, along with a boy about eight years old—skinny and dirty but with mischievous black eyes—named Manolillo, and other members of the Fernández family, loaded down with baskets and pots as if they intended to sell them, reached the walls of the town, outside of which, on an esplanade, the fair was held. Hundreds of heads of livestock—cows and oxen, pigs, sheep and horses—were offered for sale amid the crowd’s hustle and bustle. The old patriarch, Caridad, María, the smaller kids and the old women remained hidden on the roads.

Manolillo latched on to Milagros when they were stopped by the deputy magistrate accompanied by a constable: gypsies were not allowed to go to fairs, especially livestock fairs. As Diego complained and gestured, begging and pleading in the name of the Lord Our God, the Virgin Mary and all the saints, Milagros and the boy separated discreetly from the group so that neither the deputy nor the constable would notice the sacks they were carrying, which held four sleeping weasels that they had managed to hunt en route. Finally, Diego dropped a couple of coins into the alderman’s hand.

“I don’t want any altercations,” the deputy warned them all after he had hidden the money.

As soon as they were free from the attentions of the Niebla authorities, Diego Fernández gestured the other gypsies to scatter throughout the fairgrounds; then he winked at Milagros and Manolillo: “Let’s go for it, kids,” he encouraged.

More than three hundred horses were crowded in precarious enclosures made of timber and thatch. Milagros and Manolillo headed toward them, feigning a calm they weren’t feeling, among the merchants, buyers and the curious. Reaching the end of the pens, which met the town’s outer walls, they looked around and slipped in amidst the horses. Protected among them, Milagros handed her sack to the boy, pulled a flask filled with vinegar out from under her skirt and emptied it out in the sacks. Then she shook them vigorously and the weasels, who hadn’t been fed since their capture, started to shriek and squirm. The boy and girl sought shelter near the walls and let them loose. The weasels jumped crazily, shrieking and biting their feet. The horses, in turn, neighed and reared up against each other. Confined, they kicked and bit each other. The stampede was fast in coming. The three hundred animals easily broke through their fragile enclosures and galloped frantically through the fair.

In the chaos the horses caused, Diego and his men managed to make off with four of them and drove them quickly to where the patriarch was waiting, on the outskirts of town. Milagros and Manolillo, who couldn’t help laughing once the tension was broken, were already there.

“Get moving!” shouted Santiago, knowing that the deputy magistrate wouldn’t hesitate even a second before blaming them.

They set off, loaded down with their cauldrons, baskets and utensils, along with some clothes and blankets that the gypsies had managed to
steal in the confusion. One of them proudly showed off some shoes with leather soles and silver buckles.

The patriarch ordered them to head toward Ayamonte.

“Yesterday I found out,” he explained, “that a rich nobleman passed away, setting out in his will close to five thousand reals for his funeral: burial and masses for his soul—he was so sanctimonious, he paid for more than a thousand masses to be read! Plus mourning textiles and alms. They are calling all of the priests and chaplains from town as well as the friars and nuns from a couple of monasteries and convents—the halfwits are going to take his good money. There will be a lot of people …”

“And a lot of alms!” one of the women said.

They walked parallel to the coach road that led to Ayamonte, although before reaching San Juan del Puerto they had to take it to cross the Tinto River in a rowing boat; the boatman didn’t even dare to argue over the price Santiago offered him to take them to the other shore. That same afternoon they managed to sell off two of the horses cheaply to one of the customers and the owner of an inn on the way; neither asked where they had come from. They also scrounged up a few coins from the scarce patrons who had gathered at the inn after Milagros performed: she sang and danced suggestively, as Caridad had taught her, to incite the crowd’s desire. It wasn’t the deep, broken song the gypsies used to rekindle their passions and pain at night around the campfire, but even the old patriarch was surprised to find himself clapping and smiling when the girl started her cheery fandangos and
zarabandas.

Despite the cold, Milagros’s face, arms and upper breasts were beaded with sweat. Diego observed her as she walked among the tables where the patrons were drinking, and when she took a seat, with a long weary sigh, at the table where Caridad and María had been watching her performance, the innkeeper invited her to a glass of wine.

“Bravo, girl!” María congratulated her.

“Bravo,” added the innkeeper as he served her the wine. “After the roundup,” he continued, his eyes distracted by the girl’s cleavage, “we were afraid we wouldn’t be able to enjoy your dancing anymore, but since the liberation …”

The chair went flying, the wine went flying and even the table went flying. “What liberation?” shouted the girl, now standing in front of the innkeeper.

The man opened his hands before the circle of gypsies he suddenly found himself in the middle of. “You don’t know?” he inquired. “Just that … they are freeing them.”

“Not even the King of Spain can take us on and win!” the gypsies yelled.

“Are you sure?” asked Santiago.

The innkeeper hesitated. Milagros waved her arms frantically in front of him.

“Are you sure?” she repeated.

“Am I sure …? That’s what they are saying,” he added, shrugging his shoulders.

“It’s true.”

The gypsies turned toward the table where the confirmation had come from.

“They are letting them free.”

“How do you know?”

“I came from Seville. I saw them. I passed them on the pontoon bridge on their way to Triana.”

“How do you know they were gypsies?”

The man from Seville laughed sarcastically at the question. “They were coming from Cádiz, from La Carraca; they looked a wreck. They were accompanied by a notary who carried their discharge papers and several justices who were escorting the group—”

“And the women in Málaga?” Milagros interrupted.

“I don’t know anything about the women, but if they are freeing the men …”

Milagros turned toward Caridad. “Let’s go home, Cachita,” she whispered in a voice choked with emotion. “Let’s go home.”

THE GYPSIES
weren’t profitable in the arsenals. They didn’t work, complained the governors. Both in Cartagena and in Cádiz, they claimed, they had let go the expert staff to replace them with that ignorant workforce unwilling to make an effort, who weren’t working enough to pay for the food they were eating. The gypsies, they insisted, were problematic and dangerous: they fought, argued and plotted escape. They didn’t have enough troops to control them and they feared the desperation of men
imprisoned for life, taken away from their women and children, would lead to a mutiny they would be unable to snuff out. The gypsy women were just as problematic as the men if not more so, they didn’t even work, and their maintenance costs were a huge burden on the scarce resources of the municipalities they were being held in.

The briefs from those in charge at the arsenals and jails didn’t take long to reach the hands of the Marquis of Ensenada.

But it wasn’t only those officials who were complaining to the powerful minister of Ferdinand VI. The gypsies themselves were as well and from their places of imprisonment they presented complaints and petitions to the council. In addition there were some noblemen who protected them, clergy members and even whole town councils who saw how their communities had been left without workers to perform necessary tasks: blacksmiths, bakers and simple farmers. Even the city of Málaga, which wasn’t one of the places legally authorized to take in gypsies, decided to support the petitions of gypsy smiths residing there and refuse to detain them.

The pleas and petitions piled up in the offices of the royal council. In little less than two months the inefficiency, danger and extremely high cost of the big roundup were exposed. Besides, they had arrested assimilated gypsies, who lived according to the laws of the kingdom, while many others, the undesirables, still camped freely around Spain. So, in late September of 1749, the Marquis of Ensenada backtracked and blamed the subordinates who had carried out the roundup: the King had never wanted to harm those gypsies who lived in accordance with the laws.

In October, the council passed the orders necessary to liberate those unjustly arrested: the Chief Magistrates in each place had to process secret files on the life and habits of each one of the detained gypsies indicating whether they conformed to the laws and proclamations of the kingdom; the files had to be accompanied by a report from the corresponding parish priest, also secret, in which, most important, it must state whether the gypsy was married by the Church.

Those who complied with all those requirements would be freed, returned to their places of origin and their seized assets restored, although they were expressly prohibited from leaving their towns without written authorization, and from ever attending fairs or visiting markets.

Those who didn’t get past the secret reports would stay in prison or
be sent to labor on public works or projects of interest to the King; those who fled would be immediately hanged.

They also gave specific orders for the gypsies who hadn’t been rounded up: they gave them a span of thirty days to come forward, otherwise they would be deemed “rebels, bandits, enemies of the public peace and notorious thieves.” They would all receive the death penalty.

THE GYPSY
settlement had been destroyed. At night, Milagros, Old María and Caridad stopped at the start of the street that ran along the wall of the Carthusians’ gardens against which the shacks leaned. None of them spoke. The hope and illusions that had grown over two days of walking, with each of them spurring the others on, promising a return to normality, vanished at the mere sight of the settlement. After the settlement and the seizure of assets, the looters had been quick to take what they wanted from even the most miserable shacks. They were missing roofs, even those made of brushwood, and some walls had collapsed owing to the pillaging of the items the soldiers hadn’t taken: built-in iron bars, the few wooden frames, cupboards, hearths … Even so, they could see that some shacks were still inhabited.

“There are no children,” noticed the old woman. Milagros and Caridad remained silent. “They aren’t gypsies, they are criminals and whores.”

As if they wanted to prove her right, a couple emerged from one of the nearby shacks: he was an old mulatto; she, who had come out to say goodbye to him, was a raggedy, disheveled woman with her breasts bared.