The Barefoot Queen (52 page)

They fled Triana over the pontoon bridge and entered the streets of Seville. Melchor headed to the house of an old notary public who no longer practiced.

“We need fake passports to get to Madrid,” Caridad heard him asking the old man, openly.

“The Negress, too?” he inquired, pointing at her from behind a solid wood desk piled with books, folders and papers.

Melchor, who had sat in one of the chairs on the other side of the desk, turned his head toward her. “Are you coming with me,
morena
?”

Of course she wanted to go with him! But … Melchor guessed at the thoughts going through Caridad’s mind.

“We’ll go to Madrid to get Ana freed. My daughter will fix everything,” he added, convinced.

How is Ana going to fix José’s death?
wondered Caridad. Yet she clung to that hope. If Melchor trusted in his daughter, she wasn’t going to be the one to object, so she nodded.

“Yes,” confirmed Melchor to the notary, “the Negress too.”

The old man took half the morning to forge the documents that would allow them to travel to Madrid. Using an old provision of the Royal Court of Seville he elevated Melchor to the rank of “old Castilian” based on the
merits of his ancestors in the wars of Granada, in which some gypsies had accompanied the armies of the Catholic Kings as blacksmiths. He added a second document: a passport that authorized him to go to Madrid to procure his daughter’s freedom. He turned Caridad, who showed him the manumission documents that they had given her on the boat, into a maid. Even though she wasn’t a gypsy, she still needed a passport.

As he put together the documents, the couple waited in the front hallway of the house. Caridad leaned on the wall, exhausted, yet not daring to slide down the tiles until she was seated on the floor, to hide her face and try to make sense of what she had experienced that morning. Melchor seemed to be trying to get away from the blood staining his dress coat as he paced up and down in the small space.

“He’s a good man,” he commented to himself, without looking to see if Caridad was listening. “He owes me a lot of favors. Yes, he’s good. The best!” he added with a laugh. “You know what,
morena
? Notaries public make their living off the fees they charge for trial papers: so much per page, so much per letter. Those damn letters get expensive! And since they charge for the papers, many notaries provoke lawsuits, quarrels and rows between people. That way there are trials and they make a profit. Every time I passed through his district, Eulogio would ask me to start up some trouble: denounce someone; steal from somebody and stash the booty in somebody else’s house … Once he gave me the address of a ruffian who was exploiting his wife’s charms. A magnificent female!” he exclaimed after stopping, lifting his head and shaking his chin. “If she were mine …”

He interrupted himself and turned toward Caridad, who kept her gaze on her trembling hands. The ruffian’s wife had never been his, but Caridad … When he had surprised her in bed with José he had felt as if she had indeed once been his and that Carmona had stolen her from him.

Caridad didn’t take her eyes off her hands. She didn’t care about Melchor’s shady dealings with the notary public. She could only think of the terrible scene she had witnessed. It had all happened so quickly …! Melchor’s appearance, her own shame at being naked, the fight, the stabbing and the blood. Milagros had followed her to her father’s house, all the while asking why, as she stammered excuses, and then … She clasped her hands tightly together to keep them from shaking.

Melchor resumed his pacing along the hallway, now in silence.

They obtained the documents plus a letter of recommendation that the old notary addressed to a colleague who worked in Madrid.

“I think he’s still alive,” he commented. “And he is entirely trustworthy,” he added, winking at the gypsy.

The partners in crime said goodbye to each other with a heartfelt embrace.

To avoid going through Triana, they left Seville through the Macarena Gate and headed west, toward Portugal, along the same road that Milagros, Caridad and Old María had taken almost a year earlier.
Whatever happened to her?
thought the former slave as soon as her gaze took in the open field. If Old María had been there maybe Milagros, whom she loved so much, wouldn’t have sent her away after screaming and beating her. Caridad stroked one of her breasts—but what harm could her friend’s fists do to her? She hurt inside, in the deepest, most private part of her being. If at least María had been there … But the old woman had disappeared.

“Sing,
morena
!”

They took a lonely path among gardens and fields of crops. The gypsy was walking in front of Caridad with his huge, faded yellow dress coat hanging from his shoulders; he hadn’t even turned toward her.

Sing? She had reason to sing, to use her voice, as the Negro slaves did, to cry out her sadness and lament her misfortune, but …

“No!” she shouted. It was the first time she had refused to sing for him.

After stopping for a second, Melchor took a couple of steps.

“You killed Milagros’s father!” Caridad yelled at his back.

“Who you were sleeping with!” screamed the gypsy, turning suddenly and accusing her with one finger.

The woman opened her hands in a gesture of incomprehension. “What …? And what could I do? I lived with him. He forced me.”

“Refuse!” replied Melchor. “That’s what you could have done.”

Caridad wanted to respond that she would have done that if she’d had any news from him. She wanted to tell him that she had been a slave for too many years, an obedient slave, but her words contorted into a sob.

Then it was the gypsy who opened his hands. Caridad was planted before him, just a few steps away. Her worn burlap shirt rose and fell to the rhythm of her sobbing.

Melchor hesitated. He went over to her.
“Morena,”
he whispered. He made as if to hug her, but she took a step back.

“You killed him!” she accused him again.

“It wasn’t like that,” he replied. “He sought out his own death.” Before Caridad could interject, he continued. “For a gypsy there is a big difference.”

He turned around and continued along the path.

She watched him head off.

“And Milagros?” she shouted.

Melchor clenched his teeth tightly. He was sure that the girl would get over it. As soon as he freed her mother …

“What’s going to happen to Milagros?” insisted Caridad.

The gypsy turned his head. “
Morena,
are you coming or not?”

SHE FOLLOWED
him. With Seville at their backs, she dragged her bare feet behind the gypsy, allowing herself a dry, deep sobbing, just as when they separated her from her mother and from her little Marcelo. Then it had been the white masters who had sealed her sad fate, but now … now it was Milagros herself who had rejected her friendship. Her doubts about her guilt hounded her: she had only obeyed, as she always did. In pain she relived the applause with which Milagros had received her the first time she wore her red outfit. The laughter, the affection, the friendship! The suffering after the gypsies were arrested. So many shared moments …

She continued such musing until they reached a monastery where Melchor forced her to wait at the door.

He came out with money and a good mule fitted out with saddlebags.

“More friars, like the ones in Santo Domingo de Portaceli,” commented the gypsy once they were on the road again, “who won’t ever trust me again when they see that I don’t bring them the tobacco I promised.”

Caridad remembered the episode and the tall, white-haired prior who hadn’t had the guts to challenge the gypsies who had brought him fewer bags than they’d agreed on.
All my fault,
she said to herself accusingly.

“But my daughter comes first,” continued the gypsy. “And we need this money to multiply it and buy favors in the court. Surely their God will understand it that way, and if their God understands it, they’ll have to understand it too, right?”

Melchor spoke as they walked, not expecting a reply. However, when they stopped, he fell into the melancholy that Caridad knew so well.
Then he talked to himself, even though sometimes he turned to her in search of an approval she didn’t concede.

“Do you agree,
morena
?” he asked her again. Caridad didn’t answer. Melchor shrugged it off and continued. “I have to get them to free my daughter. Only Ana will be able to bring that girl into line. Marrying a García! The grandson of El Conde! You’ll see,
morena,
everything will be the way it was as soon as Ana appears …”

Caridad stopped listening to him.
Everything will be the way it was.
The tears clouded her image of the gypsy pulling the mule in front of her.

“And if the friars don’t like it,” said Melchor, “they can come looking for me. They can join up with the Garcías, who will be after me too. No doubt about it,
morena.
By this time the council of elders will already have gathered to pass our death sentences. Maybe you’ll get lucky, but I doubt it. I can imagine the smug smiles on the faces of Rafael and his bitch of a wife. They will hide the corpse so that the King’s justice doesn’t intervene and they will set gypsy justice in motion. Shortly every gypsy in Spain will find out about our sentence and any of them could carry it out. Although not every gypsy obeys the Garcías and the elders of Triana,” he added after a while.

They went through towns without stopping. They bought tobacco and food with the money from the friars and they slept out in the open, always heading northeast, toward the Portuguese border. At nights, Melchor would light one of the cigars and share it with Caridad. They both inhaled deeply until their lungs were filled; they both let themselves be carried away by the pleasant feeling of lethargy the tobacco gave them. Melchor didn’t ask her to sing again and she didn’t.

“Milagros will get over it,” she heard Melchor declaring one of those nights, suddenly, breaking the silence. “Her father was not a good gypsy.”

Caridad remained quiet. Day after day, in silence, in utmost privacy, she again felt Milagros beating on her breasts and her dreams were disturbed by the young woman’s angry face insulting her and screaming out that she never wanted to see her again.

They reached the Aracena mountain range. Melchor avoided the outskirts of Jabugo and took a detour to reach Encinasola and from there to Barrancos, in that no-man’s-land between Spain and Portugal that the blacksmith—the one they had met as they fled through the Andévalo—had told them about.

The gypsy was kindly received by the owner of an establishment that provided tobacco to Spanish smugglers.

“We’d given you up for dead, Galeote,” said Méndez after greeting him affectionately. “El Gordo’s men told us of your wound—”

“It wasn’t my time. I still have things to do around here,” interrupted Melchor.

“I never liked El Gordo.”

“He stole two leather bags of my tobacco on the beaches of Manilva, then he ordered the killing of my cousin’s grandson.”

Méndez nodded pensively.

That was how Caridad found out about the death of the captain of the smugglers’ party who had tricked her on the beach, causing such trouble and problems. She noticed that Melchor was looking at her out of the corner of his eye when Méndez asked him about the woman armed with a blunderbuss who had challenged an entire party of men and shot a smuggler, and the two large dogs that had killed El Gordo in their jaws, and how that woman had fled with what everyone assumed was his corpse.

“She saved your life,” declared Méndez. “You must be grateful.”

Caridad perked up her ears. Melchor sensed her interest and gave her another sidelong glance before answering.

“You
payos,
your women included, have the wrong idea about gratitude.”

They stayed in the tobacco seller’s place and, just as at the inn in Gaucín, Melchor made sure to make it clear to every backpacker and smuggler who showed up that Caridad was his and therefore untouchable. Melchor spent the first three days in meetings with Méndez.

“Don’t go too far,
morena,
” the gypsy told her. “There are always bad people wandering around here.”

Caridad listened to him and hung around the stables and the surrounding area, looking at the landscape that stretched away from her feet and thinking of Milagros; watching the people that came and went with their sacks and backpacks, and remembering Milagros again; taking refuge from her pain in the tobacco that was plentiful there and thinking of her … and of Melchor.

“Who was the woman who saved you from El Gordo?” she asked one night as they lay on adjoining straw mattresses in a large room they shared with other smugglers. She didn’t have to lower her voice; at the other end
of the room, a backpacker was enjoying one of the many prostitutes who followed the scent of money. It wasn’t the first time that had happened.

For a few moments only the sound of the couples’ panting was heard.

“Someone who helped me,” answered Melchor when Caridad had already given up waiting for an answer. “I don’t think she’d do it again,” he added with a twinge of sadness that didn’t go unnoticed by Caridad.

The panting turned into muffled howls before reaching ecstasy. Those women enjoyed being with men, thought Caridad, something that seemed out of her reach.

“Sing,
morena,
” said the gypsy, interrupting her thoughts.

Could he have known what she was thinking? She wanted to sing. She needed to sing. She wanted everything to be the way it used to be.

THEY WERE
awaiting the arrival of a shipment of French snuff, explained Melchor when Caridad asked him how long they would be there and why they weren’t going to Madrid to get Ana freed.

“It usually comes in through Catalonia,” continued the gypsy. “But the tobacco patrol is getting more and more vigilant and it’s complicated. It is very difficult and expensive to get, but we’ll make a good profit.”

The consumption of snuff, the thick powdered tobacco produced in France, was illegal in Spain; only the very fine Spanish powder was allowed, the color of gold and perfumed with orange-flower water in the tobacco factory in Seville, better than any snuff according to many. Although there were other types of powders—one made with stems and ribs, one mixed with mud, one doused with a diluted aromatic vinegar, one mixed with red ocher—the gold-colored one was the best. However, the appeal of all things French, including snuff, won out over even the orders from the Crown, and the first ones to disobey them were the courtiers themselves. The King had ordered severe penalties for snuff consumption: aristocrats and noblemen could be punished with stiff fines and four years of exile for the first offense; twice the fine and four years of prison in Africa for the second; and perpetual exile and loss of all assets for the third. The others, the common people, were sentenced with fines, whippings, galleys and even death.