The Barefoot Queen (55 page)

“Where is your master? What business brought him to Madrid?”

The cutter surprised Caridad by returning to the hostel the morning of the fifth day after the other two had already left. Juan was a middle-aged man, tall, bald, with a pockmarked face and teeth as black as the long nails that extended from his fingers and which at that moment were in sharp contrast to the large loaf of white bread he was holding. Caridad couldn’t keep her eyes from drifting briefly toward the loaf: she was hungry. He noticed her gaze.

“Do you want a piece?”

Caridad hesitated. What was the cutter doing there?

“I bought it at the San Luis junction,” said the man as he broke it in two and offered her one of the halves. “You and I could get a lot like this one. Take it,” he insisted, “I’m not going to do anything to you.”

Caridad didn’t do so. The cutter approached her.

“You are a desirable woman. There are few real black women in Spain, they’ve all got whiter over time.”

She backed up a few steps until her back hit the wall. She saw the cutter’s eyes light up, boring into her before he could.

“Here, take the bread.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Take it!”

Caridad obeyed and grabbed it with the hand that didn’t hold the fake sapphire.

“That’s it. Why were you going to refuse? It cost me good money. Eat.”

She nibbled the half-loaf. The cutter watched her do so for a few seconds before trying to grab one of her breasts. He didn’t manage to; Caridad had foreseen it and batted his hand away. The cutter persisted and she rebuffed him again.

“You want to make it hard for me?” muttered the man, as he threw the bread onto one of the beds, visibly excited, and rubbed his hands together. His black teeth stood out in his lewd smile.

The bread and the sapphire fell to the floor when Caridad put her arms out to repel the cutter’s onslaught. After a struggle, she managed to stop him by grabbing his wrists. Her own reaction surprised her and made her hesitate: it was the first time she had challenged a white man! He took advantage of her indecision: he freed himself, shouted something incomprehensible and smacked her. It didn’t hurt. She looked him in the eyes. He hit her again and she kept looking at him. The woman’s passive reaction to his violence excited the cutter even more. Caridad thought that he was going to hit her again, but instead he held her and started to bite her neck and ears. She tried to get away from him, but couldn’t. The man, frenetic, grabbed her curly hair and searched out her mouth, her lips …

All of a sudden he let her go and doubled over. She tilted her head to one side, as if she wanted to listen more carefully to the long muffled wail that came from the cutter’s throat. She had seen her friend María—the mulatta she sang with—do it one Sunday back at the sugar factory: María had allowed the Negro harassing her to get close, holding her and getting excited, and then she had jammed her knee into his testicles. He had doubled over and howled just like the cutter, with both hands grabbing his crotch. Caridad breathed heavily while she searched for her sapphire. She knelt and extended her arm to grab it; her hands were trembling. She
couldn’t control them. The rage seemed to want to burst from inside her. She grabbed the stone and the bread and got up, confused at the whole sequence of new feelings inside her.

“I’ll kill you!”

She stared at the cutter: he was recovering and almost able to stand up straight. He would do it, he would kill her; his contorted features made that clear; the knife that glittered in one of his hands galvanized her as if he was already about to stab her. The hostel owner was her only hope of salvation! Caridad ran downstairs. The door of the woman’s apartment was locked. She beat hard on it, but her blows were drowned out by the screams of the cutter who was coming down behind her.

“Whore! I’m going to cut your throat!”

Caridad leapt down the last flight of stairs. She ran into two women as she burst out onto Peligros Street, a narrow thoroughfare no more than five paces wide. The women’s complaints merged with the bedlam that she’d been listening to for five days, which now exploded in all its rawness. She looked both ways, back and forth repeatedly, not knowing what to do. One of the women tried to pick up the countless chickpeas that had scattered on the ground when they crashed into each other; the other screamed insults at her. Onlookers crowded around to watch the scene. So did the cutter, who had stopped in front of the building. They were separated by barely three steps. Their eyes met. Caridad tried to calm down: he wouldn’t dare to kill her in public. She saw in the man’s resigned face, as he put away the knife and brought a hand to his chin, that he had reached the same conclusion. Caridad let out a snort, as if she had been holding it in since she started to descend the staircase.

“Thief!” then echoed between the buildings. “My bread! She stole my bread!”

Caridad’s gaze ran from the half-loaf of bread, still in her hand, to the cutter, who was smiling.

“Get the thief!”

The shout came from behind her back and stopped her attempting to deny the accusation. Someone tried to grab her arm. She got away. The woman picking up chickpeas looked at her and the one who was insulting her jumped on her, as did the cutter. Caridad dodged the woman and pushed her against the cutter, taking advantage of the momentary confusion to escape and rush down the street.

The others chased after her. She ran, blindly. She bumped into men and women, avoiding others and shoving aside those who tried to stop her. The noise and the shouts of those trying to catch up to her spurred her on in a reckless race. She got to the end of Peligros Street and found herself on a wide avenue. There she was almost run over by a luxurious carriage pulled by two saddled mules. From the driver’s seat, the coachman swore at her as he cracked his whip in her direction. Caridad tripped. More carriages were passing: coaches, calashes and curious litters with a mule in front and another behind. Caridad snaked through them until she found another side street and ran down it. She could still hear the shouting; she wasn’t aware that she had already left it far behind.

They were no longer chasing her. It wasn’t worth the bother for a common darkie who’d stolen a piece of bread. So the cutter found himself in the middle of Alcalá Street surrounded by all kinds of carriages, drivers and footmen. Those accompanying noblemen were dressed in livery; the others, escorting those who had obtained royal permission to use coaches but weren’t noble, wore none. The shrieks with which he had been urging on the mob he thought was with him drowned in his throat when he saw the scornful looks he was getting from most of the drivers and footmen who walked alongside the carriages. He, a dirty, common ruffian, had more to lose if he drew attention to himself there, among the grandees.

“Step aside!” shouted out a driver in warning.

One of the footmen made as if to come at him. The cutter acted as though nothing had happened and disappeared whence he had come.

Caridad only stopped her frantic race when she could hardly breathe anymore and the pressure in her chest grew unbearable. She stopped, leaned her hands on her knees and started coughing. She held back a heave between coughs. She turned her head and could see only some people who looked curiously before continuing on their way, indifferent. She stood up and tried to catch her breath. In front of her, at the end of a narrow street, rose two towers, one on each side, crowned by spires with crosses. The one on the left also had a belfry: a church. She thought, before glancing behind her again, that she could take refuge there. No one was following her, but she didn’t know where she was. She closed her eyes tightly and felt the accelerated beating of her heart in her temples. She felt as though she had crossed all of Madrid. She was a long way from the hostel and didn’t know how to get back there. She didn’t know where
the hostel was. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know where Melchor was. She didn’t know …

Right before her, a few steps away, she saw an iron gate onto a large courtyard behind the church. It was open. She headed toward it, wondering if they would allow her into that temple. She was just a barefoot, sweaty Negress dressed in slave’s rags. What would she tell the priest if he asked questions? That she was fleeing because they accused her of stealing bread? She still carried the half-loaf in her hands.

A rotten smell, worse even than the streets of Madrid overflowing with excrement thrown from the windows, attacked her senses as she went through the iron gate into the church cemetery. No one was policing the burials at that moment.
Maybe it is safer here than in the church,
she thought as she hid between a small headstone and a wall of niches. She recognized the stench: it was decomposing corpses, like those of the runaway slaves they sometimes found in the reed beds.

As she bit on the bread the smell of death mixed in with her saliva, so dense she could almost chew it, and she started to reflect on what had happened and think what she could do next. She had time before it got dark, when the ghosts would come out … and there must have been hundreds there.

NOT FAR
from the cemetery of the San Sebastián parish, where five days later Caridad would take refuge, was the parish church of Santa Cruz, whose 144-foot-tall tower dominated the small plaza of the same name. It was there where on Holy Saturday, before they were buried in the church cemetery, the Brotherhood of Charity displayed the skulls of those who had been condemned to death and had their throats slit, after rescuing them from the roads where they were left out to intimidate people. The parish of San Ginés took care of the hanged and that of San Miguel was responsible for those executed by garrote.

In the same small Santa Cruz Plaza, beneath its arcades, was the largest market for domestic laborers. There unemployed servants would station themselves, especially wet nurses, waiting for someone to hire them. Madrid needed many wet nurses to nourish the increasingly high number of foundlings and abandoned children, but mostly they were hired by women who didn’t want to nurse their children so their breasts wouldn’t
suffer. The “vanities of the boob” was what advocates of mother’s milk called it.

But in that square there was also one of the wholesale tobacconist’s shops that brought the highest profits to the royal tax office, along with the ones in Antón Martín, Rastro and the Puerta del Sol, of the twenty-two spread all over Madrid. The sale of tobacco was complemented by two state warehouses that sold powdered or leaf tobacco wholesale, never in measures of less than a quarter-pound, so only consumers able to afford such a quantity shopped there.

The same morning that Caridad left the hostel, Melchor confirmed that the Santa Cruz tobacconist’s shop, which only sold powder, seemed more like an apothecary for the supply of medicines and remedies than those that sold the popular, unprocessed smoke tobacco used by the humbler classes. In the middle of the counter, in full view—as was required—stood a precision scale to weigh tobacco powder; on the wall shelves were the tin or glazed earthenware vessels that kept it from losing its fragrance, which is what would happen if it were stored in little paper bags, which was strictly forbidden.

Ramón Álvarez, the tobacconist, made a face when he saw the gypsy—his faded yellow dress coat, the hoops in his ears, the thousands of wrinkles that crossed his tanned face and those penetrating eyes—but he reluctantly agreed to talk to him at the insistence of Carlos Pueyo, the old notary public who accompanied him. Pueyo and the tobacconist had already done some deals as shady as they were profitable. Álvarez’s wife took over serving in the shop while Carlos and Melchor followed the tobacconist’s lethargic ascent to the upper floor of the establishment, where he lived.

Any trace of suspicion disappeared when Ramón Álvarez sniffed a sample of Melchor’s snuff. His face lit up at the mere mention of the number of pounds of it the gypsy had.

“You’ll never regret doing business with me,” the notary reproached the tobacconist for his initial reluctance.

Melchor fixed his gaze on the old notary. Those were the very words that had marked the end of their meeting when he had gone to the notary’s office, on Eulogio’s recommendation, to discuss his daughter Ana’s situation in the gypsy prison in Málaga. He’d told the notary about the jar of snuff when negotiating the payment of his fees and those of the fixer
who would be needed to intercede with the authorities to free Ana.
Fixers are expensive, but they are at home at court and they know who needs to be bought,
declared Carlos Pueyo.

At that moment, in that apartment that masked the stench of Madrid’s streets with the aromas of the tobacco that had been stored below for years, Melchor recognized in the tobacconist’s face the same greed the notary had shown.

“Where do you have the snuff?”

The notary had asked the same exact question. The gypsy, with the same gravity, repeated his response: “Don’t worry about that. It is safely hidden away, just like the money you are going to buy it with.”

Ramón Álvarez moved quickly: he knew the market, he knew who would be interested in that outlawed merchandise and, above all, he knew who could pay its high price. He was just a tobacconist, in the service of the Crown, who made a few silver reals a day, like all those whose establishments had a healthy turnover. There were others: those who sold less, or those that, in towns where there wasn’t enough business to support their salary and expenses, were forced by the Crown to provide tobacco in shops that sold other things as well and who got ten percent of the total sold.

While the tobacconists enjoyed a privileged position—they were free of burdens and obligations, they didn’t have to deal with deliveries and pack mules, and couldn’t be called up for military service; they didn’t have to pay tolls on roads, bridges or boats and were protected from wrongs and offenses—those reals weren’t enough to match the ostentatious, luxurious lives of those who enjoyed similar privileges. Madrid was an expensive city, and a shipment of quality snuff like Melchor’s was one of the best deals they could do because it didn’t affect the sales of Spanish tobacco powder.