The Barefoot Queen (63 page)

Caridad nodded.

“That was this Sister Magdalene’s idea: isolate us from the good people. And along with all that, mass and sermons to convert us and make us useful as good maids … That is our fate if we ever get out of here: service. God save us from the Magdalenes!”

But except for those who had decided to cut short their children’s sad, sure fate, the group of prostitutes and the odd other violent and nasty criminals, most of those 150 women were locked up there as a result of minor mistakes made out of ignorance or necessity.

She found out what Frasquita had been condemned for: immodest living, declared the magistrates.

“They arrested me one night strolling with a shoemaker,” she explained to Caridad. “A good man … We weren’t doing anything! I was cold and hungry and just looking to sleep indoors. But they caught me with a man.”

Frasquita pointed out many other women toiling in La Galera for their crimes against morality, a catalogue as extensive as it was vague. They condemned them for being wanton or being scandalous, layabouts, libertines, dissolute, lecherous, unbridled, harmful to the State … Since, unlike men, they couldn’t be sent to the army or to public works, they ended up in the women’s prison.

The only crime Herminia, the small blonde who came from a nearby town, had committed was trying to sell a couple of strings of garlic on the streets of Madrid. She needed the money, she confessed to Caridad with resignation. There were many peddlers like her among the prisoners:
women who were only trying to make a living by selling vegetables, which was against the law.

Caridad met two other women. A simple quarrel without real consequences had brought them to La Galera. Insults and fighting were also prohibited, as were frequenting inns or walking alone at night. They locked them up for not having a known job or address; for being poor and not wanting to work in service; for begging …

One Saturday, the day they divided up the week’s tasks among the inmates—scrubbing, mopping, lighting or putting out the oil lamps, serving the food—Caridad got the job of handing out the stale bread. They paired her with a young woman who still had the glow and vigor of her youth. Caridad had noticed the girl: she seemed even more timid and defenseless than she herself did. They were both waiting beside the breadbasket for the sentry to authorize them to distribute it to the others.

“My name is Caridad,” she introduced herself over the noise of the women lined up.

“Jacinta,” answered the girl.

Caridad smiled and the other made an effort to return it. With a wave of his truncheon, the sentry allowed them to begin handing the bread out.

“Why are you here?” asked Caridad as they distributed the crusts of bread. She was curious. She was hoping the woman would say that it had been something petty, like so many others. She didn’t want to have to think of her as a bad woman.

“What are you waiting for, girl?” One of the prisoners chivvied Jacinta, who had been distracted by Caridad’s question.

She hadn’t wanted to lie with her employer. That was what Jacinta explained when they finish serving the bread and collecting the baskets as the others ate. Caridad questioned her with her gaze: it seemed a strange crime when most of them were condemned for just the opposite.

“I gave in on other occasions and I got pregnant. Don Bernabe’s wife beat me and insulted me, she called me a whore and a slut and much more; then she forced me to give the child to the foundling hospital.” The explanation came out of the girl’s mouth as if she still was unable to understand what had happened to her. “Then … I didn’t want to have another child!”

She stifled a sob. Caridad knew that pain. She stroked the girl’s forearm and felt her tremble.

Thousands of girls like Jacinta suffered the same fate in the big capital; it was estimated that 20 percent of the working population of Madrid was made up of servants. Young girls were sent by their families from all over Spain to serve in Madrid’s homes or workshops. Most of them were hounded by their employers or their employers’ sons and they couldn’t refuse. Later, if they got pregnant, some of them dared to go to court to get a dowry if the man who had impregnated them was married or a nobleman, or to marry them if he was single. The wives and mothers accused the maids of tempting the men to gain money and position, and that was what Don Bernabé’s wife charged Jacinta with after insulting and beating her. She was just a girl from a small town in Asturias who’d been sold by her parents. She lowered her gaze toward her young, full breasts when the woman pointed to them as the cause of her husband’s lust and resulting mistake. And she felt guilty, standing there, under attack, in the parlor of a house that seemed like a palace compared to the miserable shack she came from. What were her parents going to say? What would the Asturian relative who lived in Madrid and had recommended her think? And so she allowed it. She kept quiet. One night she gave birth in the hospital of Los Desamparados, on Atocha Street as well. There they took in orphans older than seven, piled up in forty beds the decrepit, terminally ill old ladies who came to die in the only place in the capital for them, and there was also a room where the disgraced like Jacinta could give birth. Many women died in childbirth; many babies suffered the same fate. Jacinta survived. The Congregation of God’s Love hid the fruit of her womb in the foundling hospital, where the boy ended up passing away, and the girl went back to service.

“But if you didn’t want to lie with your master …” insisted Caridad. “Why did they lock you up?”

“Don Bernabé decided to do it. He said he didn’t want me working in the house, that I was a bad maid and that I was disobedient.”

That was how Caridad found out that, along with the criminals and the desperate, there was another group of inmates whose only crime had been being born a female subordinate to a man. Women who, like Jacinta, had been locked up simply by the will of a husband, father or employer. Like María, almost an old lady, imprisoned for having sold a shirt without the consent of her man; Ana, who was there for having left her conjugal home without permission; and a third whose only crime was having
struck up a friendship with a fisherman. Most of these decent women who ended up in jail because of an accusation from their husbands were sent to the San Nicolás and Pinto jails, but some of them ended up in La Galera. The only difference between them and those who had committed some crime was that the High Court consulted the man who’d asked that they be put away regarding the sentence they should receive. That man also had to pay the costs of maintaining the inmate while she was imprisoned. In some occasions, after some time, they were pardoned and left the jail.

“Don Bernabé warned me, before I was put in here,” Jacinta confessed, “that when I was ready for him, he would pardon me.”

Caridad looked the girl’s body up and down. How long would it be before she lost the beauty that the gentleman was so attracted to, locked up in a place like this?

The day that Herminia asked if she had anyone outside the jail, Caridad, knowing she was being observed by her fellow inmates, kept sewing the hospital gown in silence. Her fingers, so expert in rubbing tobacco leaves and then twisting them delicately, quickly grew accustomed to sewing. She was fine inside there: she was surrounded by many women she could talk and even laugh with; most of them were good people. They fed her, although not much and badly. Some of the inmates complained and even rebelled, which brought them severe punishment. Caridad tried to understand their attitude: she had heard them talk about the hunger and misery that many blamed on their imprisonment and she couldn’t see why they were complaining. She remembered the gruel and never-ending cod that she had eaten, day in and day out for years, in the tobacco plantation.

And freedom
 … thought Caridad. That thwarted freedom, which many of them spoke so much of, had only brought her to inhospitable lands and offered her the company of strange people who had eventually abandoned her. What had become of Milagros? Sometimes she thought of the young gypsy girl, although each time she seemed further away. And Melchor … She felt her eyes grow damp and she hid it from the others by feigning a coughing fit. No, freedom wasn’t something that she missed.

Milagros hadn’t returned to the palace of the Count and Countess of Fuentevieja since the day she had done so to request help in freeing her parents. Almost three years had passed and that girl whom the dour secretary to his excellency had not allowed past the gloomy hallway that led to the kitchens was now at ease in its luxurious rooms. Among those rich noblewomen who regularly bled themselves just to make their cheeks paler and who wore dresses plumped out with crinolines, women with corseted waists and torsos and tall, complicated and profusely ornate hairdos, which threatened to win out over the wire framework that held them up and collapse onto their bejeweled and beribboned heads, the gypsy felt observed and desired by the men invited to the count’s party. His secretary, when receiving her that late February night along with one of the doormen, had directed a lascivious look at her breasts.

“You.” The gypsy wanted to get revenge on him, as she wondered if he recognized in her the girl he had mocked years earlier. “What are you drooling over?”

The man reacted by straightening his head, embarrassed.

“These pearls are not for such swine,” Milagros spat at him.

Some of the gypsies who accompanied her showed their surprise. The doorman stifled a laugh. The secretary was about to respond when Milagros fixed her eyes on him and challenged him in silence:
Do you want
to offend me and risk my leaving? How would that make your lord and lady look in front of their guests?
The secretary gave in, not before directing a disdainful look at the group of gypsies.

Of course he hadn’t recognized her! Three years and the birth of a lovely daughter had transformed the splendid body of the eighteen-year-old woman, still young but now full-bodied. Tanned, with pronounced, beautiful features and long chestnut-brown hair falling wildly down her back, everything about her emanated pride. Milagros didn’t need corsets or elegant clothes to show off her charms: a simple green shirt and a long flowered skirt that almost covered her bare feet hinted at the voluptuousness of her legs, shoulders, hips, stomach … and her firm, turgid breasts. The tinkling of her many beads followed the steps of the doorman and the secretary to the large salon where, after dinner, the count and countess and their illustrious guests were waiting as they chatted, drank liquors and snorted snuff. After greeting the hosts and all the curious who came over to meet the famous Milagros of Triana, while the gypsies got settled and tuned their guitars, she wandered around among the people, looking at herself in the huge mirrors or indifferently touching some figurine, displaying herself before men and women in the light of the imposing crystal chandelier that hung from the ceiling, flaunting that sensuality that would soon explode.

The already rhythmic strumming of several guitars demanded her presence in one corner of the parlor expressly cleared for the group of four men and a few other women. La Trianera remained vigilant, her abundant flesh lodged in a wooden armchair carved with gold and upholstered in red silk, as if it were a throne. As soon as she’d seen it her eyes had grown wide and she had forced a couple of servants to bring it over to her from the other side of the room.

Reyes and Milagros exchanged cold, hard looks; however, all disquiet disappeared from the young gypsy’s mood as soon as she began her first song. That was her universe, a world in which nothing and no one mattered in the slightest. Music, song and dance bewitched her and transported her to ecstasy. She sang. She danced. She shone brightly. She enchanted the audience: men and women who, as the night went on, shed their rigid bearing and their aristocratic airs to join in with the gypsies’ shouts, hoots and clapping.

In the short breaks, the gypsies from the García family put down their guitars and surrounded her as she flirted with the men who approached her. Pedro wasn’t there; he never was. And Milagros scrutinized the men, seeking in their faces, and in the desire she could smell, which of them was willing to reward her in exchange for a naughty wink, a daring gesture, a smile or a bit more attention than she gave the others. Some coins, a small jewel or whatever accessory they had on them: a silver button, perhaps a well-carved snuffbox. Those civilized, cultured noblemen satisfied their vanity by wooing her shamelessly in front of their wives, who, off to one side as if it were another performance, whispered and laughed at the enormous efforts their husbands made to rise above the others and claim the spoils.