The Barefoot Queen (72 page)

They left behind the Viveros Bridge. There was still a league before Torrejón de Ardoz and Caridad already knew all about the family she was going to live with: Herminia’s aunt and uncle, Germán and Margarita. He was a farmer, like almost everyone in the town, and his wife helped him when she could.

“My uncle is a good man,” murmured Herminia, “like my father, although he was a bit obstinate. Uncle took me in as a girl, when my mother couldn’t take care of her children and distributed us to various relatives.”

Caridad was familiar with the story; she also knew that Herminia had never heard from her mother again, just as had happened to her. She remembered the night that both of them had cried.

“Aunt Margarita is old,” she explained, “and always sick with something or other, but she will treat you well.”

There was also Antón and Rosario. Caridad sensed a certain nervousness in her friend when she praised her cousin Antón, who worked the lands they had leased with his father, although he also often helped making tiles or transporting straw to Madrid.

“If your relatives are farmers,” Caridad interrupted, “why don’t they take care of the tobacco?”

“They don’t dare,” she answered.

They walked a few steps in silence.

“Because you know that this tobacco business is dangerous, right?” asked Herminia.

“Yes.” Caridad knew it. She had talked to a prisoner who had been sentenced for trafficking in tobacco.

“You have to be careful with Rosario,” warned Herminia a bit later. “She’s vain, bitter and bossy.”

Her cousin’s wife didn’t help in the fields. She had four children whose names Caridad didn’t even try to remember, and for years she had been making good money selling the breast milk that should have been theirs to the children of wealthy Madrileños. According to what Herminia told her, for almost six months now the son of a public prosecutor in the War Council had been living with them, the newborn having been brought to Torrejón by his parents so that Rosario could nurse him.

“And you?” asked Caridad.

“What about me?”

“What do you do there, in your aunt and uncle’s house?”

Herminia sighed. Caridad stopped and Marcial got a few paces ahead; Herminia hadn’t told her why she remained in her aunt and uncle’s house.

“I help out.”

Caridad squinted at her friend’s silhouette outlined against the fields while that sun that was so different from the one that shone in La Galera caressed her figure. “You’ve never married?”

Herminia urged her to continue walking. “We’re almost there—” She tried to change the subject.

“Why?” insisted Caridad, interrupting her.

“A baby,” Herminia finally confessed. “Several years ago, before prison. Nobody in Torrejón will marry me. And in Madrid … in Madrid the men are very reluctant to get married.”

“You never told me about any of this.”

Herminia avoided her eyes and they continued in silence. Caridad knew that men didn’t want to get married. Many of the prisoners in La Galera complained about the same thing, that in the Madrid of civility and outrageous luxury, the men were afraid to get married. The number of weddings decreased each year and with it a birth rate that was replaced by people who came from every corner of Spain. The only reason for it was the impossibility of meeting the costs of the luxuries, mostly dresses, that the women accrued as soon as they married in order to fiercely
compete with others, both in noble and modest homes, each according to their means. Many men had been ruined; others worked ceaselessly to please their wives.

Torrejón de Ardoz was a town of little more than a thousand inhabitants located at the foot of the King’s Highway that led to Saragossa. They passed the hospital of Santa María as they entered and dodged a couple of beggars who were harassing them. Another block and they went down Enmedio Street until they reached the town’s main square. On Hospital Street, between the church of San Juan and the hospital of San Sebastián, they stopped in front of some low adobe houses, with back gardens that bordered the fields. The sun was still shining.

Marcial emitted a grunt in farewell, handed Caridad the papers confirming her freedom, pushed the cart against the façade of one of the houses and went into it. Caridad followed Herminia to the house next door.

“Hail Mary, full of grace,” she called out in greeting as she crossed the threshold.

On September 13, 1752, three years after the big gypsy roundup, 551 gypsy women plus more than a hundred children arrived at the Royal House of Mercy in Saragossa. All of them had boarded at the port of Málaga for Tortosa, in Tarragona, at the mouth of the Ebro River, from where they went upriver in barges to Saragossa, always in the custody of a regiment of soldiers.

Ana Vega squeezed little Salvador’s hand when they saw the houses of the city and the towers that peeked out above them. The boy, almost nine years old, responded to his aunt’s squeeze with one of his own, as if he were the one trying to give her strength. Salvador was a Vega and Ana had adopted him a little more than a year ago, after his mother’s death in the typhus epidemic that devastated Málaga. It had ravaged the population of the coastal city and the gypsy women locked up on Arrebolado Street were no exception. The deaths ran into the thousands, more than six thousand they said, so many that the bishop forbade the ringing of the bells at the end of the viaticum and at burials. The priests distributed mutton rations in the houses of the sick, but none to the gypsy women and their children. Once the epidemic had passed, the famine of 1751 came, owing to the poor harvest. None of the numerous rogations and penance processions that the friars and priests convoked throughout Andalusia managed to put an end to that terrible drought.

Ana let go of the little boy’s hand, tenderly stroked his shaved head and pulled him toward her. Saragossa opened out before them; the over five hundred gypsy women contemplated the city in silence as it drew closer. Most of those women, haggard, wasted, sick, many of them naked, without even a rag to cover their modesty, had no idea what fate awaited them. What other torments did His Majesty Ferdinand VI have in store for them?

The Marquis of Ensenada had the answer. The nobleman had not wavered in his obsession to exterminate the gypsy race. Many of those arrested in La Carraca had been taken from Cádiz to the El Ferrol arsenal, on the opposite coast, in northern Spain. As for the gypsy women, the marquis had to fight with the council that governed the House of Mercy in order to move them there. The Royal House of Mercy had been established to assist the poor and the vagrants who lived in the capital of the kingdom of Aragón. It deprived them of their freedom, forced them to work to be useful to society and in some cases even applied corporal punishment, but still the council didn’t want to see it converted into a jail for delinquents. Saragossa had always considered itself an extremely charitable city, a virtue that only attracted more indigents to its streets. The “father of the orphans” took care of the defenseless children and, every once in a while, organized the rounds of the “poor cart”: a barred wagon that went through the city to arrest the beggars and vagrants who loitered or asked for alms, and locked them up in the House of Mercy. How were they going to fit in these five hundred lost causes, plus another two hundred Aragonese gypsies who were still in the jail of the Aljafería castle and whom the marquis also wanted to send to that institution, when it was already packed with almost six hundred beggars?

The tussle between the council and the marquis was settled in the nobleman’s favor: the State would take responsibility for the gypsy women’s maintenance. Likewise, it would build a new building to house them, make sure that they were always separate from the rest of the inmates and the field marshal would send twenty guard soldiers to watch over them.

The long line of dirty naked women, escorted by soldiers, caused so much excitement that a crowd joined the procession headed to the Portillo Gate, in front of the castle, where they entered the city. Not far from that gate was the Campo del Toro, onto which the grounds of the House of Mercy opened. Long brick and wooden buildings, one and two stories
tall, with pitched roofs and barred windows placed in no apparent order, made up the compound. Scattered among them were courtyards and open spaces, small service buildings and, on one end, a humble church with a single nave, also of wood and brick.

The warden of the House of Mercy shook his head at the sight of the women and children who came through the gate escorted by the soldiers. The priest, beside him, crossed himself repeatedly at the naked bodies, the gaunt faces, the bones jutting from hunger, the withered breasts revealed without modesty; squalid arms, legs and buttocks.

As soon as they had entered, they were pushed toward the building constructed expressly for them. Ana and Salvador, holding each other tightly by the hand, entered amid the mass of women and children. A simple glance was enough for the gypsies to see that they weren’t all going to fit in there. The place was dark and narrow. The dirt floor was damp from stagnant water, and the unhealthy stench that came from it in the September heat without ventilation was unbearable.

The women began to complain.

“They can’t put us in here!”

“Even animal stables are better than this!”

“We’ll get sick!”

Many of the gypsies looked toward Ana Vega. Salvador squeezed her hand to encourage her.

“We won’t stay here,” she declared. The boy rewarded her with a brilliant smile. “Let’s leave!”

She turned around and led the exit. The gypsy women who were still coming in backed up as they came up against Ana Vega. A few minutes later they were all on the esplanade that opened up in front of the building, complaining, shouting, cursing their lot, challenging some soldiers who questioned their captain. The officer turned toward the alderman, who again shook his head: he knew it; he had foreseen that problem. It hadn’t even been two months since the government council had warned the Marquis of Ensenada of the new construction’s unhealthy conditions: there was no drainage and the waters stagnated in the gypsy building. There couldn’t have been a worse beginning.

“Get them inside!” he then ordered over the din.

The roar hadn’t stopped echoing when Ana Vega started hitting and biting a sergeant beside her. Little Salvador attacked another soldier,
who threw him off with a slap before dealing with many of the gypsy women who followed Ana’s lead. Others, unable to fight, cheered their companions on. After a few moments of confusion, the soldiers retreated, regrouped and fired some shots into the air that managed to halt the women’s rage.

The solution offered by the riot satisfied the alderman: he would demonstrate his authority and resolve the housing issue. Ana Vega and another five women who were identified as troublemakers would be whipped and then locked in the stocks for two days; the others could sleep outside the building, under the stars, in the courtyards and in the garden, at least as long as the heat that was turning the stagnant water bad lasted. After all, it was already September; the situation couldn’t last that much longer.

In sight of the women and their children, Ana presented her bare back to the sentry; her jutting shoulder blades, spine and collarbones couldn’t hide the scars from the many punishments she had received in Málaga. The whip whistled through the air and she gritted her teeth. Between whip strokes she turned her gaze toward Salvador, who was in the front row as always. The little boy, his fists and mouth clenched, closed his eyes every time the leather lashed her back. Ana tried to give him a smile, to reassure him, but all she managed was a forced grimace.

The tears she saw running down the little boy’s face hurt more than any whiplash. Salvador had taken her as the substitute for his dead mother and Ana had taken refuge in the little one as the recipient of feelings that everyone seemed to want to steal from her. Twice she had disowned her own daughter. She had found out about what had happened in the San Miguel alley: La Trianera made sure to let her know. Milagros’s wedding to Rafael García’s grandson, that young troublemaker she’d once smacked, sank her further into despair. Her girl handed over to a García! On the other hand, her indifference to the news of her husband’s murder, not feeling anything after so many years of sharing their lives, surprised and worried her, but she concluded that José hadn’t deserved a different fate: he had agreed to that marriage. And as for the death sentence against her father …

“Do you have anything to say?”

The memory of that conversation with the soldier in Málaga interrupted her thoughts.

“Are they expecting a response?” she asked in turn.

The man shrugged.

“The gypsy told me that he would return once I had spoken with you.”

“Tell him that my daughter is no longer a Vega.”

“Is that all?”

Ana half closed her eyes.

“Yes. That is all.”

Some time later Milagros had sent the Camacho to her. “Tell her that I no longer consider her my daughter,” she’d declared. Was it true? Ana asked herself many nights. Was that what she truly felt? Sometimes, when her anger at the thought of Milagros in the arms of a García surfaced, the family hatred, the gypsy pride made her answer yes, that she was no longer her daughter. On most other occasions, what blossomed inside her was only infinite, indulgent, blind mother’s love. Why had she said such a horrible thing? she would then torment herself. Rage alternated or mixed together with grief in her long dark nights of captivity, yet, either way, Ana ended up having to hide her tears and sobs from her fellow prisoners.