The Barefoot Queen (88 page)

Sometimes, after hearing him lie to the naive, pious people who wanted to get close to the Virgin, Milagros also thought about Fray Joaquín, and when she did she was filled with conflicting emotions. The first days in Madrid, when they started using the Virgin to make money to pay off their onerous debt to the widow, she was exasperated with his stammering. She silently asked him for firmness and conviction, but she got even more nervous when she could see, through the lace of the mantilla, how he was constantly looking at her out of the corner of his eye to make sure she was playing her part.
Worry about yourself, friar. How could anyone recognize me in these clothes that cover me from head to toe?
As Fray Joaquín grew more confident in his role, his attitude toward Milagros changed, as if he took strength from his self-assurance. He didn’t seem as fraught over her presence and he sometimes even held her gaze. Then she would feel, even if only for a few moments, like a girl, as she had been back in Triana.

“Aren’t you attracted to me when I’m dressed in black?” she asked him brazenly one day.

“What …?” Fray Joaquín went red up to his ears. “What do you mean?”

“Just wondering if you don’t like me in these … these rags you force me to wear.”

“It must be the Immaculate Virgin, who strives to avoid temptation,” he joked, pointing to the sculpture.

She was about to reply but didn’t, and he thought he understood why: inside her was still that mistreated woman, humiliated by men.

“I didn’t mean—” Milagros started to apologize before he interrupted her.

“You are right: I don’t like you in those widow’s clothes. But I do like,” he added quickly, seeing her sad expression, “that you are joking and worrying about your appearance again.”

Milagros’s face changed again. A shadow of sadness marred her gaze. “Fray Joaquín, we women were brought into this world to give birth in pain, to work and suffer men’s perversion. Hush,” she said, seeing that he was about to reply. “They … you men rebel, struggle and fight against evil. Sometimes you win and become the triumphant hero; many other times you lose and then you turn brutally on those weaker than you to cover up your failure, and then vengeance becomes your only goal. We have to shut up and obey; it has always been that way. I finally learned that and it cost me my youth. I don’t even see how I can fight for my daughter without the help of a man. Yes, thank you,” she added before he could intervene, “but it’s true. All we can do is fight to forget our pain and suffering, to overcome them, but never to take revenge for them. We cling to whatever hope we have left, and in the meantime, once in a while, only once in a while, try to feel like women again.”

“I don’t know what …”

“Don’t say anything.”

Fray Joaquín shrugged as he shook his head, his hands extended out in front of him.

“Someone who tells a woman that he doesn’t like her”—Milagros raised her voice—“no matter how black her clothes, how old or ugly she may be, has no right to say anything.”

And she turned her back on him, trying to swing her hip enough for him to see it through her shapeless clothes.

The proximity, the common goal, the constant anxiety over the danger that someone would discover that the respectable and pious widow beneath that disguise was nothing more than a young gypsy—the Barefoot Girl from the Coliseo del Príncipe in Madrid, in fact—and that the friar was lying when he asked for alms for her to enter a convent, brought them a bit closer each day. Milagros did nothing to avoid brushing up against him; she felt the need for that respectful, innocent human contact. They laughed; they opened up to each other—she as never before, observing the man who hid beneath his habit: young and handsome, although he didn’t seem strong. Except for that round bald spot on the top of his head, he could be considered attractive. Although maybe his hair would grow
back … He was definitely no gypsy, he lacked decisiveness and haughtiness, but he showed plenty of devotion, sweetness and affection.

“I don’t think we’ll get any alms here,” Fray Joaquín lamented in a low voice one evening, when they reached a miserable group of shacks that they had been led to by a couple of farmers returning from work, the only companions they found on the road.

“Perhaps not with the Virgin, but surely we’ll find someone who would pay to have their fortune told,” she bet.

“Nonsense,” replied the friar, dismissing the idea with a wave of his hands.

Milagros grabbed one of them in midair, instinctively, just as she had done so many times in Triana with men or women who were reluctant to spend a few coins.

“Would his eminent reverence,” she joked, “wish to know what the lines on his palm have in store for him? I see …”

Fray Joaquín tried to pull his hand back, but she didn’t let him and eventually he gave in. Milagros found herself with the friar’s hand in hers, her gloved index finger already running along one of the lines on his palm. As she slid her finger, she felt a disturbing tingling in her belly.

“Wow …” She cleared her throat and shifted restlessly.

She tried to blame her nervousness on the uncomfortable clothes she was wearing. She took off her glove and swiped the mantilla away from her face. She took his hand in hers again and felt its warmth. She observed the white, almost delicate, skin of a man who had never worked in a forge.

“I see …”

For the first time in her life, Milagros lacked the effrontery to stare into the eyes of the man whose fortune she was reading.

THEY WERE
getting close to the Múrtiga River, with Encinasola at their backs and Barrancos rising over their heads. Milagros ripped off the mantilla and threw it; then she did the same with the gloves and lifted her face to the radiant late May sky as if trying to capture all the light she’d been denied over the almost month and a half on the road.

Fray Joaquín contemplated her, spellbound. Now she forced the hooks and eyes of her black bodice open so that the sun’s rays could caress the top of her bust. The long pilgrimage, which in other circumstances
would have been grueling, had had the opposite effect on Milagros: her weariness made her forget; the constant worry of being discovered eliminated any other concerns; and imagining the encounter to come softened her previously contracted and permanently tense features. She knew she was being watched. She let out a spontaneous shout that broke the silence, shook her head and turned toward the friar.
What will happen if we don’t find Melchor?
Fray Joaquín then asked himself, fearful at the wide smile Milagros was rewarding him with. She struggled to undo her bun and release her hair, which refused to fall free. The mere thought of not finding Melchor made Fray Joaquín put down the statue of the Virgin so he could pick up the mantilla and gloves.

“What are you doing now?” complained Milagros.

“We might need them,” he responded with the mantilla in his hand; the gloves were still lost among the brush.

He had trouble finding the second one. When he stood up with it, Milagros had disappeared. Where …? He ran his gaze over the area in vain; he couldn’t find her. He went around a little hill that allowed him to see down into the Múrtiga riverbed. He exhaled. There she was, sleeves rolled up and on her knees, putting her head into the water again and again, scrubbing her hair frantically. He saw her get up, soaked, with her plentiful chestnut-brown hair falling down her back, sparkling in the sun in contrast to her dark skin. Fray Joaquín shivered as he contemplated her beauty.

The people of Barrancos received them with curiosity and suspicion: a friar carrying a parcel and a lovely, haughty gypsy woman who was looking around curiously at everything around her. Fray Joaquín hesitated. Not Milagros: she confronted the first man she came across.

“We are looking for the person who sells tobacco to smuggle into Spain,” she said; the man was elderly and overwhelmed by her. He stammered out some words in the local language, unable to take his eyes off the face interrogating him as if he were guilty of some crime.

Fray Joaquín sensed Milagros’s tremendous anxiety and decided to intervene. “May peace be with you,” he greeted the older man calmly. “Do you understand us?”

“I do,” he heard someone else behind the man say.

“
IT
’
S VERY
dangerous,” repeated Fray Joaquín a dozen times as he approached the group of buildings that had been pointed out to them as making up Méndez’s establishment. The place was a nest of smugglers. Milagros walked decisively, with her head held high.

“At least cover your face up again,” he begged her, quickening his step to offer her the mantilla.

She didn’t even answer. Countless possibilities, all of them terrifying, were going through the friar’s head. Melchor might not be there; he could even be this Méndez’s enemy. He feared for himself, but above all for Milagros. Few people failed to notice her presence; they stopped, they looked at her, there were even some who complimented her in that strange language they spoke in Barrancos.

What have I got Milagros into?
he lamented just as they went through the gates of Méndez’s establishment. Several backpackers were lazing around the large dirt courtyard that opened out in front of the smuggler’s headquarters; one of them whistled when he saw Milagros. A couple of shady-looking women, peeking out of one of the windows of the bedroom that extended over the stables, screwed up their faces at the friar’s arrival and a band of half-naked little kids who ran among the sleepy mules tied to posts stopped to go over to them.

“Who are you?” asked one of the children.

“Have you got any sweets?” inquired another.

They had already reached the main house. None of the men who were watching them made any motion toward them. Milagros was about to swat away the pestering kids when Fray Joaquín intervened again.

“No,” he said before she could deal out the brusque gesture, “we don’t have sweets, but I do have this,” he added, showing them a two-real coin.

The children milled around the friar with their eyes bright at the sight of the copper coin.

“I will give it to you if you let Mr. Méndez know that he has visitors.”

“And who is asking for him?”

The children were silent; some of the backpackers stood up and the prostitutes in the window stuck their heads out even further.

“The granddaughter of Melchor Vega, El Galeote,” Milagros answered then.

Méndez, the smuggler, appeared in the door of the main house. He looked the gypsy woman up and down, cocked his head, scrutinized her
again, let a few seconds pass and then smiled. With a snort, Fray Joaquín let out all the air he had been holding in his lungs.

“Milagros, right?” the smuggler asked then. “Your grandfather has told me a lot about you. Welcome.”

One of the children demanded Fray Joaquín’s attention, pulling on the sleeve of his habit.

“For that coin I’ll take you to El Galeote,” he offered.

Milagros jumped and leapt on the little boy.

“He’s here?” she shrieked. “Where? You know where …?” Suddenly she was wary. What if the kid was tricking them just to get the coin? She turned to the smuggler and questioned him with eyes that could penetrate the entire building.

“He arrived a couple of weeks ago,” confirmed Méndez.

With the smuggler still in front of her, Milagros stammered something that could have been a thank-you or a farewell, grabbed the end of her long black skirt, revealing her ankles and, with it hiked up on one side, prepared to follow the little kids, who were already waiting for them amid laughter and shouts beside the entrance gates to the smuggler’s establishment.

“Let’s go!” one of them urged.

“Let’s go, Fray Joaquín,” Milagros hurried him, already a few steps ahead.

Unlike Milagros, the priest said goodbye in a clear voice. “I can’t go carrying the Virgin,” he then complained.

But Milagros didn’t hear him. A girl had grabbed her by the hand and was pulling her toward the road.

Fray Joaquín followed them unhurriedly, exaggerating the weight of the statue he had carried with no problem over half of Spain. Melchor was in Barrancos, thanks be to God. He had never really believed they would find him.
I would kill for her. You are a
payo … 
and a friar as well. You could renounce your vows, but not your race.
The warning the gypsy had given him one day on the banks of the Guadalquivir, at the possibility of a relationship with his granddaughter, had gripped his stomach as soon as Méndez had confirmed his presence in Barrancos. El Galeote would do anything for her! Hadn’t he already killed Milagros’s father for allowing her to marry a García?

“What are you doing?”

Two of the kids were fighting to help him with the weight of the statue of the Virgin.

“Give it to them!” ordered Milagros, ahead of him. “Or we’ll never get there!”

He didn’t hand it over to them; he wasn’t sure he wanted to meet Melchor Vega face to face.

“Get out of here!” he shouted to the pair of runny-nosed kids who, despite everything, continued to try to help him to carry the parcel. They were more of a nuisance than anything else.