The Barefoot Queen (9 page)

“Whatever you like,” answered the old woman, knowing she had won.

Several women smiled; a man sighed loudly, another made a face as he tilted his head to one side and a couple of others grumbled under their breath.

“She couldn’t move …” argued Melchor, pointing to the mud of the street. “She fell here …”

“She can now. She’s a strong woman.”

Old María told him that the black woman was named Caridad and she handed Melchor a wineskin with the rest of the barley and egg mixture that she was to take until the fevers went away completely.

“Bring it back next time you come round,” she warned. “And take care of her!” exhorted the old woman as they set off.

Melchor turned toward her in surprise and questioned her with his eyes. What did she care? Why …?

“Her tears are as sad as ours,” said María, anticipating his question.

And that was how, with Caridad noticeably better behind him and the wineskin hanging from his staff, which was slung over his shoulder like a pole, Melchor arrived at the San Miguel alley, which was flooded with smoke and the ringing of hammers on anvils.

“Who’s that woman?” his son-in-law José asked harshly when he saw her enter the courtyard. He still had a hammer in his hand and wore a leather apron over his bare, sweaty chest.

Melchor stood up tall with the wineskin still hanging over his back off his staff, Caridad motionless behind him, unable to understand the gypsy tongue. Since when did he owe any explanations to surly José Carmona? The challenge lasted a few seconds.

“She sings well,” was all he finally said.

The Carmona family’s blacksmith shop was located on the lower level of a cluster of apartments in the San Miguel alley. It was a three-story rectangular building built around a tiny courtyard with a well in the center. The workshop and the families who lived on the upper floors all made use of its water. However, getting to the well often proved a difficult task, since both the courtyard and the corridors that surrounded it were used to store the coal for the forge and the iron scraps the gypsies gathered to work with: a ton of twisted and rusty pieces piled up because, unlike the Sevillian
payos
who had to buy their raw material in Vizcaya, the gypsies weren’t subject to any ordinances or the inspectors who controlled product quality. Behind the courtyard with the well, through a narrow corridor covered by the roof of the first floor, was a small courtyard with a latrine and, beside that, a small room originally used as a laundry; that was the room Melchor Vega had taken as his own when he returned from the galleys.

“You can stay there.” The gypsy pointed Caridad to the floor of the little courtyard, between the latrine and the entrance to his room. “You have to keep drinking this remedy until you are cured. Then you can go,” he added, handing her the wineskin. “The last thing I need is for Old María to think I didn’t take care of you!”

Melchor went into his room and closed the door behind him. Caridad
sat on the ground, with her back resting against the wall, and organized her scant belongings carefully: the bundle to her right, the wineskin to her left, the straw hat in her hands.

She was no longer trembling and her fever had subsided. She vaguely remembered the first moments of her stay in the hut in the gypsy settlement: first they gave her water, but they didn’t allow her to sate her burning thirst. They put cold compresses on her forehead until Old María knelt beside the mattress and forced her to drink the thick concoction of boiled barley. Behind her, two women prayed aloud, speaking over each other, entrusting themselves to countless virgins and saints as they drew crosses in the air.

“Leave the saint worship for the
payos
!” ordered Old María.

Then Caridad fell into a restless, confused stupor that transported her to the work on the plantation, the whip, the feasts on the holidays, and all the old gods she used to sing and plead to appeared before her. The Yoruba drums echoed frenetically in her head, just as they had in the sleeping quarters on the plantation in Cuba. She danced in a dream coven that terrified her, and saw the Negroes beating on the skins of kettledrums, their laughter and obscene gesturing, the other slaves who accompanied them with claves and maracas, their faces shouting frantically inches from hers, all waiting for the saint to come down and mount Caridad. And Oshún, her Orisha, finally did mount her, but in her dream it wasn’t to accompany her in a joyful, sensual dance as the goddess usually did, but rather she forced Caridad with her movements and gestures toward a hell where all the gods in the universe battled.

She awoke suddenly, startled, soaked in sweat, and found herself amid the silence of the settlement in the dead of night.

“Girl,” said Old María before long. “I don’t know what you were dreaming about, but it scares me just to imagine it.”

Then Caridad noticed that the gypsy woman seated beside her was gripping her hand tightly. The touch of that rough, wrinkled hand calmed her. It had been so long since anyone had held her hand to comfort her … Marcelo … she was the one who had cradled the little boy. No. It wasn’t that. Perhaps … perhaps since she had been stolen away from her mother, in Africa. She could barely remember her. What was she like? The old woman must have sensed her uneasiness and she squeezed her hand. Caridad let herself be rocked by the gypsy’s warmth, by the feeling she
wanted to transmit to her, but she kept trying to conjure up her mother’s face. What had become of her mother and her brothers and sisters? What was the land and freedom of her childhood like? She remembered struggling to sketch her mother’s features in her mind …

She couldn’t do it.

IN THE
dusky light that entered the small courtyard, Caridad looked around at the accumulated filth; it smelled of rubbish. She sensed someone’s presence and she grew nervous: two women who stood inside the corridor, filling its entire width, observed her with curiosity.

“Just because she sings well?” whispered a surprised Milagros to her mother, without taking her eyes off Caridad.

“That’s what your father told me,” answered Ana, her kind expression turning serious when she remembered José’s shouting and wild flailing. “She sings well, he says! The last thing we need is a Negress!” he had howled after dragging his wife inside the smithy. “You get in a fight with La Trianera, you slap her grandson, and your father brings a Negress home. He set her up in the little courtyard! What is he thinking? Another mouth to feed? I want that Negress out of this house …”

But Ana interrupted his rant just as she did every time her husband raged against his father-in-law: “If my father says she sings well, that means she sings well, you understand? By the way, he pays for his own food, and if he wants to pay for the food of a Negress who sings well, he’ll do it.”

“And what does Grandfather want her for?” asked Milagros in a soft voice.

“I have no idea.”

They stopped whispering, and they both, as if they had agreed on it, focused on Caridad, who had lowered her gaze and remained seated on the ground. Mother and daughter contemplated the old dress of faded gray burlap she wore, the straw hat in her hands, and the bundle and wineskin to either side of her.

“Who are you?” asked Ana.

“Caridad,” she responded with her head bowed.

The gypsies had never not looked someone straight in the eye, no matter how eminent or distinguished they were. Gypsies held the gaze of
the noblemen when even their closest advisers didn’t dare. They always listened to judges serve sentences with their heads held high, proud. They addressed them all with self-confidence. Wasn’t a gypsy, just for having been born gypsy, nobler than the best of the
payos
? The two women waited a few seconds for Caridad to lift her gaze. “What should we do?” Milagros’s eyes asked her mother, seeing the Negro woman’s stubborn bashfulness.

Ana shrugged.

Finally it was the girl who decided. Caridad seemed like a frightened, defenseless animal and, after all,
if grandfather brought her here
 …, she thought. She approached her, moved aside the wineskin, sat beside her, leaning to try to see her face. The seconds passed slowly until Caridad dared to turn toward her.

“Caridad,” the girl then whispered in a sweet voice, “my grandfather says that you sing very well.”

Ana smiled, opened her hands and left them sitting there.

At first Caridad glanced furtively as she tersely answered the girl’s naive questions: What are you doing in Triana? What brought you here? Where are you from? As the evening wore on, Milagros felt Caridad fixing her small eyes on her. She searched for some gleam in her gaze, some brilliance, even the reflection of some damp tears, but she found nothing. And yet … Suddenly it was as if Caridad had finally found someone to trust, and as she told Milagros about her life, the girl felt her pain.

“Lovely?” replied Caridad sadly when Milagros asked her to tell her if Cuba was as lovely as they said it was. “There’s nothing lovely for a slave.”

“But …” the gypsy girl wanted to insist, but she grew quiet at Caridad’s gaze. “Did you have family?” she asked, trying to change the subject.

“Marcelo.”

“Marcelo? Who is Marcelo? Didn’t you have anyone else?”

“No, nobody else. Just Marcelo.”

“Who is he?”

“My son.”

“So … you have children … And your man?”

Caridad shook her head almost imperceptibly, as if the girl’s naïveté was too much for her; didn’t she know what slavery was?

“I have no man, no husband,” she explained wearily. “Slaves have nothing, Milagros. They separated me from my mother when I was very
young, and then they separated me from my children; one of them was sold by the master.”

“And Marcelo?” Milagros dared to ask after a short silence. “Where is he? Did they separate you from him?”

“He stayed in Cuba.” He did find it lovely, she thought. Caridad sketched a smile and became lost in her memories.

“Did they separate you from him?” repeated Milagros after a time.

“No. The white men had no use for Marcelo.”

The gypsy girl hesitated. She didn’t dare to insist.

“Do you miss him?” she asked instead.

A tear ran down Caridad’s cheek before she managed to nod. Milagros embraced her and felt her crying. Hers was a strange sobbing: muffled, silent, hidden.

THE NEXT
morning, Melchor bumped into Caridad as he left his room.

“Oh hell!” he cursed. The Negress! He’d forgotten about her.

Caridad lowered her head before the man with the sky-blue silk jacket trimmed in silver. Dawn was breaking and the hammering had yet to start, although you could hear people coming and going in the courtyard where the well was located, beyond the covered corridor. Caridad hadn’t slept so well in a long time, despite all the people who had stepped over her on their way to the latrine. She remembered the gypsy girl’s promise to help her cross the bridge.

“Pay?” Milagros had laughed loudly.

Caridad felt considerably better than the day before and she dared to look at Melchor; his extremely brown skin made that easier for her, as if she were addressing another slave at the plantation. He must be about fifty years old, she calculated, comparing him with the Negroes that age she had met in Cuba, and he was thin and sinewy. She observed his gaunt face and sensed the traces of his years of suffering and mistreatment, just as she had seen in the faces of Negro slaves.

“Did you drink Old María’s potion?” asked the gypsy, interrupting her thoughts. He was surprised to see the colorful blanket that covered her and the straw mattress she rested on, but it wasn’t his problem where she’d got them.

“Yes,” she answered.

“Keep taking it,” added Melchor before turning his back, heading into the narrow corridor and disappearing toward the door that led out of the cluster of apartments.

That’s it?
wondered Caridad then. Weren’t they going to make her work or mount her? That man, “the grandfather” as Milagros had called him on several occasions, had said she sang well. How many times had she been complimented in her entire life?
I sing well,
Caridad told herself with satisfaction. “Nobody will bother you if Grandfather protects you,” the girl had also assured her. The warmth of the sun’s rays that filtered into the small courtyard comforted her. She had a small mattress, a beautiful colorful blanket that Milagros had given her and she could cross the bridge! She closed her eyes and allowed herself to fall into a pleasant stupor.

At that time of the day the San Miguel alley was still calm. Melchor walked through it and, when he reached the height of the Minims, as if entering hostile territory, he touched the packet he carried in his inside jacket pocket. It was actually good snuff that Uncle Basilio had given him. The day before, as soon as he’d gone into his room, after leaving Caridad in the small courtyard, Melchor had pulled the powder out of the pig intestine it was wrapped in with a disgusted expression. He’d placed a pinch on the back of his right hand and inhaled deeply: finely ground. He preferred twisted tobacco, but he knew how to recognize quality in powdered tobacco. Probably “monte de India,” he thought, a rough powder brought from the Indies that was washed and treated in the Seville tobacco factory. He had a good amount. Uncle Basilio would make some good money … although he could make even more if … he searched through his belongings. He was sure he had it. The last time he sold powder he had used it … There it was! A bottle of red ocher, fine reddish earth. It was already night. He began to mix the tobacco powder with the red dirt, by candlelight, very carefully, making sure not to go too far.