The Barefoot Queen (92 page)

“Bring him up here!” ordered El Conde.

A brutal kick in the face clouded Milagros’s vision. Her head hit the wall violently.

“Leave me be! She’s a whore! Let me finish her off!” shouted Pedro García. Unable to free his arm, he kicked her furiously.

Amid the blows and screams, Milagros thought she heard her grandfather’s battle cry.

“Bastard dog!” she reacted and lifted her feet, still tied together, to kick back at her husband. She hit him on one thigh, not hard, but the blow calmed the pain of the others she received: on her face, chest, neck … She tried to land another one, but the two young men who were guarding the pit were already lifting Pedro up, as he kept kicking the air.

Milagros and Pedro exchanged a glance. He spat; she didn’t even move. Her eyes oozed hatred.

“Have you gone mad?” Rafael García accused his grandson even before his body was entirely out of the pit. “Silence!” he demanded, putting an end to the resistance with which Pedro returned to the surface. “Don’t let him anywhere near here again, do you understand?” he ordered the two guards. And turning to his grandson he added, “Leave Triana. I don’t want to see you here again until you get a message from me.”

While El Conde headed toward the door of the forge to look out at the alley, Milagros and Caridad communicated in a glance. Melchor remained downcast, mortified at not having been able to defend his granddaughter.
We are going to die,
the two women said to each other silently. Their faces hardened, since they didn’t want those bastards to hear them cry.

Rafael García checked that the alley was deserted and in silence. He pricked up his ears and heard how that stillness was broken by a murmur the patriarch was slow to recognize: Caridad and Milagros’s muffled singing down below in the pit. One began to softly sing her Negro songs and the other followed along, trying to overcome her fear with a fandango. A monotone rhythm joined by an upbeat one. The planks over their heads didn’t allow them to see the gleams of the oil lamp.

“Shut up!” the gypsies guarding the pit ordered.

They did not.

Melchor listened to the songs of the two people he loved most and he shook his head, his throat choked. Why did it have to be here, now, when he finally heard them sing together? They continued in the darkness, Caridad gradually adding joy to her songs and Milagros drinking in the sadness of the slave melodies. Then they matched their rhythms. A shiver ran down Melchor’s spine. Without music, without words, without
shouting and clapping, the now fused, single song sung by the two women bounced off the planks that covered the pit, filling it with pain, friendship, betrayals, love, experiences, lost hopes …

Up above, when Pedro had left the smithy far behind, the two young guards questioned the patriarch with their gaze. Rafael didn’t answer, transfixed by the women’s voices.

“Silence!” he shouted nervously, as if he had been caught out. “Be quiet or I will finish you off myself,” he added, kicking the planks.

They ignored him. El Conde eventually shrugged, ordered the young men to bolt the doors of the smithy and went home. Caridad and Milagros kept singing until dawn broke, though they couldn’t see even a glimpse of its light.

SITTING ON
the ground, Fray Joaquín felt how the passing hours transformed the space that surrounded him: the din of hammering and the clouds of smoke that came from the lower levels of the forges; the shouts and playing of children and the gypsies coming and going, or simply chatting and loafing about.

He couldn’t stop what he was sure was going to happen. He couldn’t even count on his religious community. A plague of locusts was destroying the Sevillian crops, and the friars were needed to recite rogations against that divine punishment that so frequently laid waste to the harvests, leaving hunger and epidemics in its wake. The prior, spellbound by the statue of the Immaculate Virgin, had asked to carry it in the procession. It would always be better than excommunicating the locusts, as some priests did. Fray Joaquín wondered about appealing to the authorities, but he desisted at the thought of the questions they would ask him. He didn’t know how to lie, and the officials weren’t interested in gypsy quarrels. Giving himself up to them would do no good.

Reyes and Rafael watched him from the window of their home.

“I don’t like having him there,” commented the patriarch.

“And Pedro?” she asked.

“He left. I ordered him not to return until I say so.”

“When is Pascual Carmona coming back?”

“I’ve already sent for him. According to his wife, he’s in Granada. I trust they will find him soon.”

“We have to resolve this quickly. When are you going to hand the Vega girl over to Pedro?”

“When I’ve finished with the others. El Galeote is what concerns me. I don’t want anything to get in the way of Pascual slitting his throat. After that, Pedro can do what he likes with the granddaughter.”

“Fine.”

Those were her last words before falling silent, looking out pensively on the alley, just as her husband did, and just as Fray Joaquín did. Suddenly, like everyone there, they focused their attention on a woman who had stopped at the entrance to the alleyway. “Who …?” some wondered. “It can’t be!” doubted others.

“Ana Vega,” murmured La Trianera in a halting voice.

Many were slow to recognize her; some didn’t manage to at all. Reyes, however, could even sense the spirit of her enemy asserting itself on the skinny, wizened body that held it, in the haggard face and the gaze that emerged from deep eye sockets. She was barefoot and raggedy, her dirty hair white, and she wore old, stolen clothes.

Ana ran her eyes over the alley. It all seemed the same as when she was forced to leave, years earlier. Perhaps there were fewer people … She stopped a second too long when she came across the friar, leaning on the wall, and for a brief instant she wondered what he was doing there. She recognized many others as she searched for Milagros: Carmonas, Vargases, Garcías … 
Where are you, my daughter?
She sensed misgivings from the gypsies; some even lowered their heads. Why?

Ana had been walking for almost two months since leaving Saragossa; she had fled the House of Mercy with the fifteen Vega women who were left, including girls, after Salvador and the other boys were sent to the arsenals. No one followed them, as if they were pleased they were running away, content to be rid of them; they didn’t even report their escape. They divided into two groups: one headed toward Granada; the other to Seville. Their thought was that that way some would make it. Ana headed the Sevillian party, which carried old Luisa Vega. “You will die in your homelands,” she promised her. “I’m not going to let you die in this disgusting jail.” They walked those two months before stopping in Carmona, just six leagues from Triana, where they were taken in by the Ximénez clan. Old Luisa was worn out and the others could barely continue carrying her. “We’re almost there, Aunt,” she tried to encourage her, but it
was the old woman who objected. “Let’s rest here, where we’re protected and safe,” replied another Vega. “We’ve been gone for years, what could a few more days matter?” But they did matter to Ana: she needed to find Milagros, she wanted to tell her that she loved her. Five years of hunger, illness and punishments were enough. Gypsy women from historically embittered families had ended up helping each other and smiling at each other while they shared their misery. Milagros was her daughter, and if the quarrels between families had vanished over the years of adversity, how was she going to hold a grudge against someone of her own blood? What did it matter whom she had married? She loved her!

She continued the path alone and when she arrived at the alley she was met with sullen looks; whispers; gypsy women who turned their backs on her and ran to their houses, stuck their heads out of the windows or doors and pointed her out to their relatives.

“Ana …? Ana Vega?” Fray Joaquín approached that woman who was looking at the street, perturbed.

“You still recognize me, Father?” she asked sarcastically. But something in the priest’s face made her change her tone. “Where is Milagros? Did something happen to her?”

He hesitated. How could he recount so much misfortune in a few sentences? Even the hammering in the forges stopped as Fray Joaquín told her what had happened.

Ana shouted to the heavens.

“Rafael García!” she howled soon after, running toward the patriarch’s house. “Son of a bitch! Bastard! Mangy dog …!”

No one stopped her. The people moved aside. Not even the Garcías, who remained in the door of their smithy, tried to keep her from entering the courtyard. She shouted to Rafael García at the foot of the stairs that led to the upper levels.

“Shut up!” shouted La Trianera from above, leaning on the railing of the long gallery. “You are nothing more than the daughter of a murderer and the mother of a whore! Get out of here!”

“I’ll kill you!”

Ana flew up the stairs. She didn’t get to the old woman. The gypsy women in the gallery pounced on her.

“Get out!” ordered Reyes. “Throw her down the stairs!”

They did. Ana stumbled down a few steps before she managed to grab hold of the railing and slid down a few more. She recovered.

“Your grandson sold my daughter!” she shouted, trying to go back up.

The García women in the gallery spat on her.

“That’s every whore’s excuse!” replied Reyes. “Milagros is nothing more than a common harlot, the shame of gypsy women!”

“You lie!”

“I was there.” It was Bartola who spoke. “Your daughter sold herself to men for a few
cuartos.
”

“Lies!” repeated Ana with all her strength. The others laughed. “You lie,” she sobbed.

AFTER A
couple of attempts, she understood that no one would deal with her if the friar was there. Ana needed him: he was the only one who could speak in Milagros’s favor to contradict the story Pedro had spread and La Triana had exaggerated, but finally she was forced to yield to gypsy customs.

“Go, Father,” she urged. “You will only make things worse,” she insisted when Fray Joaquín refused. “Can’t you see? This is a gypsy matter.”

“I can go to the Chief Magistrate in Seville,” offered Fray Joaquín. “I know people …”

Ana looked him up and down as he spoke. His appearance was as deplorable as his words were fiery.

“I don’t know what interest you have in my daughter … although I can guess.”

Fray Joaquín confirmed her suspicions with a sudden flush.

“Listen to me: if a constable shows up here, the entire gypsy settlement would join forces with Rafael García in defense of gypsy law. They wouldn’t listen to reason or arguments then …”

“What reason?” he exploded. “There is no sentence on Milagros like there is on Melchor … and Caridad. Let’s suppose she had become a harlot, that it were true, why keep her? What will they do to her?”

“They will hand her over to her husband. And after that nobody will worry about what might happen to her; nobody will ask about her.”

“Pedro …” muttered the priest. “He may have already killed her.”

Ana Vega remained in silence for a few seconds.

“We must trust that he hasn’t,” she finally whispered. “If they are hidden here, on the alley, neither El Conde nor the other patriarchs would let them do that. A corpse always brings problems. They will demand that it’s done outside of Triana, in secret, with no witnesses. Leave, Father. If we have any chance …”

“Leave? From what you say, if Milagros is in the alley, Pedro will have to take her out of here. I will wait at the entrance until Judgment Day if necessary. You do what you need to do.”

Ana didn’t argue. She couldn’t have, because Fray Joaquín turned his back on her, headed toward the entrance and leaned against the wall of the first building; his expression made it clear that he had made up his mind to stick it out there as long as he had to. Ana shook her head and wondered whether she should go over and tell him that there were many other ways to leave the alley: the windows and some of the back gates … Yet, she observed him and saw the blindness of someone in love. How long had it been since she’d seen passion in a man’s eyes, the fear of his beloved being hurt, rage even? First a García and now a friar. She didn’t know whether Milagros returned his feelings. In any case, that was the least of her worries. She had to do something. She didn’t have the Vega men here to back her up. The women in the settlement at La Cartuja had always been hated by the people in the alley, who wanted to keep the peace with the
payos,
do business with them; it would do her little good to go to them with this problem.

She tightened her lips and began a pilgrimage that was much more difficult than the long, hard road from Saragossa. Forges, homes and courtyards where children played and women wove baskets. Some didn’t even bother to turn their heads and listen to her pleas: “Let my daughter defend herself from her husband’s accusations.” She knew that she couldn’t plead for her father. Gypsy law would be fulfilled: they would kill him, but the terrible anguish she felt over it was eased by the opportunity to fight relentlessly for her daughter despite the weakness she felt. She got some reactions.

“If what you say is true,” replied a woman from the Flores family, “why did your daughter allow it? Answer me, Ana Vega, wouldn’t you have fought to the death to defend your virtue?”

Her knees were about to fail her.

“I would have ripped my husband’s eyes out,” muttered an old woman who seemed to be dozing beside the first. “Why didn’t your daughter do that?”

“We shouldn’t interfere in other people’s marriages,” she heard at another house. “We already gave your daughter another chance after the death of Alejandro Vargas, remember?”

“I won’t lift a finger.” “She deserves what she gets.” “You Vegas have always been troublemakers. Look at your father.” “Where’s your haughtiness now?” The recriminations followed her wherever she went. Her hands were trembling and she felt a crushing pressure in her chest.

“Besides,” admitted a woman from the Flores family, “you won’t find anybody willing to challenge the Garcías. Everyone’s afraid of going back to the arsenals, and El Conde has gained a lot of power with the
payos
and the priests.”