The Barefoot Queen (95 page)

“Take your daughter,” she told her.

They left the room just as Rafael García was reaching the gallery. They passed each other. Milagros tried in vain to calm the little girl down. Her hands were shaking and she was out of breath, but her gaze was so bright, so victorious, that El Conde grew alarmed. He dodged them, worried, and quickened his step toward his house.

“Show her to your grandfather. Put the girl in his arms. Run, my daughter. Maybe that way we can avoid tragedy. When we did that with you, years ago, it worked.”

While Ana was trying to keep Melchor from challenging Pedro García to a duel, La Trianera, sitting bruised on the floor of the room, was condemning the old gypsy.

“Go and find Pedro,” she told her husband. From the window, she had heard Melchor’s threat. “Have him fight El Galeote. He should have an easy time of it with that old man. Tell him to kill him, to tear out his eyes in front of his family, to rip out his guts and bring them to me!”

Below, on the alley, Melchor didn’t want to touch the little girl.

“Pedro will kill you, Father. You are … you’re much older than he is.”

Milagros brought the girl over to him again. Caridad was watching from a certain distance, still and in silence. The gypsy didn’t even stretch out his hand.

“Pedro is evil, Grandfather,” she pointed out with her arms extended, showing him the girl, who was still sobbing.

Melchor made a face before answering. “That son of a bitch still has to meet the devil.”

“He will kill you.”

“Then I’ll be waiting for him in hell.”

“Father, we are all alive,” interjected Ana. “We’ve found each other again. Let’s make the most of it. Let’s leave here. Let’s live …”

“Tell him not to do it, Cachita,” begged Milagros.

Ana’s eyes joined Milagros’s plea. Even Ana Ximénez and some other women who were listening attentively to the conversation turned toward Caridad, who remained in silence until Melchor fixed his gaze on her.

“You taught me to live, gypsy. If you don’t challenge Pedro, will you feel the same when you listen to me sing?”

His silence was answer enough.

“Finish off the bastard then. Don’t be afraid,” she said with a slight sad smile. “Like I told you, I’ll go down to hell with you and I’ll keep singing for you.”

Ana bowed her head, defeated, and Milagros hugged her daughter against her chest.

“Galeote!”

El Conde’s shout, as he stood at the entrance to the courtyard, silenced all conversations and made everyone stop in their tracks.

“Here!” He tossed a knife at Melchor’s feet. “When he gets here, you’ll have your chance to fight my grandson.”

Melchor bent down to pick up his knife.

“Clean it well,” added El Conde, seeing how he rubbed it against his red jacket, “because if Pedro doesn’t finish you off, I’ll do it myself.”

“No!” objected Ana Ximénez. “Rafael García, Melchor Vega: this fight to the death will end it all. If Pedro wins, no one should bother the Vega women …”

“And the girl?”

“What do you want Vega blood in your home for?”

El Conde thought for a few moments and finally nodded.

“The girl will stay with her mother. No one will seek further revenge on them! Not even your grandson, understood?”

The patriarch nodded again.

“Do you swear? You swear?” insisted the matriarch at the simple nod with which he wanted to seal his commitment.

“I swear.”

“If it is Melchor who wins …” Even she hesitated at her own words, and she couldn’t help a pitying glance at El Galeote, as did many of the women present. “If Melchor defeats Pedro, the sentence will be considered fulfilled.”

“The vengeance belongs to the Carmonas,” El Conde then declared. “And Pascual isn’t here to swear on it.”

Ana Ximénez nodded thoughtfully. “We can’t all wait here for him to return. Gather the council of elders,” she said then. “Including all those from the Carmona family.”

THAT VERY
afternoon, the matriarch represented the interests of the Vegas in an emergency council meeting. The family heads attended, along with the Carmonas, many of the gypsies from the alley and some of the gypsy women who had come from other towns. Others wandered through Triana and the ones who remained stayed with Ana and Milagros, crying over Luisa’s corpse, which up until then Fray Joaquín had been taking care of, and they settled it in one of the courtyards.

It was a long courtyard that opened up between two rows of small, single-story houses. There soon rose from it a constant wail from the gypsy women. Some of their displays of grief were restrained but most were overwhelming. Exhausted by the long torment she had suffered
since Pedro had stolen her daughter from her in Madrid, Milagros sat on a stone well attached to one of houses, and there she sought refuge in the girl she had just got back, cradling her and staring into her face with love. As she felt María falling asleep in her arms, relaxed, tranquil, trusting, she forgot all her suffering. She didn’t want to think about anything else until, from between the long skirts of the women gathered, she recognized Fray Joaquín’s sandals and habit standing before her. She lifted her face.

“Thank you,” she whispered.

He was going to say something, but she was already absorbed in her girl’s sweet features again.

Despite her sadness over Luisa’s death, Ana Vega didn’t let herself get swept up in the dismal atmosphere looming over the courtyard. Fray Joaquín had told her about the relationship between her father and the
morena,
but she’d had trouble really believing him until she had seen the bond that clearly united them. She found Caridad, alone, just a few steps away from Melchor.

“I don’t want Pedro to kill him,” Ana said to her after going to her side.

“Neither do I,” answered Caridad.

They both looked at Melchor, standing in a corner, still, expectant.

“But he will,” avowed Ana.

Caridad was silent.

“You do realize that, right?”

“What would you choose, his life or his manhood?” Caridad asked.

“If he loses his life,” replied Ana, “his manhood will be of no use to me … or to you.”

Ana waited for Caridad to react to her acknowledgment of their relationship, but she didn’t. She continued contemplating Melchor as if spellbound.

“You know that isn’t true,” Caridad then responded. “I felt him tremble when Milagros told him how she had been prostituted by her husband. I feared he would burst. Since then he hasn’t been himself. He lives to avenge her—”

“Vengeance!” Ana interrupted her. “I have spent five years locked up, suffering, only to escape and return to my homeland, with my people. I know what happened to Milagros was terrible, but just one day ago I had given both of them up for dead … all three,” she corrected herself. “Now we have the chance to start again—”

“What?” Now it was Caridad who interrupted her. “Five years locked up? What’s that? I’ve been a slave my whole life, and even when I gained freedom, I continued to be one, right here in Triana and in Madrid, too. You know something, Ana Vega? I’d rather have a second of life beside this Melchor … Look at him! That is what I learned from him, from you all! And I like it. I prefer this moment, this second of gypsy pride, than spending the rest of my days with a man full of resentment.”

Ana couldn’t find the words to answer. She noted her father’s impassive figure blurring as tears came to her eyes, and she left. She searched for Milagros, and she saw her absorbed in her little girl and with the friar close by, but the other Vega women approached Ana as soon as they saw her blend into the group. They accompanied her over to Luisa, where the gypsy women who continued to stream into the alley from various towns in Seville gathered. She knew some of them, from Málaga, from Saragossa; others introduced themselves as relatives or friends. She tried to smile at them, aware that they had come to support her. Many had even argued with their men to do so. They had risked being arrested by traveling to Triana without passports, and they had done it for her. Gypsy women! She looked at Luisa’s squalid, shrunken corpse. Yet how great she had been!
They can never take away our pride,
Luisa had said to them in the House of Mercy to spur them on.
That is your beauty,
she had flattered her later. And that very night, breaking her promise, Ana had run to watch Salvador coming back from the fields. Her stomach shrank at the memory. Then they had sent him to the arsenals, perhaps because of her stubbornness, but Salvador, like the other boys, had left with his head held high.

“Are you feeling ill?” asked one of the Vega women.

“No … No. I have something to do.”

She left them all behind and ran toward Melchor.

KILL HIM
, Father. Finish him off. Do it for Milagros, for all of us.

Ana’s words of encouragement to Melchor not long before were still echoing in Caridad’s ears. At that moment they all left the courtyard and went out onto the alley. She didn’t need to tell him anything. She’d had the feeling that Ana had come to take her place when she’d returned to the corner where Melchor was, to ask for her father’s forgiveness. Ana
had cried as she reproached herself and encouraged him with all her heart before embracing him. However, during that hug, Melchor had turned toward Caridad and smiled at her, and with that smile she knew that she was still his
morena.

Caridad let Ana be the one to accompany Melchor. She walked behind, with Martín, who had shown up at the alley on a different horse—“The other one didn’t last,” confessed the young man—with an old gypsy woman, from the Heredia clan in Villafranca, on its hindquarters. That had been shortly before Ana Ximénez arrived in the courtyard to report that the council had made a decision: the fight would end it all. There would be no more revenge taken and Milagros would be free with her daughter. The Garcías had accepted, and the Carmonas—even though Pascual wasn’t there—had as well. She didn’t tell them that it had been easy to achieve that pledge because no one believed that Melchor would be victorious. “Just another way to carry out the sentence anyway,” the matriarch had heard one of the Carmonas saying before the others nodded in satisfaction.

They were saying that the Garcías were searching for Pedro in Seville. Caridad prayed to the Virgin of Candlemas, and right there, from the tobacco Martín had given her, she tossed some leaf pieces to the ground begging her Orishas to have Pedro fall into the Guadalquivir drunk, or get arrested by the constables, or stabbed by a cuckolded husband. But none of that happened, and she knew he had arrived when the murmurs in the alley grew.

Melchor didn’t wait, nor did Ana. Milagros refused to go.

“He is going to die because of me,” she tried to offer as an excuse to her mother.

“Yes, my daughter, yes. He will die for his family, like a good gypsy, like the Vega he is,” Ana objected, forcing her to stand up and go with them.

“Don’t worry, Father, Luisa isn’t going to run away,” quipped a gypsy woman when she saw the doubt in Fray Joaquín’s face as he realized that everyone was leaving the wake in the courtyard where the corpse lay.

Some laughing was heard, though it couldn’t break the tension that reached its highest point at the series of clicks Melchor’s knife made as it opened; those clicks seemed to rise above every other sound, including the laughter. Caridad took a deep breath. The gypsy didn’t even wait for
people to make way for him. Caridad saw him grip his knife and cross the alley toward the Garcías’ apartments. Men and women moved aside as he walked.

“Where are you, you son of a bitch?”

Caridad realized that Melchor didn’t even know him. He probably hadn’t seen his face the night he jumped into the pit, she thought, since she hadn’t either. And, when they lived in Triana, why would Melchor notice a young García boy? She was tempted to point Pedro out to him herself.

It wasn’t necessary: Pedro García separated from his family and walked toward Melchor. The gypsies opened into a circle. Many were still talking, but they fell quiet when the two men began to jab their knives into the air, their arms outstretched: one with rolled-up sleeves, young, tall, strong, agile; the other … the other one old, skinny and wasted, with a haggard face and still wearing his red jacket trimmed in gold. Many wondered why he didn’t take it off. It seemed to be interfering with his movement.

Caridad knew it wasn’t the jacket. The wound from his fight with El Gordo burned, and his movements registered the pain. She had cared for him tenderly, in Torrejón, in Barrancos. He’d resented her attentions, but in the end they’d laughed together. She looked over at Ana and Milagros, both in the front row: one cowering, on the point of collapse at the terrible odds; the other crying, hugging her little daughter’s face tightly against her neck to keep her from seeing the scene unfolding before them.

Pedro and Melchor continued to circle around, insulting each other with their eyes. Caridad felt proud of that man, her man, willing to die for those he loved. A shiver of that pride ran down her back. Just as she had felt upon her arrival at the San Miguel alley, when they’d captured them, she felt in herself the power that Melchor radiated, the power that had attracted her from the first time she laid eyes on him.

“Fight, gypsy!” she then shouted. “The devil is waiting for us!”

As if they had been holding themselves back, the crowd watching the duel broke out in cheers and insults.

Pedro attacked, spurred on by the throng. Melchor managed to dodge it. Their eyes challenged each other again.

“Conceited braggart,” spat out Pedro García.

Conceited braggart … Pedro’s words set off a spark in Milagros’s
mind and she saw an image of Old María. Pedro had confessed to it in Madrid, but she had been drunk and unable to remember it.
Conceited braggarts,
those were the words he had said to her that night. Pedro had killed the old healer! She felt weak; luckily someone managed to take the little girl from her arms before she fell to the ground.

“Careful, Melchor!” warned Caridad when Pedro García launched toward him, taking advantage of his shifting his gaze toward his granddaughter.