The Barefoot Queen (15 page)

On this occasion, Don Michael, prudently separated from Milagros and with his cheeks recovering their natural pinkness, rummaged in his bag and handed the girl a couple of pieces of eight.

“Go with God!” said José Carmona, bidding farewell on behalf of his daughter.

As soon as the count and countess and their guests took their seats once more, guitars, tambourines and castanets sounded again in the night.

“Would you like a cigar?”

Milagros turned. Alejandro Vargas was holding one out to her. She scrutinized him, from top to bottom, shamelessly: he must be sixteen years old and had the dark skin and haughty demeanor of the Vargas family, but there was something odd … His eyes? That must be it. He wasn’t able to hold her gaze the way a gypsy should. And he was a bad dancer, maybe because he was too big. Behind him, at a slight remove, she saw that her mother was spying on her.

“It’s a pure Havana,” insisted Alejandro to escape her scrutiny.

“Where did you get it from?” asked the girl, focusing on the cigar Alejandro held out.

“My father bought several.”

Milagros let out a laugh. It was one of Caridad’s! She recognized it by the green thread her friend had finished off the sucking end with.

“What’s so funny?” asked the boy.

Milagros completely ignored him. She frowned at her mother, who was now watching her openly, curious about her laughter.
Was it her?
Milagros wondered. No. It couldn’t have been. Her mother wouldn’t have dared to trick the Vargases and sell them fake Havanas. It could only have been …

“You’re wonderful, Grandfather!” she exclaimed with a smile on her lips.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

Alejandro was still holding out the cigar. Caridad had made it with her own hands! She might have been there watching as she did it.

“Hand over that cigar!” Milagros held it up to her eyes and showed it to her mother in the distance. “Pure Havana,” she affirmed before pursing her features in a funny expression.

“Yes,” she heard Alejandro say.

Ana shook her head and swatted the air.

“It must be good,” ventured Milagros.

“Excellent,” replied Alejandro.

Sure,
she thought,
Cachita made it.

“Light?” he interrupted her thoughts.

Milagros couldn’t hold back a resigned sigh. “Light? Of course I want a light. How else can I smoke?”

Alejandro clumsily pulled the flint and steel from a bag.

“And the tinder?” rushed Milagros.

Alejandro muttered as he rummaged uselessly in the bag.

“Stop! You would have already found it in that little bag. Can’t you see you don’t have any? Here. Go light it off one of the torches.”

So you are the one who’s going to break in this filly?
thought Milagros as she watched him obediently walk over to one of the torches. He walked like a gypsy, slowly, his full height erect, but he wasn’t capable of taming even a little donkey. She … Her eyes searched for her mother: she was clapping behind one of the guitarists, distracted, animating the dance. She, Milagros, wanted a man!

Milagros didn’t manage to shake Alejandro off for the whole rest of the night. They shared the cigar. “Don’t you have another one for yourself?” she complained. But his father had only given him one. And they drank. Good wine, from the abundant supply the count had brought to liven up the party. Milagros danced some more, an upbeat
seguidilla
sung by the women in a lively voice. She danced with other young folk, among them a brave Alejandro.

“I’ve never heard you sing,” he said to her once the dance was over.

Milagros felt her head spinning: the wine, the tobacco, the party …

“You can’t have been paying close enough attention,” she lied in a thick voice. “Aren’t you interested in me?”

The truth was that she had never sung in spite of her father’s encouraging her to; she sang in groups, hiding her despair over her lack of ability among the voices of other women. “Don’t worry,” her mother had reassured her, “dance, enchant us with your body; you’ll sing someday.”

Alejandro registered the new affront. “I …” he stuttered.

Milagros saw him lower his gaze to the floor. A gypsy never hides his eyes. The image of Caridad came to her mind. To her dizziness was added the embarrassment over the man destined to be her husband. “That chin!” she shouted. “Up!”

Yet Alejandro addressed her again timidly. “I am interested in you. Of course I am.” He spoke just like Caridad when she’d first arrived at the
alley, looking down at the ground. “I would do anything for you, anything at all …”

Milagros looked at him, pensive: anything?

“There’s a potter in Triana …” she said without thinking.

MILAGROS HAD
talked about it with her mother. She was furious, her temper running high, after she and Fray Joaquín had managed to wheedle out of Caridad, with a thousand questions she answered between sobs, what had happened with the potter.

“That’s not gypsy business,” interrupted Ana.

“But, Mother—!”

“Milagros, we already have many problems. The authorities are after us. Don’t get us in more trouble! You know we aren’t even allowed to dress the way we do; they can arrest us just for our clothes.”

The girl opened her hands and gestured to her blue skirt in confusion.

“No,” clarified Ana. “Here in Triana, in Seville, we enjoy the protection of some noblemen and we buy the silence of magistrates and justices, but outside of Seville they arrest us. And they send us to the galleys just for being gypsies, for walking on the roads, for forging cauldrons, repairing tools and shoeing horses and mules. Our race has been persecuted for many years; they consider us crooks just because we’re different. If Caridad was a gypsy … then don’t you doubt it! But we shouldn’t go looking for problems. Your father would never allow—”

“Father hates Caridad.”

“Possibly, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s not a gypsy. She isn’t one of us. I’m sorry for her … I really am,” insisted Ana in the face of her daughter’s desperation. “Milagros, I am a woman and I can imagine better than you the torment that she went through, but there is nothing we can do, really.”

Fray Joaquín wasn’t any more helpful despite Milagros reminding him how furious he had been as he listened to Caridad’s story, on that night of the goose tourney.

“And what do you want me to do, Milagros?” he had said in his defense. “Denounce him? Denounce an honorable artisan who has been working in Triana for years based on the word of a recently freed Negress,
who has no roots in this place? Who would testify on her behalf? I know,” he added quickly before she could reply. “You would and I would believe you, but you are a gypsy and they, the justices and the judges, wouldn’t even allow your testimony. All the artisans would take his side. It would be the ruin of Caridad, Milagros. She wouldn’t be able to bear it; they would be all over her like wild dogs. Comfort her, be her friend, help her in her new life … and forget about this matter.”

However, the next Sunday, invited to preach in the parish of Santa Ana, Fray Joaquín spoke clearly and loudly from the pulpit, knowing that many of those who were listening to him had taken advantage of Caridad. He searched out the potter flesh-peddler with his eyes. He pointed threateningly this way and that. He shouted and shrieked. He lifted his hands to the heavens with his fingers clenched and shouted against ruffians and those who committed the sin of the flesh, particularly against defenseless women! With the support of the parishioners of Santa Ana who had invited him to give the sermon and before a shirking, fearful congregation, he foretold eternal hellfire for all of them. Then he watched them leave the church amid whispers.

And what did it matter? he grumbled when the church was left empty and plunged into a silence broken only by the sound of his own footsteps. It’s all just a hypocritical game! In Seville there were dozens of pardons for plenary indulgences. Any of those men, just by visiting a certain church on a particular day: the church of San Antonio de los Portugueses, any Tuesday, for example, would earn a plenary indulgence and be free of all sin, as innocent and clean as a newborn. Fray Joaquín couldn’t hold back a sardonic laugh that echoed throughout Santa Ana. What did they care about repentance or mending their ways? They would run to get their indulgence to clean their souls and they would return convinced they’d escaped the devil, ready to commit some other evil deed.

MILAGROS AND
Alejandro were near the soap factory, beside the Inquisition Castle; the penetrating odor of the oils and the potashes used to make the white Triana soaps was beginning to overcome them when, in the light of the torches on San Jorge Castle, the young woman saw her fiancé was walking with a hand gripping the handle of the dagger he
wore on his belt. She tried to steady her gait, to walk like an invincible queen beside the three gypsies accompanying her: Alejandro, his younger brother and one of his Vargas cousins, who were also playing with the hilts of their knives.

They had continued drinking, at a distance from the music played for the noblemen and their guests, while Milagros explained to the boy who was willing to do anything for her what had happened to Caridad on her arrival in Triana. Her telling of it was frenzied, even more repugnant—if that were possible—than the version she had told her mother. Alejandro knew Caridad; it was impossible not to notice the black woman who lived in the cluster of apartments with Melchor El Galeote. “Son of a bitch,” he muttered time and again as Milagros told him in full detail.

“Mangy dog!” he exclaimed when she told him how the man had tied her up. Milagros was silent and tried to focus her gaze on him. Alejandro, also affected by the drink, thought he could make out a trace of affection in those glassy eyes. “Pig!” he then added.

“Degenerate!” spat Milagros through her teeth before continuing her explanation.

IN ALEJANDRO
she found the understanding she hadn’t got from her mother or Fray Joaquín. She spoke with burning passion. And as for him, he felt her drawing closer and closer to him, seeking out his support, giving herself over to him. The wine did the rest.

“He deserves to die,” declared Alejandro when Milagros ended her story.

From that point on, everything happened very quickly.

“Let’s go,” he urged.

“Where?”

“To take revenge for your friend.”

Alejandro grabbed the girl. The simple contact with Milagros’s arm emboldened him. In the hall on the way out of the house where the party was being held, he met up with his younger brother and cousin.

“I have a score to settle,” he told them, brushing his fingers along the hilt of his dagger. “Will you come with me?”

And they had both nodded, either to fulfill gypsy law, or out of the excitement brought on by the party and the wine. Later, as they walked,
Alejandro told them about Caridad and the potter. Milagros didn’t even think about her mother’s warnings.

The neighborhood was deserted. It was the dead of night. She pointed out one of the houses on the street with an almost imperceptible lifting of her chin. Caridad had shown her which one it was from afar, terrified.

“That’s it,” announced Alejandro. “You guys keep an eye out.”

Then, without thinking twice, he beat his fists against the doors of the workshop. The blows thundered in the silent night.

“Potter!” shouted the gypsy. “Open up, potter!”

The other two young men paced up and down the street with a calmness that thrilled Milagros. They were gypsies! Alejandro banged on the doors again. The shutter of a facing house opened and the pale light of a candle peeked out. Alejandro’s younger brother tilted his head toward the light, as if he were surprised by the neighbor’s curiosity.
He can’t be more than fifteen years old,
thought Milagros. The shutter closed with a thud.

“Potter, open up!”

Milagros turned her attention to Alejandro and was disconcerted to find that her fine hairs stood on end at his boldness; a shiver that ran up her spine began to temper her drunkenness.

“Who is it? What do you want at this hour?” The voice came from one of the windows on the upper floor.

“Open up!”

Milagros remained spellbound.

“Leave me alone or I’ll call the watch!”

“Before they arrive, I’ll have set your house on fire,” threatened the boy. “Open up!”

“Here! Help! Constables! Help!” shouted the potter.

Alejandro thumped on the door again, immune to the screams for help he was drowning out with his banging in the night. Suddenly, Milagros reacted: what had she got herself into? She looked up and down the street. From a nearby workshop came a man in a nightshirt wielding an old blunderbuss. A couple of doors opened. The potter kept shouting and Alejandro kept banging on the doors.

“Alejandro …” Milagros managed to say in a halting voice.

He didn’t hear her.

“It’s some gypsy kids!” shouted the man in the nightshirt then.

“Alejandro,” repeated Milagros.

“Four beggars!”

The brother and the cousin started to back up as men came out of the neighboring houses, all armed: blunderbusses, sticks, axes, knives … One of them let out a laugh at the fear in the boys’ faces.

“Alejandro!” shrieked Milagros just as the door to the workshop opened.

Everything unfolded quickly. Milagros only half saw it; enough, however, to recognize the man she had tried to sell cigars to in San Roque on the day of the geese. He was inside the workshop, dressed in worn drawers and with his chest bare; behind him was his son with an old sword in his hand. The man held a blunderbuss whose threatening round mouth seemed immense to Milagros. Then Alejandro pulled his dagger out of his belt and, when he moved to pounce on the potter, a shot was heard. Countless lead pellets destroyed the boy’s head and neck, sending him flying.

The men on the street froze. The gypsies, mouths agape, stammering, looked back and forth from the disfigured body on the ground to the potters who had come to help their fellow guild member. Milagros, bewildered, looked at her hands and clothes, splattered with Alejandro’s blood and remains.