The Barefoot Queen (10 page)

With San Jacinto in sight, Melchor again patted the packet with satisfaction: he had added weight and it didn’t seem the quality had been too affected.

“Good day, Father,” Melchor said to the first friar he met in the area around the church under construction. “I am looking for Fray Joaquín.”

“He is teaching grammar to the boys,” answered the Dominican, barely turning, focused on the work being done by one of the carpenters. “What do you want him for?”

To sell him powdered tobacco a gypsy stole from the factory by sticking it up his arse, which you’ll surely enjoy sticking up your nose,
thought Melchor. He smiled behind the friar’s back. “I’ll wait,” he lied.

The friar made a distracted gesture of assent with his hand, still concentrating on the timber being brought to the construction site.

Melchor turned toward the former hospital of the Candelaria, attached to the chapel on which the new church was being raised, and which the preachers were now using as a monastery.

“The friar out there,” he warned the doorman of the monastery, pointing toward the construction, “says you should hurry. It seems your new church is about to collapse.”

As soon as the doorman ran out without thinking twice, Melchor sneaked into the small monastery. The refrain of the Latin readings led him toward a room where he found Fray Joaquín with five boys who were repeating the lessons in monotone.

The friar showed no surprise at Melchor’s sudden appearance; the boys did. Staring at the gypsy from their chairs, one stopped reciting, another stuttered and the others began to jumble their lessons.

“Continue, continue. Louder!” the young friar priest ordered as he walked toward Melchor. “I have to wonder how you got in here,” he whispered once he was beside him, amid the din made by the boys.

“You’ll soon find out.”

“I was afraid of that.” The friar shook his head.

“I have a good bit of powder. Quality. For a good price.”

“OK. We are low on tobacco, and the brothers get very nervous when they don’t have enough. Let’s meet in the same place as always, at noon.” The gypsy nodded. “Melchor, why didn’t you wait? Why did you interrupt …?”

He wasn’t given time to finish his question. The doorman, the friar who was overseeing the construction and two more brothers burst into the room.

“What are you doing here?” shouted the doorman.

Melchor extended his arms with his palms open, as if he wanted to halt the horde that was coming toward him. Fray Joaquín watched him curiously. How was he going to get out of this one?

“Allow me to explain,” requested the gypsy calmly. The priests stopped a step away from him. “I had to tell Fray Joaquín a sin, a very grave sin,” he
said in explanation. Fray Joaquín half closed his eyes and held back a sigh. “One of those sins that send you straight to hell,” continued the gypsy, “the kind not even a thousand prayers for lost souls helps with.”

“And you couldn’t have waited?” interrupted one of the friars.

The five boys looked at each other in astonishment.

“With such a serious sin? A sin like that can’t wait,” Melchor defended himself.

“You could have said that at the entrance …”

“Would you have listened to me?”

The friars looked at each other.

“Well,” interjected the oldest one. “So have you confessed yet?”

“Me?” Melchor feigned surprise. “Not me, your eminence! I am a good Christian. The sin was committed by a friend of mine. It’s just that he’s shearing some sheep, you understand, and since he was very worried, he asked me to see if I could come by and confess in his name.”

One of the boys laughed. Fray Joaquín made a gesture of impotence toward his brothers before the friar questioning the gypsy exploded, his face flushed.

“Out of here!” shouted the oldest friar, pointing to the door. “What were you thinking …?”

“Gypsies!”

“Despicable!”

“They should arrest you all!” he heard behind his back.

“
THIS SNUFF
is adulterated, Melchor!” complained Fray Joaquín as soon as he saw the reddish color of the ocher the gypsy had mixed in with the tobacco. They were on the bank of the Guadalquivir, near the shrimping boat port. “You told me …”

“Of the finest quality, Fray Joaquín,” replied Melchor. “Fresh from the factory …”

“But I can see the red!”

“They must have dried it badly.”

Melchor tried to see the tobacco the friar was holding up. Had he really gone too far? Perhaps the young friar was learning.

“Melchor …”

“I swear on my granddaughter!” The gypsy crossed his thumb and
index finger to make a cross that he then lifted to his lips and kissed. “Top quality.”

“Don’t swear in vain. And we need to talk about Milagros, too,” noted Fray Joaquín. “The other day, at the blessing of the candles, she was mocking me as I preached …”

“Do you want me to scold her?”

“You know I don’t.”

The friar lost himself in the memory: the girl had put him in a difficult spot, that was true. He knew that his voice had turned shaky and he’d lost his train of thought, but he also remembered her chiseled, proud face, as lovely as they come, and that virgin body …

“Fray Joaquín.” The gypsy pulled him from his musings. He drew out his words, his brow furrowed.

The friar cleared his throat. “This snuff is adulterated,” he repeated to change the subject.

“Don’t forget that she is my granddaughter,” insisted the gypsy.

“I know.”

“I wouldn’t like you to get on my bad side.”

“What do you mean? Are you threaten—?”

“I would kill for her,” Melchor broke in. “You are a
payo
 … and a friar as well. You could renounce your vows, but not your race.”

Their eyes met. The clergyman knew that, at just a single sign from Milagros, he would be willing to leave behind his habit and swear loyalty to the gypsy race.

“Fray Joaquín …” Melchor interrupted his thoughts, knowing what was going through the friar’s head.

Fray Joaquín lifted a hand and forced Melchor to be silent. The gypsy was the real problem: he would never accept that relationship, he concluded. He banished his desires.

“None of that gives you the right to try to sell me this tobacco as good,” he scolded.

“I swear to you …!”

“Don’t swear in vain. Why don’t you tell me the truth?”

Melchor took his time answering. He slipped an arm over Fray Joaquín’s shoulder and pushed him a few steps along the riverbank. “Do you know something?”

Fray Joaquín nodded with an unintelligible mumble.

“I will only tell you this because it’s a secret: if a gypsy tells the truth … he loses it! He can never get it back.”

“Melchor!” exclaimed the friar, shrugging off his embrace.

“But this snuff is top quality.”

Fray Joaquín clicked his tongue, giving up. “OK. I don’t think the other friars will notice anyway.”

“Because it’s not red, Fray Joaquín. See? You are wrong.”

“Don’t insist. How much do you want?”

Adulterated or not, Melchor made a good profit on the tobacco. Uncle Basilio would be pleased.

“Do you know of any new contraband tobacco arriving in port?” asked Fray Joaquín when they were about to part.

“I haven’t been told of any. There must be, as always, but my friends aren’t involved. I trust that now, from March on, with the good weather, work will start up again.”

“Keep me informed.”

Melchor smiled. “Of course, Father.”

After closing the profitable deal, Melchor decided to go have some wine at Joaquina’s tavern before heading over to the gypsy settlement to deliver the money to Uncle Basilio.
What a curious friar!
he thought as he walked. Beneath his preacher’s habits, behind the talent and eloquence that people praised so, hid a young man eager for life and new experiences. He had proven that the year before, when Fray Joaquín insisted in accompanying Melchor to Portugal to receive a tobacco shipment. At first the gypsy hesitated, but he found himself forced to allow it: the priests were the ones who financed the contraband operations and, besides, many of them acted as smugglers and could be found loaded down with tobacco on the borders and roads. All the clergy were involved in tobacco contraband, either directly or as consumers. Priests were so fond of tobacco, their consumption was so high, that the Pope had had to prohibit their taking snuff while they officiated at services. However, they were unwilling to pay the high prices that the King established through the tobacco shops. Only the royal tax office could deal in tobacco, so the Church had become the biggest swindler in the kingdom: it participated in the contraband, buying, financing and hiding the smuggled goods in temples and even growing it in secret behind the impenetrable walls of the convents and monasteries.

As he mused Melchor polished off his first glass in one gulp.

“Good wine!” he said aloud to anyone who wanted to listen.

He ordered another, and then a third. He was on his fourth when a woman came up to him from behind and put an affectionate hand on his shoulder. The gypsy lifted his head to find a face that tried to conceal its true features behind rancid, smudged makeup. Nevertheless, the woman had generous breasts emerging from her plunging neckline. Melchor ordered a glass of wine for her as well while he gripped one of her buttocks with his right hand. She complained with a false and exaggeratedly modest pout, but then she sat down with him and the rounds began to flow.

IT WAS
two days before Melchor showed up at the San Miguel alley.

“Can you take care of the Negress?” Ana begged her daughter when she noticed that her father hadn’t returned that afternoon. “It seems Grandfather has decided to take off again. Let’s see how long it’s for this time.”

“And what do I do with her? Should I tell her she can leave?”

Ana sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know what he was planning … what your grandfather is planning,” she corrected herself.

“She is determined to cross the pontoon bridge.”

Milagros had again spent most of the morning in the small courtyard. She rushed there as soon as her mother allowed her to, with a thousand questions on the tip of her tongue about all Caridad had told her, everything she’d been wondering about throughout the night. She felt drawn to that black woman, to her melodious way of speaking, to the deep resignation that emanated from her entire being, which was so different from the proud, haughty character of the gypsies.

“Why?” asked her mother, interrupting her thoughts.

Milagros turned, confused. They were in one of the two small rooms that made up the apartment they lived in, on the first floor of apartments off the courtyard. Ana was preparing lunch on a coal stove lodged in an open niche on the wall.

“What?”

“Why does she want to cross the bridge?”

“Ah! She wants to go to the Brotherhood of the Negritos.”

“Is she over her fevers?” asked Ana.

“I think so.”

“Well, after lunch, take her.”

The girl nodded. Ana was tempted to tell her to leave her in Seville, with the Negritos, but didn’t.

“And then bring her back. I don’t want Grandfather to come back and find his Negress gone. That’s the last thing I need!”

Ana was irritated: she had argued with José. Her husband had scolded her harshly over the fight she’d had with La Trianera, but he especially condemned her slapping the old woman’s grandson.

“A woman hitting a man. Who does that? And he’s the grandson of the head of the council of elders!” he shouted at her. “You know how vindictive Reyes can be.”

“As for the first, I will hit anyone who insults my daughter, whether they’re grandsons of La Trianera or the King of Spain himself. Otherwise, you take care of her and keep a close eye out. As for the rest, I don’t know what you can tell me about the Garcías’ character …”

“I’ve had enough of the Vegas and the Garcías! I don’t want to hear anything more about it. You married a Carmona and we’re not interested in your disputes. The Garcías rule in the settlement and they are influential with the
payos.
We can’t let them take a disliking to us … especially not over the old feuds of some crazy old man like your father. I’m fed up with my family throwing it in my face!”

On that occasion, Ana bit her lip to keep from answering back.

The never-ending argument! The same old song and dance! Ever since her father had come back from the galleys ten years earlier, her relationship with her husband had gradually deteriorated. José Carmona, the young gypsy taken by her charms, had been willing to forgo the religious wedding to have her. “I will never submit to those dogs who didn’t move a finger for my father,” she had said. The humiliating disdain with which the priests had treated her and her mother was burned into her memory. Yet, José hadn’t been able to stand Melchor’s presence, accusing him of stealing Milagros’s affection. Milagros saw her grandfather as indestructible: a man who had survived the galleys, a smuggler who outsmarted soldiers and authorities, a free, rambling gypsy. José felt he couldn’t compete: he was a simple blacksmith forced to work day in and day out under the orders of the head of the Carmona family and he didn’t even have a son to boast about.

José envied the affection between grandfather and granddaughter. Milagros’s immense gratitude when Melchor gave her a bracelet, a trinket or the simplest colorful ribbon for her hair, her spellbound look as she listened to his stories … With the passing of the years José ended up taking out the bitterness and jealousy that was eating away at him on his own wife, whom he blamed. “Why don’t you say that to him?” Ana had replied one day. “Is it that you don’t dare?” She didn’t have time to regret her impertinence. José had slapped her across the face.

And at that moment, as she was talking to her daughter about the black woman her father had brought home, Ana was cooking food for four on that small, uncomfortable stove: the three people in her family plus young Alejandro Vargas. After keeping her mouth shut when her husband once again threw the disputes between the Vegas and the Garcías in her face, she was surprised at how easy it was to convince José that Milagros’s problem lay in that she was no longer a girl. Ana thought that if they engaged her to be wed, the girl would put aside her feelings toward Pedro García, since she was sure that the Garcías would never court a Vega. José told himself the bond between Milagros and her grandfather would fade once she was married, and he supported the idea: the Vargas family had been showing an interest in Milagros for some time, so José lost no time and the next day Alejandro was invited over to eat. “For the time being there is no commitment, I just want to get to know the young man a little more,” his wife had announced. “His parents have agreed to it.”