The Barefoot Queen by Ildefonso Falcones Page A

gypsies had always refused to pay the toll—why would a gypsy pay to cross a river? Many years earlier the owner of the rights to the pontoon bridge had been paid a visit from several of them, grim-faced, armed with knives and willing to work out the problem their own way. There was no room for discussion, because really it didn’t matter much if a few mavericks crossed from Triana to Seville and vice versa among the three thousand on horse- or muleback each day.
    “What do you say?” insisted Milagros.
    All gypsies were dangerous, but Melchor Vega more than most. And the girl was a Vega.
    “Go ahead,” he conceded.
    Caridad released the air she had unconsciously been holding in her lungs and followed the girl.
    A few paces on, amid the bustle of sheep and mules, muleteers, porters and merchants, Milagros turned and smiled at her in triumph. She forgot about the argument with her parents and her attitude shifted.
    “Why do you want to go to the Negritos?”
    Caridad lengthened her stride and in a few paces she was beside her. “The nuns said they would help me.”
    “Nuns and priests, they’re all liars,” declared the gypsy girl.
    Caridad looked at her in surprise. “They aren’t going to help me?”
    “I doubt it. How can they? They can’t even help themselves. Grandfather says that before there were a lot of dark-skinned folk, but now there are only a few left and all the money they get they waste on Church nonsense and the saints. Before there was even a Negro brotherhood in Triana, but it didn’t have enough members and it folded.”
    Caridad again fell behind as she turned the girl’s disappointing words over in her head, while Milagros continued past the bridge and resolutely southward along the wall on the way to the district of San Roque.
    At the height of the Torre del Oro, the girl stopped and turned suddenly. “What do you want them to help you with?”
    Caridad opened her hands in front of her body, confused.
    “What is it that you think they’ll do for you?” insisted the gypsy girl.
    “I don’t know … The nuns told me … They are Negroes, right?”
    “Yes. They are,” answered the girl resignedly before taking up the path again.
    If they are Negroes, Caridad thought, again following in the footsteps of the gypsy girl, keeping her eyes on the pretty colored ribbons in her hair and the bright scarves that twirled in the air around her wrists, then that place had to be something like the old living quarters where they’d gathered on holidays. There everyone was friends, companions in misfortune even though they didn’t know each other, even when they didn’t even understand each other: Lucumís, Mandingas, Congos, Ararás, Carabalís … What did it matter the language they spoke? There they danced, sang and enjoyed themselves, but they also tried to help each other. What else was there to do in a gathering of Negroes?
    Milagros didn’t want to go inside the church with her. “They’d kick me out,” she declared.
    A white priest and an old Negro, who introduced himself proudly as the elder brother and the caretaker of the small chapel of Los Ángeles, looked her up and down without hiding their disgust at her dirty slave clothing, so out of place in the pageantry they strove for in their temple. “What did you want?” the elder brother had asked her peevishly. In the flickering light of the chapel’s candles, Caridad wrung the straw hat in her hands and faced the Negro like an equal, but both her spirit and her voice were stifled by the cruel way they were staring at her. The nuns? continued the elder brother, almost raising his voice. What did the Triana nuns have to do with it? What did she know how to do? Nothing? No. Tobacco,no. In Seville only men worked in the tobacco factory. Yes, women worked in the Cádiz factory, but they were in Seville. Did she know how to do anything else? No? In that case … The brotherhood? Did she have money to join the brotherhood? She