The rain had been relentless for several days in Triana and many of the inhabitants went to the river to check its water level and gauge the risk of it overflowing, as had happened so many times—with dramatic results. In the gypsy settlement by the Carthusian monastery, a persistent drizzle mixed with the columns of smoke that rose from the huts. On that inclement morning in early December of the year 1748, only some old squalid horses were out. And the half-naked kids, immune to the cold and the water soaking them to the skin, played in the mire the street had become, sinking up to their ankles in the mud. The older folk took shelter from the rain and waited it out idly.
Mid-morning, however, the children’s shrieks broke the idleness imposed by the bad weather.
“A bear!”
The shrill screams of the children echoed among the splashing of their races through the mud. Men and women stuck their heads through the doors of their huts.
“Melchor Vega is bringing a bear!” exclaimed one of the gypsy kids, pointing toward the road that led to the settlement.
“Grandfather Vega!” shrieked another.
Milagros, who had already risen from the table, leapt outside. Caridad dropped the knife she was using to cut a large tobacco leaf. Melchor Vega? The two women found each other outside on the street.
“Where?” the girl asked one of the boys, whom she managed to catch as he ran.
“There! He’s almost here! He’s bringing a bear!” he answered as she clutched him, until he managed to escape her and vanish into the hubbub; some looked on in surprise, others ran to greet Melchor and yet others rushed to move their animals, which were braying and whinnying and pulling at their halters, frightened by the presence of the large beast.
“Let’s go!” Milagros urged Caridad on.
“What is a bear?”
The girl stopped and pointed. “That.”
At the top of the street—he’d already reached the first of the shacks—Grandfather was walking and smiling, the blue of his silk jacket darkened by the rain. Behind Melchor’s two-pointed staff, an immense black bear followed him on all fours, patiently, with its ears pointed, looking curiously at all those who surrounded him at a prudent distance.
“Holy Virgin of Charity!” muttered Caridad, backing up a few paces.
“Don’t be afraid, Cachita.”
But Caridad kept backing up as Melchor, surprise showing in his face upon discovering her at the settlement, approached them.
“Milagros! What are you doing here? And your mother?”
The girl didn’t even hear him; she just stood there frozen. Melchor reached his granddaughter but the bear, who was now ahead of him, got there first and brushed his snout against the gypsy’s calf.
Milagros backed away just as her friend had done, keeping her gaze on the animal.
“And you, morena, you’re here too?”
“It’s a long story, Brother,” answered Tomás from amidst the group of gypsies who had followed him along the length of the street.
“Is my daughter OK?” the grandfather asked immediately.
“Yes.”
“And José Carmona?”
“He’s fine.”
“That’s a shame,” he complained, stroking the bear’s head. Someone laughed. “But if my daughter and my granddaughter are fine, let’s leave the long stories for priests and women. Look, Milagros! Look how he dances!”
Then the gypsy moved away from the bear and lifted both the animal’s arms.
The bear rose up on its back legs, extended its front ones and followed the rhythm marked by Melchor, who seemed small beside the beast twice his height. Milagros backed away even further, to where Caridad stood.
“Look!” shouted Melchor nonetheless. “Come here with me! Come closer!”
But Milagros didn’t.
During the rest of the morning and in spite of the drizzle that never stopped, Melchor played with the bear: he forced it to dance again and again, to walk on its back legs, to sit down, to cover its eyes, to roll in the mud, and many other skills that amused and impressed the crowd.
“And what are you planning to do with that animal?” some of the gypsies asked him.
“Yes, where will you keep him? Where will he sleep?”
“With the morena!” answered Melchor very seriously.
Caridad brought her hands to her chest.
“It’s a joke, Cachita,” laughed Milagros, elbowing her affectionately. Then she thought it over again. “It is a joke, isn’t it, Grandfather?”
Melchor didn’t respond.
“How will you feed it?” shouted one of the women. “It’s been raining for so long that the men don’t go out and we haven’t even got half a chicken around here for all of us.”
“Well, then we’ll feed him children!” Melchor pretended he was going to let the animal go so he could grab one of the bolder little kids, who had come close and now ran away shrieking. “A boy in the morning and a girl at night,” he repeated, furrowing his brow toward all the other runny-nosed kids.
As the morning wore on, the mystery was cleared up: a family of gypsies from the South of France showed up at the settlement with a caravan to pick up the bear. Melchor had borrowed it to amuse his people.
“How’d you come up with that idea? It could have carved you up with a single paw swipe. You don’t know anything about bears,” Tomás began to scold him when the caravan was leaving the settlement.
“Not a chance! I’ve been living with them for a month. I’ve even slept with that bear. He’s harmless, at least more so than most payos.”
“And even some gypsies,” noted his brother.
“Well, what about that long story you had to tell me?”
Tomás nodded.
“Get started!”
“THAT MORENA is mixed up in all our misfortunes,” commented Melchor when his brother finished explaining the events that had led Milagros to the settlement.
They were gathered around a jug of wine with the other Vega elders: Uncle Juan, Uncle Basilio and Uncle Mateo.
“That Negress is jinxed!” exclaimed Mateo.
“But she handles tobacco well,” alleged Tomás in her favor. Melchor arched his eyebrows in his brother’s direction and Tomás understood. “No, she hasn’t been singing. She works in silence. A lot, even at night. More than any payo. She makes money for us, but I haven’t heard her singing.”
“What are you planning on doing about your granddaughter?” asked Mateo after a few moments of silence.
Melchor sighed. “I don’t know. The council is right. The girl is a scatterbrain, but the Vargas boys who went with her are clueless. How did they expect to give that potter a lesson in the middle of his neighborhood, protected by all his own kind? They should have waited to catch him alone and slit his neck, or entered his house in silence … Kids today are losing their talent for these things! I don’t know,” he repeated. “Perhaps I’ll talk to the Vargas family; only with their forgiveness—”
“José told me that he already tried that …”
“He’s not capable of lighting a cigar without my daughter’s help. Well,” he added as he served himself another glass of wine, “the only thing that worries me is that she’s separated from her mother. If it wasn’t for that, it’s not a bad thing that my granddaughter is here, with her kind. María will teach her what her father never could: to be a good gypsy, to love freedom and how to not make more mistakes. I’ll leave things the way they are.”
Basilio and Mateo nodded.
“Good decision,” agreed Tomás. Then he paused. “And you?” he asked after a few seconds. “How’d it go? It doesn’t look like you got back the tobacco El Gordo stole from us.”
“How were you expecting me to bring two bags full?” he asked as he searched inside his jacket and pulled out a bag, which he dropped onto the table.
The muffled clinking of the coins silenced any further interventions. Melchor made a gesture urging his brother to open it: several gold escudos rolled out on the tabletop.
“El Gordo won’t be pleased,” commented Tomás.
“No,” agreed Uncle Basilio.
“Well, this is only half of it,” revealed Melchor. “The rest the bear took.”
The Vegas asked him to explain.
“I spent quite a few days around Cuevas Bajas, where El Gordo lives with his family; I even walked through the town at night, but I couldn’t find a way to give that son of a bitch a lesson: he’s always accompanied by one of his men, as if he needs them even to just take a piss.
“I waited. Something had to come up. One day, some Catalan gypsies who were passing through told me about the French guy with the bear who wandered through nearby towns making the animal dance. I found him, made a deal with him and we went back to wait for El Gordo to organize another smuggling party. When El Gordo and his men were gone and the town was in the hands of old men and women, the French gypsy came in with the bear and did his performance, and while they were all enjoying themselves with his dancing and juggling games, I slipped into El Gordo’s house with no problem.”
“Empty?” interrupted Uncle Basilio.
“No. There was a trusted guard who, without leaving his post, was trying to watch the bear from a distance.”
Basilio and Juan gave Melchor a questioning look; the others mockingly feigned mournful expressions: if Melchor had El Gordo’s money, that guard had not met a good end. For a few seconds, the gypsy thought about that. It had been difficult to get the man to talk. First he caught him off-guard: he primed and loaded his musket, approached him from behind and threatened him, pointing the barrel at the nape of his neck. He brought him inside the house and disarmed him. The man was lame, which was why he hadn’t gone with the smuggling party, but that didn’t mean he was weak. They knew each other from before he got the limp and the nickname El Cojo along with it.
“This will be the end of you, Galeote,” predicted the guard while Melchor, with the barrel of his weapon beneath the man’s throat, used his free hand to pull a pistol and a large dagger out of the man’s sash and dropped them to the floor.
“If I were you I’d be worried about my own end, Cojo, because you either collaborate or you’ll be going out before me. Where does that thief hide his treasures?”
“You are crazier than I thought if you think I’m going to tell you that.”
“You will, Cojo, you will.”
He forced him to lie down on the floor with his arms extended. Cheers and applause for the bear’s tricks came in through the window.
“If you scream,” warned Melchor aiming at his head, “I’ll kill you. You can be sure of that.”
Then he stomped on the little finger of his right hand. El Cojo gritted his teeth while Melchor felt his bones snapping. He did the same to the four other fingers, in silence, twisting his heel into them. Sweat dripped from the man’s temples. He didn’t speak.
“You’re going to be one-handed, not just lame,” Melchor told him, moving on to his left hand. “Do you think El Gordo will appreciate it, will he feed you when you can no longer do it for yourself? He’ll toss you aside like a dog, you know it.”
“Better an abandoned dog than a dead man,” muttered the man. “If I tell you, he’ll kill me.”
“That’s true,” affirmed the gypsy, putting his heel on the left little finger and keeping his musket always aimed at his head. “It’s a tough choice: either he’ll kill you or I’ll maim you,” he added without putting any pressure on. “Because after this we’ll continue with your nose and the few teeth you have left, and end with your testicles. I’ll leave your eyes so you can see how people look at you with scorn. If you withstand it, I give you my word as a gypsy that I will leave this house with my hands empty.” Melchor gave the man a few seconds to think. “But you have another possibility: if you tell me where the money is, I’ll be generous with you and you can escape with something in your bag … and the rest of your body intact.”
And the gypsy was true to his word: he gave El Cojo several gold coins and let him go; with that money in his bag El Cojo wouldn’t turn him in and he’d have enough time to escape.
“Then,” said Tomás when his brother ended the story, “El Gordo has no way of knowing whether it was you who robbed him or if he was betrayed by his own trusted man.”
Melchor tilted his head and instinctively brought a hand to one of his earlobes, smiled, drank wine and spoke: “What satisfaction could we get from revenge if the victim doesn’t know we were the ones who took it out on him?”
After El Cojo left the house, Melchor had taken off one of the large silver hoops that hung from his ears and placed it right in the center of the small chest he had emptied of his possessions.
“He knows,” Melchor answered his brother. “As sure as the devil, he knows that it was me! And at this moment, right now, he’ll be cursing my name and raging, just as he’ll do at night, and when he wakes up, if he’s ever able to get any sleep, and—”
“And he will hunt you down and kill you,” declared Uncle Basilio.
“Undoubtedly. But now he has more pressing problems: he can’t pay for his contraband, or pay his men. He has lost a large part of his power. Let’s see how his enemies, who are legion, respond.”
Basilio and Tomás nodded.
MELCHOR DIDN’T want to go back to the San Miguel alley; nothing tied him to the blacksmiths’ place and, if he had to choose between his daughter and José Carmona on one hand and Milagros on the other, he’d choose his granddaughter. After talking to the Vegas, he headed toward the shack where the girl lived. Night was already falling.
“Thank you for what you did for the girl, María,” he said as soon as he entered. They were cooking something in a pot that looked like a piece of meat.
The old woman turned toward him and shrugged. Melchor stopped one step in front of the coarse curtain that served as a door and watched his granddaughter for a good long while; she turned her head occasionally, looked at him out of the corner of her eye and smiled.
“What do you want, Nephew?” asked the old woman with a weary voice, behind him.
“I want … a palace where I can live with my granddaughter, surrounded by a vast tobacco plantation …” Milagros was about to turn, but the old woman elbowed her in the side and forced her to keep her attention on the fire. Melchor squinted his eyes. “I want horses and colorful silk suits; gold jewelry—tons of it; music and dance and the payos serving me my food every day. I want women, also by the dozens …” The old woman elbowed Milagros again before she could turn around. That time Melchor smiled. “And a good husband for my granddaughter, the best gypsy man in the land …” Her back still to her grandfather, Milagros tilted her head from left to right gracefully, as if she liked what she was hearing, and was urging him to continue. “The strongest and the bravest, rich and healthy, completely free, and who’ll give my granddaughter many children …”
The girl continued nodding until Old María spoke.
“Well, you aren’t going to find any of that here. You’re in the wrong place.”
“Are you sure?”
The old woman turned and Milagros turned with her. In one of Grandfather’s hands, his arm extended, hung a lovely necklace of small white pearls.
“You have to start somewhere,” Melchor then said, and he approached his granddaughter to place the necklace around her neck.
“It’s so sad to get old and know that your body no longer excites men!” complained the healer as Milagros stroked the pearls that gleamed on her tanned neck.
Melchor turned toward the old woman. “Let’s see if with this …” he started to say as he searched in one of the inner pockets of his blue jacket, “you can manage to attract some gypsy into your bed, to warm up that body that no longer—”
The old woman didn’t let him finish his sentence: as soon as Melchor pulled out a gold medallion inlaid with mother of pearl, she grabbed it from his hands and, almost without looking at it, as if she were afraid he would change his mind, put in the pocket of her apron.
“Not many men would come to me because of that trifle,” she let fly later.
“Well, here is one who needs supper and a corner to sleep in.”
“I’ll give you food, but forget about sleeping in this house.”
“The medallion’s not enough?”
“What medallion, you lying gypsy?” she responded with mock seriousness before turning back to the pot.
Milagros could do nothing more than shrug her shoulders.
“SING, MORENA.”
Caridad, absorbed in her work by candlelight, sketched a wonderful smile that lit up her face. Standing in the doorway, Melchor examined the shack: the old couple was already resting in their bed, from where they looked at him expectantly.
“Antonio,” he said to the old man as he threw a coin the other caught on the fly, “you and your wife can sleep on Caridad’s straw mattress. She and I will take yours, it’s bigger.”
“But …” the old man started to complain.
“Give me back the money.”
The old man caressed the coin, grumbled and elbowed his wife. Caridad couldn’t help smiling again as the two old grim-faced gypsies reluctantly relinquished their prize possession.
“What are you laughing at?” the old woman snapped, her gaze going right through Caridad, whose face fell. And while the old couple covered themselves awkwardly with a blanket on Caridad’s mattress, Melchor went to the table and handled some of the cigars that were already prepared. He winked at Caridad and brought one to his lips. Then he took off his blue jacket and his boots and he lay down in the bed, with his head against the headboard, where he lit the cigar and filled the shack with smoke.
“Sing, morena.”
Caridad had wanted him to ask her for that again. How many nights had she yearned to work with that man at her back! She cut the tobacco leaf for the wrapper with extraordinary skill and began to sing softly. But, without planning it or even thinking about it, she abandoned the monotone African songs from her homeland and, just as when she’d worked on a tobacco or sugar plantation, she used her music to narrate her worries and her hopes like the Negro slaves did in Cuba, only able to talk about their lives in song. And meanwhile she continued working, focused on the movement of her hands, attentive to the tobacco, her feelings flowing freely into the lyrics of her songs. And those two old gypsies steal my slave smoke, she protested in one, and then while they suck on the veins, they complain about the tobacco …
She also asked for forgiveness for having allowed them to steal the tobacco: And even though the gypsy says it’s not my fault, it was, but what could the Negress do against the white man? She cried over her torn red clothes and she celebrated Milagros’s getting them mended. She confessed her uneasiness about Melchor’s leaving to take revenge. She thanked him for the tranquil nights in the San Miguel alley. She sang of her friendship with Milagros and the hostility of the girl’s parents, and of their reconciliation, and of Old María who took care of the girl, and of the parties and the bear and—
“Morena,” interrupted Melchor. Caridad turned her head. “Come here and smoke with me.”
Melchor patted the mattress and Caridad obeyed. The wooden bed frame creaked, threatening to give when she got on it and lay beside the gypsy, who passed her the cigar. Caridad took a hard puff and felt the smoke filling her lungs completely; she held it there until she started to feel a pleasant tickle. Melchor, with the cigar again between his fingers, exhaled the smoke toward the reed and straw roof that covered them and gave it back to Caridad. What should I do? she wondered as she took another drag. Should I keep singing? Melchor kept silent, his gaze lost on that roof through which the rain dripped. She hesitated between singing or offering her body to him. Every time she had ever got into a bed, it had been for some man to enjoy her body: the master, the overseer, even the young son of another white master took her on a whim one Sunday. She smoked. She had never been the one to offer herself; it had always been the white men who called her and took her to bed. Melchor smoked too; the cigar was already burning when he passed it to her again. He had invited her into the bed … but he wasn’t touching her. She waited a few seconds for the cigar to cool down. She felt the contact of the gypsy’s body, on his side next to her, both crowded in, but she didn’t notice that accelerated breathing, that panting with which men usually pounced on her; Melchor breathed calmly, as always. And yet wasn’t her heart beating harder? What did it mean? She smoked. One drag right after the other, with gusto.
“Morena,” he then said, “finish the cigar. And make sure not to move too much during the night or I’ll have to pay those two for a new bed. Now sing … the way you used to in the alley.”
Melchor kept his eyes fixed on the reed roof: all he had to do was turn over and he would be on top of her, he thought. He felt the desire: hers was a young, firm, voluptuous body. Caridad would accept him, he was sure of that. She began to sing and the sad slave melodies filled Melchor’s ears. How he had missed her singing! If he leapt on her, she would stop. And from that point on, nothing would be the same, as always was the case with women. The affliction and pain that oozed from that music provoked other feelings in the gypsy, feelings that clouded his desire. That woman had suffered as much as he had, maybe more. Why break the spell? He could wait … for what? Melchor was surprised at the situation: he, Melchor Vega, El Galeote, wondering what to do. That morena really was special! Then he placed a hand on her thigh and slid up its length, and Caridad was silent and remained still, waiting, tense. Melchor could feel it in her leg muscles as they hardened, and in her breathing, which stopped for a few moments.
“Keep singing, morena,” he requested, lifting his hand.
HE DIDN’T seek out her body again, in spite of the ardor he felt when he awoke in the night and found they were entangled, both embracing each other against the cold, and the woman’s breasts and buttocks were tight up against him. Hadn’t she noticed his erection? Caridad’s tranquil, unhurried breathing was answer enough. And Melchor hesitated. He pushed her away from him but she kept sleeping, only muttered something in a language unfamiliar to the gypsy. Lucumí, she had told him one morning. She trusted him, slept placidly and sang to him at night. He couldn’t let her down, he again concluded, surprised on each of those occasions, before pushing her away from him.
Melchor felt comfortable in the settlement, with his granddaughter and other relatives, and where his daughter Ana regularly visited. She was the one who came running over to him one day to warn him that a couple of men had appeared at the alley pretending to be interested in some cooking pots; but not even the least sharp of the gypsies believed that they’d come there to buy anything. Amid their dealings they’d said that they knew Melchor and they asked about him, but no one, that Ana knew of, had given them any information.
Tomás increased the vigilance over the settlement. He had taken that measure when he found out about his brother’s revenge on El Gordo’s assets, but now he urged the young Vega men to be increasingly zealous. The gypsies of La Cartuja were used to being on a constant state of alert: the settlement was frequented by all sorts of delinquents and fugitives from justice seeking refuge, trying to blend in with the members of a community who proudly lived outside the laws of the payos.
Yet Melchor told his brother, “Don’t worry.”
“How can I not? They must be El Gordo’s men.”
“Just two? You and I can take them. You don’t need to bother the young men, they have things to do.”
“We have plenty of money now … for a while. Two of them accompany Old María and your granddaughter when they go out to collect herbs.”
“All right, pay those ones well,” Melchor corrected himself.
Tomás smiled.
“You are very calm,” he said later.
“Shouldn’t I be?”
“No, you shouldn’t, but it seems that sleeping with the morena does you good,” he affirmed with a crafty expression.
“Tomás,” said Melchor, running an arm over his brother’s shoulder and pulling his head close to his own, “she’s got a body that would satisfy the frenzied passion of the best lover.”
Tomás let out a laugh.
“But I haven’t laid a hand on her.”
Tomás freed himself from the embrace. “What …?”
“I can’t. I see her as innocent, insecure, sad, shattered. When she sings … well, you’ve heard me say this before. I like to listen to her. Her voice fills me up and transports me back to when we were boys and we used to listen to the Negro slaves singing, do you remember?” Tomás nodded. “The Negroes today have lost those roots and just try to turn white and become payos, but not my morena. Do you remember how Mother and Father were crazy for their music and their dancing? Then we would try to imitate them in the settlement, remember?” Tomás nodded again. “I think … I think if I lay with her the spell would be broken. And I prefer her voice … and her company.”
“Well, you should do something. The settlement is a rumor mill. Think of your granddaughter …”
“The girl knows we haven’t done anything. I’m sure of that. I would be able to tell.”
And that was true. Milagros, like all the gypsies in the settlement, knew about the deal her grandfather had struck with the old couple, who complained to anyone who’d listen about how little Melchor had paid them to have their bed to share with the morena. Who had ever heard of a Negress sleeping in a bed with legs? Milagros couldn’t stand the idea of her grandfather and Cachita … Three days passed before she made up her mind and went in search of Caridad, and found her alone in the hut, working the tobacco.
“You are fornicating with my grandfather!” she rebuked her right from the doorway.
The smile Caridad had greeted her friend with faded on her lips. “No …” she managed to say in her defense.
But the gypsy girl didn’t let her speak. “I haven’t been able to sleep thinking that you two were there: fucking like dogs. You, my friend …! I trusted you.”
“He has not mounted me.”
But Milagros wasn’t listening to her. “Don’t you realize? He’s my grandfather!”
“He has not mounted me,” repeated Caridad.
The girl furrowed her brow, still enraged. “You haven’t …?”
“No.”
Would she have liked him to? That was the question that crossed Caridad’s mind. She enjoyed Melchor’s touch; she felt safe and … did she want him to mount her? Beyond the physical contact, she felt nothing when men did that. Would it be the same with Melchor? As soon as he’d taken his hand off her leg that first night and asked her to sing, Caridad again felt the spell established between them to the rhythm of the Negro songs, their souls united. Would she like him to touch her, to mount her? Perhaps yes … or no. In any case, what would happen afterwards?
Milagros misinterpreted her friend’s silence.
“Forgive me for having doubted you, Cachita,” she apologized.
Which was why Melchor could maintain to Tomás that his granddaughter knew he wasn’t having sexual relations with Caridad. No explanations had been necessary on any of the many occasions that the gypsy came to see her.
“I’m stealing her from you,” he would announce to Old María when he entered the hut where they were working with herbs; then he would take the girl by the arm, paying no mind to the healer’s complaints, and they would stroll by the riverbank or the Triana lowlands, mostly in silence, Milagros afraid her words would break the spell surrounding her grandfather.
Melchor would also ask her to dance when he heard some handclapping, he would treat her to wine, he would surprise her when she and Caridad hid to smoke at dusk and he would join them—“I don’t have the friar’s cigars,” he would joke—or he would go with her and the old gypsy healer to gather herbs.
“These weeds won’t cure anybody,” grumbled the old woman on those occasions. “Get out of here!” she would shout at Melchor, shooing him off with her hands. “This is woman’s work.”
And he would wink at his granddaughter and move a few paces away until he was beside the gypsies Tomás had ordered to watch over the women. They were already familiar with the healer’s crankiness and bad temper. But before long Melchor would be close to Milagros again.
They were returning from one of those strolls when they heard the news of young Dionisio Vega’s death.
THERE WAS a place in Triana that Melchor hated; there gathered, all mixed and crowded together, pain, suffering, impotence, rancor, the smell of death, hatred for all of humanity! Even when he was walking around Seville, near the Gold Tower, with the wide Guadalquivir in between, the gypsy turned his face toward the city walls to avoid seeing it. However, that spring dusk, after the dramatic wake for young Dionisio Vega, an irrepressible impulse led him there.
Dionisio hadn’t even been sixteen. Surrounded by the relentless cries of grief from the women of the settlement and the San Miguel alley, all gathered to bid their final farewell to the boy, Melchor remembered the liveliness and intelligence in his dark penetrating eyes and his always smiling face. He was the grandson of Uncle Basilio, who endured the gathering with composure, trying to keep his gaze from meeting Melchor’s. When, at the end of the ceremony, Melchor headed over to his relative, Basilio accepted his condolences and for the first time in that day faced him. Basilio said nothing but the accusation floated through the settlement: It’s your fault, Melchor.
And it was. Those two men El Gordo had sent, the ones Ana had told him about, had disappeared. Maybe because they saw that Melchor was never alone, maybe when they saw the security measures. But over time, the vigilance Tomás had ordered ceased. How could they think that El Gordo would forget the offense? Spring came and one day, young Dionisio, with two friends, left the settlement and went onto the fertile plain of Triana in search of a hen to steal or some iron scraps to sell to the blacksmiths. Two men cut them off. The boys were obviously gypsies from their dark faces, their colorful clothes and the trinkets that hung from their ears and around their necks. Not a word was exchanged before one of the men stuck a dress sword through Dionisio’s heart. Then the same man addressed the other boys.
“Tell that coward, El Galeote, that El Fajado does not forgive. Tell him to stop hiding among his people like a frightened woman.”
Stop hiding among his people like a frightened woman. The boys’ words, repeated thousands of times since they appeared at the settlement with Dionisio’s corpse, stuck like red-hot needles in Melchor’s brain while many of the gypsies avoided his eyes when they passed him. They think the same thing! Melchor tortured himself with the thought. And they were right: he had hidden like a coward, like a woman. Was he getting old? Was he like Antonio, who for a mere coin had given up his prized bed so Melchor could sleep with the morena? The wake lasted three days, the women howling incessantly, tearing their dresses and scratching at their arms and faces. Melchor kept apart even from Milagros and Ana, who couldn’t keep the recrimination out of their eyes; he even came to believe he saw scorn on his own daughter’s face. Nor did he have the courage to join the parties of gypsies who, fruitlessly, went out in search of El Gordo’s men. Meanwhile he tormented himself over and over with the same question: had he turned into someone like old Antonio, a coward who could cause the death of boys like Dionisio? Even his own daughter tried to avoid him!
He witnessed the burial, in a nearby open field, crouched among the other gypsies. He saw how the boy’s father, accompanied by Uncle Basilio, put an old guitar in Dionisio’s limp arms. Later, in a heartbroken voice, addressing his son’s lifeless body, he cried out, “Play, son, and if I have done wrong, let your music deafen me; but if I have acted correctly, be still and I will be absolved.”
In the earsplitting silence, Basilio and his son waited a few moments. Later, when they turned their backs on the corpse, the other men buried him along with his guitar. When the earth completely covered the simple pine coffin, Dionisio’s mother went over to the head of it and carefully piled up the dead boy’s few personal possessions: an old shirt, a blanket, a knife, a small silver horn that he had worn around his neck as a child to ward off the evil eye and an old two-cornered hat that the boy had loved and which his mother kissed tenderly. Then she set fire to the pile.
As the flames began to die out and the gypsies leave, Melchor went over to the bonfire. Many stopped and turned their heads to watch El Galeote take off his sky-blue silk jacket, pull the money out of its pockets and put them in his sash, and throw the jacket onto the fire. Then he offered his hand to Uncle Basilio with the heavens as his witness.
Pain, anguish and guilt led his feet to the Triana bank of the Guadalquivir. He needed to be there!
“Where’s he going?” Milagros asked her mother in a whisper.
The two women, and Caridad with them, hastened to follow Melchor as soon as he bowed his head to Basilio with a resigned expression and headed off toward Triana. They did so at a distance, making sure he didn’t see them, not imagining that Melchor wouldn’t have noticed their presence even if they were walking right beside him.
“I think I know,” answered Ana.
She said no more until Grandfather passed the pontoon bridge and the bank and stopped in front of the church of the old Seafarers’ University, where they taught boys about the sea and took care of sick seamen.
“It was there,” whispered the mother, keeping a close eye on the silhouette of her father set against the last lights of the day.
“What was there?” inquired Milagros, with Caridad behind her.
“That is the church of Our Lady of Bonaria, the patron saint of seafarers. Look …” She began to address her daughter, then corrected herself to include Caridad as well. “Look at the main entrance. Do you see the uninterrupted balcony looking onto the river above it?” Milagros nodded; Caridad said nothing. “From that balcony, on days of precept, they said mass to the boats in the river; that way the seamen didn’t even have to disembark …”
“And neither did the galley slaves.” Milagros finished the sentence for her.
Ana sighed. “That’s right.”
Melchor continued to stand tall before the door to the church, his head lifted toward the balcony and the river almost licking the heels of his boots.
“Your grandfather never wanted to tell me anything about his years in the galleys, but I know, I overheard some conversations he had with the few others who survived that torture. Bernardo, for example. During the years that Grandfather was at the oars, there was nothing that hurt him more, of all the hardships and disasters he had to endure, than being chained to the galleys listening to mass docked at Triana.”
Because Triana was freedom incarnate and there was nothing more precious to a gypsy. Melchor endured the lashings of the slave driver, suffered thirst and hunger covered in his own excrement and urine, with ulcers all over his body, rowing through exhaustion. So what? he wondered in the end. Wasn’t that the gypsies’ fate, be it on land or on sea? To suffer injustice.
But when he was there before his Triana … when he could smell, practically touch, that air of freedom that naturally drove the gypsies to fight against all the ties that bind, then Melchor ached from all his wounds. How many blasphemies had he repeated in silence against those priests and those sacred images from the other side of freedom? How many times right there, on the river, in front of the retablo of Our Lady of Bonaria flanked by paintings of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, had he cursed his fate? How many times had he sworn that he would never again lift his eyes toward that balcony?
Suddenly, Melchor fell to his knees. Milagros wanted to run toward him, but Ana held her back.
“But …” the girl complained. “What is he going to do?”
“Sing,” Caridad whispered behind them, to their surprise.
Ana had never heard her father sing his “galley lament.” He had never sung it once he was free. Which was why, when the first long, doleful wailing flooded the dusk, Ana fell to her knees just like him. Milagros felt all the little hairs on her body stand on end. She had never heard anything similar; not even the heartfelt deblas of La Trianera, El Conde’s wife, could compare to that lament. The girl shivered, searched out her mother and rested her hands on her shoulders; Ana grasped them. Melchor sang without words, weaving moans and whimpers that sounded deep, cracked, broken, all tinged with the taste of death and misfortune.
The two gypsies remained cowering inwardly, aware how that profound and indescribable song, marvelous in its melancholy, cut them to the quick. Yet Caridad was smiling. She knew it: she was sure that everything the grandfather was incapable of putting into words he could express through music; like her, like the slaves.
The galley lament lasted several minutes, until Melchor ended it with a final mournful cry that he let die on his lips. The women saw him get up and spit at the chapel before starting to walk downriver, away from the settlement. Mother and daughter remained still for a few more moments, drained.
“Where is he going?” asked Milagros when Melchor vanished into the distance.
“He’s leaving,” Ana managed to choke out, her eyes flooded with tears.
Caridad, with the laments still echoing in her ears, tried to keep the gypsy’s back in sight. Milagros felt her mother’s shoulders convulse with sobs.
“He’ll come back, Mother,” she tried to console her. “He’s not … he’s not carrying anything; he has no jacket, no musket, not even his cane.”
Ana didn’t speak. The murmur of the river’s water in the night surrounded the three women.
“He’ll come back, won’t he, Mother?” added the girl, her voice now cracked.
Caridad perked up her ears. She wanted to hear yes. She needed to know that he would come back!
But Ana didn’t answer.