They had been on the road for four days, rationing the water and salted pork that Fray Joaquín had given them before they left. Even Old María doubted whether the preacher could have been right about his gods and devils when, after they decided to flee to Portugal, they drew up their itinerary along with a downcast Fray Joaquín who, nonetheless, insisted on helping them as if it were a way to purge the mistake he had made.
“There are two main routes you should avoid,” he advised, “the Ayamonte road, toward the south, and the Mérida one to the north. These have the most traffic. There is a third one that forks off the Ayamonte road near Trigueros to head to Lisbon through Paymogo, near the border. Search for that, the one that crosses the Andévalo, always heading west; go around the mountain range toward Valverde del Camino and then further west. There you’ll have fewer possibilities of running into the constables or soldiers.”
“Why?” asked Milagros.
“You’ll see. They say that when God created the earth, he was tired after the effort of making the Andalusian coasts and decided to rest, but so as not to interrupt creation he let the devil continue his work. And that was how the lands of the Andévalo were born.”
And indeed they did see.
“Why couldn’t your friar’s God have had just a little more energy, girl!” Old María complained yet again, dragging her feet—bare just like those of the other two—along the dry, barren paths beneath the August sun.
They avoided the roads and towns and walked without a single tree beneath which to take shelter, for the flocks of sheep and goats and the herds of pigs gathered where the holm-oak woods and cork oaks grew, and they were watched over by shepherds, and the women didn’t want to run into anyone.
“Of all the luck! We had to get a lazy God!” muttered the old woman.
But except for those pastures, most of the fields that weren’t near towns were fallow: large stretches of uncultivated land. Beyond Seville there were only a few occasions when they had spotted a laborer from a distance, who would always lean on his hoe, using his hand as a visor, wondering about those who walked by—but never came near.
They traveled in the early morning and at dusk, when the suffocating heat seemed to lessen. Four or five hours each stretch, which wasn’t nearly enough time to cover the four or five leagues they’d set out to, but they had no way of knowing that. Walking through those barren fields, alone and without points of reference, they began to be somewhat discouraged: they didn’t know where they were or how long it would be until they arrived; they only knew—this Fray Joaquín had told them—that they had to cross the Andévalo heading west until they reached the Guadiana River, whose course marked most of the border with Portugal.
They walked in single file; Milagros headed the march. At one point, when Caridad was trying to match her pace, she had ordered her: “Take care of María,” pointing back with one of her thumbs.
Milagros didn’t have a chance to regret the tone she used or notice the disappointment her friend was unable to hide. Her thoughts were too full of her parents, separated from each other, separated from her … she was afraid to even imagine where they were and what they were doing. And she cried. She picked out the paths with her eyes flooded in tears and she didn’t want anyone to bother her in her pain. Forced labor for the men, Fray Joaquín had said. She didn’t know what they did in the arsenal of La Carraca in Cádiz. What were they forcing her father to do? She remembered the last time he had forgiven her, like so many other times throughout her life! “Until you get every gypsy in this settlement to kneel before your charms,” he had demanded. And she had danced in search of his approval, moving her body to the rhythm of the pride sparkling in her father’s eyes. And her mother? Her throat tightened and her legs seemed to refuse to go on at the mere thought of her, as if she were betraying her by fleeing. A thousand times she thought of going back, turning herself in, searching for her and throwing herself into her arms … but she didn’t dare.
When the sun beat hard or when night fell, they searched for somewhere to take shelter. They ate salted pork, they drank a few sips of hot water and they smoked the cigars that Caridad still had in her bundle. Then, exhausted by the heat, the girl would sob in silence; the others respected her grief.
“Fray Joaquín must have been right: this land could only have been the work of the devil,” she commented with disgust at the end of that day as she pointed to a lone fig tree silhouetted against the sunset.
From behind, the old woman groaned. “Girl, the devil has tricked us: he was reincarnated into the friar who set us off on his paths. May that damn priest rot in his own hell!”
The girl didn’t respond; she had quickened her step. Caridad, behind her, hesitated and turned toward the healer: she was limping and hunched over, cursing under her breath at every step. She waited for her.
Old María, exhausted from the effort, slowly reached Caridad, stopping with an exaggerated groan and tilting her head to one side. She looked up at the worn straw hat Caridad wore.
“Morena, with that mat of hair you’ve got on your head, I don’t know what you want with a hat.”
Caridad took it off and held the hat in front of her grayish dress of coarse burlap, along with her bundle.
“You are so dark!” exclaimed the healer. “Were you sent by the devil, too?”
“No!” she quickly replied, with fear in her face.
A sad expression crossed the old woman’s face at Caridad’s denial: the morena was obviously innocent. “Of course not,” she tried to reassure her. “Help me.”
María went to offer her her forearm, but Caridad put her hat back on and, before the old woman could protest, she lifted her up in the air, held her in her arms like a little girl and started marching behind Milagros, who was substantially ahead of them by that point.
“Do you think the devil would carry you in his arms?” asked Caridad with a smile.
Old María smiled and nodded.
“It’s not a litter in the style of the great Sevillian ladies,” commented the old woman once she’d recovered from Caridad’s sudden lift. She had run an arm around the black woman’s neck and even got comfortable. “But it’ll do. Thank you, morena, and as that deceitful friar would say, may God reward you.”
María kept talking and complaining about the state of her feet, her old age, the friar and the devil, the payos and that rough, fallow land until Caridad stopped suddenly several paces from the fig tree. María felt the tension in Caridad’s arms.
“What …?”
She was silent as she looked toward the tree: against the reddish light that was already falling on the fields, Milagros’s figure was silhouetted in front of another taller one, a man’s, surely, who was grabbing her and shaking her.
“Put me down on the ground, morena, slowly,” she whispered as she searched in her apron pocket for the knife she used to cut plants. “Have you ever fought?” she added, now standing with the knife in her hand.
“No,” answered Caridad. Had she fought? She thought of the times she had been forced to defend her smoke or her daily ration of cod gruel from the other slaves: simple quarrels among the hungry. “No,” she reiterated, “I haven’t.”
“Well, now’s the time for you to learn,” said the old woman, handing her the knife. “I no longer have the strength or the youth for such things. Stab him in the eye if you have to, but don’t let him touch the girl.”
Suddenly Caridad found herself with the weapon in her hand.
“Hurry up, demon Negress!” screamed the old woman, gesticulating wildly at the man, who was already pulling the girl toward him.
Caridad stammered. Stab him in the eye? She had never … but Milagros needed her! She was about to take a step when María’s scream alerted the girl to their presence. Then she freed herself from the man, lifted an arm and greeted them with a wave.
“Wait!” called the healer, seeing how calm the girl was. “Maybe today is not the day you’ll have to … prove your valor.” She dragged the last few words out.
He was a gypsy named Domingo Peña, an itinerant blacksmith from the Puerto de Santa María, one of the towns where many gypsies had been arrested, and he had spent a couple of weeks shoeing horses and fixing farm tools in the Andévalo region.
“Except for the big towns, of which there aren’t many,” explained the gypsy, as they all sat beneath the fig tree’s large leaves, “the blacksmiths have disappeared, even though they are essential to the work in the fields,” he added as he pointed to his tools: a tiny anvil, an old bellows made of ram’s skin, some tongs, a couple of hammers and some old horseshoes.
The healer was still watching him with some suspicion.
“What was that man doing to you?” she had accused Milagros in whispers as soon as she was close enough.
“He was hugging me!” the girl said in her defense. “He had been in the Andévalo for some time and knew nothing about our raid. He was crying over the fate of his wife and children.”
“Even so, don’t let men hug you. It’s not necessary. Let them cry on your shoulder.”
Milagros accepted the reprimand and nodded, her head bowed.
Beneath the fig tree, Domingo questioned them about the gypsies’ arrest. They were speaking in Caló, the gypsy tongue that Caridad had started to understand in the settlement. Yet what caught her attention was the desperate gesturing and the anguished expression on the face of the man; he was as gaunt as he was sinewy, with a smith’s strong arms with long veins that swelled in the tension of the moment. Domingo had left behind three boys over seven, the age at which, according to what the women had just told him, they would be separated from their mother and destined to forced labor. “Juan,” he enunciated in a thin voice. María and Milagros, cringing, let him speak. “The youngest, a lively lad. He liked to hit the iron scraps against the anvil and sometimes he would even softly sing something like a martinete to the rhythm marked by the hammer. Francisco, ten years old, introverted but intelligent, cautious, always aware of everything around him; and the oldest, Ambrosio, just a year older than his brother.” His voice cracked. The boy had fallen from a crag and his legs were deformed from the accident. Had Ambrosio also been separated from his mother and sent to forced labor in the arsenals? Neither the old woman nor the girl dared to respond, but Domingo insisted, obliviously repeating the question: Were they capable of that? And when he was answered by silence again he brought his hands to his face and broke out in sobs. He cried in front of the women without trying to hide his weakness. And he howled up at the already starry sky with screams of pain that split the warm air around them.
“I WILL turn myself in,” Domingo said at dawn. He didn’t see himself capable of traveling through the towns to continue smithing in exchange for a meager coin knowing that his children were suffering. He would search for them and he would turn himself in.
Caridad sensed in the gypsy’s tone of voice and expression what he meant.
“I don’t know if I should do it, too,” admitted Milagros.
Old María wasn’t surprised by her confession: she’d had a feeling it was coming. Four days crying incessantly over her parents’ arrest was too much for the girl. She had heard her at night, when Milagros thought they were sleeping; she had noticed the stifled sobs in the long hours of the day when they took shelter from the heat and she had observed, as she walked behind the girl, how her shoulders trembled and her body shook. And it wasn’t the desperation and the implacable pain that comes from the death of a loved one, the old woman said to herself; suffering over this separation could be remedied: by turning oneself in.
“I can’t stop thinking—” Milagros started to add before the blacksmith interrupted her.
“Don’t do it, girl,” the gypsy urged her. “I wouldn’t want my children to turn themselves in. I’m sure your parents don’t want it either. Keep your freedom and live; that’s the best thing you can do for them.”
“Live?” Milagros opened her hand to include the arid fields that were already threatening to burn their feet over the course of another day.
“Leave the Andévalo region and go down to the coast, toward the flat lands …”
“They’ll arrest us!” objected the girl.
“What could we do there?” interjected the old woman with interest.
“You’ll find gypsies there. Maybe the King arrested everyone who lived in towns and cities, but there are many more, those who walk the roads; they haven’t found them. There are also many settled in towns where gypsies weren’t allowed to reside, they must have all left those places. They’ll be in the flat lands, I know it. It’s a richer land than the Andévalo.”
“We are headed to Barrancos.”
The gypsy arched his eyebrows toward Milagros. “Why?”
“We trust we’ll be able to find my grandfather there.”
María was half listening. There were gypsies in the flat lands and Domingo knew where. It was what she had been wanting all those days on the road: to meet up with her people. Despite the decision they’d made in Triana, the old woman was wary of going to Barrancos. She had had four long days to think on it: Melchor might not show up or not for a long time, which would leave them just as alone to face the dangers that threatened them as they were now.
“You only trust? You’re not sure?” the man asked, surprised. Then he looked Milagros up and down, shook his head and turned to the old woman. “Barrancos is a town of smugglers. It’s between ravines … totally isolated. Do you realize what you are getting yourselves into?” He accompanied his question with an expressive look toward Milagros and Caridad, who was hovering on the margins of the conversation. “A young, desirable, beautiful gypsy girl … virgin, and a voluptuous Negress. You won’t last two days. What am I saying? Not even two hours.”
For a few moments the four listened to what seemed to be the crackle of the dry land around them.
“He’s right,” affirmed the old woman after a short while.
“What do you mean?” the girl snapped, seeing María’s intentions. “Grandfather—”
“Your grandfather is a gypsy,” the old woman interrupted. “Melchor will seek out his own kind. If we spread the word among our people, at some point we will find him or he’ll find us, but we shouldn’t go to that town, girl.”
STOP HIDING like a frightened woman. For months before the big raid, the gibe tormented Melchor’s every step after he had sung his galley lament before the open chapel of the Virgin of Bonaire in Triana. With the silent condemnation from Uncle Basilio for the death of his grandson Dionisio and, above all, the look of scorn from his daughter Ana burned into his conscience, the gypsy headed to the Portuguese border; there he would run into El Gordo when the smuggler least expected it and then … Melchor spat. Then they would see who was a frightened woman! He would kill him like the dog he was and he’d cut off his head … his testicles and maybe a hand, anything he could offer publicly to Uncle Basilio in amends.
Along the way, he avoided inns and towns, except for one where he stopped only long enough to buy some food and tobacco, cursing his luck at having to pay for it, in a small shop where the King forced them to sell it for a tenth its price, as was the case in all those towns where it wasn’t worthwhile setting up a tobacconist’s shop. He slept under the stars for three nights before arriving at the capital of Aracena, nested among the foothills of the Sierra Morena. Melchor knew the town: he had been there on many occasions. About four leagues away lay Jabugo, the spot for loading contraband tobacco, and seven, the Portuguese border, with the towns of Barrancos and Serpa, centers of the illegal trade. Aracena, subject to the Count of Altamira, had some six thousand inhabitants spread out over the twenty-odd streets scattered beneath the remains of an imposing castle that dominated the city; four squares; the parish church of the Assumption, unfinished despite the people’s efforts; some chapels, two convents and two monasteries.
The gypsy felt the cold of the mountains; the spring temperatures there weren’t the same as in Triana and he was walking without his blue jacket, which had joined young Dionisio’s belongings in the bonfire at his ill-fated funeral. Every Saturday they held a market, mostly for grain, where the people of Extremadura traveled to sell where hardly any cereals grew. He would find some kind of a jacket, although he was unlikely to find anything like the one he had sacrificed for the boy … or was it for himself? “It’s Thursday,” answered a townsperson. He would wait until Saturday. He had no intention of staying in the town; it was somewhat off the tobacco route. He headed toward a small tavern he knew and whose owner he felt was discreet. He didn’t want his presence known and to reach the ears of El Gordo or his men.
“Melchor,” the owner greeted him without stopping his work.
“What Melchor?” he asked. The man just squinted his eyes for an instant. “I haven’t seen anyone named Melchor, have you?”
“No, not me either.”
“That’s good. Is your back room free?”
“Well, bring me some food and drink.”
The gypsy handed him a coin, enough to cover the expenses and his silence, and locked himself in the tiny room that the tavern keeper offered to his few guests. He smoked, he ate and he drank. He smoked again and drank until his memories and his guilt became blurry, incoherent stains. He tried to sleep but couldn’t. He drank more.
The dawn slipping in through the room’s only little window found him humiliated and frozen stiff, sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, at the foot of the rickety old bed. He grabbed the jug of wine beside him: empty. He tried to shout for more wine, but all that came out was a muffled rasping that scratched at his throat. He tried to swallow; his mouth was dry, so he got up as best he could and went out to the tavern, still closed to the public, where he got another jug of wine and returned to the little room. Standing, he endured a succession of heaves that overcame him after the first long, eager gulp. And while his stomach punished him, he let his back slide down the wall until he was back where he had woken up. After spending the days smoking and drinking, escaping his reality, without even trying the food the tavern keeper brought him, Saturday found him with one thought obsessing his intoxicated, revenge-fueled mind: buying the best short jacket he could find in the Aracena market.
The Plaza Alta was filled with traders from Extremadura, on the other side of the mountains, who offered the wheat, barley and rye that wasn’t grown there. Alongside them, people from neighboring villages announced their wares. Melchor was stunned by the racket. Dirty and with bloodshot eyes, he walked past the town hall and realized he had no documentation that would allow him to be there, or in any other town; he hadn’t thought to grab any of his identification papers. Then he forced his eyes, dry as they were, to look over to the other side of the square, in front of the town hall, toward the parish church of the Assumption, which was the same as ever, unfinished, with the beginnings of the pillars and the walls of the third and fourth gallery open to the air and at different heights, like jagged teeth surrounding the two and a half finished naves that were used for worship. It had been that way for more than a hundred years. How were they going to arrest him in a town where they weren’t even able to finish their main church? With his hand over his eyes to protect himself from the sun, he looked around at the different stalls and stands and the people who moved among them. The breeze was chilly. He found the stall of a secondhand-clothes dealer and headed over to it: used items, dark and patched and many times mended by the shepherds who’d worn them. He rummaged through them without much conviction; anything blue, red or yellow, or with gold or silver filigree would have stood out in the pile.
“What are you looking for?” the trader asked him. He had already noticed that Melchor was a gypsy, as evidenced by the rings in his ears and his breeches trimmed in gold.
Melchor lifted his dark, lined face toward the secondhand-clothing dealer. “A good short jacket in red or blue. Doesn’t look like you have any.”
“In that case, move along,” urged the dealer with a contemptuous flick of his hand.
Melchor sighed. The disdain roused him from the hangover of two long days drinking harsh, strong wine. “You should have what I want.” He said it in a low, deep voice, his gypsy eyes challenging the man, who gave in first and lowered his; he could shout or call the constable, but who could be sure there weren’t more gypsies who would come for him later? They always traveled in groups!
“I … don’t …” he stuttered.
“What is it you want so badly that you’re threatening this good man?”
The question came from behind Melchor’s back. A woman’s voice. The gypsy remained still, trying to find some sign in the used-clothes dealer’s face that would reveal who was behind him. There were many people slipping through the narrow aisles between the stalls. A single woman? Several people? The constable? The secondhand-clothing dealer didn’t seem too relieved; it was probably a woman alone, but a bold one, thought Melchor before turning and answering.
“Respect. That is what I want.”
She was short and strong, with a sun-beaten face and white hair that stuck out of a headscarf. Melchor figured she was about fifty years old, the same age as her shabby clothes. From her right arm hung a basket filled with grain she had bought at the market.
“Don’t overreact!” exclaimed the woman. “Gyps—Men,” she corrected herself quickly, “are so touchy lately. I’m sure Casimiro didn’t want to offend you. These are difficult times. Isn’t that right, Casimiro?”
“That’s right,” answered the used-clothes dealer.
But Melchor ignored him. He liked the woman’s insolence. And she had generous breasts, he thought, looking at them openly.
“And who are you to talk about respect?” she rebuked him for his brazenness. However, the smile on her lips didn’t match her words.
“What is more respectful than admiring what God offers us?”
“God?” replied the woman looking toward her breasts. “I’m the only one offering this, God has nothing to do with it. They’re mine and I do what I want with them.”
Melchor let out a laugh. The secondhand-clothing dealer saw people pass without approaching his stall where the pair stood. He opened his hands to hurry the woman up, but she remained focused on the gypsy, who rubbed his chin and then replied, “That’s too bad. The priests say that God is extremely generous.”
Now she was the one who laughed. “What are you getting at? We’re just two … loners, right?” Melchor nodded; the woman thought for a second and screwed up her face before looking the gypsy up and down. “You and me together? Even God would be frightened.”
“Nicolasa, I’m begging you,” whined the dealer, urging her to leave his stall.
Melchor lifted an arm, ordering him to be quiet. “Nicolasa,” he repeated as if he intended to remember that name. “Well, if God is so easily frightened, let the devil accompany us.”
“Hush!” she protested, looking to either side to see if anyone had heard his proposal. Casimiro begged her to leave, again. “How dare you place yourself in the devil’s hands?” she whispered after giving in to the dealer’s pleas and pulling the gypsy away from the stall, while the trader offered his wares in a shout, as if trying to make up for lost time.
“Woman, to be with you I’d go down to hell and drink a glass of wine with Lucifer himself.”
Nicolasa stopped short, amid the people, with a confused look. “I’ve been courted many times—”
“I have no doubt about that,” Melchor interrupted.
“As a young girl, they promised me the moon …” she continued, “then they only gave me a couple of suckling pigs, several children who abandoned me and a husband who died on me,” she complained. “But nobody has ever promised to go down to hell for me.”
“We gypsies know it well.”
Nicolasa looked at him lewdly. “Skinny as a stick,” she teased. “Have you got anything besides arms and legs?”
Melchor tilted his head to one side. She imitated him. “Keep in mind that the devil kicked me out of hell. That was after he saw what isn’t arms and legs.” She pushed him with a giggle. “It’s true! Have you heard talk about Lucifer’s knob? Well it’s nothing compared to …”
“Joker! We’ll see about that!” exclaimed the woman, hanging from his arm.