After leaving the apartment over the silversmiths’, Fray Joaquín pulled Milagros to a house on Pez Street, a road crammed with buildings filled with proud, haughty Madrileños, just as in Lavapiés, Barquillo and the capital’s other districts. The priest, fearing rumors, didn’t even dare go to a secret guesthouse, so he negotiated the rent of a couple of dingy rooms from the widow of a soldier who slept by the hearth and didn’t ask questions. Along the way, he told Milagros about his conversation with Blas.

“Well, then let’s go to Triana,” she said quickly, grabbing him by the sleeve to stop him as they went up Ancha de San Bernardo Street.

The crowd went happily in the opposite direction, toward Alcalá Street and the bullring.

“Pedro would kill you,” the priest objected as he examined the buildings and side streets.

“My daughter is there!”

Fray Joaquín stopped. “And what would we do?” he asked. “Go into the San Miguel alley and kidnap her? Do you think we have even the slightest chance? Pedro will get there before us, and as soon as he does he will spread all sorts of malicious lies about you; the entire gypsy settlement will consider you a …” The friar stopped there, his words hanging in the air. “You wouldn’t even get as far as … we wouldn’t even get across the pontoon bridge. Come on,” he added tenderly a few seconds later.

Fray Joaquín kept walking, but Milagros didn’t follow him; the flood of people seemed to swallow him up. When he realized, the friar retraced his steps.

“What does it matter if I get killed?” she murmured between sobs, tears already running down her cheeks. “I was already dead before …”

“Don’t say that.” Fray Joaquín was about to take her by the shoulders but he stopped himself. “There has to be another solution, and I will find it. I promise you.”

Another solution? Milagros frowned as she clung to that promise. She nodded and walked beside him. It was true, she admitted to herself when they turned down Pez Street: Pedro would defame her, and Bartola would obediently confirm all the slander the bastard could think up. A shiver ran down her spine as she imagined Reyes, La Trianera, vilifying her. The Garcías would enjoy publicly repudiating her; the Carmonas would do it too, their honor offended. Milagros had broken the law: there were no gypsy prostitutes, and all the gypsies would turn against her. How could she show up in the San Miguel alley in those circumstances?

However, the days passed and Fray Joaquín didn’t fulfill his promise. “Give me time,” he asked her one morning when she insisted. “The marquis will help us,” he assured her the next day knowing that he wouldn’t be able to go to his house. “I wrote a letter to the prior of San Jacinto, he will know what to do,” he lied the third time she reminded him what he had promised.

Fray Joaquín was afraid of losing her, of her getting hurt or killed; but to avoid facing up to her questions he left her alone in a filthy room with a rickety bed and a broken chair as its only furnishings. “You shouldn’t go out, people know who you are and Pedro will have the Garcías looking for you.” Echoing his excuses, with the laughter of her little girl ringing constantly in her ears, Milagros gave in to her tears. She was sure that the Garcías would mistreat her. The images of her daughter in the hands of those heartless people were too much for her. Sober, she couldn’t bear them … She asked for wine, but the widow refused to give her any. She argued in vain with her. “You can leave if you like,” the woman replied. “Where?” Milagros asked. Where could she go?

He always came back with something: a sweet; white bread; a colorful ribbon. And he would chat with her, cheering her up and treating her with affection, but that wasn’t what she needed. Where was his gypsy pluck? Fray Joaquín was unable to hold her gaze the way the men of her race could. Milagros sensed that he followed her with his eyes the entire time they were together, but when she faced him, he pretended he hadn’t been. He seemed content with her mere presence, with smelling her, brushing past her. Her nights were filled with bad dreams: Pedro and the parade of nobles attacking her. Yet she began to reject the idea that Fray Joaquín could act like them.

In a couple of weeks they were out of money to pay the exorbitant rent charged by the widow to guarantee her silence.

“I never thought we would need it,” said the friar, contrite, as if he had failed her.

“And now?” she asked.

“I will find—”

“You’re lying!”

Fray Joaquín wanted to defend himself, but Milagros didn’t allow him to.

“You lie, you lie and you lie,” she shouted with her fists clenched. “There’s nothing, isn’t that right? No marquis, no letters to the prior, nothing.” The silence confirmed her doubts. “I’m going to Triana,” she decided then.

“That would be crazy.”

Milagros’s decision, the need to leave those squalid rooms before the widow threw them out or, even worse, denounced them as adulterers, the lack of money and, above all, the mere possibility that she would leave him, made Fray Joaquín react.

“This is the last time I’m putting my trust in you. Don’t let me down, Father,” she relented.

And he didn’t. The truth was that he did nothing else for the next few days except think about how to resolve the situation. It was a preposterous idea, but he had no alternative: he had been dreaming about Milagros for years and he had just given up everything he had for her. What could be more preposterous than that? He went to a secondhand clothing shop and exchanged his best habit (of the two he owned) for coarse black women’s clothes, including gloves and a mantilla.

“You want me to put that on?” Milagros tried to refuse.

“You can’t walk along the roads as a gypsy without papers. I’m just trying to keep us from getting arrested on our trip … to Barrancos.” The clothes slid from Milagros’s hands and fell to the floor. “Yes,” he said before she could speak. “It’s not that far out of our way. It’s just another road, a few days more. Remember what the old healer woman said? She said something like if there was any place your grandfather could be found, it was Barrancos. The day we spoke, you told me that you didn’t make it there after the roundup, and things haven’t changed much since then. Perhaps …”

“I spat at his feet,” Milagros then said, reminding him of the rage she had shown toward her grandfather. “I told him—”

“What does it matter what you did or said to him? He always loved you and your daughter has Vega blood. If we can find him, Melchor will know what to do, of that I’m sure. And if he isn’t there anymore, maybe we can find some other family member who wasn’t arrested. Most of them deal in tobacco and we can probably find news of someone.”

Milagros was no longer listening. Thinking of her grandfather filled her with both hope and fear. She hadn’t heeded his warnings, or her mother’s. They had both known what would happen if she gave herself to a García. The last thing she had heard about her grandfather was that he had been captured in Madrid and had managed to escape. Maybe … yes, maybe he was still alive. And if anyone could face up to Pedro, it was Melchor Vega. But …

She knelt down to pick the black clothes up off the floor. Fray Joaquín stopped speaking when he saw her. Milagros didn’t want to think about the possibility that her grandfather had disowned her and would refuse to help her out of spite.

“HAIL MARY, full of grace.”

“Conceived without sin,” said Milagros, downcast, to the young maid who opened the door to the house. She knew what she had to do next, the same thing she had done a league back, in Alcorcón: intertwine the fingers of her gloved hands, showing Fray Joaquín’s rosary that she carried between them, and murmur what she could remember of those prayers Caridad had taught her for her baptism, which the friar repeated insistently along the way.

“Alms to send this poor, miserable widow to the Dominican convent in Lepe,” begged Fray Joaquín, lifting his voice over her chanting.

Through the black mantilla that covered her head and hid her dark face, the gypsy looked at the maid out of the corner of her eye. She would respond like all the others: refusing at first only to end up opening her eyes incredibly wide when Fray Joaquín revealed the beautiful face of the Immaculate Virgin he was carrying. Then she would stutter, tell them to wait, close the door and run in search of her mistress.

That was what had happened in Alcorcón and in Madrid as well, before they went through the Segovia Gate. Fray Joaquín decided to alleviate their poverty by joining the army of pilgrims and alms-seekers who carried saints through the streets of Spain. The former dressed in capes adorned with shells, sackcloth, staffs taller than they were, gourds and hats for supposed pilgrimages to Jerusalem or countless other foreign locations. The latter were friars, priests or abbots asking for a mite for all sorts of pious works. The people gave alms to the pilgrims in exchange for kissing their relics or scapulars that they claimed came from the Holy Land. With those who carried saints, they prayed before the images, stroked them, kissed them and drew them close to children, the elderly and especially the sick before dropping a few coins into their almsbox or bag.

And of all the sacred images, there was none like the Immaculate Virgin that Fray Joaquín unveiled to the shock of the maids in the wealthy homes. As Milagros had foreseen, the same thing that had happened in Alcorcón happened again in Móstoles, little more than three leagues from Madrid. Soon after, the lady of the house opened the door, spellbound before the beauty and opulence of the statue of the Virgin, and invited them in. Milagros did so cowering, as Fray Joaquín had instructed her, murmuring prayers and hiding her bare feet beneath the long black skirt that dragged along the floor.

Once inside, the gypsy sought out the furthest corner from the makeshift altar where Fray Joaquín placed the Virgin, while he introduced her as his sister who had just been widowed and had promised to enter the convent. They didn’t even look at her; all eyes were on the Immaculate Virgin. “Can she be touched?” they asked cautiously. “And kissed?” they added excitedly. Fray Joaquín led prayers before allowing them to do so.

And while they made enough money to continue their journey, eat and sleep in the inns or in those same houses if there were none—Milagros always separated from the rest, taking refuge in her supposed vow of silence—their progress was slow, irritatingly slow. For safety they always looked for someone to travel with, and sometimes they had to wait, as when the ladies of the house insisted on demanding the presence of their husbands, children and, on occasion, even the village’s parish priest, with whom Fray Joaquín would converse until he had convinced him of their good intentions. The shows of devotion and the prayers dragged on endlessly. When they needed money they spent entire days showing the Virgin, like in Almaraz, before crossing the River Tagus, where they were well paid for allowing the statue to protect a sick man in his room.

“And what if he doesn’t get better?” Milagros asked Fray Joaquín when he brought her food to eat in the room they had given her so she could remain in her self-imposed silence.

“Let Our Lady be the one to decide. She will know.”

Then he smiled and Milagros, surprised, thought she could make out a hint of mischievousness in Fray Joaquín’s face. The friar had changed … or was it she? Perhaps both, she told herself.

Milagros found the nights particularly hard; she was abruptly awoken by nightmares, sweaty, confused, short of breath: men forcing themselves on her; the entire Coliseo del Príncipe laughing at her; Old María … Why was she dreaming of the old healer so many years since last seeing her? While her nights were torturous, during the day the mere possibility of seeing her grandfather again gave her the courage to tolerate those coarse black clothes that chafed her skin. The tedium of the prayers and the hours spent alone in homes and inns, so their hosts wouldn’t discover their lies, became time to fantasize about Melchor, her mother and Cachita. She often had to make an effort not to launch into singing those prayers that Caridad had taught her to the rhythm of fandangos. How long had it been since she had sung? “As long as it’s been since you last drank,” Fray Joaquín had answered her, ending the conversation when she brought it up. The sun and her yearnings managed to keep the bitter, torturous dreams at bay, as if enclosed in a bubble, and the hope of being reunited with her family opened out before her. That was the only thing that really mattered: her daughter, her grandfather. The Vegas. In the past she hadn’t understood that, although she consoled herself by using her youth as an excuse. Sometimes she also remembered her father. What had the Camacho told her when he came back from talking with her mother in the makeshift jail in Málaga? He knew what the deal was: his freedom for your engagement to the García boy. He should have refused and sacrificed himself. Your grandfather did what he had to do.

When she recalled those words, Milagros struggled to banish the memories and think about her grandfather again. Only with his help could she get her little girl back and, with her, her joy in life. Each town they passed brought her a little closer to that goal.

Sometimes, after hearing him lie to the naive, pious people who wanted to get close to the Virgin, Milagros also thought about Fray Joaquín, and when she did she was filled with conflicting emotions. The first days in Madrid, when they started using the Virgin to make money to pay off their onerous debt to the widow, she was exasperated with his stammering. She silently asked him for firmness and conviction, but she got even more nervous when she could see, through the lace of the mantilla, how he was constantly looking at her out of the corner of his eye to make sure she was playing her part. Worry about yourself, friar. How could anyone recognize me in these clothes that cover me from head to toe? As Fray Joaquín grew more confident in his role, his attitude toward Milagros changed, as if he took strength from his self-assurance. He didn’t seem as fraught over her presence and he sometimes even held her gaze. Then she would feel, even if only for a few moments, like a girl, as she had been back in Triana.

“Aren’t you attracted to me when I’m dressed in black?” she asked him brazenly one day.

“What …?” Fray Joaquín went red up to his ears. “What do you mean?”

“Just wondering if you don’t like me in these … these rags you force me to wear.”

“It must be the Immaculate Virgin, who strives to avoid temptation,” he joked, pointing to the sculpture.

She was about to reply but didn’t, and he thought he understood why: inside her was still that mistreated woman, humiliated by men.

“I didn’t mean—” Milagros started to apologize before he interrupted her.

“You are right: I don’t like you in those widow’s clothes. But I do like,” he added quickly, seeing her sad expression, “that you are joking and worrying about your appearance again.”

Milagros’s face changed again. A shadow of sadness marred her gaze. “Fray Joaquín, we women were brought into this world to give birth in pain, to work and suffer men’s perversion. Hush,” she said, seeing that he was about to reply. “They … you men rebel, struggle and fight against evil. Sometimes you win and become the triumphant hero; many other times you lose and then you turn brutally on those weaker than you to cover up your failure, and then vengeance becomes your only goal. We have to shut up and obey; it has always been that way. I finally learned that and it cost me my youth. I don’t even see how I can fight for my daughter without the help of a man. Yes, thank you,” she added before he could intervene, “but it’s true. All we can do is fight to forget our pain and suffering, to overcome them, but never to take revenge for them. We cling to whatever hope we have left, and in the meantime, once in a while, only once in a while, try to feel like women again.”

“I don’t know what …”

“Don’t say anything.”

Fray Joaquín shrugged as he shook his head, his hands extended out in front of him.

“Someone who tells a woman that he doesn’t like her”—Milagros raised her voice—“no matter how black her clothes, how old or ugly she may be, has no right to say anything.”

And she turned her back on him, trying to swing her hip enough for him to see it through her shapeless clothes.

The proximity, the common goal, the constant anxiety over the danger that someone would discover that the respectable and pious widow beneath that disguise was nothing more than a young gypsy—the Barefoot Girl from the Coliseo del Príncipe in Madrid, in fact—and that the friar was lying when he asked for alms for her to enter a convent, brought them a bit closer each day. Milagros did nothing to avoid brushing up against him; she felt the need for that respectful, innocent human contact. They laughed; they opened up to each other—she as never before, observing the man who hid beneath his habit: young and handsome, although he didn’t seem strong. Except for that round bald spot on the top of his head, he could be considered attractive. Although maybe his hair would grow back … He was definitely no gypsy, he lacked decisiveness and haughtiness, but he showed plenty of devotion, sweetness and affection.

“I don’t think we’ll get any alms here,” Fray Joaquín lamented in a low voice one evening, when they reached a miserable group of shacks that they had been led to by a couple of farmers returning from work, the only companions they found on the road.

“Perhaps not with the Virgin, but surely we’ll find someone who would pay to have their fortune told,” she bet.

“Nonsense,” replied the friar, dismissing the idea with a wave of his hands.

Milagros grabbed one of them in midair, instinctively, just as she had done so many times in Triana with men or women who were reluctant to spend a few coins.

“Would his eminent reverence,” she joked, “wish to know what the lines on his palm have in store for him? I see …”

Fray Joaquín tried to pull his hand back, but she didn’t let him and eventually he gave in. Milagros found herself with the friar’s hand in hers, her gloved index finger already running along one of the lines on his palm. As she slid her finger, she felt a disturbing tingling in her belly.

“Wow …” She cleared her throat and shifted restlessly.

She tried to blame her nervousness on the uncomfortable clothes she was wearing. She took off her glove and swiped the mantilla away from her face. She took his hand in hers again and felt its warmth. She observed the white, almost delicate, skin of a man who had never worked in a forge.

“I see …”

For the first time in her life, Milagros lacked the effrontery to stare into the eyes of the man whose fortune she was reading.

THEY WERE getting close to the Múrtiga River, with Encinasola at their backs and Barrancos rising over their heads. Milagros ripped off the mantilla and threw it; then she did the same with the gloves and lifted her face to the radiant late May sky as if trying to capture all the light she’d been denied over the almost month and a half on the road.

Fray Joaquín contemplated her, spellbound. Now she forced the hooks and eyes of her black bodice open so that the sun’s rays could caress the top of her bust. The long pilgrimage, which in other circumstances would have been grueling, had had the opposite effect on Milagros: her weariness made her forget; the constant worry of being discovered eliminated any other concerns; and imagining the encounter to come softened her previously contracted and permanently tense features. She knew she was being watched. She let out a spontaneous shout that broke the silence, shook her head and turned toward the friar. What will happen if we don’t find Melchor? Fray Joaquín then asked himself, fearful at the wide smile Milagros was rewarding him with. She struggled to undo her bun and release her hair, which refused to fall free. The mere thought of not finding Melchor made Fray Joaquín put down the statue of the Virgin so he could pick up the mantilla and gloves.

“What are you doing now?” complained Milagros.

“We might need them,” he responded with the mantilla in his hand; the gloves were still lost among the brush.

He had trouble finding the second one. When he stood up with it, Milagros had disappeared. Where …? He ran his gaze over the area in vain; he couldn’t find her. He went around a little hill that allowed him to see down into the Múrtiga riverbed. He exhaled. There she was, sleeves rolled up and on her knees, putting her head into the water again and again, scrubbing her hair frantically. He saw her get up, soaked, with her plentiful chestnut-brown hair falling down her back, sparkling in the sun in contrast to her dark skin. Fray Joaquín shivered as he contemplated her beauty.

The people of Barrancos received them with curiosity and suspicion: a friar carrying a parcel and a lovely, haughty gypsy woman who was looking around curiously at everything around her. Fray Joaquín hesitated. Not Milagros: she confronted the first man she came across.

“We are looking for the person who sells tobacco to smuggle into Spain,” she said; the man was elderly and overwhelmed by her. He stammered out some words in the local language, unable to take his eyes off the face interrogating him as if he were guilty of some crime.

Fray Joaquín sensed Milagros’s tremendous anxiety and decided to intervene. “May peace be with you,” he greeted the older man calmly. “Do you understand us?”

“I do,” he heard someone else behind the man say.

“IT’S VERY dangerous,” repeated Fray Joaquín a dozen times as he approached the group of buildings that had been pointed out to them as making up Méndez’s establishment. The place was a nest of smugglers. Milagros walked decisively, with her head held high.

“At least cover your face up again,” he begged her, quickening his step to offer her the mantilla.

She didn’t even answer. Countless possibilities, all of them terrifying, were going through the friar’s head. Melchor might not be there; he could even be this Méndez’s enemy. He feared for himself, but above all for Milagros. Few people failed to notice her presence; they stopped, they looked at her, there were even some who complimented her in that strange language they spoke in Barrancos.

What have I got Milagros into? he lamented just as they went through the gates of Méndez’s establishment. Several backpackers were lazing around the large dirt courtyard that opened out in front of the smuggler’s headquarters; one of them whistled when he saw Milagros. A couple of shady-looking women, peeking out of one of the windows of the bedroom that extended over the stables, screwed up their faces at the friar’s arrival and a band of half-naked little kids who ran among the sleepy mules tied to posts stopped to go over to them.

“Who are you?” asked one of the children.

“Have you got any sweets?” inquired another.

They had already reached the main house. None of the men who were watching them made any motion toward them. Milagros was about to swat away the pestering kids when Fray Joaquín intervened again.

“No,” he said before she could deal out the brusque gesture, “we don’t have sweets, but I do have this,” he added, showing them a two-real coin.

The children milled around the friar with their eyes bright at the sight of the copper coin.

“I will give it to you if you let Mr. Méndez know that he has visitors.”

“And who is asking for him?”

The children were silent; some of the backpackers stood up and the prostitutes in the window stuck their heads out even further.

“The granddaughter of Melchor Vega, El Galeote,” Milagros answered then.

Méndez, the smuggler, appeared in the door of the main house. He looked the gypsy woman up and down, cocked his head, scrutinized her again, let a few seconds pass and then smiled. With a snort, Fray Joaquín let out all the air he had been holding in his lungs.

“Milagros, right?” the smuggler asked then. “Your grandfather has told me a lot about you. Welcome.”

One of the children demanded Fray Joaquín’s attention, pulling on the sleeve of his habit.

“For that coin I’ll take you to El Galeote,” he offered.

Milagros jumped and leapt on the little boy.

“He’s here?” she shrieked. “Where? You know where …?” Suddenly she was wary. What if the kid was tricking them just to get the coin? She turned to the smuggler and questioned him with eyes that could penetrate the entire building.

“He arrived a couple of weeks ago,” confirmed Méndez.

With the smuggler still in front of her, Milagros stammered something that could have been a thank-you or a farewell, grabbed the end of her long black skirt, revealing her ankles and, with it hiked up on one side, prepared to follow the little kids, who were already waiting for them amid laughter and shouts beside the entrance gates to the smuggler’s establishment.

“Let’s go!” one of them urged.

“Let’s go, Fray Joaquín,” Milagros hurried him, already a few steps ahead.

Unlike Milagros, the priest said goodbye in a clear voice. “I can’t go carrying the Virgin,” he then complained.

But Milagros didn’t hear him. A girl had grabbed her by the hand and was pulling her toward the road.

Fray Joaquín followed them unhurriedly, exaggerating the weight of the statue he had carried with no problem over half of Spain. Melchor was in Barrancos, thanks be to God. He had never really believed they would find him. I would kill for her. You are a payo … and a friar as well. You could renounce your vows, but not your race. The warning the gypsy had given him one day on the banks of the Guadalquivir, at the possibility of a relationship with his granddaughter, had gripped his stomach as soon as Méndez had confirmed his presence in Barrancos. El Galeote would do anything for her! Hadn’t he already killed Milagros’s father for allowing her to marry a García?

“What are you doing?”

Two of the kids were fighting to help him with the weight of the statue of the Virgin.

“Give it to them!” ordered Milagros, ahead of him. “Or we’ll never get there!”

He didn’t hand it over to them; he wasn’t sure he wanted to meet Melchor Vega face to face.

“Get out of here!” he shouted to the pair of runny-nosed kids who, despite everything, continued to try to help him to carry the parcel. They were more of a nuisance than anything else.

Milagros waited for him, holding up the hem of her skirt, impatient. The girl accompanying her stayed by her side, hands on her hips, imitating the gypsy woman’s stance.

“What’s going on with you?” Milagros asked him, puzzled.

I’m going to lose you, that’s what’s going on. Don’t you realize? he wanted to say.

“What are a few minutes after we’ve come so far?” he answered instead, more gruffly than he would have liked.

She misinterpreted his tone and her expression soured. She looked at the kids, who continued running happily ahead, silhouetted against the sun. She was overcome by doubts.

“Do you think …?” She let her arms drop to her sides. Her skirt fell. “You told me that my grandfather would forgive me.”

“And he will,” Fray Joaquín assured her, to keep himself from suggesting they run away together again, that they take to the roads with the statue of the Virgin.

But the friar’s despondency came through in his voice. Milagros sensed it and adapted her pace to match his.

“She is a García too,” she murmured.

“What?”

“My little girl. My girl, María. She is a García too. My grandfather’s hatred of them is greater than … everything! Even the affection he once had for me,” she added in a thin voice.

Fray Joaquín sighed, aware of the contradictions that lashed his soul. When he saw her happy, excited, he despaired, terrified at the idea of losing her, but when he saw her suffering, then … then he wanted to help her, encourage her to go to her grandfather.

“A lot of time has passed,” he said without conviction.

“What if he doesn’t forgive me for marrying Pedro García? Grandfather …”

“He will forgive you.”

“My mother disowned me for it. My mother!”

They reached the foot of a hill, outside the town. The oldest of the children was waiting for them there; the others were already running uphill.

A single solitary house atop the hill overlooked the lands; several of the kids pointed in that direction.

“He’s up there?” asked Fray Joaquín, taking advantage of the pause to place the statue on the ground.

“Yes.”

“What’s Melchor doing up there, alone?” he wondered, surprised.

“He’s not alone,” said the boy. “He lives with the Negress.”

Milagros wanted to say something but the words didn’t come out. She trembled and sought out the friar for support.

“Caridad,” he whispered.

“Yes,” confirmed the boy. “Caridad. They are always there, see them?”

Fray Joaquín sharpened his gaze until he could make out two figures sitting in front of the house, on the edge of a cliff.

Milagros, her eyes damp and her senses clouded, couldn’t see a thing.

“Since they arrived,” the boy continued explaining, “they’ve gone out a few nights to smuggle. Both times they came back with sweets! Caridad loves sweets … and she shared them with us. And Gregoria, the girl …” The boy scanned the path. “… that one, you see her? The first one, the little one who runs the fastest, well, they brought Gregoria some sandals because she couldn’t walk, she had huge gashes on the soles of her feet. Look how she’s running now!” Fray Joaquín watched little Gregoria leap. “But the rest of the time they spend sitting up there, hugging each other, smoking and looking out on the fields. We sneak up a lot, but they always catch us. Gregoria can’t keep still!”

“Hugging?”

The question came from Milagros, who tried to dry her eyes to focus them on the top of the hill.

“Yes. All the time! They pull each other close and then El Galeote says to Caridad, ‘Sing, morena!’ ”

Sing, morena! Milagros was starting to be able to make out the peak. Cachita! That friend whom she’d hit and insulted, whom she’d said she never wanted to see again for as long as she lived.

“Gregoria is already at the top!” exclaimed the boy. “Let’s go!”

Both Fray Joaquín and Milagros straightened up. The two seated figures stood when the little girl reached them. Gregoria was pointing at the foot of the hill. Milagros felt Melchor’s gaze on her as if, despite the distance, he was right beside her.

“Let’s go!” insisted the boy.

Fray Joaquín knelt to pick up the statue of the Virgin.

“I can’t,” Milagros groaned.

CARIDAD GRABBED Melchor’s hand and squeezed it. The touch of his coarse, rough palm, hardened by ten years rowing on the galley ship, calmed her. They were the same palms that had run over her body countless times since Melchor had showed up in Torrejón; the same ones that she had bathed in tears as she kissed them; the ones that he had brought to her cheeks waiting for a reply when just a few days later Don Valerio forbade her to live in mortal sin with a gypsy. “This setup with the ragmen isn’t going to work,” Melchor warned her. “They will catch us; they’ll end up arresting us. Let’s go far from here. To Barrancos.” Caridad’s smile sealed the pact between the former slave and the gypsy with a gleam in his eye and a face grooved with lines. Barrancos, where they’d first fallen in love, where she’d felt like a woman for the first time, where the law couldn’t reach them. They paid plenty, traveling quickly in a covered wagon to Extremadura, eager to leave it all behind.

Melchor, stock-still, expectant, with his gaze and his other senses trained on the foot of the hill, responded by squeezing her hand in return. On that occasion, the gypsy’s touch didn’t calm her: Caridad knew she was part of his whirlwind of worries, because she felt them too. Milagros! After so many years … Without letting go of his hand, she shifted her gaze from that figure dressed in black to the universe that opened up at her feet: fields, rivers, valleys, untilled lands and forests; each and every one of them had absorbed her songs as they sat, looking out on the horizon, in that new life that fortune had afforded them. She would oblige Melchor and lift her voice, a voice that she often left hanging in the air to follow its reverberation along the paths they had traveled together, loaded down with tobacco and a love that quickened their steps, their movements, their smiles. They had gone out again by night with their backpacks filled with tobacco. They didn’t need the money; they had more than enough. They only wanted to travel those paths again, cross the river again, run and hide at the crunch of a twig, sleep out in the open … make love under the stars. They lived for each other, with nothing better to do than look at each other while they smoked. Nights of caresses, smiles, conversations and long silences. They consoled each other over bad memories; they promised each other, with a simple touch, that nothing and no one would ever separate them again.

“Why doesn’t she come up?” she heard the gypsy ask.

Caridad felt a shiver: the breeze from the fields hitting her face warned her that Milagros’s arrival would affect her happiness. She didn’t want her to come up, she wished she would turn around and retrace her steps … She looked again at the foot of the hill just as the gypsy woman began her ascent. Melchor squeezed her hand harder and held it while they approached.

“Fray Joaquín?” he said in a surprised tone. “Is that Fray Joaquín?”

Caridad didn’t answer, although she too recognized the friar priest. Even the children grew silent and moved to the side, serious, solemn, at Milagros’s arrival. The stifled sobs of the gypsy woman masked any other sound. Caridad noticed a tremble in Melchor’s hand, in his entire body. Milagros stopped a few paces away, with Fray Joaquín behind her, and she looked up toward her grandfather; then she shifted her gaze to Caridad and then back to Melchor. The situation dragged on. Caridad stopped feeling El Galeote trembling. She was the one who trembled now at Milagros’s tears, at the storm of memories that came rushing to her mind. She heard again those first words from the gypsy girl as she lay in the small courtyard on the San Miguel alley after Melchor found her feverish beneath an orange tree; the pontoon bridge and the church of the Negritos; the gypsy settlement on the grounds of the Carthusian monastery; the cigars and her red outfit; Old María; the roundup; the flight through the Andévalo … She spurned her fears and let go of Melchor’s hand. She stepped forward, a small, indecisive step. Milagros’s eyes begged her to take another, and Caridad ran into her arms.

“Go to him,” she said after the first embrace.

Milagros shifted her gaze toward Melchor, stern and proud up on his hill.

“He loves you,” added Caridad, sensing the young woman’s hesitation, “but, for as much as he hides or denies it, I know that he fears you haven’t forgiven him for … for your father. Forget what happened,” she insisted, pushing her gently from behind.

Milagros left Caridad and Fray Joaquín and walked uphill. Her own tears prevented her from noticing Melchor’s damp eyes. How many times had she tried to convince herself that what had happened to her father had been in a fit of rage? She wanted to forgive him, but she couldn’t be sure if he had forgotten what he considered a worse betrayal of her Vega blood: her marriage to Pedro, another link in the chain of hatred that set the two families against each other. How was Melchor going to forget the Garcías? Just a few years ago the Garcías had tried to kill him …

“Damn the Virgin of Bonaire!”

The gypsy stopped at her grandfather’s curse. She looked at Melchor in horror and then behind her and to both sides. What was he trying …?

“What are you doing dressed in sinister black?”

She looked at her mourning clothes as if it were the first time she had seen them. When she looked up she saw Melchor was smiling.