The Barefoot Queen (80 page)

The constable managed to shake his head. Pedro didn’t see him, he was too busy ripping off Milagros’s shirt.

“Fuck her!” he shouted when he got it off, pulling Milagros’s hair back to show off her turgid breasts, which were surprisingly magnificent.

Blas was disgusted. “No,” he objected. “Stop this. Kill her if you want to, but don’t keep up this … this …”

He couldn’t find the word and he just pointed to her breasts. Pedro looked daggers at him.

“I’m not going to take part in such vileness,” Blas added in response to the gypsy’s challenge. “Finish it, or you’re on your own.”

“I pay you well,” Pedro retorted.

Not enough,
Blas thought to himself. And if the gypsy really was going back to Triana, there would be no more money. He looked at Milagros, trying to see some pleading in her eyes. He couldn’t even find that. She seemed resigned to her fate.

“Up yours, gypsy!”

Blas turned and went down the stairs, expecting to hear Milagros’s death throes and feeling sorry for her. But he didn’t hear anything.

With his free hand, Pedro García pulled his knife from his belt and opened it. “Whore,” muttered the gypsy as soon as the constable’s footsteps disappeared in the distance.

He slid the blade from Milagros’s neck to her bare breasts.

“I have to kill you,” he continued, “just like I killed the healer. The old lady fought more than you will, surely. Braggarts … The Vegas are nothing more than conceited braggarts. I’m going to kill you. What would happen if you showed up in Triana? Honoria would be furious with me, you know?”

Milagros seemed to react to the touch of the knife tip on her nipples. The gypsy smiled cynically.

“You like that?” He played with the tip of the knife, feeling his own excitement grow as her nipple hardened.

He cut her skirt and continued slipping his knife along her belly and pubis until she sighed and a fetid cloud of liquor smell reached his face.

“You’re putrid. You smell worse than an animal. I hope you meet up with all the Vegas in hell.” He raised his knife to her neck, now ready to slit her jugular.

“Halt!” suddenly echoed through the room.

“She’s drunk!”

“She can’t stand up.”

“What a disgrace!”

The comments of the ladies who accompanied him in one of the side boxes at the Coliseo del Príncipe joined the booing and shouting from the groundlings and the women’s balcony. The orchestra had attempted the
tonadilla
several times without Milagros managing to sing along to the music. The first two times she gestured furiously at the side curtain behind which were the musicians, blaming them in clumsy gestures; the other times, as the words stuck on her thick tongue and her arms and legs refused to follow her orders, Milagros’s rage transformed into dismay.

Fray Joaquín, his stomach churning and his throat clenched, tried to hide his trembling hands from the ladies and their escorts as he looked at Milagros. There was no longer any music on the stage that the day before had seemed barely large enough to contain her dancing, smiles and brazen remarks, but which now seemed vast with her kneeling in the middle, defeated and downcast. Someone threw a rotten vegetable at her right arm. The groundlings came prepared. Rumors had gone around Madrid in the last few days about the state of the Barefoot Girl: her recent performances had showed signs of her deterioration. Some said she was sick; many others recognized the effects of alcohol on her cracked voice and disjointed
movements. Milagros didn’t even react to the rotten vegetable, or when a tomato burst onto her shirt and set off laughter throughout the theater. Above the stalls, leaning on the box’s railing, Fray Joaquín shifted his gaze to find who had thrown the tomato.

“Stupid!” he muttered.

“Did you say something, Reverend?”

The friar ignored the question from the lady sitting beside him. From the stalls they were now throwing all sorts of rotten fruits and vegetables, and the people were tearing off the green ribbons that had adorned their hats and dresses in a sign of admiration for the Barefoot Girl. The magistrate assigned to the theater sent two constables to take Milagros offstage. She seemed resigned to the punishment. “Why doesn’t she leave?” the priest asked himself.

“Go, girl!” exploded Fray Joaquín.

“Girl?” asked the lady, surprised.

“Ma’am,” he answered without thinking, his attention focused onstage, “we are all children. Wasn’t it Jesus Christ who declared that he who was not like a little child would not enter the kingdom of heaven?”

The woman was about to question the priest’s words but instead she opened up a lovely mother-of-pearl fan and waved it in front of her face. Meanwhile, the two constables dragged Milagros offstage by her elbows amid a rain of fruit and vegetables. As soon as the gypsy disappeared behind the curtain and the shouts from the stalls and the balcony transformed into a murmur of indignant conversations, Celeste appeared on the stage while three men continued cleaning up. Victory gleamed in her eyes.

“The Marquis of Rafal,” commented one of the noblemen who was standing at the back of the box, referring to the Chief Magistrate of Madrid, “should never have replaced the great Celeste.”

“And certainly not with a gypsy who sells her body for two reals!” exclaimed the other.

Fray Joaquín gave a start when Celeste began to sing and the two noblemen joined in with the audience’s warm applause.

“Didn’t you know, Reverend?” The lady with the fan spoke with her face hidden behind it, leaning slightly back in her chair, “If your reverence would honor us more often with your presence at our gatherings …”

I would have heard,
he finished to himself, in silence, the sentence she left hanging in the air.

“Personally,” said the woman, “I can’t imagine what Our Lord Jesus Christ would say about that girl.” She stretched out the last two words in disdain. Then, bringing her chair closer to the clergyman’s and using the fan as cover for her brazenness, she began to list the Barefoot Girl’s affairs, multiplied in the whispers of such gatherings.

Amid vivacious Celeste’s singing and the applause and shouts of the fickle audience, again devoted to the leading lady, Fray Joaquín interrupted the woman, who turned toward him and unconsciously began to fan her face. She knew that he was sensitive—all his acquaintances praised him for that quality—although she had never suspected that the news of a simple gypsy girl’s dalliances could turn him almost as pale as a corpse.

Fray Joaquín was thinking of Milagros: beautiful, cheerful, charming, clever, joyful … clean … virginal! The memories came flooding back to stab his stomach and paralyze the flow of his blood. She filled his nocturnal fantasies and made him feel that guilt he had so often tried to atone for with prayer and punishments: her rejection, after he suggested she run off with him, had driven him to the roads, doubting that there was a sacrifice capable of purifying him in God’s eyes. Since then, that dark face had followed him wherever he went, overwhelmingly beautiful: encouraging him, smiling at him in moments of adversity. But now, what had happened to that strength of spirit? She was a drunk. He had seen that. And a prostitute, from what he had heard …

BEFORE THE
evening when Milagros collapsed onstage at the Coliseo del Príncipe, her image came to Fray Joaquín’s mind every night as he walked with all his senses alert along the dangerous streets of Madrid toward his house. When that happened, the memories of Milagros took hold of him. Fray Joaquín lived in an apartment on a tiny block with only three buildings, all narrow and so long that they stretched from the façade overlooking the silversmiths on Mayor Street to the San Miguel Plaza at the back. Francisca, the old servant who took care of him, got up sleepily to help him despite knowing how he would respond: “May God reward you, Francisca, but you can go back to bed.” Still, the woman
insisted every single night, eternally grateful for having a roof over her head, food and even the meager salary that the friar gave her for the efforts she put into her limited tasks. Francisca had never been a servant before. Widowed, with three ingrate children who had abandoned her in her old age, she had devoted her life to washing clothes in the Manzanares River. “I washed so much,” she had bragged to Fray Joaquín, “that I needed a porter to help me deliver them to their owners.” But as happened to all those women who, day after day, year after year, went into the river with their washboards to clean other people’s dirt—whether it was wintry cold and the water frozen, or in the heat of the summer—her body had paid a high price. She had swollen, stiff hands, atrophied muscles, and permanently aching bones. And Fray Joaquín would run to pick up the saucepan that had slid from her awkward hands to avoid the torment it gave her to kneel down. The priest had rescued her from the streets when the coin he gave her as alms slipped through the washerwoman’s atrophied fingers, clinked on a stone and rolled far away. They had looked at each other: the old woman, unable to chase the coin; Fray Joaquín glimpsing death in her dull eyes.

After ordering her back to bed, the friar compared the slow movements that would take Francisca to her straw mattress, at the feet of the marvelous statue of the Immaculate Conception, with the vitality and happiness of the movements that Milagros had offered her public. He was watching from one of the boxes, like the noble and rich women did almost every day with their suitors and escorts. Marvelous! Prodigious! Enchanting! Such was the praise that echoed in his ears when he first set foot in the Coliseo del Príncipe, soon after he’d arrived in Madrid from Toledo. The Barefoot Girl. And that first day he jumped in his seat.

“Is something wrong, Father?” they asked him.

Something? It was Milagros! Fray Joaquín was almost on his feet. He stammered out something unintelligible.

“Are you feeling poorly?”

Why am I standing up?
he asked himself. He apologized to his pupil, took his seat again and listened to Milagros sing, rapt, as he discreetly fought to stop the tears that filled his eyes.

SINCE HIS
arrival in Madrid, the Coliseo del Príncipe and Milagros’s performances had become a site of pilgrimage for Fray Joaquín. If some evening, Dorotea—the young woman from Toledo whom, at her father’s insistence, the priest had accompanied to the capital after she married the widower Marquis of Caja—decided not to attend, Fray Joaquín excused himself and paid, out of his own pocket, for a ticket in the pit or the upper gallery with the other religious men. The first time he felt lost at the eight doors that led to the different self-contained areas—the pit, the upper gallery, the boxes, the door just for women that led to their balcony—but soon he had won the regard of the ticket sellers and the honeyed-wine vendors beneath the women’s balcony. The friar sat through the whole show and many times, while watching a bad play with even worse acting, he struggled not to join in the surge of people mocking the comedy’s final act and leaving the theater after the Barefoot Girl’s performance. He didn’t want to be known as yet one more of those who just went for the
sainetes
or intermissions. When it ended, he praised the author and the players even though he only had the gypsy girl’s voice in mind, her measured dances that—without striving to—aroused the desire and fantasies of the public with their voluptuousness. He trembled at the memory of her insolent remarks toward the audience, to the groundlings among whom he hid. And he shrank back when Milagros ran her gaze over them, afraid she would recognize him.

“What do you say about the unjust Chief Magistrate?” she asked, interrupting her song in which a poor peasant was jailed by the King’s magistrate.

The booing and whistles, with arms raised, allowed the priest to stand up straight again in the confusion.

“Louder, louder! I can’t hear you!” shouted Milagros, encouraging them with her hands before launching herself into the next song, competing with the crowd’s shouts.

And she won. Her voice lifted above the fray and Fray Joaquín felt himself grow faint as his throat clenched. One evening, perhaps after too much wine at the meal with the Marquis and his wife, the friar got a bit closer to the stage and didn’t move when Milagros looked out over the theater’s seats. His knees shook and he didn’t have time to turn his head when she ran her gaze over the groundlings who cheered her on,
right where he was standing. Maybe he wanted her to discover him. But she didn’t see him and Fray Joaquín surprised himself by relaxing as he released the air he’d been holding in his lungs. He didn’t know why he’d done it, but that day he felt her near, as if he could even smell her.