The Barefoot Queen Read Online Free PDF

read a few more palms, but as the crowd thinned it was clear how many gypsies—some drawn and ancient crones, others young women, many boys and girls half-dressed in rags—were doing the same thing. Ana and Milagros recognized the women from the San Miguel alley, relatives of the blacksmiths, but also many of those who lived in the squalid shanties beside the Carthusians’ gardens in Triana’s fertile lowland and who stubbornly harassed people for alms, blocking their path and grabbing at their clothes while crying out loudly to a God they didn’t believe in and invoking a string of martyrs and saints whose names they had memorized.
    “I think that’s enough for today, Milagros,” announced her mother after moving out of the way of a couple fleeing a group of beggars.
    A snotty kid with a dirty face and black eyes who was following the Sevillians crashed into her while still invoking the virtues of Saint Rufina.
    “Here,” Ana said to him as she gave him a copper
cuarto.
    They set off on their return trip as the mother of the little gypsy boy demanded he hand over the coin. The alley was feverish. It had been a good day for everyone; religious holidays softened people up. Groups of men chatted at the doors to their homes drinking wine, smoking and playing cards. A woman approached her husband to show him her earnings and an argument started when he tried to take them from her. Milagros said goodbye to her mother and joined a group of girls. Ana had to settle up the tobacco earnings with her father. She searched for him amid the men. She didn’t find him.
    “Father?” she shouted once inside the courtyard of the house where they lived.
    “He’s not here.”
    Ana turned and saw José, her husband, in the doorframe.
    “Where is he?”
    José shrugged and opened one of his hands; in the other he carried ajug of wine. His eyes sparkled. “He disappeared just after you two did. He must have gone over to the settlement of La Cartuja to see his relatives, like always.”
    Ana shook her head. Was he really with them? Sometimes she had gone there to look for him and not found him. Would he return that night or not for a few days, as he’d done so many other times? And in what state?
    She sighed.
    “He always comes back,” muttered José sarcastically.
    His wife straightened up, hardened her expression and frowned. “Don’t start in on him,” she muttered threateningly. “I keep warning you.”
    The man just made a face and turned his back on her.
    He usually came back, it was true; José was right; but what was he doing when he disappeared thus on the occasions when he wasn’t at the La Cartuja settlement? He never said, and when she insisted, he took refuge in that impenetrable world of his. He was so different now from the father she had known as a child! Ana remembered him proud, fiery, indestructible, a figure she could always depend on. Later, when she was about ten years old, he was stopped by the “tobacco patrol,” the authorities that policed contraband. He was only carrying a few pounds of tobacco leaf and it was the first time he was caught; it should have been treated as a minor offense, but Melchor Vega was a gypsy and they had arrested him outside of the areas designated for those of his race; he dressed like a gypsy, in clothes as expensive as they were flashy, all laden with silver or metal beads; he carried a cane, his knife, wore earrings and, to top it all off, some witnesses swore they had heard him speaking Caló, the gypsy dialect. All of that was illegal, even more than cheating the royal tax office. Ten years in the galleys. That was the sentence they gave the gypsy.
    Ana felt her stomach shrink inside as she recalled the agony she went through with her mother during the trial and, above all, during the almost four years between when the first sentence was handed down until they actually carried her father off to the Port of Santa María to board him onto one of the royal galley ships.