“Mistakes like that are common,” she chose to answer. “I don’t know if you know but something similar recently happened to me, with a young gypsy girl who had got herself into a bind. The council of elders was about to banish her.”
María didn’t want to see the expression the girl’s face twisted into. “There it is,” she said instead, pointing to a couple of small buildings that could barely be seen in the darkness.
They were greeted by some barking dogs. Instantly, a faint light appeared in one of the windows. A piece of canvas that was the only thing separating it from the night was pushed to one side. The figure of a man was silhouetted inside of what was nothing more than two shacks together, as miserable if not more so than the ones in the gypsy settlement.
“Who’s there?” shouted the man.
“It’s me, María, the gypsy.”
The two women continued advancing, the now calm dogs trotting between their feet, while the farmer seemed to be consulting with someone inside the shack.
“What do you want?” he asked after a little while, in a tone that didn’t please María.
“From your attitude,” answered the healer, “I think you already know.”
“The law has threatened to jail anyone who helps you. They have arrested all the gypsies in Spain at once.”
Milagros and María stopped a few steps from the window. All the gypsies in Spain! As if wanting to accompany the bad news with his presence, the man came out into the light. He was gaunt with thin hair, a long messy beard and bare torso that clearly showed his ribcage, proof of his hunger.
“Maybe you’d be better off in jail, Gabriel,” spat out the healer.
“What would become of my children, crone?” he complained.
Let their fathers take care of them! she was tempted to reply.
“You know them, you’ve cured them; they don’t deserve that.”
She knew them, of course she knew them! One squalid little abandoned girl, her large eyes sunken in their sockets, had begged her for help over the two long days it took for her to die in her arms; she could do nothing for her. “All the thankless sons of bitches like you should be in jail!” she answered, remembering the girl’s eyes.
The man thought for a few seconds. Behind him appeared two boys who had been awoken by the conversation.
“I won’t turn you in,” assured the peasant farmer. “I swear! I will give you something to help you continue on your way, but don’t ruin my life, crone.”
“Now he’s going to offer you those two eggs again,” whispered Milagros. “Let’s go, María. We can’t trust this man, he’ll sell us out.”
“Your life is already in ruins, you wretch,” shouted the old woman, ignoring the girl.
They couldn’t continue walking. It was pitch black. They had no money: the little they’d had was left behind in the settlement—for the soldiers, lamented the healer, including the lovely medallion and pearl necklace that Melchor had given them. All the gypsies in Spain, the farmer had said. She was tired; her body could take no more … She needed to think, to organize her thoughts, find out what had happened and where those who had escaped were.
“Are you going to refuse help to the granddaughter of Melchor Vega?” she said all of a sudden.
Milagros and the farmer were both surprised. Why had María mentioned Grandfather? What did he have to do with it? But the healer knew what she was doing: she knew that those who knew Melchor—and in that house he was well known—grew to appreciate him as much as they feared him.
“Do you know what would happen to you if Melchor finds out?” insisted María. “You’ll wish for the worst of jails.”
The man hesitated.
“Let them in!” It was a woman’s voice.
“The gypsy must have been arrested,” he tried to oppose his wife.
“El Galeote arrested?” The woman laughed. “You’ll always be an idiot! I said let them in!”
And what if they arrested him in some other gypsy settlement? wondered Milagros then. It had been four months since anyone had heard from him; no news had reached them although both she and her mother, and even Caridad, had asked every gypsy who showed up in Triana. No. Melchor Vega couldn’t have been arrested.
“But tomorrow at daybreak, without fail, they will leave.” The farmer gave in, interrupting Milagros’s thoughts, before disappearing from the window.
The two women waited for the man to remove the planks he used to close the shack. Amid the sounds of wood moving and muttered insults, Milagros felt she was being watched: the two boys who had appeared behind their father were now by the windowsill, and they undressed her with their eyes. Instinctively, the girl, feeling the weight of their gaze, moved closer to María.
“What are you looking at?” The old woman scolded them as soon as she noticed what Milagros was doing. Then she took her by the arm and led her inside, kneeling to enter through a space that the farmer had managed to open.
María knew the shack but Milagros grimaced at the penetrating odor that hit her as soon as she entered and at what she could make out in the light of a guttering candle: three or four sweaty children slept on the floor, on straw, between the legs of an emaciated donkey who rested with its neck and ears drooped; it was probably the only possession those people had. There’s no need for you to hide the burro, thought Milagros. Not even a starving gypsy would go near it. Then she turned her head toward a broken stool and what used to be a table where a candle rested atop a twisted mountain of wax, both near the straw mattress where a woman lay. After squinting her eyes to try to make out some trace of Melchor in the girl’s features, she indicated with a halfhearted sweep of her hand for them to settle in wherever they could.
Milagros hesitated. María pulled her toward the donkey, getting it out of the way with a slap to the rump, and they sat against the wall with the children. The peasant, now that he’d put the door planks back up, didn’t lie down with his wife. Despite the summer heat he curled up next to a little blonde girl who grumbled in her sleep at his touch. María sucked her teeth in disgust.
“Get out of here,” she said later, when the boys from the window, dirty and in rags, tried to lie down near Milagros.
Before they decided where to lie, the farmer’s wife extended her arm and snuffed out the candle by pinching the wick with her fingertips; the sudden darkness made Milagros better able to hear the murmur of the two older boys’ complaints and stumbling.
Shortly after, the only sounds heard in the shack were the slow and deliberate breathing of the children and the donkey, occasional coughing, the peasant’s snores and his wife’s sighs as she tried to get comfortable, time and again, on the straw mattress amid the shadows visible in the moonlight that entered through the worn canvas on the window. All those sounds and images were unfamiliar to Milagros. What were they doing there, beneath the miserable roof of some payos who had only reluctantly taken them in? Their law forbade it; Grandfather would say: you shouldn’t sleep with payos. Would María sleep? she wondered. As if she knew what was passing through the girl’s head, the old woman searched out her hand. Milagros responded, grabbing it and squeezing it tightly. Then she sensed something more in those thin atrophied bones: María, plunged into the unknown just as she was, was also looking for solace. Fear? Old María couldn’t be frightened! She had always, always been a bold, resolute woman. Everyone respected her! Nevertheless, the gaunt hand that jabbed her palm clearly showed the opposite.
Far now from the shots, the commotion of the settlement and the need to flee, surrounded by unfriendly strangers in a disgusting shack, in the darkness and gripping a hand that suddenly had turned old on her, the girl understood her true situation. Nobody would help them! The payos had always repudiated them, so now, when they were threatened with jail, it would be even worse. Nor would they find gypsies they could take shelter with; from what that man said, they’d all been arrested, and the few who had managed to escape would be in the same situation they were. A tear,
long and languid, ran down her cheek. Milagros felt it brushing against her; its slow sliding seemed to want to drown her further into vulnerability. She thought of her parents and of Cachita. She yearned for her mother’s embrace, to be close to her, wherever she was, even in a jail. Her mother had always known what to do and she would have consoled her … Old María was already sleeping. Her hand was limp now, and her labored breathing and snores told Milagros that she was alone in her desperation. Milagros gave in to sobs. She didn’t want to think anymore. She didn’t want …
A blow to her thigh stopped even the tears in their tracks. Milagros remained stock-still while the possibility that it had been a rat ran through her head. She reacted when she felt fingers clawing at her inner thigh, over her clothes. One of the sons! she said to herself, violently releasing Old María’s hand and searching in the darkness for the scoundrel’s head. She found him on his knees by her side. The boy pressed and pinched her pubis hard, and when Milagros tried to scream he silenced her by covering her mouth with his other hand. His panting stopped abruptly when she pulled out some locks of his hair. His pain gave Milagros the chance to get free of the hand covering her mouth; she pounced on him, drove her teeth into the skin beneath one of his ears and scratched his face. She heard a repressed howl. She tasted blood just as he lifted her skirt and petticoats. She twisted, without letting go of her prey, at the stab of pain she felt when he reached her vulva. She had never been touched there by anyone … Then she bit him viciously until he left her privates alone because he had to use both hands to defend himself from her bites, which was when Milagros took the opportunity to push him away with her foot.
The sound that the peasant farmer’s son made when he fell didn’t seem to disturb anyone in the shack. Milagros was sweating and panting, but above all trembling with an uncontrollable shivering. She heard the boy moving and knew for certain that he would attack her again: he was like an animal in heat, blind.
“I have a knife!” she shouted as she tried to find the one the old woman used to cut plants in María’s apron pockets. “I’ll kill you if you come near me!”
María woke up, startled by the shouts and agitation. Confused, she stammered out some unintelligible sounds. Milagros finally found the knife and bared it, with a trembling hand, to the rat who was once again at her side; the blade shone in the moonlight that entered the shack.
“I’ll kill you!” she muttered in rage.
“What … what is going on?” Old María managed to ask.
“Fernando.” The voice came from the mother’s bed. “She will do it, she will kill you, she’s a gypsy, a Vega, and if she doesn’t, her grandfather surely will. But before he does, Melchor will castrate you and rip out your eyes. Leave the girl alone!”
With the knife trembling before his face, Milagros saw him back up like the animal he was: on all fours. Then her hand fell like a dead weight.
“What happened, girl?” insisted the old woman even though she was pretty sure of the answer.
SHE HAD never been touched there, and she never imagined that the first time would be a disgusting, pathetic payo. The dawn found the two women awake, just as they had been the rest of the night. The light gradually revealed the poverty and filth inside the shack, but Milagros paid no attention to that; the girl felt dirtier than her surroundings. Had that bastard stolen her virginity? If so, she could never marry a gypsy. That possibility had obsessed her through the long hours of the night. She went over and over in her mind a thousand times the confused scenes and a thousand times she scolded herself for not having done more to keep it from happening. But she had kicked, she remembered that; maybe it was in that moment … surely that had been when the boy was able to reach her virtue. At first she hesitated, but later she confided in María.
“How far did he get?” the old woman questioned her in the darkness, not hiding her concern.
María was one of the four women who always took part, for the Vega family, in checking brides’ virginity. Milagros shrugged, her palms up, which the old woman couldn’t see. What did she know? How far did he have to get? She only remembered the pain and terrible sensation of humiliation and helplessness. She felt unable to define it; it was as if in that very instant, just a mere second, everything and everyone had disappeared and she was facing her own disgraced body insulting her.
“I don’t know,” she answered.
“Did he dig inside of you? For how long? How many fingers did he stick in?”
“I don’t know!” she shouted. Milagros shrank back at the light that was starting to enter the shack.
“When it’s light,” the healer whispered to her, “check to see whether your petticoats are stained with blood, even if it’s only a few drops.”
AND WHAT if they are? The girl trembled.
Gabriel, his wife and children began to get up. Milagros kept her head bowed and made sure to avoid eye contact with the two older boys. She did look at a small dark-skinned boy with blond hair who didn’t dare to come over to her but who smiled at her with strangely white teeth. María’s expression soured again when the little blonde girl the farmer had been embracing in his sleep showed tiny budding bare breasts when she stretched in front of her father. She had treated Josefa, that was the girl’s name, a few months earlier for some tapeworms. The girl, flustered, hid from the healer when she realized she was there.
The peasant farmer, scratching his head, went over to the planks he used to close the door, followed by the tetherless donkey. María gestured toward the door with her chin.
“Go,” she said to Milagros, who got up and waited beside the animal.
“Where do you think you’re going?” growled the farmer.
“I have to go out,” answered the girl.
“With those colorful clothes? You’d be recognized a mile away. Forget about it.”
Milagros sought the old woman’s help.
“She has to go out,” María affirmed, already by the girl’s side.
“Not a chance.”
“Cover yourself with this.”
Gabriel and the gypsies turned toward his wife. The woman, standing, her hair messy, dressed in a simple shirt beneath which you could see large hips and immense fallen breasts, tossed a blanket at Milagros that the girl caught on the fly and threw over her shoulders.
The peasant farmer swore under his breath and let them through the door when he had finished with the last plank. The first to go out was the donkey. Then Milagros, and as María was about to follow her, the two older boys tried to get ahead of her.
“Where do you think you’re going?” inquired María.
“We need to go out, too,” answered one of them.
The old woman saw the wound beneath his ear and stationed herself in the doorway, small as she was, with her legs open and her penetrating gypsy gaze in her eyes.
“Nobody leaves here, is that understood?” Then she turned toward Milagros and indicated that she should head off toward the fields.
It took the young gypsy girl some time to check whether she had lost her virtue. She took so long that Old María, aware of the lust oozing from the boy who had attacked her during the night, understood how serious a predicament they were in: they had made it through the night but they would only get through this moment if the young man, who was shifting restlessly from foot to foot, didn’t push her over and run out to force himself on Milagros again. Nobody would be able to stop him.
Suddenly she knew she was vulnerable, tremendously vulnerable; it wasn’t like among her people, she wasn’t respected here. A father who slept with his young daughter? He wouldn’t do anything to stop it—he might even join in happily. She watched the wife: she was distractedly tearing off bits from a crust of bread, detached from it all. If they killed them, Melchor would never find out … If they survived this morning, what would happen the next day, and the next? How could she protect Milagros? The girl was beautiful; she emanated sensuality with every movement. They wouldn’t even be able to wal
k a couple of leagues before men started pouncing on her, and she would only be able to respond with shouts and insults. That was the crude reality.
A noise from behind her back made her turn her head. Milagros’s smile confirmed that she was still a virgin, or at least she thought so. Old María didn’t let her come any closer.
“Let’s go,” she ordered. “The blanket is instead of the eggs you owe me,” she added to the peasant woman, who just shrugged and continued picking at the crust.
“Wait,” requested Milagros when the old woman was heading toward her. “Did you see that blond boy with the brown skin?” María nodded as she closed her eyes. “He seems smart. Call him over. I thought he could do something for us.”
FRAY JOAQUÍN observed the warm embrace that united Caridad and Milagros.
“Thank God you are all right!” exclaimed the priest when he reached the peripheries of the solitary chapel of the Virgen del Patrocinio, nestled in the fertile valley, on the outskirts of Triana, before Milagros and Caridad ran to each other.
“Leave God out of it!” exclaimed María then, which made the friar’s face fall as he turned to her. “The last time your reverence spoke of God you told me that he was going to come to my house and instead the King’s soldiers showed up. What God is this who allows women, old people and innocent children to be arrested?”
Fray Joaquín stammered before opening his arms helplessly. From then on the friar and old woman remained silent, ignoring each other as Milagros showered questions on Caridad, who was barely able to respond.
The dark peasant boy from Camas ran his alert gaze over both couples, nervous at the healer’s startling reaction and his anticipation of the silver bracelet that Milagros had promised him if he brought Fray Joaquín, from San Jacinto—the girl had repeated it several times—to the chapel of the Virgen del Patrocinio. Old María didn’t like the clergy, she distrusted them all, the secular ones and the regular ones, the priests and the friars, but she gave in to Milagros’s wishes.