“No, no! You stick to your herbs,” said Milagros when María tried to help her with some ropes. “Cachita!” she then shouted, completely ignoring the old woman. “Come over when you can, and pound this stake in deeper. We’d hate to have the devil sneeze tonight and blow our tent away.”
“Cachita, I need you first!” came from another woman.
María searched for her friend in the small clearing they had stopped in for the night. Cachita here, Cachita there. And she came and went. Once they’d got over their initial misgivings, the gypsy women had found the strong and always willing Caridad to be of invaluable help in all sorts of tasks.
The old woman remained beside Milagros.
“Move aside,” the girl scolded her again as she tried to move to the other side of what was already taking shape as a tent as irregular as the fabric they were using. It was flat and very low, just barely enough to provide shelter to the three women. “Cachita!” Milagros shouted again. “I asked first!”
María saw that Caridad had come to a halt among the unfinished tents and the kids piling up firewood and scraps.
“Morena,” said the other woman who had called her, “if you don’t help me I’ll steal your precious red dress.”
Caridad swatted at the air and headed toward the woman who had threatened her. Milagros let out a laugh. Everything’s changed so much, thought María when she heard the joyful sound of the girl’s laughter. Domingo, the traveling blacksmith, had offered to accompany them down to the lowlands until they found Santiago and his people. The man didn’t have to go too far out of his way to Puerto de Santa María, and he wasn’t in any rush to turn himself in to the payos, he confessed in terrible anguish.
They had joined Santiago and his family two months ago, and they weren’t the first. A Vega cousin, his wife and two-year-old child who had managed to escape the settlement had come before them, although they’d left behind a four-year-old girl who had slipped from her mother’s arms in the frantic escape: María had heard, a thousand times, their sobbing and the excuses the young married couple gave each other as they tried to rid themselves of the guilt. Two boys from Jerez and a woman from Paterna completed the list of refugees in the Fernández tribe.
Throughout those weeks the old woman had witnessed a transformation in Milagros, although she still held back sobs on the nights when she didn’t fall asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow. Cry, she would encourage her in silence, never forget your loved ones. All in all, the migration seemed to have changed the girl’s character; her personality had bloomed, as if her life in the settlement had held her back. “Blessed freedom,” muttered the old woman as she watched Milagros run, or sing and dance at nights around the fire in a camp like the one they were setting up. During the day, busy with typical gypsy bustling about, Milagros’s face only clouded over when she failed to get news of the fate of the detained gypsies from the walkers she passed or the people in the towns, as if they didn’t give those gypsy bastards a second thought. As for Melchor, Santiago had promised Milagros he’d do everything in his power to obtain news of him.
Life was rough for the gypsies. Selling the baskets and utensils that hung from the mules and horses; getting the day’s food—buying it when they had some money or stealing it when they didn’t; a fandango or a zarabanda in an inn or on a street corner for some coins; reading palms; trading with whatever they found along the roads, always on the lookout for Chief Magistrates and their deputies, justices and soldiers; buying favors; always ready to pick up their camp and flee at the drop of a hat … where were they headed and for how long?
“You see that, girl? That is our route,” Santiago had told Milagros while he pointed to the horizon line at nothing in particular. “For how long? What does it matter? The only important thing is the present moment.”
Only when she was alone beneath the tent, at night, surrounded by the sounds of the countryside, did Milagros recall her home. And looking at the uncertain future, she was unable to hold back her tears, even though during the day she tried to live the way Santiago had taught her to—which was also how, she realized, her grandfather lived.
That night they were at least a league from the town of Niebla, setting up their new camp amid laughter, joking and shouting. Milagros struggled to make the tent fabric as taut as possible so that the wind, the devil’s sneeze, didn’t lift it during the night. Old María looked over the scene, and Cachita ran from one side to the other helping everyone until a commotion among the men attracted her attention: two of them had grabbed a ram they’d stolen from the town of Trigueros, and Diego, one of Santiago’s sons, headed toward it with an iron bar in his hand. The animal didn’t even have time to bleat: an accurate and definitive blow to the head made him drop down dead.
“Women!” shouted Santiago as they all moved away from the ram’s body as if they had done their part. “We’re hungry!”
Gazpacho with mutton roasted over the fire. Wine and stale bread. Fried blood. A piece of cheese that someone had kept hidden and decided to share. That was how the first part of the evening was spent, the gypsies eating their fill around the bonfire, their features fragmented by the flickering flames, until the strum of a guitar announced the start of the music.
Milagros shivered when she heard the first chords.
Several of the gypsies, old Santiago among them, looked at the girl, encouraging her; a couple of girls rushed to switch spots and sat on the floor next to her.
The guitar insisted. Milagros cleared her throat and then took several deep breaths. One of the girls who had run to her side began to clap boldly in time with the instrument.
And Milagros started with a long, deep wail, her face flushed, her voice cracked and her hands open in front of her, tensed, as if she were incapable of transmitting everything she wanted to with merely her voice.
THAT CLEARING surrounded by low thickets and pines was overtaken by their frenzy; the shadows of the men and women dancing in confused movements silhouetted against the fire, the guitars wailing, the clapping echoing against the trees and the songs scraping together feelings: all these made Caridad’s heart clench.
“You did it, morena,” Old María, who was sitting beside her and guessed what was going through her head, whispered into her ear.
Caridad nodded in silence, her eyes fixed on Milagros, who contorted voluptuously in a frenetic dance; in some of those lustful movements she recognized what she’d been teaching her over those past months.
“Teach her to sing,” the healer had suggested as soon as they had joined Santiago’s party, pointing with her chin at Milagros, who was walking with the group sadly, dragging her feet.
Caridad was surprised by the suggestion.
“Melchor liked how you sang and, what with the way she is, it would be good for her to learn.”
Caridad was absorbed for a few seconds in remembering Melchor, and those lovely nights they’d spent together … Where could he be now?
“What do you say?” insisted the old woman.
“About what?”
“Will you teach her?”
“I don’t know how to teach,” objected Caridad. “How …?”
“Well, give it a try,” the healer said authoritatively, knowing by that point that Caridad only heeded orders.
As for Milagros, she just shrugged her shoulders at the idea of María’s project, and from that day on, at every opportunity, the old healer dragged the two far from the group, in search of some isolated spot to sing and dance. The first few days the little girls in the group spied on them, but they soon started to join in.
“Guineos, cumbés, zarambeques, zarabandas and chaconas,” the gypsies explained to Caridad the first day, after Milagros danced one of them reluctantly, accompanied only by the awkward handclapping of a healer with atrophied fingers. They were the Negro dances and songs brought to Spain by slaves. The words of the songs were nothing like what they sang in Cuba, but Caridad was able to find in them the African dances she knew s
o well.
Caridad didn’t hide her confusion from the gypsies, her arms at her sides.
“Come on!” María spurred her on. “You move now!”
She hadn’t danced in a long time; she missed the drums and the other slaves. Yet she ran her gaze around: they were in nature, under an open sky, surrounded by trees. It wasn’t the lush Cuban countryside, with its banyan trees, kapoks and royal palms, where the gods and spirits lived, but … all nature was sacred. All thickets and grasses, even the smallest stalk, held some spirit. And if that was the case in Cuba and the other islands, in all of Africa, in Brazil and in many other places, why would it be any different in Spain? A shiver ran up Caridad’s spine when she understood that her gods were here, too. She turned around and she could feel them in the life and nature that surrounded her.
“Morena …!” Old María started to scold her impatiently, but Milagros hushed her by putting a hand softly on her forearm: she sensed the transformation that was happening to her friend.
Which one of these trees holds Oshún? wondered Caridad. She wanted to feel her inside again, could she mount her here? Dancing. She would do it. But the countryside is sacred, she said to herself, you must go into the countryside with respect, like into a church. She needed an offering. She turned toward the gypsies and stuck a hand into her bundle, at María’s feet. As the other two women watched her attentively, she searched around inside. She had … There it was! The remainder of a cigar that one of the gypsies had given her. She headed off and, among some pine trees, she lifted her hand with the cigar in it.
“What is she going to do?” whispered María.
“I don’t know.”
“Fool,” the healer whispered when she saw Caridad breaking up the cigar between her fingers and letting the tobacco fly away. “That was the only cigar we had,” she complained.
“Shush.”
Then they saw her search among the trees, until she returned to them with four sticks in her hands. She handed two to Milagros. “Listen,” she asked them.
And she hit the sticks against each other in the simplest rhythm she could remember: the one marked by the clave; three spaced-out taps and two close together, again and again. A couple of times, Milagros joined in. Caridad was already moving her feet when she offered the sticks to María, who took them and started hitting them against each other.
Then the former slave closed her eyes. It was her music, different from the gypsy music and the Spanish music, which had melody. The Negroes didn’t look for melody: they sang and danced on just percussion. Caridad, little by little, was able to imagine that those simple clave beats were the boom of the batá drums. Then she searched for Oshún and danced for the Orisha of love among her gods, feeling them near, in the presence of two astonished gypsy women, their eyes wide at the frenetic and lewd movements of that black woman who seemed to be flying.
A couple of days later, with two little gypsy girls banging the claves together, Milagros began to imitate Caridad in her Negro dances.
IT WAS harder to get the girl to sing.
“I don’t know how,” lamented Milagros.
The three women were seated in a circle on the floor, beneath a pine tree as the dusk tinged the fields and forests with melancholy.
“Show her,” the old woman ordered Caridad.
Caridad hesitated.
“How do you want me to do it?” Milagros said in her defense. “All I have to do to learn her dances is pay attention and repeat what she does, but when I say I can’t sing it’s because I pay attention to those who do know how and, the more I pay attention, the more I know I don’t know how.”
Silence overtook the three women. Finally, María opened her hands, as if giving in; she had already managed to distract the girl with the dancing. That was her goal.
“I don’t know how to sing either,” Caridad added.
“Grandfather says you sing very well,” contradicted Milagros.
The other woman shrugged. “All Negroes sing the same way. I don’t know … it’s our way of talking, of complaining about life. There, on the plantations, while we worked, they forced us to sing so we wouldn’t have time to think.”
“Sing, morena,” the old woman asked again after a new silence.
Caridad remembered Melchor with nostalgia, closed her eyes and sang in Lucumí, with a deep, weary, monotone voice.
The gypsies listened in silence, shrinking increasingly inward, into themselves.
“Now you do it,” Old María begged Milagros when Caridad ended her whispering. “Do it, girl,” she insisted when the girl tried to object.
The old woman didn’t want to talk to her about pain. She had to find it herself. What were the deblas, martinetes or galley laments but songs of anguish? Who would dare to deny that the gypsy people were as persecuted as the Negroes? Hadn’t that girl suffered enough?
“Come with me,” Caridad encouraged her, standing in front of her and offering up her hands, inside which Milagros’s hands took refuge.
Caridad began again and soon Milagros was humming the song hesitantly. She searched for help in her friend’s small brown eyes but, despite the fact that she was staring right into them, they seemed lost somewhere far away, as if they were able to bypass anything that got in her way. She felt the touch of her hands: they weren’t holding tight, yet she felt that hers were trapped. It was … it was as if Caridad had disappeared, converted into her own music, merged with those African gods who had stolen her. And she understood the grief she distilled through her voice.
That day ended with Milagros confused but with Caridad and Old María convinced that the girl would be able to pour her feelings out into the songs.
And so she did. The first time that Milagros tore at their emotions with a song, the group of gypsy kids who tagged along at their lessons broke out into applause.
Milagros was caught off guard and stopped singing.
“Go on, keep going until your mouth tastes of blood!” Old María spurred her on, scolding the kids with a harsh look, who scampered off behind the trees.
From that point on it was all easy. What up until then had been nothing more than upbeat ditties, sung with a misunderstood passion, became pure pain and heartbreak: for the imprisonment of her parents and her love for Pedro García; for her grandfather’s disappearance; for Caridad’s rape and Alejandro’s death; for the constant fleeing amid the payos’ gobs of spit; for the hunger and the cold; for the injustice of the rulers; for the past of her persecuted people and their uncertain future.
That night, camped on the outskirts of the town of Niebla, Caridad and Old María, sitting beside each other around the fire, experienced conflicting feelings as they witnessed Milagros’s new way of dancing, lascivious yet filled with joy, and the depth of emotion in her songs of gypsy hardship.
Niebla, the town that gave its name to the county then belonging to the House of Medina-Sidonia, had been an important Arab and medieval military enclave. It was surrounded by strong, high walls and defensive towers and it had an imposing castle with its tower keep. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, it had lost its original importance and its population had dropped to little more than a thousand inhabitants. Yet, it still maintained its tradition of three festivals a year: San Miguel’s, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and All Saints’ Day, all three devoted to the buying and selling of livestock, sackcloth and leather.
The festivals had followed the same path as the town and no one hesitated in describing them as “fallen on hard times.” They were used mostly for supplying old animals for the nearby city of Seville. Santiago headed there with his group of gypsies. On the first of November, All Saints’ Day, Diego and Milagros, along with a boy about eight years old—skinny and dirty but with mischievous black eyes—named Manolillo, and other members of the Fernández family, loaded down with baskets and pots as if they intended to sell them, reached the walls of the town, outside of which, on an esplanade, the fair was held. Hundreds of heads of livest
ock—cows and oxen, pigs, sheep and horses—were offered for sale amid the crowd’s hustle and bustle. The old patriarch, Caridad, María, the smaller kids and the old women remained hidden on the roads.
Manolillo latched on to Milagros when they were stopped by the deputy magistrate accompanied by a constable: gypsies were not allowed to go to fairs, especially livestock fairs. As Diego complained and gestured, begging and pleading in the name of the Lord Our God, the Virgin Mary and all the saints, Milagros and the boy separated discreetly from the group so that neither the deputy nor the constable would notice the sacks they were carrying, which held four sleeping weasels that they had managed to hunt en route. Finally, Diego dropped a couple of coins into the alderman’s hand.
“I don’t want any altercations,” the deputy warned them all after he had hidden the money.
As soon as they were free from the attentions of the Niebla authorities, Diego Fernández gestured the other gypsies to scatter throughout the fairgrounds; then he winked at Milagros and Manolillo: “Let’s go for it, kids,” he encouraged.
More than three hundred horses were crowded in precarious enclosures made of timber and thatch. Milagros and Manolillo headed toward them, feigning a calm they weren’t feeling, among the merchants, buyers and the curious. Reaching the end of the pens, which met the town’s outer walls, they looked around and slipped in amidst the horses. Protected among them, Milagros handed her sack to the boy, pulled a flask filled with vinegar out from under her skirt and emptied it out in the sacks. Then she shook them vigorously and the weasels, who hadn’t been fed since their capture, started to shriek and squirm. The boy and girl sought shelter near the walls and let them loose. The weasels jumped crazily, shrieking and biting their feet. The horses, in turn, neighed and reared up against each other. Confined, they kicked and bit each other. The stampede was fast in coming. The three hundred animals easily broke through their fragile enclosures and galloped frantically through the fair.