The Barefoot Queen (58 page)

“Halt! Who goes there?”

Suddenly she sensed she was alone although the shirt over her face didn’t allow her to see. Violent splashing told her that the men were running off. When she pulled the shirt down from over her eyes, she found
herself before two men dressed in black, illuminated by the oil lamp one of them carried. The other held a truncheon. Both wore rigid cardboard collars that had once been white at their necks.

“Cover yourself,” ordered the one with the oil lamp. “Who are you?” he inquired as she struggled to cover her bare breasts. “What were you doing with those men?”

Caridad lowered her gaze toward the water. The white man’s authoritarian tone caused her to react as she had on the tobacco plantation. She didn’t answer.

“Where do you live? What is your occupation?”

“Come with us,” decided the other, his voice weary with the fruitless questioning, as he tapped his truncheon on the edge of the basin.

They set off walking down Atocha Street.

“Prostitution!”

That was the charge that one of the constables alleged to the sentry at the door of La Galera, Madrid’s women’s prison, after he had let them in. The prison was right there on Atocha Street, a bit beyond the plaza where she had been arrested. Caridad, downcast, didn’t see the immediate, exaggerated reaction of the guard after giving her a quick glance.

“No room for any more,” he claimed.

“Of course there is,” objected one of the constables.

“You released two women yesterday,” the other reminded him.

“But—”

“Where is the warden?” the constable with the truncheon said, interrupting the sentry’s complaints.

“You know perfectly well where he is: sleeping.”

“Go get him,” he ordered.

“Don’t start fucking with me, Pablo!”

“Then keep her.”

“The rooms are full,” insisted the sentry, without much conviction; it was the same song and dance every night. “We can’t even feed them all—”

“You are keeping her,” Pablo cut in with a tone of voice similar to the one the other had used.

The guard let out a long sigh.

“She’s a Negro! How many women like this one do you have in there?” joked the second constable.

The three men walked toward a gloomy little room to the left of the entrance, where the thick black smoke given off by a tallow candle clouded the light meant to illuminate a decrepit desk. Caridad walked in the middle of them.

“Negroes like this one …” answered the sentry as he went around the desk to sit down, “none. At most we have a couple of mulattas. What’s her name?” he added after dipping the quill in the inkwell.

“She didn’t want to tell us. What’s your name?”

“Caridad,” she responded.

“Well, it turns out she does know how to talk.”

“Caridad what?” asked the sentry.

She was just named Caridad. Nothing more. She didn’t answer.

“You don’t have a last name? Are you a slave?”

“I’m free.”

“In that case you have to have a last name.”

Hidalgo, she then remembered the commander at the Sea Gate in Cádiz reading in her papers; Don José’s last name.

“Hidalgo. That is the last name they gave me on the boat, when Master died.”

“Boat? You used to be a slave? If you say you’re free now, you must have a deed of manumission.” The sentry looked her up and down: still wet, barefoot, wearing only her gray shirt. He snorted. “Do you have the deed?”

“It is in my bundle, with my things, in the room …” Her voice tailed off.

“What room?”

Caridad merely gestured with her hands as she recalled Melchor’s warning.
Don’t say anything to anyone,
he had told her.

“What do you have in your hand?” the sentry surprised her by asking, seeing that she kept it constantly tightly clenched. She lowered her gaze. “What have you got there?”

Caridad didn’t answer, her chin trembling, her teeth gritted. The truncheon hit her back.

“Show it to us,” the constable ordered her.

She felt that that stone was the last thing tying her to Melchor, to the days they had shared in Barrancos and on the road to Madrid. The bundle, her red dress, her documents and the contraband money Melchor had shared with her in Barrancos and which she had guarded zealously: she’d left everything she had at the hostel. The truncheon hit harder against her kidneys. She opened her hand and showed them the fake sapphire.

“Where did you get that?” said the sentry, leaning over the table to grab it.

“What does all that matter now?” interjected the constable. “It’s late and we have to continue our rounds. We aren’t going to spend all night here. Just record her name, the date and time she came in, assets you find on her and reason for her arrest. That’s all that matters.”

With her gaze fixed on the blue stone that the sentry left on the desk, Caridad heard the scratching of the quill as it slid across the paper.

“And what is the reason for the arrest?” the man finally asked.

“Prostitution!” The reply echoed through the room.

LA GALERA
, the royal prison for scandalous and dishonest women, was located in a two-story rectangular building with a central courtyard. Beside it, on the same block, was the hospital of La Pasión, also exclusively for women, which in turn, via an arch that crossed over Niño Perdido Street, linked to the General Hospital, the last building in Madrid before the Atocha Gate.

Once the constables signed the record and left to continue their rounds, Caridad followed the sentry to the upper floor. The man had taken a truncheon and the candle from the desk, which he used to try to illuminate a long hall, with a gallery whose windows overlooked the interior courtyard and the street; it was filled with sleeping women, some on cots, most on the floor. Caridad heard the sentry complain to a female guard who should have been watching over the prisoners. She was sleeping. “Same as ever,” the man seemed to reluctantly accept. As if he didn’t want to take another step further, he used the candle to illuminate the corner near the door, on his right side, where two women were curled up together. He used the truncheon to wake them up. They both grumbled. “Make room!” he ordered.

The one closer to the wall pushed the other as the sentry hit her on the back to get them to obey. He stopped when a small space opened up between the woman and the wall.

“Squeeze yourself in there,” he indicated to Caridad with the truncheon.

Before she had crouched down, the man was gone and, with him, the light of the smoking candle, which was gradually replaced by the gleam of the moon and the thousand shadows it cast.

Caridad lay down on the floor, trapped between the wall and the other woman. She struggled to move her arm and place it beneath her head as a pillow. The accusation of prostitution came to her mind as soon as she managed to settle in. She was no prostitute. She was tired, yet found some comfort in the contact with the woman she was huddled beside. Her worries intensified: fear of what was going to happen to her, fear for Melchor, who would return to the hostel and not find her there. She listened to the sounds of the night. Coughs and snores. Sighs and words revealed in dreams. Like in the shack on the tobacco plantation, when she slept with the other slaves. The same sounds. All she was missing was Marcelo … She stroked her hair just as she had her son’s and closed her eyes. She was convinced that someone was taking care of him. And, in spite of everything, exhausted, she fell asleep.

They forced her to her feet at five in the morning, when a point of light began to slip in through the windows. Several guards chosen from among the trusted prisoners went through the various galleries of the second floor and woke the rest by shouting. Caridad took a few seconds to realize where she was and why there were thirty or forty women in front of her, standing in a corner beside the door, yawning, stretching or chiding the guards.

“New girl, huh?”

The words came from the woman who had slept by her side: she was about forty years old and gaunt, with features forged by poverty and as disheveled as the other woman she pointed out Caridad to. There were no more words or introductions; instead, the tone of the chatter intensified, occasionally blending in with shouts or arguments. Caridad observed the women: many of them had joined a queue to pee into a chamber pot. One after the other they lifted their skirts without the slightest modesty and
crouched over the pot, the others urging on the one whose turn it was, who was slowing everyone up by defecating. Then they took the chamber pot, clambered onto a box to reach the high window and poured out the urine before putting it back in place for the next woman.

“Gardy loo!” she heard some of the women shout as they threw the piss down to the street.

“Let’s see if you can hit the warden’s bald head!”

The remark was met with some laughter.

Caridad felt the need to urinate and joined the queue.

“There were no Negro women here yesterday, were there?”

The comment came from a fat woman who had queued up behind her.

“I can’t remember any,” came from some other point in the line.

“Well, this one would be hard to forget,” laughed the fat woman behind her.

Caridad felt many eyes on her. She tried to smile, but no one paid her any heed. The prisoner who was using the chamber pot right before her looked at her insolently the entire time.

“All yours,” she said after getting up. She didn’t empty the pot.

Caridad hesitated.

“Negress,” intervened the fat woman behind her, “Frasquita’s quite a pisser. Watch that you don’t overflow the pot when you go, getting your fanny wet and spilling it everywhere. Then you’ll have to clean it up!”

Caridad threw Frasquita’s piss out of the window, urinated and repeated the operation. She moved away from the queue. No one had told her what to do next, so she watched how many of the prisoners went downstairs and she rejoined the group. Behind her, the guards’ shouting chivvied those who remained upstairs.

Mass. She heard mass in a small chapel, on the lower level, packed with close to 140 standing prisoners, whom the priest constantly scolded for their disrespectful behavior—talking and even the occasional loud laugh—during the service. Then they prayed a Station to Jesus, a prayer Caridad didn’t know. They left the chapel and again made a long queue at the entrance to another room in which there was a hearth for cooking. They were each handed a piece of leathery bread that was days old. They could also drink with a ladle from a bucket of water. As the queue moved forward, Caridad saw that the sentry from the night before was pointing
at her while he spoke to a couple of guards, who nodded along with his words as they stared at her. She finished off the bread before even reaching the gallery of the upper floor.

“Do you know how to sew, Negress?” one of the guards there asked her.

“No,” she answered.

And while the other prisoners began sewing the white linens for the hospitals of La Pasión and El General—sheets, pillowcases and shirts—Caridad was put to scrubbing and cleaning. At twelve they called her for lunch: some meat and another piece of old bread. Back to work until six in the evening, when they supped on a few vegetables, prayed the rosary and Salve Regina and went to bed. She returned to the same corner she had slept in the night before.

The next day, before lunch, the guard from her gallery brought her to the sentry. There a constable was waiting for her and, without a word, he led her up Atocha Street. Caridad stopped in the street; the sun, high in the sky, dazzled her. The constable pushed her, but she didn’t mind much. For the first time since she had arrived, she began to look at the city that Melchor had told her was so important; the other times she had passed through it at night or like a bat out of hell with the cutter on her heels. She pursed her lips sadly at the memory: she had managed to escape him only to end up imprisoned as a prostitute. That was what the sentry had written on the papers.

“Watch out, Negress!”

The shout came from the constable. Caridad stopped before she crashed into a rickety cart with two wheels, loaded with sand and pulled by a mule headed in her same direction. She ran her gaze down the street and was overcome with anxiety: the crowd came and went. The houses, most with businesses on the ground level, extended on both sides of one of Madrid’s widest streets. They left behind the two hospitals, the women’s prison and the monastery of clerics for the dying across from it. Following in the constable’s footsteps, she shifted her gaze toward the businesses: a chandler’s shop, a shoe shop, a carpenter’s shop, bars, taverns and even a bookshop, as well as a lay monastic community and the Orphanage for Waifs and Strays. People came in and out loaded down with baskets or earthenware jars of water; they chatted, laughed or argued in a universe that was beyond Caridad. Soon she could make out in front of her the
fountain topped by the angel that she had leapt into thirstily before she was arrested. From that point on, the look of the street changed: between the homes rose impressive buildings. Caridad kept looking from her left to her right: the convalescent hospital shortly before reaching the square; the Our Lady of the Love of God Hospital devoted to venereal diseases, and the Our Lady of Montserrat, which took in natives of the kingdom of Aragón and whose highly decorated façade made her feel tiny; the Loreto school to the right once she had left the square. Then the Antón Martín hospital and the church of San Sebastián, with its cemetery where she had hidden. There she almost stopped short when she saw the church’s atrium: congregated on the platform elevated over the street that led inside was a huge group of chatting dandies. She had seen them in Seville, but never so many in one place … She was surprised by their colorful attire, their white wigs, the way they moved, laughed and gestured as they chatted with each other.