Free The Barefoot Queen by Ildefonso Falcones Page A

they arrested him, perhaps for a more serious crime, like simply walking free along the roads, he could claim that the previous time they hadn’t restored him to his asylum, and get out of the sentence that way. “Cold immunity,” repeated Melchor as he drifted off to sleep.
    Melchor spent the next morning in the settlement. He sat smokingon a stool in the street, beside women who were weaving baskets with reeds they’d collected on the riverbanks, absorbed in those expert hands braiding baskets they’d later try to sell in the streets and markets. He heard their conversations without joining in; they all knew who Melchor was. Every once in a while, one would disappear and return shortly with a bit of wine for him. He ate at his brother Tomás’s house, chicken stew that was a bit past its prime, and he leaned the chair back again for a nap. When he awoke, he got ready to return to the San Miguel alley.
    “Thanks for lunch, Brother.”
    “No thanks necessary,” answered Tomás. “Don’t forget this,” he added, handing him the pig intestine filled with powdered tobacco they’d talked about the night before. “Uncle Basilio trusts you’ll make a good profit.”
    Melchor grabbed it with a disgusted expression, put it in one of the inner pockets of his short jacket and left the hut. Then he started down the street that bordered the wall surrounding the lands belonging to the Carthusian monastery. He would have liked to continue living there, among his own, but his beloved daughter and granddaughter lived with the Carmonas, in the alley, and he couldn’t distance himself from the blood of his blood.
    “Nephew!” A woman’s shout interrupted his thoughts. Melchor turned toward Old María, in the door of her shack. “You’re forgetting your Negress,” she added.
    “She’s not mine,” he answered wearily; he had already told her that several times.
    “She’s not mine either,” complained the woman. “She’s taking up my mattress, and her legs stick out the bottom. What do you want me to do with her? Take her with you! You brought her, you take her.”
    Take her with me?
thought Melchor. What was he going to do with a Negress?
    “No—” he started to say.
    “What do you mean no?” Old María interrupted him, her hands on her hips. “I said she’s going with you and she’s going with you, understood?”
    Several gypsies whirled around them when they heard the ruckus. Melchor looked at the little old woman, gaunt and wrinkled, planted in the door of the hut in her colorful apron, challenging him. He … he wasrespected by everyone in the settlement, but this was Old María before him now. And when a gypsy woman like Old María puts her hands on her hips and skewers you with her gaze …
    “What do you want me to do with her?”
    “Whatever you like,” answered the old woman, knowing she had won.
    Several women smiled; a man sighed loudly, another made a face as he tilted his head to one side and a couple of others grumbled under their breath.
    “She couldn’t move …” argued Melchor, pointing to the mud of the street. “She fell here …”
    “She can now. She’s a strong woman.”
    Old María told him that the black woman was named Caridad and she handed Melchor a wineskin with the rest of the barley and egg mixture that she was to take until the fevers went away completely.
    “Bring it back next time you come round,” she warned. “And take care of her!” exhorted the old woman as they set off.
    Melchor turned toward her in surprise and questioned her with his eyes. What did she care? Why …?
    “Her tears are as sad as ours,” said María, anticipating his question.
    And that was how, with Caridad noticeably better behind him and the wineskin hanging from his staff, which was slung over his shoulder like a pole, Melchor arrived at the San Miguel alley, which was flooded with smoke and the ringing of hammers on anvils.
    “Who’s that woman?” his son-in-law José asked