The Barefoot Queen by Ildefonso Falcones Read Free Book Online Page A

reached old age on the tobacco plantations, in the sugar mills or cane factories. The law prohibited selling a slave for more than it had been bought for, so no master, after having taught them a trade, would get rid of them; they’d lose money. One could mistreat them or force them to work to the point of exhaustion, but a good overseer knew his limits and usually stopped short of death. There were those slaves who took their own lives; sometimes at dawn, the light would gradually, unexpectedly, reveal the silhouette of an inert black body hanging from a tree … or perhaps several who had together decided to escape their lives once and for all. Then the master would get very angry, as he did when a mother killed a newborn to free it from a life of slavery or when a Negro injured himself to avoid work. The following Sunday, at mass, the priestfrom the sugar mill would shout that it was a sin, that they would go to hell, as if a hell worse than that existed. Die?
Maybe,
thought Caridad,
maybe the time has come to escape this world where no one will miss me.
    That same night it was two men who enjoyed her body. Then the potter closed the door again and Caridad was left in the most absolute darkness. She didn’t think about it. She sang softly through what was left of the night, and when the first rays of light made their way through the cracks in the planks of the miserable little room, she searched among the junk until she found an old rope. This could work, she concluded after pulling on it to test its strength. She tied it to her neck and climbed onto a rickety box. She threw the rope over a wooden beam above her head, pulled it taut and knotted the other end. There had been times when she’d envied those black figures hanging from the trees, interrupting the landscape of the Cuban tobacco plantation, freed from their suffering.
    “God is the greatest of all kings,” she called out. “I only hope not to become a lost soul.”
    She leapt off the box. The rope held her weight, but not the wooden beam, which cracked and fell on top of her. The noise was such that the potter soon appeared at Caridad’s cell. He put her in irons and, from that day on, Caridad stopped eating and drinking, begging for death even as the potter and his son force-fed her.
    The visits from men off the street continued, usually one, sometimes more, until one night an old man who was clumsily trying to mount her got up and off her with shocking agility.
    “This Negress is burning up!” he shouted. “She has a fever. Are you trying to give me some strange illness?”
    The potter came over to Caridad and put his hand on her sweaty forehead. “Get out of here!” he ordered, pressuring her with a foot in the ribs as he struggled to force open and recover the chains that held her captive. “Right now, this minute!” he yelled once he had managed to free her. Without waiting for her to get up, he grabbed Caridad’s bundle and threw it out onto the street.
    WAS IT possible that he had heard a song? It was just a murmur mixed in with the sounds of the night. Melchor pricked up his ears. There it was again!
    “Yemayá asesú …”
    The gypsy remained still in the darkness, in the middle of the fertile lowlands of Triana, surrounded by garden plots and fruit trees. The murmur of the Guadalquivir’s waters reached his ears clearly, as did the whistle of the wind among the vegetation, but …
    “Asesú yemayá.”
    It seemed like a dialogue: a whisper sung by the soloist who then responded like a chorus. He turned toward the voice; some of the beads that hung from his jacket jangled. It was almost completely dark, except for the torches from the Carthusian monastery, a bit further on.
    “Yemayá oloddo.”
    Melchor left the path and entered an orange grove. He stepped on rocks and fallen leaves, he stumbled several times and even loudly cursed all the saints, and yet, despite his shouts echoing like thunder in the night, the sad soft singing