minutes she had been gone. On those occasions, his arm was so painful that Juliana had to spoon the soup into his mouth, cool his brow with orange-blossom water, and entertain him for hours playing her harp, reading Lope de Vega to him, and playing girls’ games. Distracted by Diego’s wound, which though not serious was nonetheless of concern, Bernardo had forgotten that he’d heard Rafael Moncada ask his servant to summon Pelayo, remembering only when he learned through the servants, several days later, that Count Orloff had been assaulted on the night of Eulalia de Callis’s party. The noble Russian had stayed at the palace until very late, then called for his carriage and started back to the residence he had rented for his brief stay in the city. On the way, a group of armed ruffians had stopped his coach in an alleyway and easily subdued the four footmen. After stunning the count with a vicious blow to the head, they took his purse, his jewels, and the chinchilla cape he always wore. The attack had been attributed to guerrillas, although that had never been their mode of operation. The general reaction was that all traces of order in the city had evaporated. What good was it to have a safe-conduct for the curfew if decent people were no longer safe in the streets? It was the last straw that the French could not maintain a scintilla of security! Bernardo reported to Diego that the stolen purse contained the gold Count Orloff had won from Rafael Moncada at the gaming table.
“Are you sure you heard Moncada name Pelayo? I know what you are thinking, Bernardo. You think that Moncada had some role in the assault on the count. That is a bit strong, don’t you think? We don’t have proof, but I agree with you that it is a suspicious coincidence. Even if Moncada had nothing to do with this, he is still a rogue. I do not want to see him anywhere near Juliana, but I don’t know how to stop him,” Diego admitted.
In March of 1812, in Cadiz, the Spanish approved a liberal constitution based on the principles of the French Revolution, though with the difference that it designated Catholicism as the official state religion and outlawed the practice of any other faith. As Tomas de Romeu often said, there was no reason to keep fighting Napoleon when, after all, they agreed on the essential points. “It won’t get any farther than paper and ink, because Spain is not ready for modern ideas,” was the opinion of Le Chevalier, and he added with a gesture of impatience that it would be fifty years before Spain crept into the nineteenth century.
While Diego spent long hours studying in the ancient halls of the School of Humanities, practicing his fencing, and inventing new magic tricks to seduce the immovable Juliana, who as soon as his wound healed had gone back to treating him like a brother, Bernardo explored Barcelona, dragging Padre Mendoza’s heavy boots, which he never could get used to. Around his neck was the magic pouch containing Lightin-the-Night’s black braid, which by now held the warmth and odor of his skin; it was part of his own body, an appendage of his heart.
His self-imposed muteness had refined his other senses. He could follow a course by scent and hearing. He was solitary by nature, and in his situation as a foreigner he was even more alone, but he liked that. He was not oppressed by a crowd because in the midst of all the hullabaloo he always found a quiet place for his soul. He missed the open spaces of his early years, but he also liked this city with the patina of centuries: the narrow streets, the stone buildings, the dark churches that reminded him of Padre Mendoza’s faith. He liked best the port, where he could gaze out at the ocean and communicate with dolphins from distant seas. He walked silently, invisibly, among the throng, taking the pulse of Barcelona and the nation. It was during one of his wanderings that he saw Pelayo again.
A filthy, beautiful Gypsy woman was standing at the entrance of a tavern, tempting passersby, in her broken Spanish, to let her reveal their destinies, which she could read in the cards or in the map of their hands. Moments before, she had told a drunken sailor, to console him, that a treasure awaited him on a distant beach when in fact she had seen the cross of death in his palm. A few minutes later the man realized that his money pouch was missing and concluded that the Gypsy had stolen it. He rushed back in a mood to get what was his. His eyes were smoldering, and he was foaming like a rabid dog as he grabbed the supposed thief by the hair of her head and began shaking her. Her yelps emptied the tavern of its customers, who began jeering and cursing if one thing united a crowd, it was their blind hatred of the Romany, and to make things worse, thanks to the war it took very little to fire up a mob. They accused the woman of every vice known to humanity, including stealing Spanish children to be sold in Egypt.
Grandfathers could recall lively fiestas when the Inquisition had burned heretics, witches, and Gypsies alike. Just at the instant the sailor opened his knife to carve the woman’s face, Bernardo intervened, butting him like a mountain goat and shoving him to the ground, where he lay weakly kicking amid a cloud of alcohol fumes. Before the crowd could react, Bernardo seized the Gypsy by the hand, and they ran for their lives. They didn’t stop until they reached the barrio of La Barceloneta, where they were more or less safe from the enraged crowd.
There Bernardo dropped her hand and turned to leave, but she insisted that he follow her several blocks to where a wagon brightly painted with arabesques and hitched to a sad, big-hoofed Percheron was sitting in a side street. The inside of that vehicle, battered by the abuse of several generations of nomads, was a Turkish cave crammed with strange objects: a waterfall of colored kerchiefs, a jumble of little bells, and a museum of almanacs and religious images in little boxes nailed everywhere, even on the ceiling. Bernardo breathed in a mixture of patchouli perfume and dirty clothes. A mattress strewn with ostentatious brocade cushions was the only attempt at furniture. With a gesture the woman invited Bernardo to make himself comfortable and immediately sat down before him with her legs tucked beneath her, studying him with her piercing gaze. She pulled out a liquor flask, took a swallow, and passed it to him, still breathing heavily from their escape. She had dark skin, a muscular body, fierce eyes, and hennaed hair. She was barefoot and was wearing two or three long ruffled skirts, a faded blouse, and a short jacket with crisscrossing laces; a shawl was tossed over her shoulders, and she had tied a kerchief around her head in her tribe the sign of a married woman, although she was a widow. A dozen bracelets tinkled at her wrists in chorus with little silver bells on her ankles and gold coins sewn onto the kerchief across her forehead.
She told Bernardo that she used the name Amalia among the gadje, that is, people who weren’t Gypsies. Her mother had given her another name at birth, which only she knew; its purpose was to mislead evil spirits by keeping the girl’s true identity a secret. She also had a third name, one she went by among the other Gypsies. Ramon, the man of her life, had been cudgeled to death by farmers in the market in Lerida, accused of stealing hens. She had loved him since she was a girl, and their families had arranged the marriage when she was only eleven years old. Her in-laws had paid a high price for her because she had good health and a strong character, and she was well trained for domestic chores. In addition to those selling points, she was a true drabardi; she had been born with a natural gift for telling fortunes and for healing with spells and herbs. When she was young, she had looked like a wet cat, but beauty had nothing to do with selecting a wife. Her husband had a pleasant surprise, then, when the pile of bones turned into an attractive woman, but that pleasure was countered when they discovered that Amalia could not have children. Her people considered children a blessing; a sterile womb was grounds for a divorce, but Ramon loved her too much.
At the death of her husband, Amalia sank into a long period of mourning, from which she would never recover. She was not supposed to utter the dead man’s name, in order not to summon him from the other world, but secretly she wept for him every night.
For centuries her people had roamed throughout the world, persecuted and despised. The ancestors of her tribe had left India several hundred years before and made their way through all of Asia and Europe before ending up in Spain, where they were treated as badly as in other places. The climate lent itself to their nomadic life, however, so they had settled in the south of that country. There were few nomadic families like Amalia’s left. Hers had met adversity again and again, and so Bernardo’s unexpected intervention had touched Amalia’s heart.
Her people never had relations with the gadje unless for commercial reasons, otherwise the purity of their breed and their traditions would be endangered. Out of basic caution, the Romany stayed out of the mainstream; they never trusted strangers, and they reserved their loyalty for their clan. But it seemed to Amalia that this young man was not exactly a gadje; he was from another planet, a foreigner everywhere. Maybe he was a Gypsy from a lost tribe.
Amalia, it turned out, was Pelayo’s sister, which Bernardo would discover that same day when Pelayo himself came to the wagon. He did not recognize Bernardo; the night they had caught him singing to Juliana in Italian, on Moncada’s behalf, he had seen nothing but Diego and felt the sword tip pressing against his throat. Amalia explained what had happened to Pelayo in the brittle sounds of Romany, her Sanskrit-derived language. She asked her brother’s pardon for having violated the taboo of not mixing with gadje. That grievous sin could condemn her to ma rime a state of impurity that warranted rejection by the entire community, but she was counting on the fact that rules had been relaxed since the beginning of the war. The clan had suffered greatly during that time, and families had been scattered. Pelayo reached the same conclusion, and instead of scolding his sister, as he would have before, he calmly thanked Bernardo. He was as surprised as Amalia at the Indian’s generosity, since they had never
