been treated well by a foreigner. They had realized that Bernardo was mute, but they did not make the common mistake of thinking he was also deaf and slow-witted. As a group, they scrambled to survive by taking on any job that fell into their hands; usually that meant selling and breaking horses, as well as treating them if they were sick or injured. They also made money with their small forges, working metals iron, gold, silver to fashion everything from horseshoes to swords and jewelry. The war frequently made them move on, but at the same time it worked in their favor, because in the furor of killing each other both French and Spanish ignored them. On Sundays and feast days the Gypsies would set up a ragged tent in some plaza and put on a small circus. Bernardo would soon meet the rest of the group, among whom a certain Rodolfo stood out, a giant covered with tattoos, who coiled a fat snake around his neck and lifted a horse with his bare hands. Over sixty years old, he was the eldest of the large family, and therefore the one with the most authority. Petrina, a tiny nine-year-old girl who folded herself like a handkerchief to fit inside a vessel for storing olives, was the main attraction of the pathetic Sunday circus. Pelayo did an acrobatic act on one or more galloping horses, and other members of the family delighted their public by throwing daggers at one another with their eyes blindfolded. Amalia sold raffle tickets, read horoscopes, and told fortunes with a classic glass ball, all with such unerring intuition that she frightened herself with her lucid successes. She knew that the ability to foretell the future can be a curse, since if it is not possible to change what is to happen, it is better not to know at all.
As soon as Diego de la Vega learned that Bernardo had struck up a friendship with the Gypsies, he insisted on meeting them so that he could learn more about Pelayo’s dealings with Rafael Moncada. He never imagined that he was going to take a liking to them and feel so comfortable in their company. By that time in Spain most of the tribes of the Roma people, as they called themselves, were living a sedentary life. They set up their camps on the outskirts of towns and cities.
Little by little they became part of the landscape, until the local population got used to seeing them and stopped bothering them, although they were never accepted. In Catalonia, on the other hand, there were no fixed camps; the Romany of that part of the world were nomadic.
Pelayo and Amalia’s tribe was the first to come along that wanted to stay in one place; they had been there for three years. Diego realized from the first moment that it was not a good idea to ask questions about Moncada, or anything else, because the Gypsies had very good reason to be suspicious and to keep their secrets to themselves. Once the wound on his arm had completely healed, and Pelayo had forgiven him for the nick his sword had made on his neck, Diego was able to get his permission to join the improvised circus, along with Bernardo. They made one brief appearance, which was not as stunning as they had hoped because Diego’s arm was still weak, but it was good enough to allow them to join as acrobats. With the help of the rest of the company, they put together an ingenious tangle of posts, ropes, and trapezes modeled on the rigging of the Madre de Dios. They entered the ring wearing black capes that they removed with a grand flourish, revealing tights of the same color. In that garb they flew through the air quite recklessly, as they had on a pitching ship at twice the height. Diego also made a dead hen disappear and then pulled it from the neck of Amalia’s blouse, and with his whip he put out a candle placed on the head of the gigantic Rodolfo, without disturbing a hair. They never mentioned these activities outside the world of the Gypsies; Tomas de Romeu’s tolerance had its limits, and he surely would not have approved. There were many things that de Romeu did not know about his young guest.
One Sunday Bernardo peeked from behind the artists’ curtain and saw that Juliana and Isabel, accompanied by their chaperone, were in the audience. On the way back from mass, where Nuria insisted on taking them even though the idea greatly displeased Tomas de Romeu, the girls had seen the circus and insisted on going in.
The tent, patched together from yellowed pieces of sail discarded in the port, had a center straw-covered ring, some wood benches for the moneyed spectators, and space in the rear for the hoi polloi, who had to stand. In that ring the giant lifted his horse, Amalia squeezed Petrina into the olive vessel, and Diego and Bernardo did their trapeze act. In the same spot, at night, Pelayo organized cockfights. It was not a place where Tomas de Romeu would have wanted to see his daughters, but Nuria could not stand firm when Juliana and Isabel joined together to bend her will.
“If Don Tomas finds out that we’re involved in this, he will send us back to California on the first available ship,” Diego whispered to Bernardo, aghast to see the girls in the tent.
Then Bernardo remembered the mask they had used to frighten the sailors on the Madre de Dios. He cut holes for eyes in two of Amalia’s kerchiefs, and they tied those on to cover their faces, praying that the de Romeu sisters would not recognize them. Diego decided to cancel his magic act, since he had often performed it in the girls’ presence.
Even so, they had the impression that the girls recognized them, until later that evening when he heard Juliana reporting the details of the spectacle to Agnes Duchamp. Whispering, behind Nuria’s back, she told her friend about the intrepid black-clad acrobats who risked their lives on the trapezes, and she added that she would give each one a kiss if only they would show their faces.
Diego was not as lucky with Isabel. He was celebrating their escapade with Bernardo when the girl came into the room without announcing herself, as she often did despite her father’s strict prohibition not to get too friendly with Diego. She planted herself before them, arms akimbo, and announced that she knew who the trapeze artists were and that she was ready to expose them unless they took her the next Sunday to meet the Gypsies. She wanted to see whether the giant’s tattoos, which looked as if they were painted on, were real, and whether the lethargic snake might not be embalmed.
In the following months, Diego, whose blood was boiling with the pent-up desires of his seventeen years, found relief in Amalia’s bosom.
They met at tremendous risk. By making love with a gadje she was violating a basic taboo, for which she could pay dearly. She had been a virgin when she married, the custom among the women of her people, and she had been faithful to her husband till the day he died.
Widowhood had left her in a kind of never-never land: still young, she would be treated like a grandmother until Pelayo, charged with finding her another husband once she dried the last tear of her mourning, fulfilled his obligation. Lives were lived in full view of the clan.
Amalia did not have time or a place to be alone, but occasionally she was able to meet Diego in some quiet alleyway: there she would take him in her arms, always with the insufferable fear of being caught. Amalia did not entangle Diego with romantic demands; after the ugly murder of her husband, she had resigned herself to being alone forever. She was twice Diego’s age and had been married for more than twenty years, but she was not expert in matters of love. With Ramon she had shared a deep and faithful affection absent raptures of passion. They had been married in a simple rite in which they shared a piece of bread anointed with drops of their blood. That was all that was required. The mere fact that they had made the decision to live together sanctified the union, but they gave a bountiful wedding banquet anyway, with music and dance that lasted three whole days. Afterward, they took a place in a corner of the communal tent. From that moment on they were never apart; they traveled the roads and byways of Europe together, they went hungry in hard times, they fled aggression in many places, and they celebrated at the slightest excuse. As Amalia told Diego, she had had a good life. She knew that Ramon, whole again, was waiting for her somewhere, miraculously recuperated from his martyrdom. When she had seen his body, mutilated by the hoes and spades of his murderers, the flame that lighted her within had gone out, and she had never again given a thought to sensual pleasure or the consolation of an embrace.
She had decided to invite Diego to her wagon out of simple friendship, and when she saw how on edge he was for want of a woman, it had occurred to her to help him; that was the extent of it. She ran the risk that the spirit of her husband would return, transformed into a mulo, to punish her for her posthumous infidelity, but she hoped that Ramon would understand her motives: she was not motivated by lust, only generosity. A bashful partner, she made love in the dark, without taking off her clothes. Sometimes she quietly wept. Then Diego would dry her tears with soft kisses, deeply moved. With her he learned to decipher some of the hidden mysteries of a woman’s feminine heart.
Despite the severe sexual norms of her tradition, Amalia, moved by unselfish sympathy, might have done Bernardo the same favor if he had given her so much as a hint, but he never did; the memory of Lightin-the-Night was always foremost in his mind.
Manuel Escalante watched Diego de la Vega for a long time before deciding to talk to him about the most important thing in his life. At first he had distrusted the youth’s arresting magnetism. To Escalante, a man of funereal seriousness, Diego’s lightheartedness was a character flaw, but he had been forced to revise that judgment the morning he witnessed the duel with Moncada. Escalante knew that the purpose of a duel is not to
