couldn’t prove it. They never dared bring the subject up with the giant, who was very close-mouthed and would never have confessed to them. Neither did Amalia respond to Diego’s subtle questions; even in moments of greatest intimacy she guarded the family’s secrets. Diego could not take a suspicion of that nature to Tomas de Romeu without proof, and if he did, he would have to confess his own connections with the tribe. He decided, nevertheless, to take action. As Isabel said, they could not allow Juliana to end up married to Moncada out of mistaken gratitude.
The next day they managed to convince Juliana to get up out of bed, control her nerves, and go with them to the barrio where Amalia usually posted herself to tell the fortunes of the passersby. Nuria went with them, as was her duty, though her face looked worse even than it had the day before. One cheek was purple, and her eyelids were so swollen that she looked like a toad. It took less than half an hour to find Amalia. While the girls and their chaperone waited in the carriage, Diego, calling upon an eloquence he did not know he possessed, urged the Gypsy to save Juliana from a terrible fate.
“One word from you will prevent the tragedy of a loveless marriage between an innocent young girl and a heartless man. You must tell her the truth,” he pled dramatically.
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Amalia replied.
“Oh, yes, you know. The men who attacked the girls were from your clan. I know one of them was Rodolfo. I think that Moncada set the stage to look like a hero in front of the de Romeu sisters. It was all arranged, wasn’t it?” he insisted.
“Are you in love with her?” Amalia asked, with no malice.
Caught off guard, Diego had to admit that he was. Amalia took his hands, studied them with an enigmatic smile, and then wet the tip of a finger with saliva and traced the sign of the cross on his palms.
“What are you doing? Is this some kind of curse?” Diego asked, frightened.
“It’s a prediction. You will never marry her.”
“You mean that Juliana is going to marry Moncada?”
“That I do not know. I will do what you ask, but have no illusions that woman must live out her destiny, just as you must, and nothing I say will change what is written in the heavens.”
Amalia climbed into the carriage, nodded to Isabel, whom she had seen several times with Diego and Bernardo, and took her seat across from Juliana. Nuria held her breath, frightened, because she believed that Gypsies were descendents of Cain, as well as professional thieves.
Juliana dismissed her chaperone and Isabel, who complained but got out of the coach. When they were alone, the two women looked one another over for a long minute. Amalia made a detailed inventory: the classic face framed by black curls, the green cat’s eyes, the slender neck, the short fur cape and hat, the delicate kid boots. For her part, Juliana studied the Gypsy with curiosity; she had never seen one so close before. If she had been in love with Diego, her instinct would have warned her that this was her rival, but that thought never crossed her mind. She liked Amalia’s smoky scent, her prominent cheekbones, her full skirts, the tinkling of her silver jewelry. She thought she was beautiful. Impulsively, she removed her gloves and took Amalia’s hands in hers. “Thank you for talking with me,” she said. Disarmed by Juliana’s spontaneity, Amalia decided to violate the basic rule of her people: never to trust a gadje, especially if it endangered the tribe.
In a few words she described the dark side of Moncada; she told Juliana that, yes, the assault had been planned, that she and her sister had never been in danger, and that the stain on Moncada’s pant leg was not from a wound but from a piece of sheep gut filled with chicken blood.
She said that once in a while one or two men of her tribe did jobs for Moncada, usually unimportant things; only in a handful of instances had they done something bad like the attack on Count Orloff. “We are not criminals,” Amalia explained, and added that she was sorry that the Russian and Nuria had been struck; violence was prohibited in their law. And as the real coup de grace, she informed Juliana that it was Pelayo who had sung the serenade because Moncada was as tone-deaf as a duck. Juliana listened to the entire confession without a single question. The two women nodded and said goodbye. Amalia left the carriage; then Juliana burst into tears.
That same afternoon Tomas de Romeu formally received Rafael Moncada, who had informed him in a brief note that he found himself recovered from loss of blood and hoping to pay his respects to Juliana. That morning his footman had delivered a bouquet of flowers for her and a box of almond nougats for Isabel, delicate, modest attentions for which Tomas gave the suitor good marks. Moncada arrived dressed with impeccable elegance, leaning on a cane. Tomas welcomed him in the main salon, dusted in honor of his future son-in-law. He offered him a glass of sherry, and once they had taken a seat thanked him again for his timely intervention. Then he sent for his daughters. Juliana looked strained, and was wearing a dark dress more appropriate for a nun than for an important occasion like this. Her sister Isabel’s eyes were blazing, and the corners of her lips lifted in a mocking smile; she held Juliana’s arm in such a strong grasp that she seemed to be dragging her along. Rafael Moncada attributed Juliana’s ravaged countenance to nerves. “It is no wonder, after the terrible experience you have been through ” he began before she interrupted to announce in a trembling voice, but with iron conviction, that not even dead would she marry him.
After hearing Juliana’s emphatic no, Rafael Moncada left the house fuming, although still in control of his good manners. In his twenty-six years he had encountered a few obstacles but he had never failed in anything. He was not going to give up. He still had a few tricks up his sleeve: that was what social position, money, and connections were for. He had refrained from asking Juliana for her reasons; intuition warned him that it would be very bad strategy. She knew enough to have doubts, and he could not run the risk of being exposed. If Juliana suspected that the assault in the street had been a farce, there could be only one reason: Pelayo. He did not think the man would have dared betray him there was no profit in it for him but he might have been careless. There were no secrets in Barcelona; the servants had a much more efficient information network than the French spies in La Ciudadela. Just one wrong word from any of the conspirators and it would have reached Juliana’s ears. He had used the Gypsies on various occasions precisely because they were nomads; they came and went with no interchange with anyone outside their tribe; they had no friends or acquaintances in Barcelona; they were discreet out of necessity. During the time that he was away on his journey, he had lost contact with Pelayo, and in a certain way he was relieved.
Dealings with such people made him uncomfortable. When he got back, he thought that he could start with a clean slate, forget the peccadilloes of the past and start anew, detached from the underhanded world of hired skullduggery, but his vow to be a new man lasted barely a few days. When Juliana had asked for another two weeks to respond to his proposal of marriage, Moncada suffered a panic very rare in him; he prided himself on dominating even the monsters of his nightmares.
During his absence he had written Juliana several letters, which she had not answered. He attributed her silence to shyness; at an age when her contemporaries were already mothers, Juliana behaved like a schoolgirl. In his eyes that innocence was the girl’s best quality; it guaranteed that when she did give herself to him, she would do so without reserve. But with the new postponement his certainty faltered, and that was when he had decided to put on some pressure. A romantic exploit like one of those in the books she treasured would be his most effective move, he calculated, but he could not hope that the opportunity would happen on its own he had to speed things up. He would get what he wanted without harming anyone; it would not actually be deceiving her, because should footpads attack Juliana or any other decent woman he would rush to their defense. It did not seem necessary to explain those arguments to Pelayo, of course; he simply gave the orders and they were carried out without a hitch. True, the scene the Gypsies staged was briefer than he had planned because the knaves broke and ran after a few minutes, when they feared that Moncada’s sword was overly enthusiastic. That had not given him time to act with the dramatic splendor he had envisioned, which was why when Pelayo came to collect, he felt it was fair to haggle over the price. They argued, and Pelayo ended by accepting the lower amount, but Rafael Moncada was left with a bitter taste in his mouth; the man knew too much, and he might be tempted to blackmail him. Definitely, he concluded, it was bad for a man of that stripe, who respected no law or moral code, to have power over him. He must get rid of him as quickly as possible, him and his whole tribe.
As for Bernardo, he was very familiar with the tight network of gossip that people of Moncada’s class were so in fear of. With his tomblike silence, his dignified Indian ways, and his willingness to do favors, he had endeared himself to many people: the women in the market, the stevedores in the port, the artisans in the barrios, and the coachmen, lackeys, and servants in the homes of the rich. He stored information in his prodigious memory, divided into compartments as if in an enormous archive that contained orderly facts and lists to use at the proper time. He had not stored the night he had met Juanillo in Eulalia de Callis’s courtyard under “blow received” but, rather, under
