from you. Women who’ve gone among them—my mother included—have even had pieces of their dresses cut off.
“When they first entered our country,” he continued, mopping his brow with a well-used linen, “they were given offers of safe conduct and were even provided with alms. However, it wasn’t long before they, and the people with whom they ran, were being paid to stay away.2 It’s unfortunate,” he said with a shrug, “for they have skills as smiths, musicians, and soldiers. However, they’re not to be trusted. No,” he repeated, “best to stay clear of them. We may camp here now that they’re gone, but, should they return for their washtub or these other things, we’ll abandon this camp.”
They took the camp the gypsies had deserted and Catalina, who had begun to brighten in her general demeanor, made use of the tub to disinfect the few items of clothing they had found, some of which fit the children. As she worked at her washtub, she assured herself that every fold and seam was thoroughly scrubbed in the boiling water. Looking over their encampment as the sun slowly sank behind the valley’s western wall, she examined the sky and watched a bird circling at great height in the cloudless heavens. There was something about the evening, perhaps the color of the light as it filtered through the pines, that reminded her of home. She thought back to the bathing time they had been forced to keep secret and to a conversation she had had with Pedro.
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It was at their home in Carmena and she had been helping Pedro as he secured their house prior to taking their forbidden baths. How was one to deal with such a concept, that warm baths were illegal? These were not ritual baths or baths of purification such as those that must be taken in the water of a rushing stream. These were only baths which created and intensified a sense of cleanliness and self-respect and the Cortes had decreed them illegal!
Surely, Catalina had insisted to anyone who would listen, that law of 1567 was intended for the Moriscos—the name given to converted Moors—and had nothing to do with them. Some of these followers of Mohammed were still wearing their shapeless pants, turbans, and white linen trappings, were still speaking Arabic, and were probably still Muslims beneath their forced conversions. The Moriscos were calling attention to themselves, she feared, and, like the dreaded gypsies, might not survive until this law, as with most laws in Spain, became a dead letter. In any event, she had insisted, if any Spaniard followed these insane laws, citizens could easily revert to a time when it was illegal to sit on the wall of a house and dangle one’s feet, or to lead an animal to water by chains. Clothes left hanging outside their home might still be confiscated, but no one was going to decree that here behind her own walls she could not give her children a bath!
Pedro and Catalina talked as they completed preparations for the family’s bathtime.
“‘I’m glad she’s gone,” Catalina said, in reference to their housekeeper, Ama. “God help me, Pero there are times when she drives me crazy, absolutely crazy,” she added, displaying the frustration she experienced at dealing with the 12-year-old.
“What’d she do now?” Pedro asked, steeling himself to hear a new absurdity while taking a caldron of water from the wrought iron rod of their stone hearth, the floor of which extended into their firelit room. He held it by its bail, placed it on top of an old hearth stool whose seat had been blackened by similar objects, and replaced it with another as she had continued with her lamentations.
“Oh the things she comes up with!” Catalina had said while wrapping her hair in a turban, her auburn curls revealed at its edge. “The things she tells the children, Pero,” she said. “She scares them half to death. Last week she told them that this past fall while she was helping us pick corn from the fields below the walls, she saw a person’s shadow without its head! Can you even imagine that, Pero?” she had asked in frustration. “A person’s shadow without its head? She told them that her grandmother had told her that if a person sees her shadow without its head on the seventh day of the autumn festival, that she’ll die during the year. Then, later, she told me that it wasn’t her own shadow she’d seen, but someone else’s . . . you know . . . in that way she has of speaking as though she has a secret known only to herself. Porquerias, Pero, that’s all her secrets are. Useless trifles! I know that she wanted me to ask whose shadow she’d seen, but I refused. I wasn’t going to encourage her foolishness. Thank God, she went to see her mother and won’t be back till Tuesday. Anyhow, we couldn’t be taking our baths outside if she was here.”
Ama, Catalina’s housekeeper, was a soot-splattered young urchin whom Catalina’s father had rescued from the mills where she had worked with her mother amid the stale and sour smell of millions of silkworms. Catalina and Pedro had spoken with Ama’s mother who seemed to be a sensible woman, but this ancient grandmother whom they had yet to meet, was constantly filling Ama’s head with nonsense.
Catalina had tried to tame her—this mysterious and wild thing—providing clothing and shoes for her as replacements for the rags that she wore. But Ama refused to be tamed. She reluctantly wore the clothes they provided, but refused to wear the shoes which remained hidden beneath her bed. Catalina had wondered what had happened to them and had discovered them while searching for one of Luis’s toys.
The shoes, alpargatas of the Basque region, tiny sandals of coarse canvas soled with hemp, just sat there, idle and abandoned, their toes curling toward the ceiling. There, too, hidden beneath her bed, were a tattered blanket, a sack of dried bread, several ears of corn, and, unaccountably, what appeared to be weeds from their garden—the latter with tufted roots the soil of which was still attached. Catalina recalled looking around her uncomfortably as she had halted her search, feeling that she had invaded a private space, the coop of a starving and frightened chicken. She left the items where they lay and retreated, never to speak of them to Ama, and, although Ama continued to sleep beneath the bed they provided, she spent most weekends with her own family, which gave Catalina a brief but needed respite from her.
Pedro, of course, was first as he walked across the cold stones with his final pail of water. Now clad in a sheet and clutching a bar of Neapolitan soap (made of wheat bran, milk of poppies, goat’s milk, marrow of deer, bitter almonds and sugar), he moved quickly across the cold stones of the plazuela. Then, without taking off his mantle, which he wore as a barber’s cape that encircled both shoulders, he sat in the water that he had poured for himself. His bath would be a short one, for there were two to go.
Diego and Luis were next, and their baths were also short as they sat in the water used by their father and washed with the soap and rag he had provided them. However, Diego, at least, seemed more interested in cleaning the beautiful white stone he had brought with him than caring for his own needs. Catalina had admonished the boys to wash here and there while she poured water over them with a copper cup. Diego though, continued to play with the stone he had found, noting that, with a cross seemingly etched across one of its surfaces, it looked like a cruzado. His father had told him that a white stone meant good luck and that this was a stone to cherish. Clutching it beneath the sheet his mother had provided him after the bath, he took the stone with him as he later ran into the house.
With their basin newly filled, and in the shadowed light of their open plazuela, Catalina placed Lucia and Ana within the water. Then, uncharacteristically, for she was excessively modest, she kicked off her alpargatas, let her robe slip from her slim, white shoulders and stepped in behind them.
Their bath, which now contained angel water, was a special treat. The angel water was a cosmetic made from the distillation of red and white roses, trefoil, red poppies, lavender root, honeysuckle, orange blossoms, white lilies, thyme, carnations and orange rinds which the three of them had made during the previous summer. It was a bath within which to soak. Therefore, with their knees tucked neatly beneath their chins, and with the warmth of bared flesh connecting them as they pressed one against another, they observed a small group of swifts and black martins as they flew in tight semicircles far above their heads. Then, with the flecks of orange rinds floating lazily about them, they watched as the late afternoon sun sank behind the wall of their plazuela.
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Was that only a week ago? Catalina thought. Standing