The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia

by Max Besora

  Driven mad by hours of frenetic dancing, most of them fell to ground out of pure exhaustion. Others, their thoughts still flummoxed by the effects of the lethal fungus, had visions of another world. Amid the general hallucinations, Grau de Montfalcó thought he was a hen and was clucking in a corral amid other hens, until the rooster approached and pecked him in the foot. Martulina the Divina was dancing and kissing a very dark gypsy girl, giving free rein to her natural instincts. Triboulet the Dwarf had fallen into the stew and was imagining he was at a Turkish bath surrounded by concubines, while his tiny Homunculus hopped through the bread crumbs on the ground and envisioned himself on the surface of some imaginary planet. Our hero, on the other hand, was having a bad trip and, dancing and dancing, he’d ended up in front of an abandoned house. And the house had stuck in his mind. And now, instead of a head, Orpí had a house. And inside that house, no one was ever home.

  ___________

  61. i.e. Gypsy camp.

  62. A dialectical phenomenon native to some southern parts of the Iberian Peninsula.

  63. A type of traditional dwelling in southern Spain.

  64. Caló for God.

  Chapter VI

  In which Orpí and his friends meet an Arab who tells them a ghost story

  The next morning, when Orpí and his friends awoke, they saw that the improvised camp had disappeared and the gypsies had vanished as if by the art of magic.

  “Damn tinkers! They hath bilked us!” bawled our hero. “But unaccountably, they forsooke our ducats and took merely our shoes … what bisarre folk!”

  So, barefoot as your average penitents, Orpí and his friends continued their route toward Seville, where they stopped at a convent to ask for some soup. There they were given shoes and that very afternoon, crossing over two gigantic mountains traversed by a timid brook of crystal-clear water, our hero said, “Methunks we’ve been here before.”

  “Cain’t be,” replied Martulina. “Hange on, now that thou sayeth that … yond brook ringeth a bell.”

  “Alass & allack!” cursed Orpí. “We hath gone in circles! Did thou not say thou knew the way, Triboulet?”

  “I lied,” confessed the dwarf, laughing the whole while.

  A fog was now spreading through the precipitous mountains, surrounding the small group lit only by a big, round, full moon that was partially blurred by the mist. Suddenly, a long, high-pitched howl broke the silence.

  “Awesum, just what we needeth: wolves,” complained Grau de Montfalcó, furrowing his brow. “We shll be eat’n alive if we don’t doeth something!”

  Too late. A shadow appeared before them, spinning in circles, emerging and vanishing amid the rocks.

  “They art surrounding us!” carped Martulina, who’d pulled out a slingshot and fired a rock at the beast, who let out a quite unbeastly “ow!”

  “Ow?” asked Orpí. “Wolves don’t say ow.”

  The friends approached the wounded body stretched out on the ground, and discovered a man covered in wolf hides.

  “This poore man besuffereth mania lupina,” said Orpí, medically. “He most lik’ly wast bitten by a wolf, like the King of Arcadia,65 and did turn into a lycanthrope.”

  At that, the wolfman, who wasn’t dead, leapt up and bit the person closest to him, who was poor Grau de Montfalcó.

  “Owwww!” Grau cried out in pain as Orpí and the others pounced on the stranger and tied up his hands.

  When the biter came to, he spoke like this: “”66

  “What sayeth he?”

  “That must bee the language of the licanthropes,” concluded Orpí. “We must heal Grau rapid or he shall turnt into a wolf as well.”

  “No! He be a Turk!” exclaimed Triboulet the Dwarf, drawing his dagger.

  “”67 he said before continuing in Spanish. “I art no wolfman and no Turk! More like a yunicorn with this noggin bumpe from yon rock ye threw at mee! I art Valle del Omar Sha-Rif and a Moslem from the Penynsula, a physician by trade. Free me and, while I healeth thy friend, I shall tell ye mine peckuliar story.”

  A little while later, they were all sitting around a campfire on which Triboulet the Dwarf and Martulina were cooking, lovingly, two hares they’d caught a few hours earlier. While they all gorged themselves, the Arab tended to Grau de Montfalcó’s wound and told his story.

  “As a man of mine wurd, I shall begin at the begynning. I am a Moor, Allah is xabidor,68 borne and raized in Alhama, a city of the Kingdom of Granada, and did study to be an algebraist69, as ze Arab triumfs in those lands art numerous and varied, in the fields of architecture and bricklaying, agrickulture, medicine, and craftwork. Mine medical renown anon reach’d the ears of a deep-pocket’d gentleman, whose saintly wife, Doña Inés, grewe very ill after a tumble offe a stallion. As the Averroists, I doth not believe in eternal life, notwithstanding I did sweare to remedy his bryde and thus I did, and they both didst marvell, and hence I did becomme their doctor. However a remarkible friendship aroseth twixt Doña Inés and I, so remarkible that mine orbs didst growe more and more captivat’d with each passing day as I look’d beponst her, ’til her splendour seemed to me commensurate to, and even greater than, the majestick gardens of Aranjuez (which, as all civilised men knowe, art the most lovely in this worlde). Altho her husband didst discover our secret love, and one night he did kille Doña Inés as she sleept and had me arrest’d and condemn’d to death by hanging. But, by the prophet Mohammed, whilst I did awaite mine fate in pryson, induring a mickle of tortures, one night before me didst appeare the ghost of Doña Inés, who open’d up every door to me, allowing mee to escape. I fled yond city, into the mountains, where I did contrive to catch a wolf to sate mine hunger. And then I didst rid mineself of mine vestiments so as to elude discoveree, then did sheathe mineself with the skyns of that beest. And tis thusly how I came to be thusly: in these mountains, in this solitude amongst these crags, amidst this snow, distanc’d from mine longe life of anguish, ever glancing o’er mine shoulder, for the long arm of justice be long. Eresince, mye Doña Inés doth appear to me each night—prithee may the Prophet keep her in his Garden—and tis as if I twere wedded to a zombee. That be alle, peoples of the northland, I canst tell ye of mie story, whose ending I shall leave to the heavens, to the earth, and to thine goode guidance.”

  After hearing the end of Valle del Omar’s sad and moving biography, Orpí and his friends dried their tears. And it aroused such tenderness in them toward that poor man that they invited him to continue along with them to Seville in search of a better life. However, dear reader, that is a story not for this Chapter, but the next.

  ___________

  65. i.e. Orpí is alluding to Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

  66. i.e. “You’re crazy!” in Arabic.

  67. i.e. “Damn idiots!” in Arabic.

  68. i.e. “Only Allah knows,” in Arabic.

  69. i.e. Surgeon specialized in bone fractures and dislocations.

  Chapter VII

  In which we learn of the arrival of the six friends to the city of Seville and Joan Orpí receives some bad tidings

  The five friends (plus the Homunculus) finally reached the city of Seville. It was all flower-filled balconies, narrow cobblestone streets, churches with gold and polychrome altars and Solomonic columns, and it was all immobilized by a lethal heat that made the excrement and urine on the streets boil with an unbearably noxious stench. Our band led their horses up-up-up a long, narrow street of white houses, crowned with a small church. Then they went down an even narrowerer street to the Torre del Oro and from there, to the Puerta del Arenal. A raging sun beat down, and throughout that entire trajectory they didn’t see a single soul. The city seemed to be abandoned. But as soon as the sun set behind the mountains and the chiming of the bells of the Giralda were heard, the whole city suddenly filled with people and the roar of human life: royal soldiers, hidalgos, gentlemen, ladies of the upper bourgeoisie, black slaves imported from Africa, natives from the Indies wearing loincloths and feathers on their heads
who looked at everything with terrorized eyes, carriages and carts passing up and down, taverns opening up their doors, churches ringing their bells, sopistas70 singing amusing syllogisms for their sopa boba, villains plotting swindles beneath bridges, sailors flirting with ladies of the night, and citizens of a thousand different nations.

  “What a lotte of people there be in this city … and suche rejoicing!” exclaimed our hero.

  Where so many people came from not even God knows, but the city of Seville turned out to be a very lively, jovial place, a marvel where it seemed all dreams could be realized.

  Orpí and his friends entered one of the many taverns that lined a square, where they heard a music entirely new to their ears, with intense guitar strumming, shouts, faces that clenched and softened, shrieks and vibrant stomps. A dancer moved her skirt as if two flags were waving at once and a man bellowed as if his liver were being pulled from his mouth, and everyone accompanied the musicians with rhythmic hand clapping. When Orpí asked Valle del Omar what sort of music that was, the Moor answered, “Fellah-mangú, mine friend. The song of the Moors and the journeymen gypsies.”

  “Thou dost call it falamengu?” asked Orpí.

  “Yes, flamenco, or some such,” he said.

  While Martulina, del Omar, and Grau had some tapas and Triboulet the Dwarf joined in with a dancer, our hero headed, thinking positively and wasting no time, to the local government office. He was prepared to ask for the job that his former mentor in Barcelona, the Sephardi Yehuda Abrabanel, had assured him his letter of recommendation would secure him. When Orpí reached the secretary, he removed his hat in a wide bow and said, “Hello, esteem’d secretary.”

  “My name iz Zeñó Ernesto, not zecretary.”

  “Very well, Ernesto. I come sent by Manuel de Rubeola, of Barcelona, bearing a letter of commendation for the post as administrator to thee royal tobacco shoppes,” he said, in Catalan-inflected Spanish.

  The secretary Ernesto laughed so hard he almost choked.

  “Lookee here, Catalan, the man whoze name thou bandy about be a huckzter and a Jew. He’z wanted by the law, underztand? If he zhowz hiz face in Zeville, he shan’t live long.”

  “Art thou saying I don’t get the job?” asked Orpí. “I have a law degree, eh? Can I speak with whomever’s in charge around hither?”

  “Law degree zchmaw degree! Skedaddle!”

  When our hero returned, entirely woebegone, to where his friends were waiting for him, he found Martulina the Divina in a sword fight with five rogues at once and the tavern in shambles.

  “Wouldst thou mind telling me what the heyeck be going on here?” asked Orpí, fighting by the young woman’s side.

  “Thy friend, the dwarf,” she said, stabbing an opponent. “He groped his dance partner and now thirty of her brothers, cousins, and uncles be intent on cutting us down to size to safeguard her honour. It seems she was unmarried and the didicois have very strict laws regarding such matters.”

  “Aha,” said Orpí, as he brandished his sword left and right.

  Meanwhile, squads of fearsome musketeers began to arrive, breaking up the bar fight with shots of their muskets. Orpí and Martulina slipped through the backstreets before they could arrest them. Not long after, they found Grau de Montfalcó sitting on a wooden bench.

  “Friends, sorry that I didst not lend a hand,” he said, crying inconsolably. “Ye know I canst bear violence, I’m ever so sensitive.”

  “Wherefor art del Omar and Triboulet?”

  “They hath vanished into the thicke air.”

  “Well, that’s juste great.”

  The three friends searched for somewhere to spend the night. Once they were installed at a posada, they went out to a mesón for supper.

  “Friends, I feele lost,” confessed Orpí. “Turns out I have not the job I was expecting to gette. No matter thine university degree, if thou hath no godparents nor goode contacts these days, thou art a veritable no-body.”

  “Chinne up!” exclaimed Grau de Montfalcó. “Surely only good canst befalle us from now on! Don’t ye agree?”

  Orpí and Martulina looked at each other with their eyebrows raised, not at all convinced.

  “Be thou a lump or what?” said the girl. “All we’ve had are catastrophes!”

  “One moment,” reflected Orpí. “Grau maketh a point. We must not allow ourselfs to lose hope withe such insouciance. As Doménico Cavalca sayeth: he who doth not work hath no right to eat. Morrow I shall get busy pursuing a jobbe, and ye guys aught followe my lead!”

  Thus, with a clear plan, the three friends finished their supper and then snuck into a new comic play, entitled Don Gil of

  71. i.e. By Tirso de Molina (1579–1648).

  the Green Breeches,71 in a corral in the Plaza Alfalfa, and then later they went to sleep, and then later … I’ll explain what happened then later.

  ___________

  70. Poor students who sang in exchange for a stew made of leftovers.

  71. i.e. By Tirso de Molina (1579-1648).

  Chapter VIII

  In which Orpí searches for work everywhere and finally tries his luck in a bookstore

  During the following weeks, our hero devoted himself heart and soul to his search throughout the city for paying employment. He asked for work at the port as he watched stevedores and sailors hauling sacks to and fro, he asked for work from the Genovese bankers and at the markets, he asked the carpenters, the makers of sails, the tavern keepers, the apothecaries, and the gunners, but he received no positive response. Finally, one day he entered a house of books called Cromberger Press.72 The old, antiquated place was crowded with used, damp-smelling copies, disorganized on shelves that went all the way up to the ceiling in endless dusty towers. On one of the shop’s walls, Orpí noticed an engraving by Jan van der Straet that showed Amerigo Vespucci discovering an America represented by a naked feral woman, as seen in this reproduction:

  Rummaging through the shelves, our hero also found a copy of Les Grandes Voyages (1588) by Theodor de Bry, which depicted the natives of the New World as savages and cannibals. The darkness inside the shop, lit only by a weak oil lamp on the counter, prevented our hero from making out a figure seated in an armchair, right behind him, in the shadows. Orpí rang the bell on the counter several times, until the figure spoke.

  “Good tidings, sir.”

  Our hero turned with a start, and discovered a wrinkled old man whose eyes, behind small glasses, were fixed on an enormous tome propped up on his lap. He was surrounded by mountains of books on both sides.

  “Good tidings be to thee too, sir, deare bookseller!” exclaimed Orpí, removing his hat courteously as he picked up a random book to touch its dried pages and theatrically smell its binding, as he took a breath to begin the declamation of his curriculum vitae. “Ahh, what scent these longevous books doth have, both nauseating and intoxicating! Mine name be Juan Urpín, a name that perhaps means nothing to thee and as such I shant repeat it (for the moment), but thou shouldst know that tis destiny or fate what brought me here. Being as I art learn’d and well-read, I specialise in the selling of books long and short: entertainin’ books such as pastoral and byzantine novels (which, lest we forget, traditional rhetoric considers the highest and most noble literary genre) and chivalresque novels (somewhat out of fashione nowadays), almanacks and books of vet’rinary science, breviaries & missals, albums of stamps and crestomathies, dictionaries & grammar books, collections of maxims & adages, books with complex characters and simple ones, violent novels for manly men and romances for restless women, epistolary collections and ancient history, eclectic medickal treatises, esoteric kabbalistic volumes or gardening manuals, expensive books with elegant covers for the rich and cheap reading copies for the plebes, notebookes for students and teachers, pens & pencils for the erudite and the ignorant, new editions for those who are uppe on the latest of trends, old books for the carefree, and editions princeps for those seeking ancient treasures, and even the most heathen on the t
rail of secret, arcane, or directly heretical books included in the famous Index Librorum Prohibitorum, whence the Holy See did gather all the volumes the faithful must not read under threat of mortal sin. I canne furthermore sell with equal utmost ease and sweet diligence books of military strategy as of theology, maps, or imagery, since, as an accredit’d attorney, I be a great expert in sundry subjects, from Greek and Latin to the most scientific wizdom and voguish educational postulates, and I be also capable to presage, just by looking at a customer’s face, what sort of book he seeketh, and whye and whatfore, whether he shall treat the book well, as if twere ’is son, or if he shall tear it up at his first need for a bonfire, whethere he shall use what he gleaneth from his reading for Good or for Evil, since it is knowne that litterature, of all the arts and branches of ’nowledge, be verily the fertile mother of all wisdom, the fount of all relative to human experience and behaviour and, just as God omnipotent playeth with his creation (that is to say, us), the writer canst employ his skillful techniques to do as he wishes with his protagonists, so that if, for example, this were a novelle and not pure, concrete reality and I were the writer, I couldst decide for thee whether or not to grant me this job, and maketh all sorts of introspections into thine mind, but as such writing, just as reading, be a ne’erending story, pray let us goeth straight to the bunche of sublime and original ideas I hath in mine brain for rest’ring thine business its erstwile glory and sheen, i.e. a nice coat of paint on these mouldy walls engulf’d in centuries-olde dust, or swapping out these disgusting, opaque windows for clear’r ones, believe me, fore henceward passersby wouldst see thine intellectual business from outside and all come running in, anxious to educate their souls to the fullest, and now we couldst move right into discussing the salary that, in mine opinion, such a person as meself, Doctor of Law, shouldst receive, seeing as knowledge doth not make one rich in this worlde.”