by Max Besora
“Tis not possible!” exclaimed Gregorio Izquierdo. “Such a book was published in 1555, if mine memory serves, and we art now in the year of our Lord 1623! If you be truly Esteban the Blackmoor from his Shipwrecks … thou must be older than Methuselah!”
“You’ve got a point there,” said Estebanico. “But it was in that tlibe where we found the Fountain of Youth. Keep this twixt us, but that’s why I never age.”
“Incredible!”
“Nay. What was incledible was escaping flom there, since once you dlink flom that magic fountain, you can nevel leave: those wele the lules of that tlibe. Cabeza de Vaca pletended to be a doctol and, once we’d ealned the tlust of the Indians, we fled into extlemely difficult adventules. Eight yeals laer I was palt of an expedition in Pelu to find the Seven Cities of Cibola. I didn’t find them but I got lich with a tleasule of umalked pieces of gold I found neal a volcano in the nolth. But when I got to Quito, a detachment of soldiels of foltune got wind of mine luck and excogigated against me, until they managed to lob me of my ealnings. One of them, by the way, had the same name as you: Gregorio Izquierdo, but he looked naught as thou. Othelwise, I would have had to kill you light this minute with mine bale hands.”
When our hero heard that his heart made a triple somersault.
“A strange story, Estebanico. And now, let us speak in private, if thou don’t mind,” he said, pulling him to one side.
There our hero explains the entire real Gregorio Izquierdo affair to him and promises Estebanico the Blackamoor half of the treasure if they manage to find it.
“I’m no longel intelested in gold,” he replied. “But you should know that tleasule is culsed, since those Castilian pigs took it, put me in chains, and sent me to the galleys. I’ve clossed this ocean mole times than anybody. I’m black by bilth and folced into slavely, sir. But I cannot live without my fleedom, which is worth mole than all the gold in this filthy wolld.”
“I shall grant thee thine freedom, ladino92,” said Gregorio Izquierdo. “And I vow that any man who tries to steal it from thee again will taste mine sword.”
That night the Africans joyously celebrated their newly recovered freedom, dancing the macumba and singing songs, and everyone was happily drinking grog, as our hero mused on the affair of Gregorio Izquierdo’s treasure, which was actually Estebanico the Blackamoor’s. It was all well and truly a fix, but he’d have time to ponder it further because, as no good deed goes unpunished, the ocean began to get choppy. The ship crashed against the water, which had turned from light blue to gunmetal gray, and increasingly rough. Gusts of wind from the west made the ship veer directionless, spinning on the crests of immense waves. The Argos was dragged out of control through the waters of that dark ocean sea.
“We shant escape this thunder-head,” cried Captain Nino.
Since the ship was too loaded down and was leaking everywhere due to having been poorly caulked, they had to toss part of the cargo into the water. The rudder was wrecked and even the mast got cracked, and had to be chopped down, while the wind and thunderclaps destroyed the sails. Some of the crewmembers fell into the sea, including the three Capuchin friars, while Father Claver was saved from the same fate at the last moment thanks to our hero, who grabbed him by his Christian beard and pulled him back on deck. And that was how they all spent the night, without a wink of sleep, bailing out water to stay afloat, vomiting all the sirens they’d eaten because of the ship’s bucking back and forth, and pleading with God for the mercy of making it out of that alive.
___________
92. i.e. A form of address for foreigners who speak Spanish like natives.
Chapter XVI
On how the Argos arrived safely in port and “Gregorio Izquierdo” sees the New World for the first time
The next morning, the sunlight revealed a clear day, as well as the image of the Argos completely destroyed, bobbing adrift. The survivors gradually awakened from the nightmare, one by one, and what they glimpsed when they opened the blinds of their eyes was a miracle.
“Terra … terra firma!” hollered a sailor.
It was the Cape of Three Points on the Paria-Araya peninsula. After two months, three days, five hours, and nine and a half minutes of brutal sailing, the mountainous silhouettes of terra firma appeared on the horizon like a dream while the forest trees extended from one shore to the other. Only 8% of the Argos’s crew had survived, but it was a happy 8%. The sailors were singing, the soldiers were singing, and the civillian passengers were singing.
Kind friends and companions, come join me in rhyme
Come lift up your voices in chorus with mine
Come lift up your voices, all grief to refrain
For we may or might never all meet here again
So here’s a health to the company and one to my lass
Let’s drink and be merry all out of one glass
Let’s drink and be merry, all grief to refrain
For we may or might never all meet here again …
And such was the rejoicing and mirth at life’s triumph over death, that everyone burst into tears, and trumpets, drums, and lutes were brought out on deck and they danced and laughed like children, spinning in a celebratory circle around the main mast.
When they were closer to Margarita Island, a hundred natives appeared in their canoes, offering pineapples, cassava, guavas, and tobacco in exchange for trinkets. Some of the vendors, with tattooed faces, smiled in the shadow of their canoes and the gold coins with the image of the King glimmered in the sun as they changed hands.
“I like this barter sistem,” said Martulina the Divina, as she swapped a straw hat made by the natives for her rat-eaten blanket.
Our hero, oblivious to the transcultural trafficking, was looking out at those lands and saw in them the possibility of leaving behind the decadent world of the Iberian Peninsula in order to start afresh, in a new Golden Age, a new beginning. It was the year of our Lord 1626 and the equatorial climate of that promised land made his little hairs stand on end.
“Indeed, so much mountain and so much green upon the horizon seem to be a Lost Paradise,” said Gregorio Izquierdo to Father Claver. “I canst scarce believe we surviv’d this hellish voyage.”
“Poseidon hath pardoned us, mine son,” said the Jesuit, who wasn’t arriving in the New World for the first time. “But don’t think for a minute what thou seeth be Plato’s Atlantis (whych, as thou knowst, was ruled by Poseidon, a distant ancestor of Plato’s father himself). Newcomers believe this to be Eden, but tis the same or worse than the Peninsula.”
The Argos ascended, drained and gutted, to Cumanà, towed by sixty native canoes and a patache that came out to greet them.
There the entire crew disembarked and after getting through customs they found that the few belongings they had were inspected by the Inquisition staff. Many of the books the crew was carrying, rotted by saltwater, were requisitioned, since they were banned to avoid setting a bad example for the natives educated in Christendom. Our hero, however, managed to keep his extensive library—more than a hundred volumes, their pages covered in mold due to the sea climate—from being confiscated because it was hidden beneath a pile of clothes in his trunk.
The port of Cumanà, which was not larger than the one in Seville, had constant commercial traffic: strange animals with even stranger names: popinjays, panthers, and pelicans (and others that didn’t start with the letter P) were for sale, criolla prostitutes whose flesh trembled, but not with fear, as they approaching singing obscene songs, brushing them with their breasts toasted by the tropical sun, blacks selling pearls, muleques93 trafficking in indigo dye and cacao, and Indian women dressed in their huipils selling flour, fresh fish, seeds, and giants’ bones to the ships heading back to Spain. Many other vessels arrived constantly in that port, from Africa, their holds filled to bursting with black slaves from Mauritania and “white” Berber slaves from Morocco, who disembarked covered in wounds and lacerations from the terrible conditions on the voyage.
Some of those bozales94 died as soon as they set foot on terra firma and their corpses were burned on a small island near the port in two large bonfires that were lit each day, at dusk, and gave off a greasy black smoke.
“Ay, I’m so afflight’d!” said Estebanico the Blackamoor. “If I’m not caleful, these honkeys will fly me alive!”
“Worry not, mine friend,” said Gregorio Izquierdo. “Stick by mine side and everything will be fine.”
Estebanico the Blackamoor followed our hero as they made their way toward the city. The imposition of Christianity and the Latin of the Vulgate mixed in that region with all the autochthonous imagery, creating a bizarre, improbable blend. Churches and monasteries sprang up all over and the clergymen rushed to create schools to educate and convert the locals. Cumaná, a border city between the old and new continents, turned out to be a cheap knock-off of Seville, made of white clay houses and a church that gleamed on a hillock. Criollo actors recited meters and rhymes for a few gold ducats on improvised stages in the city streets, the mulequillos95 offered themselves as servants to the newcomers, the hidalgos, sweating beneath outmoded dress coats, rested in the shade of mahogany trees on their private ranches, while two cimarrons96 were executed in a public square for insurrection and others were displayed on a stage with their ankles shackled to an iron rod, as punishment for refusing to work. What was once jungle was now a garbage dump where wild dogs fought over a piece of rotted, fly-covered meat. However, our hero could see that, beyond that hostile town, the true America awaited him, a continent of lush vegetation that he would soon explore.
The surviving crew of the Argos, meanwhile, was celebrating with a meal in a tavern.
“In this one, fer twenty-five maravedis, thou canst eat in the Sevillian style,” said Captain Nino.
After eating turtle soup, Gregorio Izquierdo made the decision to desert the army in order to fulfill the promise he had made to Úrsula Pendregast: to collect the part of the treasure the real Gregorio Izquierdo had stashed in Caracas. But, when he patted down the pockets of his dress coat, he discovered that where he once carried the letter given to him by the Sevillian swindler, there was now nothing. He’d lost it! And he was just about to leave, when a squadron of soldiers for the Crown burst into the tavern.
“Not so fast, chapetón!”97 one of them said. “Or hath ye forgotten ye be royal soldiers? We are being sent to Salinas de Araya to defend it from the Flemish, and we’re expected there yesterday!”
Our hero had to obey orders or risk being written up and convicted for desertion. Followed by Martulina, the Jesuit Father Claver, and Estebanico the Blackamoor, they had to get back onboard again, when it hadn’t been even an hour since they’d come ashore and, bidding farewell to the captain and the remaining crew of the Argos, they were quickly taken along with a squad of eighty soldiers to the south of Venezuela. And here begins the true life of the soldier Gregorio Izquierdo, which will not be told here in this Book Two but rather in the third, which follows after a brief pause as … [if you’ll excuse me, I have to visit the loo!]
1714. The captain has an important and profound discussion with his soldiers:
The captain returns from the bathroom still buttoning up his fly and realizes that his public has grown. Women, children, and old folks are now huddled inside the theater to take refuge from the Borbonic artillery fire, which is relentlessly falling on the city of Barcelona. Proud of the sudden swell in his audience, the captain sits down among his soldiers and fills his pipe with tobacco, lighting it with a match in preparation of continuing his story. But he’s interrupted before he can start.
“Sir …” says the soldier who is acting as scribe, “I hath some questions about the plotte of this story: what happens to the princess Doña María, does she just disappear? And how is the whole ‘Gregorio Izquierdo’ affair resolved? I mean, how doth Joan Orpí recover his true identity?”
“All in due time, soldier,” assures the captain, taking puffs on his pipe in such a way that his face is enveloped in a cloud of smoke. “Allow the mysteries to resolve themselves, following the plot like a river follows its natural course. As I was saying …”
“But, Captain, thine story is too predictable,” complains the scribe, interrupting him again. “How doth thou expeckt readers to identify with the protagonist? While we’re at it, we could also critique the fact that the narrative voice is constantly interfering in the story, notte to mention the cacophonic pirouettes thou oblige me record, the dialectical expressions, the poetic amphigory, the constant linguistic ups and downs, and the impossible mishmash of archaic and modern language, etc. Thou art a rhetorical rebbel!”
“Shut thine trap, soldier!” the captain exclaims angrily. “Since when does the scrivener have opinions? What sort of habitus be this? What thou shouldst be doing is writing down what I say! And if mine words doth not illuminate all the paths of writing, tis because the relationship betwixteth signified and signifier—sorry to break it to you—will allways be arbitrary.”
“Perhaps, Captain, but the way thou mocketh language itself leads to absolute ethical relativism and the impotence of ordering existential chaos,” exclaims a different soldier. “I mean, I hope no pissed-off reader comes to me later complaining he’s been duped by the back jacket copy, that it’s all too parodical and scatterbrained, or that it’s an attempt to write in a spoken Catalan or how they spoke in Orpí’s time but without any sense of grammar, morphology, or syntax …” gripes the soldier.
“And so what is it that you want?” the enraged captain asks. “You want me to use more popular prose that fully respects the pact with the reader and the Aristotelian principles of realism? Would that make thou happy? Maybe you’d appreciate some sort of less autonomous literature, that takes part in the collective project? Come on, man, gimme a break! Your obsessions would make Plato himself laugh! You’re worried they’ll criticize thee for writing incorrectly? Well you tell them that you’ve invented a language that constitutes the topography of its own world … and that’s that! Withal, as far as I knowe, Catalan doesn’t yet have any normative grammar—or descriptive, or prescriptive, or predictive, for that matter! And if we ever do, it will be like taxidermying the language and putting it in a museum, because everything’s better when it’s mixed! So just write down what I sayeth and quit yer jibber-jabber.”
The soldiers looked at each other with a tinge of compassion. They seem depressed.
“Oooohkay. And when art we getting to the end of this story, Cap?”
“We’re not far off,” said the captain. “Book Three is the final and definitive of the adventures and misadventures of Joan Orpí, and they all take place in the Americas, except two or three Chapters. And now, if ye don’t mind, it’s time to shut your traps and prick up your ears.”
The soldiers nod their heads and the one assigned as scribe prepares the pen and paper, the civilians get ready to listen, and the captain slowly opens his mouth, revealing a glimpse of teeth blackened by tobacco, about to continue declaiming his tale, amid the noises of war outside the theater.
___________
93. African slaves between seven and ten years old.
94. i.e. Recently arrived black slave.
95. i.e. Slave child up to the age of seven years old.
96. i.e. Runaway slave pursued by the law.
97. i.e. A term for Spaniards who had just arrived in America.
Book Three
In which we learn of Joan Orpí’s rise from a low-ranking soldier to lieutenant general of the Province of New Andalusia; and from lieutenant general to royal representative in the city of Caracas; and from royal representative to conquistador and founder of New Catalonia after passing through both hell and high water in the jungles of the new world, battling irascible tribes and becoming bosom buddy to some and nemesis to yet others amidst sundry milieus throughout those there tropical and torrid latitudes and meridians.
Chapter I
In which our hero engages in his first battle
as a soldier of the Crown and sketches out a plan for desertion
With the servitude of all authors, we will fulfill our promises, not only those made in the title of this Book Three, but in the title of the whole book, since this is where our whole story takes off (complete with a surprise ending, like in all the best adventure stories), and will satisfy the patient reader who has reached this point.
Since 1593, the Dutch had been harvesting salt from a conglomerate of natural salt pans at the mouth of the Unare River, on the Araya Peninsula, and at the same time fostering contraband on the Windward Islands,98 all in territory of the Kingdom of Castille. The Crown of Castille’s only response had been to build, in a design by the famous Antonellis,99 a fortress above the beach, the ideal spot for defending the salt pan. But while it was still being built, a detachment of forty Dutch ships had arrived on the attack. The Castilians’ situation was now a critical one. They were sitting ducks inside that lethal cage. It was only a question of time before the Dutch destroyed all the walls. Besides, the potable water had gone bad and the soldiers were drinking boiled sea water, sweetened with large amounts of sugar. On the fifteenth day of the siege, “miserere colic” showed up: the soldiers were losing their lives through their anuses while others were dealing with scenes lifted from the Book of Revelation. A soldier who had been reading some Chapters from The Adventures of Esplandian threw himself into battle, all on his lonesome, the day before, thinking that he was an immortal knight, and now his body, riddled with bullet holes, was resting in front of the doors to the fort.