The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia
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132. i.e. a grammar
133. i.e. Women, in his language
134. i.e. Hard, long wooden rods, used by the Indians like large swords.
135. i.e. Concubinage between Spaniards and indigenous women.
136. In this declaration we see Father Claver’s attempts to convert a virgin, marginal space into the axis mundi, creating the possibility of transforming the colonization process in order to create a Paradise on Earth, an autarky where otherness was a constant, a providential third space of salvation, making possible a new—hybrid—society that minimized the processes of acculturation that erased differences, and transformed both the Spanish colonization and the pre-Colombian civilizations.
137. i.e. royal letters
138. i.e. Ships that carried correspondence and dispatches for the royal court.
Chapter XIII
In which Joan Orpí encounters some freebooters who speak strangely and is nearly murdered by a mysterious hired assassin
It had been more than ten years since Joan Orpí’s arrival in America and now he was returning home against his will. However, this time, he was no longer traveling as a royal soldier but as lieutenant general of his own territory and, as such, he was entitled to a private berth befitting his rank. Less than ten hours after setting sail, our hero noticed a man dressed entirely in black who didn’t take his eyes off of him. Thinking that perhaps he knew him from somewhere, Orpí approached to make conversation but the man slipped away and hid among the crew. Not thinking much of it, Orpí locked himself in his berth to meticulously prepare his speech before the Royal Audiencia in Madrid. But the calm voyage was soon brutally disrupted. When the Spanish vessel passed by the island of Tortuga, located near Hispaniola, a small brig cut off their access to the open sea. The passengers saw only one thing. The thing was this:
“Quotha! The Jolly Roger!” exclaimed a sailor. “Pirates!”
“Worse …” said the captain of the vessel, dodging the cannonballs that tore through the sails, shattering the mizzen and part of the prow. “They be freebooters … ! To yer weapons!”
The freebooters’ boat was lighter and therefore swifter, and soon had the Spanish ship trapped. From larboard, they launched their grappling irons and proceeded to board extremely professionally. The assault was quick and brutal. Harquebus and musketoon bullets flew in every direction. Once the firearms were empty, both sides entered readily into hand-to-hand, face-to-face combat without further ado, armed with daggers and swords.
Joan Orpí, lost in the pandemonium of screams and bullets, was loading powder into the pan of his pistol when he heard a voice behind him amidst the clamor of the battle.
“Halt, barrister, thou beest a dead man!”
Those words were spoken by the mysterious man in black, whom our hero had seen when embarking on the ship. He was now pointing a gun at him, and pulled the trigger. Orpí was hit so hard that he fell backward, his legs out from under him, as he emitted a horrific moan. A pool of blood stained his shirt. His gaze befuddled, Orpí didn’t seem to understand what was happening to him until he realized he had a hole in his abdomen. Before the man in black could shoot again, Araypuro, who’d seen it all with tearful eyes, pounced on the assassin, who managed to slip away and crack Araypuro over the head with the butt of his gun, leaving him flummoxed. When the executioner drew close to our hero to finish him off, Orpí asked, “Who art thou, gunslinger?”
Just as the mysterious man was about answer, he was shot and dropped onto the deck, dead. Our hero was bleeding out in a corner of the ship and, as his vision blurred into a nebula of blacks and grays, he managed to make out a small figure pressing a dirty shirt to his wound to stop the hemorrhaging.
Meanwhile, the skirmish had ended and soon the freebooters had taken over the ship. Quite a few men on both sides had died. The freebooters towed the battered Spanish to Tortuga Island, where they ordered the surviving crewmembers off. Curiously, and going against all prognoses, none of the crew were executed. Quite the contrary, those who were wounded, like Orpí, had their injuries attended to. There was no explanation given. Our hero was patched up by the freebooters’ surgeon, who was just then sharpening his machete on a rock.
“Allouns’y ’ave a looksie at dere wound,” said the surgeon, slicing open his belly as if he were a roasted boar, in a room filled with the injured and a horrendous stench of coagulated blood.
An hour later, our hero was already sewn up and on his feet, as if nothing had happened, standing beside that surgeon, who went by the name of Exquemelin and had been in the service of l’Olonnais and Henry Morgan, among other famous pirates, and who let Orpí have a look at the first copy of his memoirs among these pirates and buccaneers, with the provisional title De Americaensche Zee-Rovers.139
“Interesting, too bad it’s in Dutch,” lamented our hero.
Later, Orpí was happily reunited with Araypuro, who had been left stunned by the attack. They had no time to catch up before the captain of the victorious freebooters, some guy named Rock Brasiliano who wore eight loaded pistols around his neck and a parrot on his shoulder that sang in French, introduced himself to the crew:
“Nous no estamos nourrir por ningún boss, ni rei ni ná de ná. Tripeando por estos mares, guachimanamos & cachamos boten eben doh da draiba del timonero se le fue la têtê y neerly nos tuer. Nous belong to da Cofradía o’da Bróders de la Costa, of da Ille de la Tortuga, y we raid por rechts propio. Dropeando dejo por escrito que todo cuanto findeamos en este boot es ours and los survivors van a morir ol tugeder.”
“Listen, injun, to the manner in whych these ruffians speak. What a dynamic language! What fabulous entropy … What be that jabberwocky? I understand not a scrap of what he speaketh,” whispered Orpí.
“They speak pechelingue, a super chévere tongue,” whispered Araypuro, “a kooky mix of English, Spanish, French, and Dutch. They’re saying that basically they want to kill us all, because as is well-known, dead men doth tell no tales.”
“There be no need for them to kill me,” lamented Orpí. “I’ll push off any minute now if that surgeon fail’d to do his job aright.”
Then, Rock Brasiliano, polite as can be, introduced his band of freebooters:
“Ik presenteer a my équipage: El Manco, Rompepiedras, Barbanegra, Exterminador, Triboulet Dvergar el Distasteful …”
When Orpí heard that name, he bellowed, “By Neptune’s beard! I knowe that guy!”
When our hero found himself face to face with the dwarf—who was limping, drunk, happy, and irascible, dressed in rags and with a cane in his right hand and a pistol in his left—he laughed so hard he almost had a stroke.
“Triboulet! Don’t thee e’er tire of playing the chameleon?”
“Nouus destinies vuelven a crossing!” exclaimed the dwarf, tipping his hat. “Verdad: ja no suis bucanero, ara suis filibustero. Bamoj a bacilal y truhanear por ahi pa bujcal tezoros pa chasser e vender.”
“Stop making up wordes! You seem to care not a fig for whole Gramàtica Castellana!140” barked Orpí. “What be this tommyrot?”
“Que salimos a uerkaut por el zee con lo puesto, okey?” explained the dwarf, who was missing one eye and one ear from the kerfuffles inherent in that violent lifestyle.
“Are you stoopid or what, halfman? Prithee … speak in Catalan or in Castilian … but not in that horrific hodgepodge that no one can understand!”
Triboulet explained to our hero that he had been kicked out of the town of Carazco, because the cimarrones no longer wanted any white men among them, preferring to establish a realm of absolute negritude where Estebanico the Blackamoor was king. Triboulet and the other buccaneers had then joined up with the few pirates remaining on Tortuga Island, and that was the birth of that new race of sea dogs: the freebooters. When Triboulet found himself on Orpí’s boat, during the skirmish the dwarf had seen a man try to kill our hero, but Triboulet was able to shoot him before he could finish the job. When the dwarf saw that Orpí
was truly dying, he spoke with Rock Brasilero, who agreed to spare the survivors of the Spanish vessel and treat the injured in exchange for keeping half the spoils. And that was how, instead of more war, there was peace.
“So who in tarnation was that killer?”
“Je nai sais pas,” said Triboulet, “the man who wanted to massacrate you wasn’t one of ours, or one of yours. But you know what they say, he who liveth by the sword, dieth by the sword.”
“Be mindfull, Orpinet, someone wishes you harm!” said the Homunculus who, following in his creator’s footsteps, had also become a freebooter. The being had grown and now was as tall as Triboulet (which is to say, not very). He was like a child in a costume. Upon seeing our hero, the Homunculus sang a ditty that went something like this:
Despite thine obsessions with territory
yar siempre getting maltraitered, Orpí.
If you break out in hives or the clap
Put on some cream and that’s that,
But if they plottin to murderlate-vous
Then yar best be realistique, sacre bleu!
Buck up, tis normal that yar downplay
Yar yearning for ye olde liberté
Hasta wakin’ up in da cachot,
yar siempre getting maltraitered, Orpí.
If you break out in hives or the clap
Put on some cream and that’s that,
But if they plottin to murderlate-vous
Then yar best be realistique, sacre bleu!
Buck up, tis normal that yar downplay
Yar yearning for ye olde liberté
Hasta wakin’ up in da cachot,
Just north of Barstowe
Yar yearnin to row row yer boat
not to be just a footnote
It be tyme for ya ta even out the score
Wake up, stop actin’ like a sophomore!
Dose noblemen refuse vous dineros
--and I know, I get it, it blows--
But yar gotta look to make ya own way
Releaseth all yon spiritual decaye
Dost thou graspest what I’m trying to say?
“Bravo, Homunculus! Great song! But what canst I do? Living is slowly dying,” declared Orpí in a somber tone.
“Arrrt yar insane in the left brain? Don’t say quelquechose, Orpinet,” said Triboulet. “Enjoya la vida, qu’es très short and don’t megaworry tu mutx!”
After spending a night of revelry with those soldiers of fortune, including a dreadful “bathtub” rum, Orpí and the rest of the Spanish crewmembers sailed calmly to the Peninsula without any further piratetechnic scares. But our hero remained uneasy about the mysterious assassin who’d tried to murder him, and he gave explicit orders to Araypuro to keep his eyes peeled thenceforth. The only way, he figured, to have the same power as his rivals in the Spanish Indies was to win the favor of the King. But first he had to get to Madrid, as ye shall learn whereof in this next Chapter.
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139. i.e. Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin, French writer known for his work on seventeenth-century pirating, The Buccaneers of America.
140. i.e. He is referring to the first ever Spanish grammar rule book, by Antonio de Nebrija, published in 1492.
Chapter XIV
In which Joan Orpí travels from Seville to Madrid, where he encounters an old friend
The ship on which Orpí and Araypuro were traveling docked in the port of Guadalquivir one morning in the year 1620, with the Giralda and the Torre del Oro rising undaunted over Seville as a heavy scent of burning human flesh greeted them. The Holy See had begun a veritable crusade against the Devil and hundreds of heretics were burned each day throughout the Peninsula, up into France, and beyond, as black smoke from the mortal bonfires darkened the European skies. Many things had changed since our hero had left that city, years earlier. The architecture of the buildings and cathedrals presented new shapes, twisted and darkly gilded, just as obscure as the grotesque faces of the Spanish people, white and with heavy shadows under their eyes, like cadavers, always looking over their shoulders as if Death was waiting to snatch them away at any moment.
“Carajo! These irregular stones doth remind me of the trees of the spirits in mine jungle, master,” said Araypuro, contemplating the Spanish architecture.
“Indeed, injun, they do,” said our hero, wrinkling his brow, “but everything here is much more destrudo. I prefer the positive jungle energy.”
From Seville, the two men rode on horseback to Madrid, but since requesting an audience before the Royal Council was a slow, bureaucratic process, they had to wait almost a month for their turn. So Orpí and Araypuro found themselves tourists, marveling at the buildings in the Spanish capital and the industrial quantities of white people in the Old World. The denizens of Madrid, on the other hand, regarded the two men like something out of a circus.
“We are not dressed in the latest styles, injun. We are eccentric, here,” said Orpí, looking at the people. “I have to say, injun, thou stickest outest not only for thine darkness, but for thine bisarro native garments with feathers, and the amulets that hang from thine hair and scrag.”
“Well, thou aint so hot thineself,” noted Araypuro. “Thou resemblest a taxidermied hen.”
“Insolent!” exclaimed our hero, moving to smack Araypuro but stopping suddenly when he saw himself reflected in a shop window: his big eyes were hidden in a dry, wrinkled face that was partially buried beneath a sparse beard turned yellow by the Almogàvers™ cigars; he wore torn trousers that were stained either by sea salt or excrement; his once-white shirt was just a memory; his hat was old and had no cord; and his shoes were pathetic sandals that clung to his feet out of pity. When Orpí saw his bedraggled image, he decided to visit a tailor. There they decked him out in some short black breeches with green silk stockings, immaculate white shirt, red velvet vest, stiff-necked doublet, and top hat. Elegantly dressed, our hero soon after ran into a character seen earlier in this story: none other than Grau de Montfalcó,141 who it turns out was living in the capital at that time.
“I’m right contented here,” Grau said. “I work mornings as a doctor in a hospital and I sing in a choir of castrati in the church in the afternoons.”
“Good for thou,” said our hero, who, when passing by a shop selling folkloric paintings, spotted a retablo engraved with the sad figure of Don Quixote and his loyal squire Sancho Panza. “Look at that, my friend. They are characters created by Miguel de Cervantes, from the book I gave thee when we met there in the kingdom of Valencia years ago. Dost thou recall?”
“And how! In fact, a second part hath already come out, Cervantes’s highly intelligent response to a student of Lope de Vega who had the temerity to write a sequel to the Quixote (which wasn’t half as good, truth be told), before Cervantes himself had a chance.”
“Too many bad books in the worlde,” said Orpí. “Diego de Saavedra, in his Republic of Letters doth declare that, with the invention of the printing press, ‘everyone drags into the light what would be best kept in the dark, because, just as there be few whose actions are worthy of being record’d, there be few who write something worthy of being read.’”
“Tis true, and technology is everything these days,” said Grau, showing him a French pocket watch. “Beholde, the universe is like this device, made of hands and numbers, more precise than a rooster’s crow. What once was impossible to do no longer is: measuring time, controlling nature, ergo controlling peoples. Arms and letters no longer go together. The era of mythical kingdoms hath come to an end. Reality and progress rule. Everything is bureaucracy, here and in America.”
“I doth still believe in magic, my friend, as this conquest looks more like a step backward than progress, by any measure: astrolabe, sextant, hourglass, north star, or the minutes and seconds on thy watch. Howebeit I shant allow these rascally noblemen with the king’s ear snatch from me what I’ve earned with my blood & sweat. Those virgin lands must be my economic salvation.”
“Remember tha
t Felipet is absolute sovereign of an empire on which ‘the sun never sets,’ as Charles the Fifth dared say.”
“I’ve no intention of tossing in the towel,” declared Orpí, gazing out at infinity. “Furthermore, Philipus IV is a two-bit monarch compared with the ones in the jungle. I’ve seen kings who knowe the language of magical plants, who can transform into birds and fly through the skies on whim, and whose armies obeyye them with the cohesion of a single man. Those be true kings.”
After strolling along the Castellana, the two friends, followed by Araypuro, stopped to watch a sinister auto-da-fé, where repentant sodomites forswore their sins before being carried off to die by fire.
“I see tis yet fashionable to burn and hang people,” lamented Orpí, as he glanced at the peninsular news on the cover of La Gazeta Nueva.142
“Yea, things haven’t changed much ’round here,” said Grau de Montfalcó. “And this Inquisition is positively soporific!”
And thus the two friends continued chatting, followed by Araypuro, until they start stuffing their faces at one of the capital’s merenderos.143 And there we will leave them as we move on to the next Chapter.
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141. See Chapter III, Book Two.
142. i.e. A Madrid magazine of the time.
143. i.e. outdoor eating areas
Chapter XV
In which Orpí meets with the King and demands legitimate dominion over his lands
Finally, after three weeks of waiting, our hero’s day before the Royal Audiencia arrived. Orpí, dressed like a duke and accompanied by Araypuro, admired the palace square. They both watched the fish swimming in the pools, and were greeted by the fanfare of out-of-tune trumpets as they entered the long royal halls. The two men walked along an endless patterned carpet, through drawing rooms and chapels, taking in the royal sumptuousness: the royal library, the royal pharmacy, the royal armoury … everything there was royal, and a hustle and bustle of pages and courtiers dressed in finery who looked at the strange pair, lifting their hats. It turned out that the news of our hero’s arrival in court had spread far and wide, as had his fame as a conquistador following the article printed up about him in a pliego suelto144: