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

by Max Besora

  Noteworthy.—New discoveries in America.

  In the Society of Jesus much has been written about the solar eclipse that last year occurred in the Indies, with terrible and strange aspects and signs. We have also heard news that a Catalan captain ’as founded a large province, called New Catalonia, and founded new towns, and seeks to place a bishop. And now this captain, the attorney Juan Urpín, has come to pursue audience with the King, accompanied by his eccentric Indian sidekick.

  Orpí introduced himself to the Royal Council, ready to save his honor and recover his New Catalonia. He had prepared concise proceedings to rectify the royal decree, which he read aloud before the entire Council. First he recited a list of his accomplishments to demonstrate his more than justified ascent from rank private to Conquistador and Governor:

  “I wert in many battles like the one in the Haraya Salt Pans against the Dutch, when we killt fifty-seven soldiers and were all injur’d, even meself, and we didst wage war of our owne volition and were vicktorious; and in another verry dubious battle when we went after some Indians and Captain Vázquez de Soja set the dogs on them, and I didst bringe up judicial proceedings for his infraction; and another battle with the warrier womyn called Amazons, who art nowadays our friends; and another with those they call Caribes who desir’d to eat our bodies and now we’re friends with them, too, since we did teach them to eat only grass.”

  After that he defended himself against the bureaucratic attacks by the Venezuelan noblemen, enumerating all the good things his New Catalonia had brought the Crown:

  “And tis true that I’d a dispute with the very noble Vázquez de Soja over that dubious battle in the jungle, but the Indians didst suffer vile, cruel deaths for rejecting enslavement, whych be not legal in compliance with the Laws of the Indies, which was the motiv for myne opposition towardst Captain Vázquez de Soja, and I was named Lieutenant General for sayd achievement. And as for mineself, I must say that the journey I undertook in Terra Firma was entirely for Your Majesty. Altho’ my honour was called into question by Vázquez de Soja and other noblemen from Cumaná and Caracas, I should wish to here clarify that all I didst do in mine province was trade in merchandise for the Crown. And in those regions I dist deal in cacao, cotton, and tobacco, register’d under my brand Almogàvers Tobbaco™, and in a positive, not negative, colonization. Furthermore, I hath allways led the natives to the knowledge of our fayth and service to Your Majesty and for said reason no one shouldst speak ille of me, because I assure ye, Sire, that it’s all a load of codswallop.”

  Finally, Orpí ended his speech before the Royal Council thusly:

  “Withal, as the fate of man is a struggle betweenst free will & chance—as Machiavelli says, Fortune is the mistress of one half our actions, and yet leaveth controll of the other halphe to us-selves. Withal, either I must be paid for the expenses incrued on said endeavor (upward of 10,000 pesos) or I must be compensat’d for mine services with the restitution of mine government, for, as much as I hath had, I’th spent much more in the aggrandizement of Your Highness’s dominyon and assets, by meanes of conquest and placing mine personage in all manners of danger and risk all for new and novel kingdoms for Thine Highness.”

  His petition was so bold that it succeeded. In February 1636, a troupe of powdered wigs from the court nodded, and our hero once again held the title of Governor and Captain General of the Province of the Cumanagotos of his New Catalonia. Orpí had reached the peak of success. However, as far as money was concerned, they didn’t give him back even a thin dime. The Royal Court did ratify all his military promotions, supported his appointments and decrees, and announced imminent reinforcements of troops, arms, and ammunition, and promised him his own ship for business dealings with the Peninsula. And there was more. After approving those decrees, our hero was granted a private audience with King Philip IV himself, lasting two minutes.

  While he was left alone for a few moments in a vast waiting area, with large stained-glass windows and a majestic carpet, he saw a shape moving behind one of the curtains. As he approached he could make out the gleam of a dagger held by a man dressed in black, identical to the one who had shot him on the freebooters’ ship. Orpí swiftly unsheathed his sword and began to silently advance on the hitman, when trumpets rang out triumphantly. Alarmed by the burst of sound, the mysterious man opened up one of the windows and leapt through it, before disappearing down a narrow alleyway.

  Before our hero had a chance to react, the King arrived, followed by a page and two trumpeters. The monarch languidly made his way over to the royal throne as he waved off the brass section, and our hero ran to kneel before him, scrambling to remove his hat to bow down before his king.

  “Blatsthed muthithcianth, playing that infernal muthic into my ear all the livelong day …” complained the King. He suffered from an alarming case of mandibular prognathism, poorly concealed by an insipid beard, that kept his upper teeth from ever meeting his lower ones. “Pleathe, sthand, Thir Urpín, and regale me with the thory of thine conqueth. But make hathe, for I’ve an appointment with the doctor.”

  Orpí explained his adventures with more imagination than truth, and as a result the King was quite contented with the story, despite the fact that his face reflected a thousand aches and pains, as the monarch was suffering from gout, arthrosis, tertian fevers, dropsy, and a host of other ailments that left him there sitting on the throne half dead, partly due to having suckled—by royal decree (which also meant he had a considerable collection of “milk brothers” scattered throughout the peninsula)—a band of Asturian wet-nurses rather than his mother’s colostrum, and partly due to the constant concubinage with all manner of whores, as was the royal custom.

  “… and therefore, Your Excellency,” concluded Orpí, looking directly into the monarch’s watery eyes, “I be in most urgent need of the ducats invested in said enterprise.”

  “We hath no ducath in our cofferth, our debthth to German bankth art tremendouth, and profith from the Americath, diminithing. Withall, thine landth art newly thine againe,” said the King. “Now thee muth religiouthly pay thine royal taxeth, ath put forth in mine mandate, theeing ath I am Philip ‘the great.’ Worry not, boy, twill all be fine & dandee. Goe with

  God.”

  Our hero knelt in multiple reverences before the monarch and left the palace infuriated by the King’s lack of empathy with respect to his delicate situation, but pleased to have recovered what had cost him so much to achieve and what had been so vilely taken from him: self-governance. The following morning, he and Araypuro left for Piera to visit the Orpí family, as shall be revealed in continuation.

  ___________

  144. Fanzine-style format of popular short writing of the period.

  Chapter XVI

  In which our hero returns home triumphant, yet irked by a strange sensation

  Orpí and Araypuro covered the route from Madrid to Barcelona in less than eight days and in relative tranquility, excepting their encounter with a group of criminal bandits in the woods of Catalonia.

  “God ’av’ mercy!” their leader, by the name of Serrallonga145, tipping his hat. “I seeth, from your appearance, that you must be a lord of great lineage, respected and affluent. So, if you wood be soe kind … your money or your life!”

  Our hero, who had become a person who was quite difficult to frighten after years of waging war in the jungles of the New World and with little time to lose, unsheathed his sword and killed six highwaymen at once. Then he approached Serrallonga, who awaited his fate with eyes and mouth open, and Orpí exclaimed—with a gift for words and vast experience with bloodsplattering: “Sir, I hath seen many a highwayman such as yerself in the course of my life and I shant lie when I offereth up this advice: get a new job.”

  But Serrallonga didn’t heed Orpí’s words, and some years later he would end up hanged. In the meantime, Orpí and Araypuro finally reached the town of Piera. Our hero was anxious to see his family, or what was left of it, since his sister Joan
a had died in 1623, and his mother had passed on just a few months prior. Arriving at the hostel on Raval de Baix and seeing the fields and the castle as he came over the ridge had our hero in a tizzy, and he regaled Araypuro with detailed stories of his childhood and the family business. When they reached Piera, the townspeople stared at the strange pair as if they were characters from fiction. It was well known that the eldest boy of House Orpí had become a conquistador on the obscure continent of America and had fought and pacified the natives like something out of a fable. Our hero, now forty-three years of age, had come home a veritable splendid man of fame and fortune.

  His younger brother Jaume was now in charge of the lands of House Orpí, and had become a successful trader in Piera, surrounded by weights and scales that he used to count the money of their growing family business. In his first two days back in Piera, Joan was impressed to see how the town had prospered, with its new white-washed belltower, and flourishing agriculture, and he watched the bulls working in the fields and the shepherds leading sheep with their whistling. He enjoyed the sensation of seeing nature domesticated from the surrounding woods and strolling along the paths he’d spent so much time on as a child. He smiled to see the young artisans carrying on the trades of their ancestors: the blacksmith hammering a hoe at the forge, the cobbler sewing a hide to a sole, and the vegetable sellers setting up a stand in the market in the town square. And yet he felt strangely distanced from the atmosphere. He missed the remote province of New Catalonia and his life in the tropics. All that had once been his home was now only the memory of an idea that didn’t fit with the current reality. His childhood friends, whom he met up with at the town tavern, were now strangers with whom he scarcely exchanged a word. Gisela Coll de Cabra, whom he had once found pretty, was now a fat woman deformed by cheap wine who hawked fish at the market with the voice of a drunken sailor. All the nexuses to his past were broken.

  “I feel as a stranger in my own land, brother,” he confessed. “After so many years in the Indies, this no longer seems like my home. Either everything is very changed, or tis I who hath changed too much.”

  “Verily, King Phillipus IV hath created a national state with extremist structures of centralised government, and people are abandoning the countryside to goe to the city in serch of work,” complained Jaume. “To boot, his viceroys are siezeing, extralegally, Catalan powers and they no longer even take cognizance of the Constitutions of the Principality. The war between France and Castille have brought Felipet’s soldiers into our homes, and believe you me they’re a pain in thee ass, behaving like right beestes whereversofare they arte. Our Catalonia, in the longe or the short term, shant have an easy time maintaining its freedoms, and we’ll ende up like everyone else: duking it out. I shall need all of Godde’s help to keep the business afloat … at least ye’ll gette rich, in the Amerrricas.”

  “Ye think that it be some Promised Land, eh? Turns out the vices of a sick society travell faster than goode intentions!” clarified Orpí. “However that distant chunk of land is my great opportunity, since it gives me the possibility of making my fortune. And at the same time it is the safe-conduct to your own future, mine brother, with the yields I hope to gain from it. It be a rich land, and unexploit’d, where the treasures are not gold but the soil itself & its fruits & its livestock.”

  As our hero asked his brother for funding for New Catalonia, effectively mortgaging his home and family assets, so sure was he of his favorable outcome, Orpí glanced out the window and saw, up in a tree in the garden, a man dressed in black, identical to the ones he’d seen on the ship and in the royal Court. Leaving Jaume mid-sentence, he went out brandishing his sword and shouting, “Where be thee, hitman? Draw near and we shall end this once & foreall!” After searching frantically through the garden for some trace of the assassin, he went back inside the house with a panic attack.

  “I be increasingly convinc’d these men in black be spies for the noblemen of Cumanagoto, payd and trained to do me in.”

  “Art thou quite sure of these hallucinations, Joan? For I can see no one.”

  “Hell’s bells, brother! They’ve already madeth two attempts on mine life! The governors of the viceroyalties in America hold mee in infinite envee. Those cretins are out to steal mine lands what I’ve earned with mine sweat and, being pedigreed hidalgos, they employ the Crown against mee to the point that it seems I’m battling against all the viceroyalties.”

  “And what dost thou plan to do, declareth war on the King?” asked Jaume, in jest.

  “For Godde’s sake, on the King, no! May Godde hold Him and keep Him. But the criollo noblemen of Santo Domingo and Caracas wante to rob me of what I’ve worked so hard to earn!”

  After a few days with his brother, our hero had to leave. Jaume, seeing that Joan was now a man of royal fame and institutional worth, didn’t hesitate to mortgage the lands of their family patrimony, and lent him 12,000 escudos for the conquest of New Catalonia.

  “Bon voyage,” said Jaume, embracing his older brother for the last time.

  “Best of lucke, Jaumet,” said our hero.

  And that was how Orpí and Araypuro came to travel south once more, smoking and singing to the rhythm of their trotting. When they reached Seville they bought provisions to bring to New Catalonia, and embarked on a galleon headed to the Americas, the Indies, the New World, or whatever the fa-boop you want to call it, dear reader.

  ___________

  145. i.e. The legendary highwayman Joan Sala Ferrer (1594-1634).

  Chapter XVII

  In which Juan Orpí sees a play he finds very disconcerting

  The caravelle with our hero on board departs and travels away from Old Europe for the second time, toward the remote provinces of America. By now, Orpí’s headaches over the criollo noblemen’s plotting had turned him well and truly paranoid and he kept looking over his shoulders for men dressed in black. “Tis no time to lose ye ’ead,” our hero told himself, filling his lungs with sea air, while the sailors went up and down the ship’s masts, unfurling sails and hoisting the anchor, amid popular songs. Now they would set sail on a dicey new voyage through ocean seas populated by enemy ships and subject to metereological inclemencies that struck all nations and flags with equal force. Luckily, the water was so calm that they could see flying fish diving into the crystalline depths past corals on the sea floor.

  On deck everyone was in good spirits and they now gathered around an improvised play. A theater company called Il Gran Teatro di Broccoli, comprised of Italians trained in commedia dell’arte and some Castilians who were headed to the New World in search of work in theaters there, performed a naumachia146 with caravelles made of paper and actors in sailor costumes.

  Orpí and Araypuro approached the imminent spectacle, joining the audience and watching as an orchestra made up of soldiers and actors lugged scores and cardboard set pieces to and fro. Then an actress transformed into a Mademoiselle by a gleaming tunic appeared, to the strains of a copla, and was received with an ovation as she began to declaim:

  Gather ye round to hear the tale

  Of lawy’r and his holy grail

  Seduced by a saucy lass

  In Seville he gave up his past

  Betwixt the two they did kill

  Her husband (just for a thrill)

  Twas in error … oh, the horror!

  He took the name of the cuckhold

  Off to the Yndies, seeking golde.

  Along the way he kiss’d sirens

  Oer to his new environs

  But not all was honky-dory

  For all of his fame and glory

  Twas in error

  Allways in err-orr,

  oh, oh, what an “honor”!

  Our hero furrowed his brows and widened his eyes maniacally. “Araypuro, answer me thusly: art they singing mine exploits or be I hallucinating?”

  “No master, get over theeself, thatz just a made-up little ditty,” said Araypuro, impassive, scratching his inner thigh.


  “How is’t possible yond the story of mine adventures is known on the other side of the globe? Could it be the King hath spies in every corner of the worlde?”

  The choir was now singing beside an actress being seduced by an actor dressed as a low-ranking soldier, and Orpí didn’t know whether to hide somewhere or jump directly into the ocean to be devoured by fish.

  Urbín, Urtín or Urdín

  (who giveths a whoop, I mean)

  Like a pig to slaught-err

  Did foind himself in hot water

  When his very double he met

  And was working without a net

  Zoinks, how his hopes were adash-ed

  Oer the riches safely stassh-ed …

  “My God, Araypuro, what sort of terrible metalepsis be this?!” Orpí exclaimed in a whisper, his paranoia reaching new heights. “How canst these ydiots know my history so? If news of this reacheth Drye Lande or the Court I’m a dead manne!”

  “No problemo, master, simple coincidence,” said Araypuro, lighting an ounce of Almogàvers™ tobacco.

  “How couldst thee, buffoon! Canst thou not see they speak of me? What sort of intrigue be this? Perchance a fisherman spake of the ’istory of New Catalonia with an innkeeper on Espaniola, and he, in turnne, explixt it to some soldiers what returrned ere the Peninsula, and so onne and thus …”

  “De pinga, bro! You bestest check that ego, master. Thine delusiones of grandeur nair grow.”

  “Insolence!” barked our hero. “Thou art verily like a stubbern mule, comprehending nothing!”