by Max Besora
The nucleus of the chorus, made up of sailors and some of the audience members themselves, were now reciting verses that went fast and loose with the chronology of events, while the actors depicted a battle:
Ruses and cunning arguments,
The occasional armaments
Allowed him conqu’r yon lands
Freed the slaves with a shake of hands
Along with Jesuit ideal
And thirty-five pinches of zeal
There be men who think with the groin,
But this one: of coin to purloin!
Challeng’d his king and government
to some halffcoxk’d covenant.
Rogue plusse ’is mestizo sidekick
Verily as some bromance flick
Dey conquistador’d & found’d
And oftentimes they flound’r’d
“Wait up!” exlaimed Araypuro. “Am I the mestizo sidekick?”
“Aha! Now that they mentione thee, dost thou finally believe me, ya thick injun?” asked Orpí, smirking. “In any case, we hath not employed the word ‘conquer’ since 1573, but rather ‘pacify’ or ‘populate.’ These dramatists are behind the tymes.”
“They’re talkin’ about me, massa!” said Araypuro, doing a happy dance. “I’m famous!”
“Very well, injun, hush thine mouth a while so I canst hear the play …” ordered our hero.
An actor playing a fortuneteller was now delivering a prediction, in the voice of a countertenor, about the apocalyptic future of a mythical territory, amid the crew’s general jubilation:
Yet that new civilization
Is a repetitive nation
Of all that he doth reject
Mirror’d bye a new architect
The hatred and envy and greeds
No gold to show for his misdeeds.
Urbín, Urtín, Urpín, Urpine
Be the name o’ this jewy canine
And the cries of noblemen
Were nary as Greek to him.
Twas a big mistake on his part
Since no single man can outsmart
Our great ruler, the Planet King.147
Especially on a shoestring…
In a fit of paranoic delirium, our hero leapt up, determined to multiply his allegoric and hypostatic legend and, moving through the audience, plants himself amid the actors, exclaiming: “Ladies & gentlemen, I be the sole manne what knowth the veritable story told here! For I beest the veritable Juan Orpín and this story be mine pure life!”
“Say what?”
“Juan … who?”
“What sayeth this nutman, this play is by a mightily famouz playwrite!” exclaimed the starring actress.
“Zat so?” asked our hero. “And what be the name of this capricious hack?”
The actors stammered for a few moments and, after gathering in a circle and murmuring among themselves, one said, “Ahh, no, tis an anonymouse work!”
“And what be the title, then?” asked our hero.
The actors gathered in a circle again, whispering secretively.
“So ye knowst it not, hucksters? I shall tell ye who wrote this play, and who strives to drive me battsky with all these theories of conspiration, which with each passing moment I doth see more and more clear before mine eyes!” bellowed Orpí, beside himself. Then he spied a man dressed in black and, thinking him one of the murderous hitmen, began to chase him all over the ship with his sword drawn. In the end our hero had to be reduced by a group of five soldiers. After everyone swore up and down that the man in black was merely an actor, our hero calmed down a little bit.
“Damn’d if I canst understand any of alle this, injun,” said Orpí, stretched out on his bunk with a lime blossom infusion to calm his nerves. “Thee canst see that I be not mad, right? We must remain alert for I canst trust no-man. Take the first watch turn, then wake me and I shall take over, agree’d?”
“I knowst not whether thine madness is real or feigned, master,” said Araypuro, drinking down a slug of firewater he’d found in the hold. “But thou footests the bills, and I follow thine orders without rolling mine eyes.”
Having said that, when less than five minutes had passed since our hero had fallen asleep, Araypuro was already snoring his heart out and in danger of falling from his chair. But even if Araypuro were to fall, that would not stop the historian from continuing his telling of these adventures (despite no one asking him to) thusly:
___________
146. i.e. A mock naval battle.
147. i.e. One of the names for Philip IV.
Chapter XVIII
In which Joan Orpí is shipwrecked in a highly literary manner and questions the meaning of life
That selfsame night a storm unleashed upon the high seas and, while the ship surfed gigantic waves, a monstrous figure emerged from the depths and appeared before the caravelle:
The giant squid of colossal proportions moved its tentacles, glued to the keel, tossing the vessel to and fro. The entire crew came up on deck to see the creature, including Orpí and Araypuro, who looked upon it in horror.
“Bejabbers!” exclaimed Orpí, trying to remember his readings. “This creature must be a physeter, as described by Torquemada in his Garden of Curious Flowers (Book VI)!”
“Jesus, Maria, and José! Either that monster’s gonna eat us all, or we’re surely bound for the black depths!” exclaimed Araypuro, crying in desperation.
As was written in the immutable, eternal legends of centuries past, some of the sailors ran for weapons to hunt that sea monster. “To the kraken!” they shouted, “Launch the harpoons!” Seeing the threat, the enormous cetacean squeezed the ship’s hull and it collapsed with a loud wooden crunch. The crew was exiled from that false kingdom of secure timber and thrust into the black depths without time to even think twice.
Our hero, who had also leapt into the sea as sportingly as he could muster, found himself suddenly swimming upward from the bottom of the ocean in search of oxygen, dodging a stream of blows, barrels, arms, and fabric until finally he was able to surface. In the distance (but not as distant as he would have liked), he saw the sea monster swallowing up sailors by the dozens, and himself managed to cling to a wooden plank that floated adrift. With his body numb from the cold water and his mind fixed on all the mythology of shipwrecks, watery graves, and legends with horrible endings that he had read or heard tell of, out of the corner of his eye Orpí saw the boat’s stern sinking in a swirl of water and the giant squid diving into the nadir. The few surviving crew members were floating in the night and getting lost in the darkness, shrieking as long as they could before drowning in the waves. Our hero searched for Araypuro, but it was impossible to see a thing with the saltwater creeping into his mouth, nose, and ears. He tried to climb up onto the plank he was gripping and, after a few frustrated (and frankly pathetic) attempts he pulled it off. Using his arms as oars, he navigated those fearsome latitudes guided by Polaris, sailors’ fundamental astronomical point of reference, which hid beyond the horizon. And thus the hours passed, as he observed the night sky until the effort wore him out and he fell asleep with the swaying of the plank floating in that dark ocean.
Believing himself to be dead, he had the horrible sensation that demons were tickling his toes. When he opened his eyes, he found that he was stretched out on the sand of a beach, with two pyschopathic seagulls nibbling on his feet. Waving his arms and legs and shouting like a lunatic, he scared them off and then stretched out again on the sand, watching the luminous clouds slowly sketch out the shape of a whale in the blue American sky. All was now calm. The speed with which the incident had occurred the night before, plus the coldness of the water, and the effort he’d expended to save his own life provoked in him a sensation of inebriation similar to madness. “What designs doth this twist of fate hold in store for me?” Orpí wondered. “And what symbols, presences, messages, or warnings must befalle me in order for me to comprehend my mission here?” His questions received no answers. In part becau
se they had none and in part because our hero was distracted by a body floating near the shore, not far from him. Thinking that it was his Araypuro, he struggled to his feet and ran over to it. When he turned the body over, he recognized the lead actress from the theater company, dead, swollen, her skin black from stomach gases about to explode. “No man ever said the life of an artiste war easy,” he thought. Then he saw how, along the beach, the corpses of his vessel’s crew swayed back and forth in the shallow water, inert and jumbled amid a scramble of guts that came out of their open mouths. A prolonged shriek from the sky was the prelude to the predatory symphony of a group of vultures spurred on by the rotting flesh, who flew down in increasingly tighter circles in search of gifts from King Neptune. Horrified, Orpí ran away from the shore and into the jungle, scratching himself on the brush and the skin on his feet bleeding as he advanced along streams filled with pointy rocks. Lost in the tropical vegetation, our hero embarked on the adventure of scampering up a tree in order to look out on the horizon in search of some trace, however faint, of civilization. Scraping his body against the bark, scratching himself on the branches, he finally reached the crown and, once there, all he could see was a carpet of treetops extending endlessly. Losing hope, he clambered down and took off, without a specific destination, into the thick lattice of the jungle as the afternoon shadows surprised him along his erratic wandering. Starving, and with his stomach grumbling, Orpí watched as ants gathered tiny pieces of fruits, transporting them in a chain to their hills, until his mind grew cloudy. Frightened by the giant butterflies that were following him, he fell onto all fours in an enormous puddle of mud wearing no more than some torn bloomers, his torso bare and all his ribs jutting out in relief. Hallucinating from his hunger and with his face marked by terror, he discovered that even his own shadow had abandoned him and that night was falling filled with the sounds of ferocious beasts, devouring each other in the darkness, until our hero embraced a sensation of belonging to the eternal circle of life more than to any particular period in history. Dragging himself along like a larva, his bloodied hands now gripped the trunk of a fallen tree and his dilated pupils remained fixed on the absence of reality. His skin dirty and white, he resigned himself to the monstrous death of his earthly life, waiting for the end, which he was sure would not be long in coming. Just as he was about to give in to his fate—either devoured by one of those famished beasts or dying of pure desperation—the tree he was clinging to disappeared as if by the art of magic and our hero found himself in the midst of a desert of white sand.
“This lyfe is unbearable!” Orpí complained in desperation as he fell to the ground. “I require a divine sign!”
No sooner did he pronounce that invocation than a figure materialized right before him. Orpí fell to his knees, prepared to die.
“Quit yer drama!” roared a familiar, deep voice.
“Beest thou angel or devil?” said our hero, his head in the sand like an ostrich.
“Less lip and look mee in the face, halfwit!” said the voice.
Orpí lifted his head and saw the ghost of his father before him.
“Father … ? Art thou true?”
“Indeed! To mine dismay. Look what hath become of thee, goldbrickster!” said the ghost, with a voice from beyond the grave. “Thou hast ever been a spineless gyrl!”
“Thanks. Thou donst look too bad thyself, Dad,” murmured our hero. “One query: be it veritable that beyonde death lyes only emptyness, blackness, and the abyss?”
“Quit thy foolishness, mine son,” said the apparition. “All what thy seeth is thee work of God, who ist All and is in All.”
“Ah, okay then. So forsooth, what must I doeth now, Dad? Must I die and enter the kingdome of Heaven or wut?”
“Thou hast more doubts than Hamlet, my sonne …” he replied. “Thy thyme hath not yet come. Follow the dog and there thee shall find thine sidekick. And now fare thee well, they art calling me from up in the heavens … so, gotta run!”
Having said that, the ghost of his father disappeared and our hero found himself face to face with a dog that was attentively watching him. Orpí had no idea where that animal had come from but, after sniffing at the air, it approached him wagging its tail. It was some sort of mutt, an impossible mix of Spanish water dog with American coyote. Our hero gave it the name Friston, in homage to the magician in Don Quixote and because he thought it was the reincarnation of his father’s ghost. The animal seemed to know the route and Orpí followed it until, a few meters on, he found Araypuro sleeping under a tree, just as his ghostly father had predicted.
“Idle injun … wake up!” he said, delivering a swift kick to Araypuro’s rear end.
“What … ? How … ? Señor Urpín?” said Araypuro, opening his eyes and looking at the dog. “Shit … what’s that?” he asked, pointing at the canine.
Friston sniffed the two men and trotted around in circles wagging his tail. While Orpí explained the story of his shipwreck, Araypuro noticed something gleaming on a promontory. As they approached it, the two men were amazed to discover a gigantic round building, shining like a mountain made of solid gold. Both men had heard (and read) stories of realms where the chairs, pots, and helmets were made of gold, where nature’s miracles offered the prodigious metal as if it were marjoram water. Now those mythical stories, accumulated in their genetic memory over centuries, were becoming reality.
“Now I understand the exact meaning of my hallucinated adventure,” reflected Orpí, scratching his beard. “It was fate what brought me to the City of Gold …”
“Let’s not waste time thinking … we’re rich! Filthy rich!” said Araypuro, running up the promontory toward the enormous geometric mass, driven mad by its blinding gleam.
“Halt, idjot!” shouted Orpí, wary.
Too late. Araypuro had already gone inside and our hero and the dog Friston had no choice but to follow him, as detailed in the following Chapter:
Chapter XIX
In which Joan Orpí and Araypuro find a treasure and other unexpected things
While the two men walked further inside that mysterious structure, lighting their way with some palm leaves they burned like torches, they saw a series of strange symbols covering the walls. It wasn’t written in the alphabet imported by the Castilians to America, but they weren’t the typical native glyphs either. Those inscriptions, in some unknown language, were accompanied by primitive paintings of short little beings with enormous heads, emerging from an ovoid house that seemed to be elevated in the heavens.
“Where we at, massa? The City of the Caesars?” asked Araypuro, as he contemplated the mysterious graffiti.
“Nay,” replied Orpí, advancing along the hallway.
“El Dorado?”
“Nay.”
“The Empire of Prester John?”
“Nay.”
“The Valley of Cinnamon?”
“Nay.”
“The Seven Cities of Cipango?”
“Enough, injun! Shut up for once and for all!” ordered Orpí. “I knowth not the cause behind all this Egyptianism, but I hear voices. We art not alone.”
Indeed, as the two men continued, their surroundings shone brighter and brighter until they found a room that was not illuminated by any natural light but rather by mountains and mountains of gold that glowed like stars in the night. And amid that whole gilded promontory, there was a man rolling around, happy as a child. He was dressed in stinking rags. Orpí approached him, pinching his nose, while Araypuro stayed back, and Friston the dog growled, baring his eyeteeth threateningly.
“Who be thee, sir?” asked Orpí.
When the man saw him, a string of drool fell from his lower lip, which hung listlessly. His palate was a conglomerate of bleeding gums and rotten teeth. His eyes were bloodshot and revealed him, clearly, as demented. His face was tinged with blue, surely brought on by some unknown tropical disease or perhaps a liver infection. But the most important detail, which did not escape Orpí’s eye, was that the
figure was missing a hand. His left hand, to be precise.
“It canst be …” murmured Orpí, drawing even closer. “Thou art … Gregorio Izquierdo!”
We have no way of knowing whether the man was listening to our hero or not, but we can say that he did not react when hearing his own name. Instead, the numbskull merely repeated one word, over and over:
“Nyargocs, Nyargos … nya-nya-nya-nya-nyargocs!”
“Poor thing, he hath lost his marbles,” said Orpí.
“Gangsta done flipp’t the wig, bro,” confirmed Araypuro. “Let’s grab the gold and hit it!”
“Nay, one moment, injun. We canst just abandon a Christian. Mine brain ist cloud’d with mysterious questions. How hath Gregorio Izquierdo arrived to this here place? Why is this treasure here? And, above all, why is a bizarre, slimy being tugging on mine trousers?”
Orpí and Araypuro, pulled from their gilded moment, jumped back in fear when three tiny figures appear out of nowhere. Friston started barking and refused to stop until Araypuro gave him a swift kick.
“Who be ye?” asked our hero, who received no reply. “We espeek no Inglish, comprenden?”
“They be not Spaniards, nor of any known tribe,” said Araypuro, analyzing them. “They be mightily ugly & ill-humoured but do not seem to be Englishmen. Their strangest aspect is the fact that they have no butts.”
Indeed, the three mysterious creatures were standing there like dolts, looking at our hero blankly. They were short, poorly put together beings, wearing green leggings and, as Araypuro had said, had no butts whatsoever.
“Who be theese monsters, Sir Gregorio?” Orpí asked the demented man, while keeping one eye on the strange beings.
“Nyargocs!” shouted Gregorio Izquierdo, kneeling before them.
“Nyargocs?” said our hero. “Must be some sort of Oriental tribe …”
“Oriental or not, massa, let’s get outta here,” said Araypuro, pricking up his ears. “I hear war tam-tams.”