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

by Max Besora

  “I hear nothing,” said Orpí. “Quit thy inventions, injun.”

  Too late. Our hero’s disbelief (or deafness) was swept aside as dozens of indigenous locals armed to the teeth came in along the hallway they had entered through not long before.

  “There be no end to this pile-on!” complained Orpí.

  “They’ll slaughter us like rabbits! Shit just got real,” exclaimed Araypuro.

  Indeed, the natives on the warpath would soon reach the large room, pointing their bows at Orpí and the others. When the natives saw the gold, they didn’t think twice and began to shoot. But—miracle? Or not—when the arrows dipped in curare seemed about to pierce the body of our hero, they stopped suddenly, slowly veered and traveled back whence they came to kill the archers.

  “Pinche me to see if I dream, injun … What artifice, miracle or rich mystery be this?” said Orpí. “Didst those arrowes retorne to their bows, verily a Zeno paradox?”

  “I knowst not from Ceno, massa, but that’s what it looks like!” said Araypuro, whimpering and hiding behind our hero. “It be the buttless beings and their hocus pocus!”

  “Life itself seemeth unreal, injun.”

  Indeed, those three beings that Gregorio Izquierdo called Nyargocs extended their arms against the natives, who shot arrows at themselves or stabbed themselves with their own daggers, and died with believable expressions of surprise and disbelief. The problem was that more and more armed Indians kept arriving, entering en masse in a jumble, to the point that the three beings were having trouble containing them all. Arrows flew everywhere chaotically, and one of them hit Gregorio Izquierdo, making him collapse on the floor.

  “Listen up …” he said, with that gust of lucidity typical of the moribund. “Grabbe all the golde ye can and escape thru the backe. There be a door that leeds outside … aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa- aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa- aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa- aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa- aaaaaaaaa aaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh.”

  “This be the seconde time I see thou diest, Sir Gregorio,” said Orpí, tossing him over his shoulder. “This tyme I shall save you. Grabbe all the gold thou canst, injun, and let us blow thar pop stand, anon!”

  And as our hero carried the wounded man, Araypuro filled up three sacks high with gold and they both fled, followed by Friston the dog, through a small side exit, as hundreds of arrows pierced the door they were now closing. Once outside, what they’d assumed to be an ovoid city began to shake as if it were alive, spinning, and two of those strange buttless beings stood in a door waving goodbye.

  The golden geometric object rose up, floating through the air, and after buzzing over the jungle treetops with an earsplitting hum, it disappeared into the extraterrestrial outer space. Everything was left in darkness and only a first-quarter half moon illuminated Araypuro, who smoked sitting alone now on the promontory, while Orpí scratched his head, not knowing what to say over Gregorio Izquierdo’s pale, inert body. After a short while, the two men buried the deceased in a Christian grave and prayed a very heartfelt ourfather as the crickets chirped ric-ric in the obscurity of the jungle. But the stillness was shortlived because from a distance again they heard the war tam-tams. It was the tribe who had come to find the treasure that belonged to them. A few brief, brave words emerged from the lips of our hero:

  “Erry man fer hisself!”

  Chapter XX

  In which Orpí and Araypuro come down with gold rush fever and it very nearly ends in homicide

  Not without much effort, Joan Orpí and Araypuro dragged along with them all the gold they’d managed to save from that floating temple, walking arduously through the jungle and crossing vast harsh deserts, rough mountains, rivers, marshes, and great lakes. And all that while hearing, night and day, the shrieks and drumming of the Indians, who continued to stalk their prey. During six days and their respective nights, they advanced with their precious cargo until, on the seventh, they stopped in a forest clearing, near a grotto that served as their temporary shelter.

  “I can take no more, massa,” said Araypuro, dropping two sacks brimming with gold. “I quit …”

  “Never, injun!” bellowed Orpí. “Don’t get persnickety with mee or I shant pay thine wages!”

  Araypuro suddenly burst into laughter.

  “I seeth not what the gleek is, injun.”

  “The gleek is that we’re filthy rich! But the way this gold is slowing us down, those Indians finna eat us alive!”

  “Very well. We shall camp here this night,” said our hero, sitting down. “On the morrow we shall decide what to do.”

  While Araypuro went hunting for some game, Orpí prepared a campfire with dry brush. The two men ate in silence, watching the flames rise and spark into the sky, as they tried to digest the impossible adventures they had recently lived through.

  “I recall reading The Adventures of Esplandián as a boy,” our hero said sadly, “where tis recount’d the dream of El Dorado. We hath made that dream a reality, injun.”

  “Pero, bro, what use to us is this pure gold?” he asked, gnawing on an iguana drumstick.

  “It shall finance New Catalonia,” said Orpí, looking into the fire. “We no longer must waite for financing from the Crowne. If all the coin we hath forked over as the anata and the royal fifth were retornned to us as aid, these lands would have long been prosperous and booming. Yet those Castilians ere want more and more, and the King hath alreddy saith he shant helpe me againe. This here treasure means the ende of begging for scraps. We shall live in abundance! From the fountains shall spring gold! No one will ere go hungered!”

  “And what do we want wid dat? We’d be better off headin’ to France to live like lords, off the fat a da land, like kings!”

  “Thine be a trick question, injun. Is it that …” said Orpí, picking up a red-hot ember, “… thou wishest to catch me unawares and steal mine gold?”

  “Master, don’t get thine bloomers in a twist, thou knowst I am sensitive …” said Araypuro, frightened.

  “Inveigle me not, injun …” said our mad hero, threatening him with eyes aflame. “I shant allow thee to purloin this treasure!”

  “Master!” said Araypuro, leaping up and running toward the jungle. “How now!?!”

  “Thou canst run, but thou canst not hide!” bellowed Orpí, completely bonkers, chasing after him, while Friston barked without knowing exactly why he was barking.

  “Don’t crosseth that line, massa, for I hath done nothing wrong!” whimpered Araypuro, running in circles amid the trees. “Quit thy aggression against me!”

  Crazed, Orpí chased Araypuro for a good long while through the forest thicket until he finally caught him and threw him to the ground. When our hero was about to bash in the Indian’s head with the torch, he stopped, hesitating, in a state of shock. He threw the red-hot branch far away and kneeled beside Araypuro, crying disconsolately.

  “Mine Godde … apologies … !” he said, his nose dripping with snot. “Mine Faustian ambition be repellent … ! I did wend crazy for a moment, as if Satan himself had possess’d me … ! Canst thou ever forgive me, injun?”

  “Dale! Have I any choice? All ist ever forgiven to the massa if he pays enuf,” said Araypuro, hugging our hero.

  “Forgive me, injun, mine greed got the best of me, but I’m cured now,” begged Orpí. “I shall tell thee what we will doo: bury the treasure in this clearing, near this cove, and that way we may verily escape these Indians and stay alive. Once we reach New Barselona, we shall retornne with horses and soldiers to recover it, what say thee?”

  “I darent say no, for fear thou wilt go all mandinga on me aginn, and send me straight to hell, hence … dale.”

  After hiding the gold in the darkest corner of that cave and drawing an improvise
d map on a piece of paper, Orpí and Araypuro continued on for New Catalonia. Three days and three nights they traveled, lost in the mountains, until finally losing the tribe that was on their trail and, on the fourth day, the two men reached the shores of a river, where they found a detachment of New Andalusian colonists, made up of twenty people living in deplorable conditions in a few straw houses around a wretched garden patch. A man of syphilitic appearance, who seemed as if he could drop dead at any moment, emerged from among the townspeople, prepared to challenge them, but our hero, who had kept a few ounces of gold from the treasure in his pocket, exchanged one for a ship. And that was how our hero and Araypuro set sail in a small canoe, with Friston sitting in the back, vanishing into the fog as they traveled down the Orinoco. What happened to them on that river no one can rightly say, however what remains of our outlandish story will please all who wish to persevere with it.

  Chapter XXI

  In which our hero returns to New Catalonia, founds New Tarragona and cuts a rug

  In Cumanagoto, news of Joan Orpí’s return quickly spread. After various rumors that included murders, pirates, monsters, and shipwrecks, the steadfast attorney had come back victorious from his audience with the King and now was fully invested with the power to govern his New Catalonia. When Vázquez de Soja and the other criollo noblemen heard that, their envy multiplied and they doubled down on their efforts to defeat that “Doctor Urpín” who so enraged them with his achievements, moving all the strings they had in reach, which were many. They spread tittle-tattle among the people of Cumaná, Cumanagoto, and Caracas, saying that our hero’s lands were a breeding ground of outlaws and notorious miscreants who were getting rich at the expense of the livestock of other viceroyalties such as New Andalusia, and that Orpí himself was a frequenter of taverns, a cardsharper, and a swindler who was cheating the King out of taxes. This vile rumorology resulted in furious letters sent by the criollo noblemen to King Philip IV, only snowballing the nefarious lies.

  Meanwhile, nearly a year after leaving Spain, Orpí and Araypuro rowed their small canoe until they reached the first traces of civilization: trimmed lawns, straight trees, and a small dock announced they were close to New Barcelona. Once they had eaten and were dressed, they took stock of the progress made in that tropical city, filled with the smells of oil, roasting coffee, incense. Almost all the homes were now two stories high, with wide balconies and arched doorways, decorated with colorful flowers. The businesses had prospered and now one could find a tailor, a carpenter, a hairdresser, and even one man from Seville who had opened up a bookstore—Suspicious Books—with one of the few printing presses in America, furtively publishing all the works of fiction (by Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Moredo, etc.) banned by the Spanish authorities in the New World. The cultivation of raw materials had yielded bumper crops, particularly tobacco, and they saw large bales tied with hemp cord of the Almogàvers™ brand, giving off a perfumed scent.

  After a few days of resting at his ranch, our hero continued with his plan of populating the vast wild regions of New Catalonia. Astride his steed Acephalus and followed by Friston the dog, Orpí led a small expedition of thirty soldiers and twenty Indians, plus Father Claver and Araypuro, up the Unare River in a felucca148 to unknown lands yet to be conquered. When the river became too narrow, they continued on foot through the jungle, first in a straight line, then in circles, and finally zigzagging through the thick brush, and they soon had no idea where they were.

  The following account is part of Father Claver’s Chronicles of this voyage:

  Aving advanced oer three days and three nights we came upon a very fertile and clean plain & Doctor Urpín deemed that place good territory for populating and decreed New Tarragona be found’d there. And in the fifteen or twenty days of work that we were there that city of New Tarragona was constructed, under the unerring leadership of Lieutenant Jeremías, and such a peaceful land was nere before seen and the Indians aided us with the task and cooked us fowls, pheasants, tame geese, reed birds, hares, and rabbits. And having done so …

  “What be that which thou scribest, Father?” asked Orpí, interrupting the Jesuit’s writing.

  “Some Chronicles of Conquest,” said the friar, who sat beneath a tree with Friston curled up beside him. “Someone must leave written documentation of thine exploits and all what happens here, is that not so?”

  “The tyme for writing is passt, Father. Tis time for action and labor, not intellectual daydreaming and leisure.”

  That night the natives and the soldiers ate moriche and bitter yucca casabe and together drank and sang to the freshly founded New Tarragona. Our hero gathered with Lieutenant Jeremies and Araypuro, who danced arrhythmically in a circle. Their eyes gleamed because they had imbibed the “magic grass” that allowed them communion with the world of the dead and they now danced like men possessed, in honor of fertility and life, while some Indians blew bamboo flutes, repeating the same tune over and over, accompanied by the recurrent beating of a drum.

  Orpí approached them and asked, “What be this dance, injun?”

  “Areyto, Indian dance,” said Araypuro, his eyes bulging out of their sockets.

  Then our hero taught them a dance of his land, done in a circle, everyone holding hands, making little hops and gazing up at the moon.

  “This dance is called Sardana.”

  “What a bore!” complained Araypuro. “I much prefer zarabandas, zambapalos, and chaconas! Chumbamenea!”

  Seeing that they were all dancing like wild beasts, Father Claver wrote the following in his Chronicles:

  … and t’day the grand party twixt Indians and soldiers was celebrated, all conjointlee, and Doctor Juan Orpín put forthe the idea of a dance with many peoples all round & in circkler formation and round that cirkle there were four fires in the sine of the cross and the musicians didde play and the people leapt and ate magick grass and thus passt the lifelong night & all in attendunce felt content’d and Doctor Urpín, who also danced with his beloved dogge Friston, didst relate to the Indyans that the dance doth goe by the name Sardana and thuslee the Indians adopt’d it and made it their own, yet they didst Christen it The Dance of the Crazed Snake altho the whole kit & kaboodle was ekwal heathen for twere better to praye the Our Father.

  “Be thou scriptulating again, Father?” asked Orpí, coming out of the circle. “Pray dance a while, Godly man!”

  “I must confessor, milord Orpí, that I findeth these dances highly sinful,” complained the Jesuit. “As the saying goes: Lead us not into Sardana, for it be mightily profane.”

  “Come now, where tis it written that one mustnt dance?”

  “Back in 1552 twas banned in the Liber Consolatus of the city of Olot and Father Benet Tocco, Benedictine monk, Abbot of Montserrat, and Bishop of Girona, in 1573, did write edicts against dancing sardanas at the church, for it be a rite of witchesses.”

  “Now, Father, leave off the sermones. Would thee like to dance or not?”

  The Jesuit, seeing that everyone was having fun except him, abandoned his Chronicles and, crossing himself a couple of times and hitching up the skirts of his habit, entered the throng of dancers as someone gave him some magic grass to eat. The festivities grew to such a joyous fever pitch—with the Jesuit dancing wildly, laughing and leaping—that the circle broke and they all took their partying to the street of New Tarragona, and not a soul ceased dancing during the entire blessed night.

  ___________

  148. i.e. Vessel propelled by oars or lateen sails, or both.

  Chapter XXII

  In which Joan Orpí and Father Claver search for the treasure whilst engaging in a debate on economics

  Orpí was anxious to set in motion his enterprise, this New Catalonia, for he was nearing fifty years of age and those lands had yet to bear him any material fruits. All the petitions he had sent to the King, asking for ships to allow him to do business with the Peninsula and other neighboring regions in the Americas, had been ignored and he now found himsel
f completely isolated. The industrial quantities of products such as cacao, leather, and tobacco that those lands produced had no way to travel, and that was an impediment to acquiring financing to make New Catalonia prosper. Orpí named Lieutenant Jeremies governor of recently inaugurated New Tarragona and left him in charge, heading off on his trusty steed Acephalus and followed by his dog, with Father Claver and Araypuro on a pair of mules. They resolved to go find Gregorio Izquierdo’s treasure, which, according to their calculations, couldn’t be too far.

  “Those nobles from the viceroyalties aim to halt mine progress, bye legall or illegal means, and they ne’er shall cease untill they hath seiz’d our landes,” lamented our hero. “Yet the trezure shall allow us to face up to such injustice. Perhaps purchase an entire shippe for trade with the Pininsulla.”

  “Be wary what ye wishe for,” advised Father Claver, “for golde doth unhinge the wizest ’mongst menne.”

  “Ya dont say! I know it all too well, Father,” complained Araypuro, “ole Massa here near nigh burn’t me up right crispy fore it.”

  “Bee not unappeased, injun!” exclaimed Orpí. “That war a passing delirium. Now I comprehendest the utility of that golde, far fromme its initial purppose.”

  “Prithee explain,” said Father Claver, his curiosity piqued.

  “Let us suppose,” began our hero, “that in these lands there war a man what wanted the selfsame as I, the right selfsame, and furthermore, he bore the name I once did have, Gregorio Izquierdo. Or more precise, I bore hizz name. Let us suppose that we sought the selfsame thing, our hopes identical, and we both call’d this thinge ‘trezzure.’ Very well, the question is whether the veritable Gregorio Izquierdo and I doth refer to the selfsame thinge when we speak of ‘trezzer.’ Ex hypothesi, our brains, while identic, thinke on different thinges when pronouncing that word. Gregorio Izquierdo, in thinking of the word ‘trezzure,’ thought of being able to live without working like a noblemen foreremore henceford. I, when thunking on dis very word, think of prosperating the entire territory of New Catalonia.”