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

by Max Besora

  “Thine objective is true and thus honorable,” said Father Claver. “Yet I know not how thou canst elude the royale dominion.”

  “The conquest hath passt into handes of private entrepeneurs,” explained Orpí, “to whoms the costs defray’d must grant rights and prerogatives regarding the exploitation of the Indians and the new territories. The gelded trezzer shall aid us in our tasks.”

  “To pay the Kings anatas?” asked the Jesuit. “Or mayhaps to create an Aristotelian-Thomist autarkeia?”

  “Nay, to buyye shipps fore import-export!” replied our hero. “Mine intent is to create a region based on calculation and reason.”

  “Take heed, milord, for we alle must make an accounting with Our Lord on the day of Finall Judgment,” warned Father Claver.

  “Fear thee not for I be a learn’d lawyer and I canst defendd meself befor the courts, be they earthily or divine,” said Orpí. “Furthermore, I hold noe evul in mine hart, tis the others what wish me harm.”

  “Hath thou lost thine Faith, milord?” said the priest, repeatedly crossing himself.

  “I hath seen tribes what art not of ourn unclean world,” said Araypuro.

  “Shaddup, injun, thou turnst mine stomache,” said Orpí, raising an index finger to his nose to request silence, not wanting to continue that conversation.

  The weather had changed and now a solid rain fell on the three men, who struggled to advance along the muddy path. Father Claver, on his little burro, pulled a notebook from his satchel, placing the quill and inkwell on his lap, and jotted down the following in his Chronicles:

  … and Sir Urpín bade us speak no more and thusly put payd to the conversation. Then we climb’d arduous seeking a cave wherce suppos’d said treasure war. Yet having reach’d the pointe indicated neither Sir Urpín nor his Indian of labor encountered anything rezembling the treasure sought, tho’ much smelling about by hiz dog didst ockur. Aformentioned episode made Sir Urpín scream many sinfull werds & even hit his dog, what no blame hath in the matter, may the Lord hold ’im und keep ’im. And then, enraged at not finding said treasure, he chasd me and his Indian of labour all round the jungle, wishing to kille us both with his sward. But, fortunately, he regain’d his good sense just in the nick of tyme & then bust into teers like a wee child & the Indian and I hadd to console him verily like his blessed fathers. And then he wished to take his own lyfe with his owne sward and we had to grabbe him fore he couldst kille hisself right there & all on account of that blasted treasure & soon we three all werst crying like wimmin. Doctor Urpín then wanted to retrace our path and retornne home, but no befor leaving a sign in that place, thus he order’d his Indian of labor to done so, who took up a knife and mark’d a stone, thus and so:

  And then our lord Urpín made proffecy, vaticinium ex eventu, what said that in that land a cave and its treasure would be found by future generashuns, brought to these parts by a merchant in letters, alongside this field diary like an ancient scroll, what those who knoweth the language shall decipher with much effort. And that said, we three menne travelld down the mountain and returned to our belov’d New Catalonia, hands empty but hearts fill’d with joy for the treasure was safely stor’d in the mountains of …149

  “What be this mad passion for writing, Father?” asked Orpí, as they all headed down the mountainside.

  “In case some day some one reads thine adventures, milord,” replied the Jesuit. “The written word is the only way thee shalt bee remembered, for good or for ill.”

  As the three men passed a high plateau covered in dry brush, they came across a small settlement of colonists mixed with natives who, in that very moment, were celebrating some sort of Carnaval. They approached our hero to the sound of trumpets, cymbals, and flutes. Most were dressed as knights with strange names such as the Unfortunate Knight, the Knight of the Forests, and the Panther Knight. A man, dressed in black with (fake) gold flourishes and topped with a cavalier hat with a long feather plume, mounted on a horse adorned with a (fake) pearl-encrusted saddle, and accompanied by four pages dressed in striped uniforms, headed up the procession. He went over to an altar where simulated chivalrous feats were being performed. Then, from amid the crowd, materialized a character who fascinated Orpí and his companions. Father Claver, surprised, noted the following in his Chronicle:

  At that pointe the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance Don Quixote of La Mancha appeared, searching for his Dulcinea, as natural and true to life as he be depicted in his book, and twas a great joy to beholde him. The knight-errant came on a skinny horse very much like his Rosinante. He was accompanyed by the priest and barber with their own suits and Princess Micomicona, as welle as his squire Sancho Panzo on his saddled ass. Don Quixotte approach’d an improvised altar wherce ther war sum jutges and Don Quixotte awarded a prize to Sancho Panza, and gaveth him instructions to lay said troffy at the feet of the mistress of ’is heart, Princess Dulcinea, beseated amongst the laydees at the reception. And erryone laughed and applaud’d.

  “Incredible,” exclaimed Orpí, as the carnavalesque character thrilled the audience, which shouted, clapped, and laughed like crazy. “Cervantes’s character hath crosst the Atlantic! And to thinke that I mette that famous author!”

  “And that be not all, milord,” said one of the locals. “Tis sayd that the liver of the true Don Quixotte canne be found in Trujillo, in Perú.”

  “Yet … he is mere a literary character!” exclaimed Orpí in surprise.

  “Mayhaps for thee,” replied the local man. “For here we all suffer from a mite of oneirataxia, like poor ole Alonso Quijano.”

  That colorful incident worked to brighten our hero’s existence and improve his mood, and thus, along with Araypuro and Father Claver, they spent that night in company of those affable locals, enjoying the festivities and a nice Tinta de Toro,150, which all three friends drank happily, forgetting for a time their bad fortune at not having located the golden legend of the New World.

  ___________

  149. i.e. This fragment of Father Claver’s chronicles is smudged beyond recognition in the original manuscript. Truly a pity, since surely the part that is missing would have given us the geographical coordinates indicating the location of the treasure.

  150. i.e. Wine imported from the Kingdom of Leon, famous for tolerating long voyages without arriving as vinegar.

  Chapter XXIII

  In which is recounted a battle against the Dutch and in which Orpí carries out a pharaonic labor

  The day after the inauguration of New Tarragona, Governor Jeremies went running into Orpí’s house, bellowing, “Milord, there be a shitton of Dutchmenne at the Unare making trobble … !”

  And indeed, a troop of Dutchmen, who in that era were at war against the Kingdom of Castile, had disembarked on the beach of New Catalonia and were stealing salt from the salt pans at the delta of the Unare River. Orpí sent a messenger to request urgent aid from the noblemen of Cumaná and Cumanagoto, but there was no time. Our hero, adorned in a metallic cuirasse, his sword on the left side of his belt and a dagger on the right, resolved to head there with forty soldiers from New Barcelona, twenty from New Tarragona, and some fifty-odd Indians from various tribes, to engage in battle. When they arrived they found twenty hulks and five-hundred Flemish soldiers armed to the teeth.

  “Let ‘er rip, boys, fight these Flems to the very death!” ordered Orpí.

  Shots hither and thither, the battle was bloody, and would have gone to the Dutch side, due to a sheer question of numbers, if not for the fact that a caravelle with an English flag happened to be passing by, and seeing the kerfuffle, joined in the battle alongside Orpí without thinking twice.

  After the Dutch captain’s death and the retreat of his troops back into the river, our hero offered his thanks to the English captain who’d come to his aid. The days that followed were a frenzy of trading merchandise between New Barcelona and the hold of the British ship, a highly profitable exchange for both sides: one sold cotton, tobacco, leather,
and Venezuelan pearls, while the other sold oil, wine, cinnamon, and many other basic necessities that were much needed in New Barcelona.

  Orpí struck up a friendship with a pleasant Swedish sailor, who went by the name of Jonas Jonassen Bronck,151 who was on his way back from Jamaica and headed for North America, to the territory controlled by the Dutch West India Company. The two men shared a fondness for smoking and the gift of the gab. One evening, as they were sitting on the porch of Orpí’s house, eating a papaya, Jonas pulled out some dried branches from a little bag and rolled a cigarette.

  “What be thee smokin’, sailor? Uat du iu smokin’?”

  “Marijuana from Jamaica,” said the man, who had three enormous dreadlocks hanging from his head. “This noted weed, as Shakespeare said, makes a journey in your head. Do ye wanna try? Fire it up, man, and inhale-exhale.”

  Orpí took a good long hit on the joint and suddenly found himself floating above his ranch and seeing everything through a strangely-colored lens. It even seemed to him that his dog Friston was staring at him, his head cocked as if to ask, “You okay, master?”

  “Lorde in Heaven, what a lonng strange trippe its be-iiinniiin …” said Orpí when he returned from his psychotropic journey.

  After smoking that wacky tabacky he felt depressed, since what with those new attacks by the Dutch to control the salt pans of the Unare, our hero had had no time to further the cause of New Catalonia. And if he had to depend on the aid of the Castilian administration, it was going to be a long haul, because they were harder and harder on him with each passing day. He explained all his concerns to Bronck, who—also high as a kite—had a madcap idea:

  “Översvämning152 the salt pans!” he said, gesturing with his hands to get the idea across.

  “Gute aidiah!!” exclaimed Orpí who, after burning off a few more brain cells with some more tokes, had grasped the concept.

  Our hero put into action the pharaonic project of flooding the salt pans so that no one would ever again have the crazy idea of trying to steal them. He notified all his allied indigenous tribes in the region and, in less than three days time, he already had more than five thousand Indians prepared at the entrance to New Barcelona. Jonas and his crew also offered to lend a hand. Everyone rolled up their sleeves and prepared to work together. They opened up a vast ditch from the Unare to the salt pans, with hoes and their bare hands. It was so vast that it could have held more than ten heads of cattle. The work got off to a bad start since it entailed leveling a part of the virgin forest and, on the very first day, a tree fell upon two soldiers, killing them instantly. We have no record of the exact number of laborers involved, nor how many of them died of thirst, attacks by other tribes, or execrable exhaustion. Under the beating sun and over two months time, they all worked to expand the channel, digging out that reddish earth, amid caimans, boas, and carnivorous ants, making their way through the various clay stratifications along the morass. It was hard, back-breaking work and hundreds of Indians, whites, and blacks fell ill with fevers or enervation. But finally, one day, the river’s water ran down through that wonder of artisanal engineering to the salt pans. That entire enormous promontory of smooth, sterile, violet rocks that extended in a display of mysterious geometric shapes, formed by the action of the ocean water, spirals and twisted barbs that looked like the surface of an unknown planet, were submerged forever beneath the river’s surface. And, with that strategic move, Orpí was free from having to worry about any more Dutch incursions.

  Once the epic task was completed, the festivities began in New Barcelona, complete with theatrical representations paying homage to Jonas Broncks and his invaluable help, who then continued on northward, until he reached New Amsterdam, near the island of Manhattan, where he bought some lands he named Broncksland. But that’s a story for another day. When Orpí returned to his ranch, there on the table, he discovered that the Swede had left him his little bag filled with magic grass. As he lit up one of those magical cigarettes, under the watchful eye of his dog Friston, he saw a shadow behind the tree in his little garden. When he went out, armed with his sword, he found himself face to face with a man dressed in black who came rushing toward him, arm held aloft, brandishing his own sharpened blade. Luckily, Friston sank his teeth into the hitman’s leg, and he fell, like a dead weight, to the ground. Once the mysterious man was captured and his wrists tied, Orpí interrogated him:

  “I war just following orders …” he said, bleeding from the blows received during the interrogation. “But tis true, sir, that milord Domingo Vázquez de Soja and other criollo nobles from Santo Domingo and Caracas wish thee harm and t’wont end well, for they hath munch more power than thee.”

  The hitman was freed while our hero seriously reconsidered what to do about the criollo noblemen and the rest of the viceroyalties surrounding New Catalonia.

  “For this I hath worked so many years in service to the Crowne? I doth refuse to allow New Catalonia to falle into the wrong hands. Cannot somethinge be done?”

  ___________

  151. i.e. A historical figure who traveled from Sweden to North America and settled by the Bronx River (which bears his name), in the state of New York.

  152. i.e. Flooding, in Swedish.

  Chapter XXIV

  In which our hero finds himself besieged by enemies and realizes that history is an endlessly repeating circular path

  Well, yes, something was done. Not in the Americas, but rather on the Iberian Peninsula. It was the year of our Lord 1640 and France declared war on King Philip IV in the well-known Thirty Years War. The Spanish monarch strategically situated his troops within the Principality of Catalonia, which fueled the population’s discontent, to the point that many Catalans ended up rebelling against the royal army itself.

  That remote political reversal in the distant fatherland triggered unknown forces and devastating consequences for the colonies across the ocean and, particularly, for New Catalonia. Orpí’s territory bordered New Andalusia, whose old Spanish populations were abandoned and malnourished, and so they gradually moved into New Barcelona, which was growing with each passing day. That worried the Castilian authorities in Caracas and Cumanagoto, who observed—with a combination of envy, disgust, and stupefaction—how the Catalan was growing strong in his region, which even—to top it all off—bore the name Catalonia in a direct tribute to the peninsular one. The governor of Cumanagoto, Arias Montero, was spurred on by his friend Vázquez de Soja to complain that everywhere Orpí “sentaba Real”153 was soon filled with “slaves and outlaws.” This calumny spread like wildfire through the Spanish nobility of the region. And all that was exacerbated by Orpí’s legal fights to end the enslavement of Indians and Blacks, which the Venezuelan nobles felt impinged on their rights. Furthermore, our hero had engaged in trade with the English, considered heretics by the Castilian crown, which only hammered the point home. None of Orpí’s efforts to protect the salt pans, construct canals, and make his region more prosperous and habitable for the profit of King Philip IV had done him a lick of good. Orpí and his name were completely surrounded by rumors, snares, lies, and letters back and forth filled with mortal loathing, unfounded envy, twaddle, and calumny amid a heat that poisoned the humors and a mugginess that made everything a sticky mess.

  Our hero, seeing what was his lot, acted quickly. In a letter addressed directly to the King, he requested that Cumanagoto and the rest of New Andalusia be annexed to New Catalonia, which was much more prosperous and gentrified than the former. He received no reply. Considering the precedent of the original Catalonia, the one on the Peninsula, neither the King, nor a single noble, nor those on the Council of the Indies were now looking kindly upon the project of New Catalonia. Quite the contrary, in fact. What those nobles were wanting, actually, was for Orpí’s lands to be annexed to New Andalusia. The campaign against our hero brought together the most fantastic gathering of illustrious noblemen in Santo Domingo and Caracas, who all saw the Catalan as a secessionist danger to crush.
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  “These noblemenne be worst than bloodsucking mosquitoes and cannibalous ants!” complained Orpí. “There be no way to get them off mine back. They be greedfull and sellfish, with some sort of institutional delirium against me, despite the fact that I be as pro-King Philip as they art, if not more. All this gluttony for land merely rotts souls.”

  “We shall get nowhere with that pessimistic logick, master,” said Araypuro.

  “Life is but a theater, dear injun. And just menne such as I, lemme telle ya, allways get the short straw in this crazed trompe-l’œil. Tis better just to dream: tis free and no-one gets hurt.”

  “Man does not live by dreams alone.”

  “True, my injun. Yet all this greed for conquest hath only broughten me great misfortune,” said Orpí, as his blood rose to his face. “Belieffeeme, man wasteth away laboring for these noblemen, who live off the fruits of others, and miss not a chance to get backstabby. And I, somehows, musteth extricate mineself from all this or I shall end up ill, for I am near nigh fifty-one & tortur’d by dis ’ernimated disc.”

  Araypuro tried his darnedest to cheer him up, but Orpí could now only see the futility of all his efforts.

  “All these yeers of travell & wandering hath made mee see how wrongheaded mine venture hath been. All the things of this worlde be mirror doubbbles, to infinity and beyonde. Godde be prais’d, yet ne’er shall He forgive mineself.”

  “I don’t know about God, massa,” said Araypuro. “But I forgive you.”

  “Thank thee, my injun, yet it be not enuf. If thou couldst see the lyes writ against me by those sonnes of snaggletoothed whorebuckets,” swore Orpí, pulling out a stack of letters. “The inhabitents of Cumanagoto in New Andalusia, afeared of their governor, keep sending complaints to the King, difaming mee publickly. Listen to these callous fiends: ‘Aforementioned Mr. Orpín, sinister to de core, never hath done had any nown wealth and thusforth and so he approprimagated the fals name of Gregorio Izquierdo.’ And what bout this one: ‘He hath disappropriate dealings with the Indian ladys and even rite befor the Indian mennes theyselfs & he dances impiouslously round fyres with the natifs’ … canst thou belief this? And, as if that warn’t bad enuf, theyve the gallish balls to pulleth out the olde canard that they be ‘Spaniards & loyal vassals of Your Majesty whilst said conquistador be a native o’the Catalan nation, and as such we groweth quite alarm’d, be he not another Aguirre, in whomse footsteppes he be followeing!’ Sooth be told, these criollo noblemen art greatly enviegious and wish to have New Barcelona under their control. Desire be a slipperee thing and everyboddy want what others doth possess. Domingo Vázquez de Soja desireth mine desire, which is to saye mine very vice-royalty and the usufruct of all mine labor. On mine life, if they want a piece of mee, they verily knowe where to finde mee!”