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

by Max Besora

  “Negotiate thy surrender anon & thine lyfe & that of thine citisens shall be pardouned & granted preeminence,” advised the Commissioner. “The King hath decreed that thee shall be ceded an encomienda that shall allow thee and thine captains to live like kings in thine haciendas in Caracas or Cumanagoto, and thou couldst even return to the Peninsula, to thine home, and retire as a gentlemann to live off the fatt of the lande … with riches few menn hath ere seen!”

  “I refuse to negotiate!” bellowed Orpí. “Tis precisely the institution of the encomienda what shelters the Crown’s policy of slavery! If thou dost think that I shall sell out to thine King like a veritable strumpet thou bestest think agin … I be the slave of no man!”

  “Well then prepare to die,” warned the Royal Commissioner, “for I seeth not much of an armee to protect thee in this city.”

  “Mindeth thine selfsame beeswax, Commissioner. Tis sooth I hath few men yet they be all devoted to a cause, and if they perish they shall do so with honesty & justyce, and it be not thy place to call their honor into cuestion. Now, get thee to helle!”

  Our hero’s speech had been clear, concise, well-delivered, without excessive rhetoric, and the soldiers applauded as the Commissioner galloped off amid hoots and whistles from the Orpian troops and fierce barking from his dog Friston.

  “Those serfs of the King wish to scare us, however I canst telle ye now they shant achieve said goal,” said Orpí. “Altho’ tis indeed sooth that we be four-hundred against four t’ousand.”

  Two weeks later they heard the news: the noblemen of Cumaná had gathered up an army and were coming across the border of New Catalonia, advancing toward the capital of New Barcelona, flooding the surrounding mountains with armed men. War was nigh. Our hero went out into the streets of the city, ordering his lieutenants to gather the troops. Some soldiers, however, impelled by fear, had fled to the Castilian side the night prior, waving a white flag. Our hero realized that he was leading into certain death soldiers who had too long hence become farmers, and farmers who had never been soldiers. It was a war lost before it even began. Depressed, Orpí was about to tell them all to return to their homes and await surrender when, suddenly, from the beach, a ship fired its signal cannons. Everyone ran to their weapons but when they reached the beach, they found it was merely an old, decrepit boat with patched sails, like one of those ghost ships in pirate stories. At the stern was a small man waving hello.

  “Triboulet!” exclaimed Orpí happily.

  They set out their small boats and soon Triboulet the Dwarf and his entire gang of gap-toothed freebooters, their skin gleaming with sundry diseases, stepped onto the beach and limped over to our hero and his army.

  “Didst thou think I wouldst miss this soiree?” said the dwarf.

  “Helles to the nay. Yet thine hundred freebooters shant suffice to defeat the enemee.”

  Having said that, from the depths of the jungle came the terrible shrieks (“yeeeee-haaaa!”) of the Lionzas, led by Queen María Lionza and Martulina the Divina, who now arrived on wild horses, nude as ever and armed with bows and arrows. Behind them came various tribes such as the Caribes and the Cimarron community, captained by Estebanico the Blackamoor. They had all come to offer their sworn loyalty to New Catalonia. Our hero straightaway granted them the same standing as VIP citizens.

  “Wee soldier boy of mine heart,” said María Lionza. “For the first time we shall fight alongside men, however this shall be the expection, not the norme.”

  “I verily appreciate, mine queen, thine ferocious aid,” said Orpí, kneeling before her while Martulina the Divina, beside him, winked complicitly.

  Our hero organized his attack formations, placing his captains at the head of each detachment, while an insistent rain fell increasingly harder. It was typical for those lands to be besieged each year by a cyclone from the coasts of Mexico that laid waste to everything in its path like some sort of collective purge. The fishermen had officially announced the impending cyclone, and it was approaching land. As Orpí trotted hither and thither atop Acephalus, organizing trenches and advising his soldiers, he found Father Claver deep in prayer, standing in the middle of the street, staring up at the sky.

  “Father, art thou quite right?” asked our hero.

  “Betwixt Heaven & Earthe there be much invisible to the human eye,” said the Jesuit, pointing toward the ocean. “Divine punishment approacheth!”

  Everyone turned to look at the Atlantic and saw ten columns of water forming over the ocean’s surface, heading toward dry land. The wind howled monstrously and made the churchbells chime out of rhythm. There was no time to protect the homes and livestock. Spirals of air and salty rainwater came down from the sky and crashed to the ground, shaking doors and windows as everybody ran to prepare for battle, which was announced by the enemy troops’ signal cannon. Domingo Vázquez de Soja’s army had arrived at the gates of the city. Enemy cannons were soon launching their terrible balls, and terror gripped those beneath the projectiles falling harder and harder upon the streets of New Barcelona, hammering the roofs of houses, collapsing walls, perforating stone and wood, sending balconies and double doors flying through the air, bouncing down the street and rolling, between cracks of thunder, into anything and everything. Each new round was a butchery of bodies turned cadavers. A scent of discharged gunpowder swathed the city and dried out the throats of the people running helterskelter, breaking formation. The fires produced by the bombing spread throughout the entire city, and as most of the homes had roofs made of braided leaves and fibers, they burned by the dozens. Orpí, atop his loyal Acephalus, with his cape soaring behind him and one hand clamped down on his hat, rode all over the city gathering his soldiers and emboldening the cowards, amid that cataclysmic setting. More than a thousand but less than two thousand armed men and women awaited the enemy troops: blacksmiths, butchers, jewelers, prostitutes, monks, soldiers, scholars, and vagabonds gritted their teeth over the impending combat.

  Twas shortly after midnight when the squadrons of royal soldiers entered the city brandishing their musketoons. The two sides came face to face. Orpí guiding his, and Domingo Vázquez de Soja leading the royal army, which was much better armed and more numerous. The two men’s gazes met and they scrutinized each other’s faces for any symptom of weakness or disillusionment. While the two armies awaited the order to charge, a silence had imposed itself atop the rain and the heavy winds from the north.

  “Unleash the beast!” screamed Orpí, lifting his saber over his troops as his voice boomed across the plain and his war cry blended with Friston’s barking. Or perhaps it was the dog’s barking that sounded like his voice. Man and beast had both influenced each other.

  Before either of the two armies moved an inch, and after a few moments in which time and motion seemed to have stopped, an immense bellowing was heard advancing along the streets of New Barcelona. Suddenly, a diabolical wind picked them all up and dragged them: the cyclone was touching down in full force. Several columns of whirling air came down from the heavens and swept up everything in their path. Soldiers rolled along the ground, houses collapsed, horses neighed as they floundered, eyes panicked. Those who could fled and hid in the jungle as from the heavens rained down pieces of beams, roofs, glass, wood, doors, and windows, and a moment came when the entire ground trembled, opening up a rift that shook the church belltower and, as the bell sounded amid the roaring winds, the tower cracked and fell, crushing some soldiers beneath it. Father Claver and a few Jesuits witnessed the spectacle, their arms outstretched like the savior on the cross, observing it all like an illustration of the End of Times. Everything was dragged, pushed, rolled, thrust forward by the mercilessly inclement weather, and the cyclone’s strength didn’t wane until everything was well and properly smushed, flattened, and razed.

  A few hours later, it seemed the army of clouds in the sky decided to break file and retreat, following the wind. The cyclone also seemed to pacify, fading in increasingly weaker and sporadic gusts as
from the sky fell only a harmless, cold, intolerably sweet rain. Hundreds of inert bodies rested in the rubble of New Barcelona, and the royal army—or what was left of it—had withdrawn before ever attacking. Peace reigned, after so much raging weather.

  “Chumbamenea! We won!” shouted Araypuro, who had spent the entire evening hidden inside a wine barrel playing with Ta-Ipí.

  “Do not believeth yond, injun,” said Orpí, “for those noblemen shall anon return with an army double grand. We hath birthed a stillborn New Catalonya. They shall hang me for insurrection and thee, for following me. I surrender.”

  “Yeah, no … thou canst poop our fiesta now, literally. We mustnt abandon ourn ranchito, master,” insisted Araypuro.

  “Hath thee beenst smoking mine magick herbs, injun? Dost thou ween the Castilians shall stop here? Thou be wide-eyed & artless! All what hath been blighted today shall pass to the possession of the Crown. Leave aside thine folly and tell everybody to return home and pray forgive me for mine sinnes. I ne’er wish’d harm upon a soul, mine aspiration war to build a more meritorious worlde.”

  “Go forth and build it somewhere else! Whither thou goest, we all shall go.”

  “Whyfore doth I dearly ween that tis I who allways follows thine orders, when in sooth it oughtest be precisely versa and vice?” asked Orpí warily.

  “For I be thine lackey, furthermore I be so by free obligation.”

  Orpí, spurred on by Araypuro, organized the exit from the flattened city. They built stretchers to transport the wounded and, with no time to bury all their dead, they left that ghost city en masse: Caribes, Lionzas, colonists, freebooters, and Cimarrons, amid tears of sadness, traveling deep into the darkness of the virgin forests until they disappeared forevermore from those lands belonging to the Crown. Once Orpí and his motley crew were gone, New Catalonia was finally annexed to New Andalusia by royal decree, just as the criollo noblemen wanted. New Barcelona was dismantled and as for New Tarragona, it was abandoned, and its wooden houses were soon overtaken by ants and fungus. And thus, in that brusque, stupid, and indecent way, Joan Orpí’s dream of founding a New Catalonia in the New World drew to a close. Or did it? Dear readers, do not rush to judgment. Dear critics, accuse us not of a facile deus ex machina, for the final Chapter will put all things in their right place, as called for in a fine adventure of these characteristics.

  Chapter XXVIII

  In which, in this here final Chapter, Joan Orpí’s death and New Catalonia’s final destiny are revealed

  We could very well have titled this book The Outlandish Peregrinations of Joan Orpí, since our hero spent half his life on the road, both on the Iberian Peninsula and in the New World, and we beg leniency for any errors of our pen, whose ink flows with the kind goodness and clever wit of its author as our story nears its end.

  Joan Orpí, dressed in the finery of the Guaiquerí Indians and riding bareback on his loyal Acephalus and accompanied by his faithful dog Friston, headed up that final desperate, desgeographied expedition, deep into the heart of the thick jungle where no white man had ever set his stank feet, fleeing everything. More than six hundred people—men, women, and children—wounded by the cyclone and the bullets of the Spanish army, followed him for months, advancing up the mountain and down the mountain in their adventure north into uncharted territory. One fine day, the expedition came across a particularly green and florid area, made fertile by the gifts of a nearby volcano and river.

  “Holey Saint Pancras!” exclaimed Captain Scourge when he laid eyes on that beautiful landscape. “Is this is or is this aint a veritable Paradise on earth?”

  “Veritably,” agreed Orpí. “And thusly I name this place Saint Pancras of Paradise, and here we shall found the Brandnew New Catalonia.”

  Orpí left a quarter of his expedition members there to lay in crops and begin a new life, with Captains Octopus and Scourge in charge, along with Triboulet the Dwarf, his freebooters and his Homunculus, while the rest continued along the banks of the Antuvi River to a red field where poppies happily sprouted, surrounded by imposing mountains.

  “Here, amid these fancyful mountains and this valley of fresh spryngs, we shall found skools,” said Orpí, daydreaming. “And teech Civill Law to all the Indians, as I learnt in Ole Catalonia, so they may defend themselfs from the injustices of this lyfe.”

  “I swear to thee I shall,” said General Jeremies. “Twill be the most rheumily intellecktchuell acaddemy ere seen!”

  “Jesus, Orpí! Mayhaps building a monastery be more urgent,” ordered Father Claver.

  “Monastery and academy,” ordered Orpí, “both places art ideal for the habitus of study and contemplation.”155

  Then the expedition arrived to a valley filled with black rocks, which our hero named the Valley of the Bronx, in honor of Jonas Broncks, the Swede who had helped him in the liberation of the Unare salt pans. Captains Jeremies and Sedeño de Albornoz stayed behind there, along with Estebanico the Blackamoor and his Cimarrons, as well as the Lionzas, with María Lionza and Martulina the Divina, who soon forsook their matriarchial exclusivity to join forces with those men. Finally, the expedition arrived at the frontier where the Castilian Crown’s property ended, there by the mouth of the Antuvi River. From that point on the landscape and ocean were unknown. The region, perfect for agriculture, was filled with fruit trees, and fields of fresh grass so pleasing to the sight and so perfumed with the scent of wildflowers. Seeing that the area stimulated everyone’s five senses, Orpí decided to establish his city there.

  “Pero, like, what shld it bee call’d this time: New Barselona, Brand-new New Barselona, Ultra-Mega-New Barselona?” asked Araypuro sarcastically.

  “Shaddup, injun, thou giveth mee a migraine. Twill be callt just Barselona, for the previous one no longer exists in mine mind. I hath no past, merely future.”

  For our hero did not want to reproduce the rational world he had already left behind, but rather forge an authentic jungle city. He founded it in a virginal tabula rasa, a marginal space free of tariffs, laws, and borders. When it came time to establish the configuration of the new city, Orpí sketched lines that weren’t always straight, but more often curves that wound back upon themselves, and the engineers and architects were incredibly stressed out trying to follow his antigeometric blueprints. As a result, the new-new Barcelona ended up being a hieroglyphic of streets that led nowhere, inverted bridges, stairs that returned to the same place they started, and squares with no exits or entrances. Everything in that small city grew and multiplied organically, like a fungus, with no sort of logical planning. Farmers, office workers, shopkeepers, and customers frequently lost their way and often people would be spotted wandering with no particular destination, their eyes lost in the distance; when asked where they were headed, they had already forgotten. And in spite of it all, Orpí felt at home in that supremely antirational artificial homogeneity. In a matter of few weeks the town was bursting with life, families, and prosperous bartering businesses, with garden patches beside the river that were blooming green, relationships between white men and Indians that were improving, and our hero smiled happily seeing that he had devoted his best years and efforts to building that ultimate nation and that in the end it was bearing fruit. He must have done something right, he thought, over the course of that turbulent existence of his.

  For a few years, Orpí lived in relative tranquility in that place and spent his days puttering in his private garden patch and long hours of reading that kept him amused, interspersed with walks with his dog Friston. Araypuro, who had a small ranch with his wife Ta-Ipí, studied Catalan and took up painting, devoting many hours to an enormous canvas depicting the most important episodes that he and Orpí had lived through—the kerfuffles with the tribes in the jungle, the Virgin of Montserrat’s appearance, the founding of the first New Barcelona, the whole treasure affair, their trip to the Iberian Peninsula—immortalizing their adventures in an eternal manner.156 And as for Father Claver, his days were spent finishing hi
s Arte, the multilingual dictionary translating Catalan into Guayquerí and other local languages, and putting the finishing touches on his Chronicles of the conquest.

  Everyone seemed to now be living in peace and harmony in that new secret territory, but as so much adventure can’t be good for one’s health, one evening Joan Orpí felt himself ailing and collapsed to the ground. Fierce fevers attacked our hero. His skin had turned pale, his belly swollen, his tongue black, and his wide-open eyes bulged at the very Gates of the Apocalypse. He lay prostrate in a bed as Father Claver acted as his doctor, performing two or three bloodlettings on our hero without a miracle. He delivered his definitive verdict to Orpí’s captains:

  “He is headed to the better place of daisy-pushing.”

  Joan Orpí felt his life slipping away and everyone in New Catalonia was of heavy heart. The sorrowful news traveled through all the tribes in the new territory like a flash of lightning and soon hundreds of people had come to Barcelona to pray in front of our hero’s home, bringing palm leaves and lit candles, and watch over the dying man. All his captains came, the Ya-no-mama and all the other tribes, Martulina the Divina came, as did Queen María Lionza, Triboulet the Dwarf, and his freebooters. No one failed to show up. Some brought incense and aromatic plants to see if they could cure him. Others intoned strange prayers that were said to have extraordinary powers and even the Cimarrons, with Estebanico the Blackamoor dressed in white, sang in unison, decapitated a rooster, and held it aloft so that blood poured out, in an attempt to distract Death from his rightful duties.

  Surrounded by his friends, Orpí spoke to Araypuro, who kneeled beside him, whimpering.

  “Be not sad, injun, we all must go when it be our tyme,” our hero said. “Mine bajukaya,157 as thou callst it, be in the toilet.”