Chapter VII
In which we learn of the arrival of the six friends to the city of Seville and Joan Orpí receives some bad tidings
The five friends (plus the Homunculus) finally reached the city of Seville. It was all flower-filled balconies, narrow cobblestone streets, churches with gold and polychrome altars and Solomonic columns, and it was all immobilized by a lethal heat that made the excrement and urine on the streets boil with an unbearably noxious stench. Our band led their horses up-up-up a long, narrow street of white houses, crowned with a small church. Then they went down an even narrowerer street to the Torre del Oro and from there, to the Puerta del Arenal. A raging sun beat down, and throughout that entire trajectory they didn’t see a single soul. The city seemed to be abandoned. But as soon as the sun set behind the mountains and the chiming of the bells of the Giralda were heard, the whole city suddenly filled with people and the roar of human life: royal soldiers, hidalgos, gentlemen, ladies of the upper bourgeoisie, black slaves imported from Africa, natives from the Indies wearing loincloths and feathers on their heads who looked at everything with terrorized eyes, carriages and carts passing up and down, taverns opening up their doors, churches ringing their bells, sopistas70 singing amusing syllogisms for their sopa boba, villains plotting swindles beneath bridges, sailors flirting with ladies of the night, and citizens of a thousand different nations.
“What a lotte of people there be in this city … and suche rejoicing!” exclaimed our hero.
Where so many people came from not even God knows, but the city of Seville turned out to be a very lively, jovial place, a marvel where it seemed all dreams could be realized.
Orpí and his friends entered one of the many taverns that lined a square, where they heard a music entirely new to their ears, with intense guitar strumming, shouts, faces that clenched and softened, shrieks and vibrant stomps. A dancer moved her skirt as if two flags were waving at once and a man bellowed as if his liver were being pulled from his mouth, and everyone accompanied the musicians with rhythmic hand clapping. When Orpí asked Valle del Omar what sort of music that was, the Moor answered, “Fellah-mangú, mine friend. The song of the Moors and the journeymen gypsies.”
“Thou dost call it falamengu?” asked Orpí.
“Yes, flamenco, or some such,” he said.
While Martulina, del Omar, and Grau had some tapas and Triboulet the Dwarf joined in with a dancer, our hero headed, thinking positively and wasting no time, to the local government office. He was prepared to ask for the job that his former mentor in Barcelona, the Sephardi Yehuda Abrabanel, had assured him his letter of recommendation would secure him. When Orpí reached the secretary, he removed his hat in a wide bow and said, “Hello, esteem’d secretary.”
“My name iz Zeñó Ernesto, not zecretary.”
“Very well, Ernesto. I come sent by Manuel de Rubeola, of Barcelona, bearing a letter of commendation for the post as administrator to thee royal tobacco shoppes,” he said, in Catalan-inflected Spanish.
The secretary Ernesto laughed so hard he almost choked.
“Lookee here, Catalan, the man whoze name thou bandy about be a huckzter and a Jew. He’z wanted by the law, underztand? If he zhowz hiz face in Zeville, he shan’t live long.”
“Art thou saying I don’t get the job?” asked Orpí. “I have a law degree, eh? Can I speak with whomever’s in charge around hither?”
“Law degree zchmaw degree! Skedaddle!”
When our hero returned, entirely woebegone, to where his friends were waiting for him, he found Martulina the Divina in a sword fight with five rogues at once and the tavern in shambles.
“Wouldst thou mind telling me what the heyeck be going on here?” asked Orpí, fighting by the young woman’s side.
“Thy friend, the dwarf,” she said, stabbing an opponent. “He groped his dance partner and now thirty of her brothers, cousins, and uncles be intent on cutting us down to size to safeguard her honour. It seems she was unmarried and the didicois have very strict laws regarding such matters.”
“Aha,” said Orpí, as he brandished his sword left and right.
Meanwhile, squads of fearsome musketeers began to arrive, breaking up the bar fight with shots of their muskets. Orpí and Martulina slipped through the backstreets before they could arrest them. Not long after, they found Grau de Montfalcó sitting on a wooden bench.
“Friends, sorry that I didst not lend a hand,” he said, crying inconsolably. “Ye know I canst bear violence, I’m ever so sensitive.”
“Wherefor art del Omar and Triboulet?”
“They hath vanished into the thicke air.”
“Well, that’s juste great.”
The three friends searched for somewhere to spend the night. Once they were installed at a posada, they went out to a mesón for supper.
“Friends, I feele lost,” confessed Orpí. “Turns out I have not the job I was expecting to gette. No matter thine university degree, if thou hath no godparents nor goode contacts these days, thou art a veritable no-body.”
“Chinne up!” exclaimed Grau de Montfalcó. “Surely only good canst befalle us from now on! Don’t ye agree?”
Orpí and Martulina looked at each other with their eyebrows raised, not at all convinced.
“Be thou a lump or what?” said the girl. “All we’ve had are catastrophes!”
“One moment,” reflected Orpí. “Grau maketh a point. We must not allow ourselfs to lose hope withe such insouciance. As Doménico Cavalca sayeth: he who doth not work hath no right to eat. Morrow I shall get busy pursuing a jobbe, and ye guys aught followe my lead!”
Thus, with a clear plan, the three friends finished their supper and then snuck into a new comic play, entitled Don Gil of
71. i.e. By Tirso de Molina (1579–1648).
the Green Breeches,71 in a corral in the Plaza Alfalfa, and then later they went to sleep, and then later … I’ll explain what happened then later.
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70. Poor students who sang in exchange for a stew made of leftovers.
71. i.e. By Tirso de Molina (1579-1648).