In which Joan Orpí travels from Seville to Madrid, where he encounters an old friend
The ship on which Orpí and Araypuro were traveling docked in the port of Guadalquivir one morning in the year 1620, with the Giralda and the Torre del Oro rising undaunted over Seville as a heavy scent of burning human flesh greeted them. The Holy See had begun a veritable crusade against the Devil and hundreds of heretics were burned each day throughout the Peninsula, up into France, and beyond, as black smoke from the mortal bonfires darkened the European skies. Many things had changed since our hero had left that city, years earlier. The architecture of the buildings and cathedrals presented new shapes, twisted and darkly gilded, just as obscure as the grotesque faces of the Spanish people, white and with heavy shadows under their eyes, like cadavers, always looking over their shoulders as if Death was waiting to snatch them away at any moment.
“Carajo! These irregular stones doth remind me of the trees of the spirits in mine jungle, master,” said Araypuro, contemplating the Spanish architecture.
“Indeed, injun, they do,” said our hero, wrinkling his brow, “but everything here is much more destrudo. I prefer the positive jungle energy.”
From Seville, the two men rode on horseback to Madrid, but since requesting an audience before the Royal Council was a slow, bureaucratic process, they had to wait almost a month for their turn. So Orpí and Araypuro found themselves tourists, marveling at the buildings in the Spanish capital and the industrial quantities of white people in the Old World. The denizens of Madrid, on the other hand, regarded the two men like something out of a circus.
“We are not dressed in the latest styles, injun. We are eccentric, here,” said Orpí, looking at the people. “I have to say, injun, thou stickest outest not only for thine darkness, but for thine bisarro native garments with feathers, and the amulets that hang from thine hair and scrag.”
“Well, thou aint so hot thineself,” noted Araypuro. “Thou resemblest a taxidermied hen.”
“Insolent!” exclaimed our hero, moving to smack Araypuro but stopping suddenly when he saw himself reflected in a shop window: his big eyes were hidden in a dry, wrinkled face that was partially buried beneath a sparse beard turned yellow by the Almogàvers™ cigars; he wore torn trousers that were stained either by sea salt or excrement; his once-white shirt was just a memory; his hat was old and had no cord; and his shoes were pathetic sandals that clung to his feet out of pity. When Orpí saw his bedraggled image, he decided to visit a tailor. There they decked him out in some short black breeches with green silk stockings, immaculate white shirt, red velvet vest, stiff-necked doublet, and top hat. Elegantly dressed, our hero soon after ran into a character seen earlier in this story: none other than Grau de Montfalcó,141 who it turns out was living in the capital at that time.
“I’m right contented here,” Grau said. “I work mornings as a doctor in a hospital and I sing in a choir of castrati in the church in the afternoons.”
“Good for thou,” said our hero, who, when passing by a shop selling folkloric paintings, spotted a retablo engraved with the sad figure of Don Quixote and his loyal squire Sancho Panza. “Look at that, my friend. They are characters created by Miguel de Cervantes, from the book I gave thee when we met there in the kingdom of Valencia years ago. Dost thou recall?”
“And how! In fact, a second part hath already come out, Cervantes’s highly intelligent response to a student of Lope de Vega who had the temerity to write a sequel to the Quixote (which wasn’t half as good, truth be told), before Cervantes himself had a chance.”
“Too many bad books in the worlde,” said Orpí. “Diego de Saavedra, in his Republic of Letters doth declare that, with the invention of the printing press, ‘everyone drags into the light what would be best kept in the dark, because, just as there be few whose actions are worthy of being record’d, there be few who write something worthy of being read.’”
“Tis true, and technology is everything these days,” said Grau, showing him a French pocket watch. “Beholde, the universe is like this device, made of hands and numbers, more precise than a rooster’s crow. What once was impossible to do no longer is: measuring time, controlling nature, ergo controlling peoples. Arms and letters no longer go together. The era of mythical kingdoms hath come to an end. Reality and progress rule. Everything is bureaucracy, here and in America.”
“I doth still believe in magic, my friend, as this conquest looks more like a step backward than progress, by any measure: astrolabe, sextant, hourglass, north star, or the minutes and seconds on thy watch. Howebeit I shant allow these rascally noblemen with the king’s ear snatch from me what I’ve earned with my blood & sweat. Those virgin lands must be my economic salvation.”
“Remember that Felipet is absolute sovereign of an empire on which ‘the sun never sets,’ as Charles the Fifth dared say.”
“I’ve no intention of tossing in the towel,” declared Orpí, gazing out at infinity. “Furthermore, Philipus IV is a two-bit monarch compared with the ones in the jungle. I’ve seen kings who knowe the language of magical plants, who can transform into birds and fly through the skies on whim, and whose armies obeyye them with the cohesion of a single man. Those be true kings.”
After strolling along the Castellana, the two friends, followed by Araypuro, stopped to watch a sinister auto-da-fé, where repentant sodomites forswore their sins before being carried off to die by fire.
“I see tis yet fashionable to burn and hang people,” lamented Orpí, as he glanced at the peninsular news on the cover of La Gazeta Nueva.142
“Yea, things haven’t changed much ’round here,” said Grau de Montfalcó. “And this Inquisition is positively soporific!”
And thus the two friends continued chatting, followed by Araypuro, until they start stuffing their faces at one of the capital’s merenderos.143 And there we will leave them as we move on to the next Chapter.
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141. See Chapter III, Book Two.
142. i.e. A Madrid magazine of the time.
143. i.e. outdoor eating areas