In which our hero returns home triumphant, yet irked by a strange sensation
Orpí and Araypuro covered the route from Madrid to Barcelona in less than eight days and in relative tranquility, excepting their encounter with a group of criminal bandits in the woods of Catalonia.
“God ’av’ mercy!” their leader, by the name of Serrallonga145, tipping his hat. “I seeth, from your appearance, that you must be a lord of great lineage, respected and affluent. So, if you wood be soe kind … your money or your life!”
Our hero, who had become a person who was quite difficult to frighten after years of waging war in the jungles of the New World and with little time to lose, unsheathed his sword and killed six highwaymen at once. Then he approached Serrallonga, who awaited his fate with eyes and mouth open, and Orpí exclaimed—with a gift for words and vast experience with bloodsplattering: “Sir, I hath seen many a highwayman such as yerself in the course of my life and I shant lie when I offereth up this advice: get a new job.”
But Serrallonga didn’t heed Orpí’s words, and some years later he would end up hanged. In the meantime, Orpí and Araypuro finally reached the town of Piera. Our hero was anxious to see his family, or what was left of it, since his sister Joana had died in 1623, and his mother had passed on just a few months prior. Arriving at the hostel on Raval de Baix and seeing the fields and the castle as he came over the ridge had our hero in a tizzy, and he regaled Araypuro with detailed stories of his childhood and the family business. When they reached Piera, the townspeople stared at the strange pair as if they were characters from fiction. It was well known that the eldest boy of House Orpí had become a conquistador on the obscure continent of America and had fought and pacified the natives like something out of a fable. Our hero, now forty-three years of age, had come home a veritable splendid man of fame and fortune.
His younger brother Jaume was now in charge of the lands of House Orpí, and had become a successful trader in Piera, surrounded by weights and scales that he used to count the money of their growing family business. In his first two days back in Piera, Joan was impressed to see how the town had prospered, with its new white-washed belltower, and flourishing agriculture, and he watched the bulls working in the fields and the shepherds leading sheep with their whistling. He enjoyed the sensation of seeing nature domesticated from the surrounding woods and strolling along the paths he’d spent so much time on as a child. He smiled to see the young artisans carrying on the trades of their ancestors: the blacksmith hammering a hoe at the forge, the cobbler sewing a hide to a sole, and the vegetable sellers setting up a stand in the market in the town square. And yet he felt strangely distanced from the atmosphere. He missed the remote province of New Catalonia and his life in the tropics. All that had once been his home was now only the memory of an idea that didn’t fit with the current reality. His childhood friends, whom he met up with at the town tavern, were now strangers with whom he scarcely exchanged a word. Gisela Coll de Cabra, whom he had once found pretty, was now a fat woman deformed by cheap wine who hawked fish at the market with the voice of a drunken sailor. All the nexuses to his past were broken.
“I feel as a stranger in my own land, brother,” he confessed. “After so many years in the Indies, this no longer seems like my home. Either everything is very changed, or tis I who hath changed too much.”
“Verily, King Phillipus IV hath created a national state with extremist structures of centralised government, and people are abandoning the countryside to goe to the city in serch of work,” complained Jaume. “To boot, his viceroys are siezeing, extralegally, Catalan powers and they no longer even take cognizance of the Constitutions of the Principality. The war between France and Castille have brought Felipet’s soldiers into our homes, and believe you me they’re a pain in thee ass, behaving like right beestes whereversofare they arte. Our Catalonia, in the longe or the short term, shant have an easy time maintaining its freedoms, and we’ll ende up like everyone else: duking it out. I shall need all of Godde’s help to keep the business afloat … at least ye’ll gette rich, in the Amerrricas.”
“Ye think that it be some Promised Land, eh? Turns out the vices of a sick society travell faster than goode intentions!” clarified Orpí. “However that distant chunk of land is my great opportunity, since it gives me the possibility of making my fortune. And at the same time it is the safe-conduct to your own future, mine brother, with the yields I hope to gain from it. It be a rich land, and unexploit’d, where the treasures are not gold but the soil itself & its fruits & its livestock.”
As our hero asked his brother for funding for New Catalonia, effectively mortgaging his home and family assets, so sure was he of his favorable outcome, Orpí glanced out the window and saw, up in a tree in the garden, a man dressed in black, identical to the ones he’d seen on the ship and in the royal Court. Leaving Jaume mid-sentence, he went out brandishing his sword and shouting, “Where be thee, hitman? Draw near and we shall end this once & foreall!” After searching frantically through the garden for some trace of the assassin, he went back inside the house with a panic attack.
“I be increasingly convinc’d these men in black be spies for the noblemen of Cumanagoto, payd and trained to do me in.”
“Art thou quite sure of these hallucinations, Joan? For I can see no one.”
“Hell’s bells, brother! They’ve already madeth two attempts on mine life! The governors of the viceroyalties in America hold mee in infinite envee. Those cretins are out to steal mine lands what I’ve earned with mine sweat and, being pedigreed hidalgos, they employ the Crown against mee to the point that it seems I’m battling against all the viceroyalties.”
“And what dost thou plan to do, declareth war on the King?” asked Jaume, in jest.
“For Godde’s sake, on the King, no! May Godde hold Him and keep Him. But the criollo noblemen of Santo Domingo and Caracas wante to rob me of what I’ve worked so hard to earn!”
After a few days with his brother, our hero had to leave. Jaume, seeing that Joan was now a man of royal fame and institutional worth, didn’t hesitate to mortgage the lands of their family patrimony, and lent him 12,000 escudos for the conquest of New Catalonia.
“Bon voyage,” said Jaume, embracing his older brother for the last time.
“Best of lucke, Jaumet,” said our hero.
And that was how Orpí and Araypuro came to travel south once more, smoking and singing to the rhythm of their trotting. When they reached Seville they bought provisions to bring to New Catalonia, and embarked on a galleon headed to the Americas, the Indies, the New World, or whatever the fa-boop you want to call it, dear reader.
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145. i.e. The legendary highwayman Joan Sala Ferrer (1594-1634).