34 Misc Laff: Andrés Dorantes de Carranza
They made their moves in the late hours and reestablished their prestige. They told a series of tales that were quite unusual, and the other liars looked at them with awe and admiration. Due to the peculiar nature of these stories they cannot be given here. There was weird stuff in them, and we haven’t the presence or style of Esteban and Dorantes to carry them off with a flourish. We would be disbelieved if we told them baldly. But by dawn our two friends were the Princes of the Place. They received an ovation from the members, and once more they were proclaimed to be the finest liars of the Indies. The sea-serpent in his nest of pegs on the wall glowed at them with real pleasure and rewarded them with his most comprehending wink. When you are in with the serpent, you are in.
In Chapter Eleven of Esteban, Esteban sits in the Liars’ Club stroking two greyhounds he has bought from Castile. They cost him a hundred duros each. “Only a man of wealth could have owned such creatures,” Lafferty writes. Esteban finally seems to have made it, and he stacks gold on the table while he and Andrés Dorantes listen to the other storytellers and prepare to outmatch them. By dawn they have vanquished the other liars, reestablishing what we have been told about them from the beginning. In Chapter One, when Dorantes acquires Esteban as a slave, Lafferty gives us our first view of the two men:
He had but two glaring defects: he was a liar; and he was lazy. The boy Esteban had only one of these defects: he was a liar also, but he was not lazy.
Dorantes is one of Lafferty’s most vivid creations. Like Esteban, he is a historical figure: Andrés Dorantes de Carranza (ca. 1500–1550s), a Spanish soldier and explorer who served as a captain in Pánfilo de Narváez’s disastrous 1527–28 expedition to Florida. After being shipwrecked on the Texas coast, he and Esteban were two of four men who eventually reached Spanish settlements in Mexico in 1536. It took them nearly eight years of extreme hardship and travel among Indigenous peoples, which makes up the bulk of the longest of Esteban's three sequential plots. Dorantes later transferred Esteban to Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, who sent him north with the Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza in 1539 to investigate reports of wealthy settlements. Dorantes settled in New Spain, married, and had a large family before dying in the 1550s.
A few pieces of Lafferty’s characterization will give you a sense of the man. Lafferty describes Dorantes as having a golden complexion, “blue eyes the size of small leaves,” and wrists and forearms as thick as tree trunks. He can kill a man with a single blow. When he first sees Esteban, he gives a lion-like laugh that sticks in his throat, “always on the verge of sound,” for the next twenty-five years. He is handsome, extravagant, fond of ornament, given to “sudden kindnesses of heart.” He is likable, likable even as we first encounter him running a slave raid with a knife at another man’s throat.
Dorantes is also a memorable talker. When Esteban says that he can walk on water, Dorantes shoots back, “But show me this marvel. I’ve not seen a man walk on water all day.” He enjoys the boy’s lies and is eager to join in. He also knows when Esteban has the better of him. Ordered by Cabeza de Vaca to bring the deserting Esteban back to the expedition, Dorantes says that he can’t. When pressed on whether he can’t or won’t, he replies, “I cannot. But to salve my pride I say that I will not.”
Much of Esteban is about the expedition’s suffering, and Lafferty implies that without Dorantes’s good humor, the few who made it might not have. At one memorable moment, Cabeza de Vaca is near total despair. Dorantes and Esteban come up from the shore carrying an enormous basket of oysters, singing a bawdy song and laughing at the blood covering them. Esteban has a broken bone sticking through his arm. The sight of the two of them makes Cabeza swear that he can survive anything they can survive:
They did not know where they were. They did not know where to go, and they had no means of going anywhere. Then at one dusk, Cabeza de Vaca saw Andres Dorantes and his man Esteban coming up from the beach over sharp rocks on bleeding feet. They carried between them a basket of oysters so full that a horse could hardly have carried it. They were singing a bawdy happy song of the Indies, the golden and the purple voice blending together in compelling disharmony. They were laughing together at the blood that covered them. Esteban had broken a bone in his forearm and it stuck out through the flesh. There are men of insufficient humor to appreciate this, but both Dorantes and Esteban found it funny. Cabeza de Vaca came up from the ground with a great oath that he could survive any hardship those two rogues could survive. This determination of Cabeza not to break before Esteban and Dorantes did would keep all three of them alive many times. They were not irrevocably lost. No man is lost if he knows which way is up.
Lafferty gradually gives Dorantes a conscience. Under Castillo’s influence, Dorantes stops being a con man. For once, he uses his tactical intelligence for good, helping hundreds of Indigenous people escape the Spanish slavers. He later refuses to make a false claim of discovery for Mendoza: “But Andres Dorantes, the greatest liar of the Indies, could not bring himself to lie on an important matter.” All of this makes Chapter Eleven such a gut punch. At this point, Esteban and Dorantes seem to have become friends. They are acclaimed as the finest liars of the Indies. Then, as they leave, Dorantes casually drops it: he has sold Esteban.
The next chapter begins with Esteban trying to understand what has happened. He asks whether Dorantes received more than thirty pieces, a Judas allusion. Dorantes says that he got a hundred, and gold rather than silver. Esteban immediately knows that money cannot explain the sale. Dorantes has given him five times that amount for pocket money. Then comes this exchange:
“Each of my greyhounds cost me that much.” “They are fine animals also, Esteban.”
Mendoza later says that he compelled the sale, but the ugly power of “also” makes it one of the finest literary moments in Lafferty.
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