by Max Besora
“Bade us go to the Plaça del Rei to visit a friend of mine,” said Triboulet the Dwarf.
The friend turned out to be an old comrade, the famously fake vicar Antoni Roca, who had been captured by the authorities and was now being executed for his crimes. The prisoner was transported, half naked, on a small donkey along Carrer de la Bòria, where a considerable throng was shrieking “death to the highwayman” and throwing feces on him as he passed. The bandit endured that public shaming stoically, dignified as a duke. Once they reached the Plaça del Rei, they set up a platform and placed the prisoner on it. Then the executioner arrived. First he burned Roca’s skin with red-hot tongs. That pleased the mob, who roared fervidly as the whole plaza filled with the stomach-churning stench of roasted flesh. Then the executioner took a hammer to his arms and legs, breaking them with catacracks that echoed throughout the plaza (ovation from the crowd). Then he cut off Roca’s hands, and liters of blood splattered those sitting in the front row (more ovations). Then he ripped out his eyes, which he threw to the plebes, since some collected them recreationally. Finally, Roca’s throat was slit and he was beheaded as the crowd exploded with joy. Then the former highwayman was quartered with a hatchet, his body parts hung in different places throughout the city, and his head placed at the main gate into Barcelona. Seeing his fate, a clergyman named Pere Giberga24 intoned a popular ballad:
With his pair of sizzling plyers
Z’executioner didst relish
Thus and so with his screwdrivers
Yea, the dude war oh so zealous
Then he wipt out a hot poker
ye malefactors heed this day,
the life of Antoni Roca
Has drawn to a bloody close, hey
“Hear ye, hear ye! Tremendilious! Exquisite! Truly a sight to see!” exclaimed Triboulet the Dwarf. “That there be what I do call a death wit’ erry honour!”
“I doth deem said expiration abominable,” said young Orpí, vomiting on the street after all that human butchery.
“Don’t be such a priss! Come now, bade us returnne to the inn and rest.”
As they were passing beneath the window of a home, someone threw out the day’s trash (excrement, chicken bones, banana peels, and watermelon rinds) and our hero was once again soiled from head to toe, so much so that he was forced to wash yet again. That very night young Orpí went with Triboulet to a renowned casino in the city, where the crème de la crème of the local villains, prostitutes, artillerymen, and bohemians gathered. While the dwarf bet more and more bags of gold, our hero observed it all from a distance. Finally, five hours later, someone shouted, “Damne ye cozeners! That there gnome be bamboozling!”
“My lordling, that accusation be not reasonably proven,” said the dwarf. “Furthermore, I may be short, but from where I doth stand thou art ugly as a toade and thine breath stinketh most foul.”
And chase him they did, indeed, but they couldn’t catch him. With Triboulet vanished, young Orpí found himself alone as could be against that gang of furious gamblers who wanted back the money the dwarf had swindled from them.
“Mine pockets be emptee, kindly sirs. And now, if ye will excuse me, adieu.”
“Nay, nay we shant excuse you,” said the chief victim, grabbing Orpí by the arm. “As thou refuseth to cough up the coin, I, Ernest of the Cirrhotic Liver, son of Bernat of the Cirrhotic Liver, grandson of Prudenci of the Cirrhotic Liver, great-grandson of … etc., doth declare mine honor besmirched. I hitherforth demand full & complete legal recompense from a juridical perspective, ipso facto.”
“I knowe not what thou meanst,” said young Orpí, linguistically befuddled.
“I meanst a duel with swords, right here, right now.”
“But I hath no sword!”
“No problemo,” said Ernest of the Cirrhotic Liver, grabbing one of his friends’ weapons. “Here, now thou doest.”
And thus our hero found himself, through no fault of his own, in his first official duel. The circle of people around him were shouting “death to the huckster” and “kill ’em” and “slit ’is scrawny throat” and things of that nature. Young Orpí couldn’t see how he could possibly get out of there alive and his heart began to beat faster and faster. Cirrhotic Liver leapt toward our hero, leading with his sword. Orpí, petrified, knelt down fearing the worst. But as luck would have it, his sword was facing out and pierced his adversary’s thigh like a spear.
“Ay, ay, ay … ! Lorde holp me, I’m dying … !” shouted the villain.
But the villain didn’t die. Young Orpí himself, along with some others, helped carry him home, where a doctor dressed and cured his wound.
“So, all’s fair in love and craps? Bee we even lyke Steven?” asked our hero later.
“Even Steven,” said Ernest, “for at the morrow I hath an entrance exam at university and I shant have time to killeth thee anywise.”
Orpí, flabbergasted, said, “What a fit of happenstance, I hath come to Barcelona to study at the university, too! I wish to becomme a civil attorney.”
“Heavens to murgatroyd! I too wish to be an attorney, albeit a canonical one!”
And that was how Joan Orpí made his first friend in the city. When our hero returned to the inn that night, he found no trace of Triboulet the Dwarf. The next morning, he had gathered up his things and was just about to leave, when he was violently stopped by a hand. That hand belonged to an arm and that arm was the property of the hostel’s owner, a man named Guiseppe Gorgonzolla, who had yet to be paid for the accomodations.
“I thought mine friend hath already paid thee,” said our hero.
“Cosa dici? Quell’amico?”
“The dwarf I did arrive with yesterday.”
“Non inventare storie perché non ho visto nessun nano,” stated the innkeeper, boiling with rage. “Escaguitxa come tutti gli altri o chiamo a la polizia, mafioso!”
Young Orpí patted his pockets, which were entirely empty.
“I hath suffer’d excoriation by highwaymen! Defilement by hags! Pursucquition by psychopathic friars! And just yesterd’y I near nigh perished in a duel!” he whimpered in his defense.
“Bugiardo! Malandrino!” bellowed the innkeeper, holding him back as he called for the militia of the Mossos de l’Esquadra.25
Our hero was arrested, despite resisting with all his might, and what happened next will be explained tout de suite in the very next Chapter.
___________
23. i.e. Today the Plaça de l’Àngel.
24. i.e. Popular poet of the period who, in 1544, published Cobles novament fetes contra tots los delats de Catalunya sequaços de Antoni Roca.
25. The (peninsular) Catalan regional police force, originally dating back to the eighteenth century during the reign of Philip V.
Chapter XII
In which young Orpí is locked up in jail and meets some rather odd characters
Our poor hero was thrown like a sack of potatoes into a dark, smooth, ugly, useless, nasty, and poorly ventilated cell, with two other prisoners.
“Fine folk, why for art ye locked up here?” asked Orpí, lifting his head off the ground.
“Point of fact: we be harden’d criminals,” said one of them, a man with a very long beard that hung off his face like a curtain covered in spider webs. He smiled, revealing teeth yellowed by tartar and desperation, in equal parts.
“Speaketh for thineself,” said the other prisoner, who was dressed as a woman. “For mine presence here be a miscalculation. I am none othere than Queen Cleopatra. Ergo, I’m innocent.”
“Yeah, sure,” added the first. “And I be Charles V … tommyrot! All and sundry here shall be condemned according to Title XXXI Law of Registry VII, what reads:
to the pillory ( … ) in the sunn, smear’d with honey to be devour’d by flies or whipp’d or openly branded with hot irons to teach a publick lesson to the pilferers & purloiners with lash wounds or other means so they may suffer anguish and shame.
Upon hearing that, our
hero broke down in tears, defeated by his ill luck.
“Cryeth not, young leman,” said the prisoner in drag, whom we shall call Cleopatra from here on out, to avoid misunderstandings.
“Fear not, kid, I’ve here the solution to our problems,” said the other, stripping down to reveal decrepit skin covered in hundreds of tattoos.
“Zoinks, what a noisome bod,” complained Cleopatra, in an effeminate tone.
(S)he and Orpí approached to get a better look at all those permanently inked characters covering the bearded man’s body.
“They appear verily like hieroglyphics,” murmured Orpí, trying to decipher them. “Beyon that, I be harde pressed to unriddle ‘em.”
“A month hence, anoth’r prisoner did make these drawings,” said the bearded man. “From mine chest to mine pinky toe, he didst draw an unexpurgated scheme for abscontion from this here prison.”
“Impressive!” exclaimed Cleopatra.
“But if thou hatheth a map, why hath thee yet to abscond?” asked our hero.
“I canst see mine back or mine asse without snapping my spine … that’s why!” exclaimed the bearded man. “Now, if thou & Cleopatra would do mee the indulgence of reading mine body, all three of us could vamoose this dark, smooth, ugly, useless, nasty, and poorly ventilated place. Shall we?”
Our hero and Cleopatra looked at each other for a few moments, their eyes questioning, and then nodded without needing to say a word. They started with his chest. Moving aside the old man’s beard, a drawing showed a cell with a single floor tile that opened. So all three men started to search for a loose slab. A few minutes later, Cleopatra exclaimed, “Come hithere, post-haste!”
Between the three of them they managed to move the heavy stone and to their surprise they discovered a small blackened tunnel, which they hid inside. After crawling on all fours for a short time, they emerged in something like a laundry room. No, that was exactly what it was: a laundry room. Our hero and Cleopatra looked at Bewhiskered’s next tattoo, inscribed on his ribs.
“Curiouser,” said young Orpí. “The inking depictes thee exact place whence we now befindeth ourselves and, conform with these indications, we must openne a weeny window to our right.”
And so they did. They opened the window to their right and went into an interior courtyard filled with garbage that they trotted right through. Following the directions on the tattoo located on his triceps and latissimus dorsi, they turned left and then right until they reached a gallery at the extreme south of the prison. Once there, Cleopatra and Orpí again took a look at Bewhiskered’s body. On his gluteus maximus the tattoo showed a shortcut through the prisoners’ yard. So the three crossed it, from one end to another, waving to all the inmates who were playing dice or sunbathing, until they reached a small door, off limits to prisoners, which they nonchalantly opened. That door led to an office where they encountered the jail’s bureaucracy, but few of the bureaucrats lifted their heads from their classified papers and, when they did, they didn’t show the slightest interest in the fugitives. Having crossed that area, Cleopatra and Orpí went back to Bewhiskered’s tattoos. The drawing continued along his sartorial muscle and quadriceps femoris and seemed to be depicting a leap. So they leapt over the wall in front of them, without any of the soldiers on guard seemingly interested in their fugitive affairs. After leaping over the wall, now outside the prison, the three inmates found themselves on a large esplanade. The tattoo at the height of Bewhiskered’s biceps femoris directed sprinting to the nearest forest, and in that manner all three absconders pranced along until they found themselves amid magnificent trees where birds happily trilled.
After a few seconds of catching their breath, they continued following the instructions found on Bewhiskered’s tibialis anterior, which proposed skirting the forest, descending to a nearby stream, and entering a sewage pipe. The three of them followed these directions without a single moment of hesitation and, after checking the tattoos, they advanced through a long tunnel, feeling their way until they saw a light at the end. When they reached the surface, they found a wall, which they gamely jumped over; then they went through a room where a few workers had their bespectacled eyes fixed ocularly on piles of papers on their desks; then they crossed a courtyard filled with men who, strangely, waved at them; then they went down through a gallery, then around an interior courtyard; then they entered a small window into a laundry room, where there was an open floor tile. They descended through it, finally crawling through a tunnel until they resurfaced in a room lined with bars.
“Tis right bizarre,” said Bewhiskered. “I hath the sensation I’ve been heere before.”
“I understandeth not a thing. Heeding the tattoos, we did everything right,” said Cleopatra.
“Zounds!” exclaimed young Orpí. “We art back whence we did start! We be back in our cell!”
Indeed they were. The tattoos on Bewhiskered were actually part of an elaborate prank among the wardens. One, pretending to be a prisoner, had tattooed the old man with a round-trip route. The three buffoons had managed to escape the prison and return without realizing it, while the guards on every shift had a hearty laugh at what idiots the three jailbirds were. And that was how, on that day, young Orpí learned not to do what everyone else does, but rather the exact opposite, and he fell asleep in that dark, smooth, ugly, useless, nasty, and poorly ventilated cell.
Chapter XIII
In which diligent Joan Orpí begins his university studies and comes to realize that a fine sword is a good as a fine brain
The next day, young Orpí was released from prison, after his bail was paid by the nobleman whom his father had assigned as his guardian: Antoni Carmona, an affluent, young hunchback. After Carmona helped Orpí get installed in the pigeon loft in his house, he accompanied him to the University of Barcelona, making a tour of the city. They passed the seaside wall and the Sant Ramon bastion where, from the watch-tower, guards kept lookout for attacks from Turkish pirates. They passed the fishermen’s market filled with pungent salted sardines, smoked fish, dried cod; they passed more stands where they sold salted pork leg, mutton and lamb, veal and sheep; they passed baskets filled with grapes, calabashes of weak wine, bundles of hay, barrel hoops, and millstones. Then they walked to the Shipyards, where they could watch galleys small and large being built with the cheap labor of hundreds of prisoners.
“More boats be made in Katalonia than in any oth’r kingdom or province on the Peninsula,” said Carmona, scratching his hump, “but the Kingdom of Castille hath banned our trading with The Indies. If thou don’t want to end up sentenced to the galley ships like these men, or in the lockup again, thou best study thine darnedest.”
“By all means,” agreed young Orpí, marveling at the architecture of those urban buildings and the market in the plaza by the port, with its stands and awnings set up to keep the midday sun off the fresh tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and parsley.
Next they passed the Torre de les Puces26 and both men walked up the Rambla dels Estudis27, alongside Capuchin and Carthusian monks, gentlemen, knights, and garlanded damsels who stopped to look at the shops selling kitchen supplies, silverware, tapestries, and sweetmeats. They also saw some doctors wearing beak-like masks to prevent contagion from the plague-stricken they cared for at the Hospital de la Santa Creu, where consumptives and asthmatics shared scabies, viruses, and other pestilence. Orpí and Lord Carmona arrived at Barcelona’s Studium Generale. The two-story university building, located at the top of the Rambla was adorned with the crest of Charles V.
“Above all, Joanet, pay close attention to thine lessons and waste not thine time carousing,” advised his guardian. “Thine father bid me keep a close eye on thee.”
Young Orpí nodded as he entered the cloister of that monastic building. Once inside the Aula Magna, the university rector, a Peripatetic humanist theologian by the name of Cosme Damià Hortolà, gave the opening speech. Then a man named Rafael Vilosa, who had earned his doctorate at Salamanca, began handin
g out the course program. The ius commune included Roman law, an introduction to Canonical law, and some broad strokes on feudal law. That first day, young Orpí already had to familiarize himself with Accursio’s Magna Glossa, Penyafort’s Summa Iuris, Azzone’s Summa Codicis, the Corpus Iuris Civilis, the Justinian Code, and Roberto Maranta’s Aurea Praxis, some consilia et responsa (legal rulings) and the constitutions of Catalonia.
“All that be mere duck soup,” said Ernest of the Cirrhotic Liver, whom Orpí had found again and now sat beside in the Aula Magna. “I had the goode fortune to meet the famous jurist Celse Hugues, an extremely erudite womanizer. He doth question many of the immutable laws sold by these ‘word peddlers’ knowne as salaried professors. Whom dost thou hath for criminal law?”
