The Adventures and Misadventures of the Extraordinary and Admirable Joan Orpí, Conquistador and Founder of New Catalonia

by Max Besora

  “Heretic! Nigromancer!” exclaimed Orpí. “I doth still believe in virgyns and miracles! Listening to thee, theurgic demiurge, leadeth mee to ween that, afore thine intervenchun, the world didst live with a veil over its eyes. And forbye, I reckon thee be more scharlatan than magician.”

  “I fancy the wurde ‘scientist,’ if thou donst mind,” said the dwarf, scratching his beard. “Lyfe be as a hieroglyph concealing a series of enigmas that must allways be kept secret, but evene vox populi sayeth tis highe time to repudiate the ancient Aristotelian-Thomistic ways in favour of empyrical nahledge.”

  “I cann’t graspe half the things thou sayeth, halfman, but I can tell thee that playing at Prometheus be verily playing with fire,” said Orpí. “Specially in thys era wenne so many art burned at the stake. Deus factus sum: pilfering the divine flamme to bestowe it upon man must have consequences, beyond besmirching thine home and leaving it in vast disarray. This playce be a righte shambles!”

  “Bogg off!” Triboulet exclaimed angrily.

  As the two men argued, the sound of horses’ hooves was heard outside. A few moments later there was a knock at the door, accompanied by a barking voice: “Open up, that’s an orrder!”

  “The Mossos de l’Esquadra! What didst I tell thee, halfman?” said Orpí. “They’ll lock us up or send us off to the galleys and it be all thine fault! Let us skedaddle ’fore we’re arrest’d! Every time I seeth thee, bad things happen!”

  “Relax, Orpí,” said the dwarf, grabbing his homunculus and putting it into a small box. “Thou must fleeeth out the left door and I’ll take the right. As thou shalt see, Orpí, there be a price to pony up for everything in this worlde and by and large the price is incredibly steep. We only survive if we createth anoth’r being in our image. And now I bid thee farewell.”

  Having said that, Triboulet the Dwarf vanished through one door and young Orpí did the same through the other, again pushed out into the harsh darkness of the night without knowing where to go. Patting his pocket as he headed away from the house as it was looted by the police, he found the elixir against impotence the dwarf had given him and then he had a clearer idea of where to direct his feet: he would finish what he’d started with Roberta the strumpet.

  ___________

  33. i.e. In that era, the Raval was still outside the city walls.

  34. i.e. Fragment of the Völuspá, Scandinavian mythological poem of The Poetic Edda, bastardization of the translation by Henry Adams Bellows.

  Chapter XVI

  In which young Orpí celebrates Carnaval with his fraternity and ends up dressed as the Stag King

  It was our hero’s last year of university and, having failed almost all his subjects, he found refuge only in debauchery. Calends, Whitsunday … any excuse for merrymaking was a good one and, particularly, Carnaval, which lasted three days, beginning on Carrer de la Palla and ending where shrimps whistle. A grand procession of parade figures featuring devils, dragons, giants, and cardboard horses were followed by brotherhoods dancing to the beat of drums along the city streets, illuminated by countless torches. The festivities also included Tarasques, hoop games or pala mall,35 bull fights, minstrels singing and dancing the contrapàs, sotties with some people dressed as demons and others as madmen, yet others as funambulists with bells on their legs, reciting gibberish and repetitions, dizzying lists and satirical allusions to the clergy as they threw fireworks. The celebration also included jousts, circus numbers, tastings, and executions left and right of the riffraff filling the city’s prisons. Just then there was an announcement, along with trumpet fanfare, of the execution of ten dangerous highwaymen who had their flesh torn off with pincers, then were hung by their arms, had their genitals amputated, and finally were quartered. The whole city was in motion: the Frogs were bustling about angrily because they’d been forbidden to carry weapons (crossbow, lance, or shield), while some gentlemen idled, walking their purebred doggos, and some Holy Thursday penitents who’d gotten the day wrong and were dragging themselves through the streets flagellating their own backs with iron whips until they bled while the ning-nang of cathedral bells could be heard in the distance. A band of musicians, strumetty-strum, blowetty-blow, advanced as costumed people danced around them in a muddle of arms and legs in sweet harmony.

  So, as the multitude partied down the streets of Barcelona, young Orpí and his brothers in the fraternity of the Nocturnal Academy got drunk on piment36 in one of the taverns in the Born, on Carrer de les Mosques. There they could listen to parodies of the Easter Week Sermons improvised by fake priests in chaps, and guilds planning all sorts of hooliganism, and singing old Goliardic songs.

  Vivat nostra societas!

  Vivant studiosi!

  Crescat una veritas,

  floreat fraternitas,

  patriae prosperitas.

  Vivat et Republica,

  et qui illam regit.

  Vivat nostra civitas,

  Maecenatum charitas

  quae nos hic protegit.37

  “Hold up, waite a minute,” said Cirrhotic Liver. “This song is passé. We hath no patrons. Nor do we believeth in the Republic or the Church.”

  “Nay, but protegit rhymes with regit, man!” said a student from the University of Salamanca who was on an exchange in Barcelona.

  “Hey, guys, why donst we procure a few kiloes of oranges and bombard the home of the dean, Abbot Cuckhold?” said one who answered to the name of Fear.

  “Goode idea,” exclaimed another, whom they called Shadow. “There be no body more vain and orgulous than the dean.”

  “Any day now he’s like to ban laughing in the university, as Plato attempted in his Academy,” put forth Silence.

  “He hath already separated the liberal artz (doctrine, theory) from the mechanic artz (painting and sculpture), which methinks deeply grosswitted,” noted young Orpí.

  “And how they maketh us read the fourth eclogue of Virgil’s Aeneid as a proffecy of the coming of Christ is right bunkum!”

  “They do the selfsame with Genesis, melding theological trut’ and sense to validate their monopoly on knowledge and gette a paycheck at the end of the month!”

  “The university bestinks of fustylugs!”

  “And withal, we liveth amid the darke ignorance of Vatican idolatree!”

  “Let’s do up his house in oranges and fecations!”

  “Let us play pranks & capers!”

  That being decided, the student fraternity filled up baskets of rotten oranges and even some excrement from a sick dog, and went to the dean’s home, near the Rambla. When they got there they threw the oranges against the walls of his house while singing lewd songs. The darkness of the night helped the student gang, which even painted obscene drawings on the walls and smeared feces on the door. In fact, the “oranging” was a tradition repeated each Carnaval for centuries, even though it had been prohibited by the Consell de Cent, and the dean had long grown sick and tired of those nocturnal serenades come February.

  “How now, students?” the rector bellowed like an ass, sticking his head out the window as a bag filled with liquid diarrhea splashed his clenched face.

  The students, scattering, were relentlessly chased by the Mossos de l’Esquadra. Luckily, young Orpí was able to camouflage himself amid a group of people coming down the street singing songs and dressed up as cows, monkeys, goats, and birds.

  Someone handed a deer mask to Orpí and they covered him with an animal hide. Following the cavalcade, laughing, baying, bellowing, our young hero ended up in the cemetery, where the entire gang of joyous revelers engaged in the most varied array of obscenities, with the invaluable help of copious amounts of alcohol. Some licked others’ anuses, others ate fruits and tomatoes they’d rubbed on their genitals, and yet others drank sacramental wine and masturbated and danced with the improvised music of flutes and tambourines. Surrendered to the collective liturgy, they offered up their bodies, standing, kneeling, opened legs, nipples pointed skyward. Most of them were peasan
ts who worshipped the trees and the rocks … the fake beards, gleaming silk clothes, masks with giant noses, feather headdresses, goat horns, and silk masks stimulated the sinners’ lust and everyone sang, shrieked, shouted, offered themselves up, muddy and half-naked … ducks and rabbits fell … some hens were raped and gutted … some smeared themselves with the blood of the dead animals … women spread their legs revealing hairy, damp vaginas that were penetrated and hosed down with industrial quantities of semen … anuses dilated and bled as a squad of policemen in rooster costumes sang Nun, Little Sister, we’ll bust yer teensy hole … ! and she, coquettish, lifted her habit to flaunt a round, white ass while another woman shat in the mouth of a large peasant man who opened his jaws (somewhat repulsed) as one of the roosters jerked him off … and in that widespread transfiguration of pagan inversion, our Orpí was the Stag King, brandishing, like a knight his lance, his now definitively cured foreskin, prepared to meet all the indecent demands of the lovely courtesans in heat that Carnaval night, if not for—exactly—if not for the fact that the Mossos de l’Esquadra interrupted that colossal orgy and everyone scattered into the foggy night as quickly as they’d come.

  ___________

  35. i.e. A game similar to today’s croquet.

  36. i.e. White wine infused with honey and spices.

  37. Long live our association! / Long live those who study! / May the single truth grow, / may brotherhood flourish, / as well as the prosperity of our homeland. Long live the Republic, / and its governor. / Long live our city, / and the generosity of its patrons / who take us under their wing.

  Chapter XVII

  In which young Orpí finds his first job as a lawyer and ends up getting a bit scalded

  Truth be told (because here we tell no lies), we would need a few hundred more pages to explain in full how our hero managed to finish his law studies, being as he was so featherbrained. But, for the time being, suffice to say that he finished them, and he finished them well, in other words, in utroque jure,38 not with cum laude but definitely with sapere aude. And, indeed, he’d become a true legum professor.

  The next period in Orpí’s life worthy of telling took place the year after he earned his degree, when we see him walking through Barcelona’s streets toward the Tribunals. A friend from university had procured him a penal case at the Courts, in defense of alleged witchcraft. The courtroom is brimming with people, and our hero sits at the atrium awaiting his clients, whom he has yet to meet. When Orpí greets the accused his eyes near nigh fall out of his head. They are seven women, and none other than the seven witches who had raped him four years earlier in the wood.

  The trial was presided over by a prelate judge and two Inquisition judges, and got off to a bad start.

  “Zhese women art witches, milord,” said the prosecuting attorney, a long-bearded Frenchman who went by the name of Pierre Pathelin.39 “It is très facil to establish. Zhey all hafth a verry small mark on their shoulders, reveal’d ere rubbing wifth holy water. Ergo, they art demonically possessed practitioners of la sorcellerie ad cursum Dianae!”40

  The lawyer pulled down the shirt of one of the women, showing the judge and audience the fateful mark. The two Inquisition judges kissed their portable crucifixes and Holy Oils as they sensed the Devil’s proximity. The attendant public, a mix of vagabonds and housewives, let out ohs! with a mix of shock and shuddering. But Orpí, despite having been violated and visiting hell itself because of their psychotropic potions, couldn’t quite believe the whole scene, since he was well versed in distinguishing reality from daydreams.

  “Maywith it pleaseth the court,” said our young hero, whose pulse was accelerating each and every minute he had to tolerate that fallacy, “methinks the unequivocal accusation by Barrister Pathelin forsooth consummately equivocal. These women mere be persuad’d they art witches, but in sooth they art nowise, they giveth ear to superstitions and blasphemies41 and maketh them their own. They dost ween they descrye the Devil when they doth not, since in reality they mere hallucinate with strange herbs. They appear to fly thru the skies but in sooth they doth not. This fancifull daydreaming, joined with the barmey convicktion they canst make hail and smoke plumes, be naught more than jejune malarkery. Moreover, we stande requisite to elucidate the classic contradistinction betwixt witchcraft and sorcery: witches engageth in satanic ministree hence renouncing Jesus Christ; sorceresses be mere ladies who art benamoured of drugs, like these ones hither.”

  “For Saint Raymond of Penyafort … I acutely objecteth!” exclaimed the prosecutor.

  “Objecktion sustain’d …” said the judge, waving his hand as if to say “we’ll put that on the way back burner,” weary of holding court over the same cases day after day, while one of the two Inquisitors recited, in a whisper, versicles from Apocalypse and Psalm 50 from the Bible, which begin Miserere mei, Deus.

  “This dandiprat lawyer be unfitted fer the fearsome trut’,” continues the prosecution. “Howbeit this heretical crime seemsth comprised of autarkic acts, they doth all converge into one selfsame iter criminis. If the bench doth allow it, we hath testimony from an attestor who hath seen and heard tell that these wymmin be all witches.”

  The witness in question turned out to be a young thief who had been tortured so badly that he no longer had eyes. The boy confessed to having seen those women with the Devil, but his confession rang as false as the supposed chastity of a priest. It was obvious he’d been forced to confess a lie in exchange for a pardon.

  “Prevarication!” bellowed Orpí. “This man hath been coerced civly and creminally! The farce of Barrister Pathelin art pathetic!”

  “No, lord!” the prosecutor cried in his defense. “Didst thou or didst thou not see these energumen42 fornicating amongst themselves and subsequentlee with the Devil?”

  “Yea,” said the boy without eyes.

  “Canst thou now seeth? This poor rogue prevaricatith not, Your Honor,” stated Pathelin. “Civil legislation has for centuries prescrib’d death sentences for sodomee. As far back as the 1189 Fuero de Cuenca it was decreed that: ‘Burne whosever shalt descend into sodomitic sinne.’ And tis understood that here no appeals shall be entertain’d from convicted confessors nor others whom, by common law, art deny’d appeal in criminalibus.”

  “Hear, hear!” cried the public. “Sin … ! Blasfaemy … ! Burn at the stake … !”

  “If it pleaseth the court!” exclaimed Orpí to quiet the room. “This be pure poppycock! Lectura facilis! There art no justice in this! Not only are they wyping their arses with the law, and transgressing the universelle dyrectives of natural law and jus gentium, but moreover flouting the legal & moral framework of a fair trial for all.”

  “Milord, with full justiceness discharg’d, let us signeth what we must and get this here show on the road!” replied the prosecutor.

  “Silence every-one!” shouted the judge, his wig slipping on his head to reveal a mortifying baldness. “Silence in the court, I sayeth!”

  In those years, the courts had a bad rep because they allowed exploiters to take advantage of people and grow rich through prevarications, acting under the Saepe contengit that allowed them to sentence in the blink of an eye. Finally, it was announced:

  “Bailuff!” bellowed the judge. “Get thee to the Nuncio and bid him publish, upone mine orders, the promulgation of capitall punishment by dynt of rigorous execution in eight days time. And one more thing: have this courtroom scrubb’d of any and all traces of eville spirits!”43

  And thus the accused were condemned and, after the authorities of the Holy Office read a pronouncement, they were hung in the Plaça del Rei the following week.

  “This here proclivitee for slaying people is the stuff of savage no-nothyngs,” said Orpí to a man next to him, as he watched the executions. “Ramon Llull did stateth clearly in his Art of Contemplation: the trickery of false testimony and the trickery of bad judges and lawyers causeth the entyre world to be corrupt and disturbed. At least these women shall finde rest in the
next world. Meantime, I must commence the search for a new job gyven that no one in Barcelona will hire me as a lawyer.”

  “Thou canst sayeth that again,” said the tall, bearded man beside him, in Spanish. “I doth divine thou art a person with an ethical sense of justyce.”

  “For I art an attorney, and most of all a goode person,” said Orpí before switching into Spanish, “Mine name is Joan, what be thine, good sir?”

  “Miguel, from Alcala de Henares,” said the man, bowing. “Yet I sweareth that never hath I seen a city this fair, fountain of courtesy, shelter for strangers, hospice to the poor, land of the valiant …”

  “… these acts of death bringeth not distinction to any land,” said Orpí, interrupting the man. “But far be it from me to leave thee with a bad memory of the Catalans, so prithee accept mine invitation to a tipple.”

  Our hero and the Castilian sat down at a tavern and proceeded to converse at length. It turned out the Man from La Mancha was a famous writer of plays, poetry, and prose. Seeing the pessimistic tribulations that had young Orpí lamenting, his Castilian friend gifted him a copy of his latest work: The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha.

  “Truly, if thou doth savour reading ‘uninhibited prose,’ kind sir, I promise that at the very least thou shalt obtaine a few chuckles from these exployts.”

  “Thanks be to thee, ever so clement!” said Orpí gratefully. “But what I doth need art a job, not entertainment.”