by Max Besora
Once upon a tyme, there were a knight, named Sir Hierro Azul de los Llanos Castrados, very noble in his personage who, after instating a Theocracy in his kingdom, christened Jauja Valley, was keene to wedde. Yet there wart nary a princess in that realm, merely corrupted sauvages. Accordingly, he took up sword & steed and set out in search of a robust ladee of royal lineage who would do. In the magickall lands of El Dorado, he discover’d a castle built of gold with a princess lock’d up in the highmost tower. The knight did his darnedest to breeche its walls and rescue that damsell but an armey financed by the king of the castle kept him at bay. Hierro Azul foughten the thousand and three soldiers, smiting them all with a single blow of his sword. “Milord,” did sayeth the sergeant to the king, “Hierro Azul is invincible! He slayt our entire army withe a single blow!” “How now?” did saith the King, “Ynacceptable! Thou art degradedeth to latrine-cleaner!” Then the King started the catapults. Three million rockes, as big as cathedrals, fell upon Sir Hierro Azul, but they broke into tiny pebbles the size of shirt buttons with a syngle swash of his sword, fore he were invincible. Then they dispatch’d a monstrous, fire-breathing dragon, likewise payd for by the King, to eate the knight, but it were Sir Hierro Azul which ate the monster in a single bite, having not eatene prior in that day. Then, Sir Hierro Azul entert the fortress, lopped offe the regall head with but one finger and leapt up into the gilden tower fore to recover the princess, who was named Magdalena Morena de la Sierra. After a brief, hackneyed exchange of platitudes, the princess did consent to marryeth that gent. Before leaving, Hierro Azul knock’d down the castle withe one lunge, plunketh the precious rubble into a satchel, and knight and princess bade offe hence the Lands of Jauja, whereuponst they lived happily ever after much as the clams of yore, thus & so & blah-blah-blah, we finde we hath reach’d the ende of our tale.
Everyone clapped while the two actors, who played the knight and the princess, struck the attrezzo, cursing their nomadic life all the while. But it was the boys and girls in the audience who were the most spellbound by the story. And little Orpí, restless by nature, was no exception. Heroic dreams twinkled inside his skull:
“Henceforth, Papa, for mee, tis knighthood or bust!”
“You ginormous son of a bobolyne!” bellowed his progenitor, slapping him on the back of the neck. “I forbid thee even think such claptrap. What thou must do is attende school so thou canst keepeth the books and maketh some coin forr the family busyness!”
And, well, his house, his rules. And thus little Orpí began his studies, as you shall learn in the next Chapter, which, as you shall soon see, starts on the very next page.
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8. i.e. High-pitched flute of the period.
Chapter IV
In which young Orpí does not seem a particularly gifted scholar, so his parents seek out a tutor
The school, located on the outskirts of lower Piera, near the Casa de les Voltes, turned out to be an uninteresting place for little Joanet. Any chance he and his friends got, they shoved aside their Latin notebooks and covertly opened up the chivalric romances that were fashionable at the time, such as The General History of Sir Partonope: Count of Blois and Emperor of Constantinople; The Four Books of the Virtuous Knight Amadís de Gaula; The Adventures of Esplandián; The Tribulations of Valiant Gausbert Calostre; The Ballad of Merlin the Wise and His Prophecies; The Book of the Assiduous Knight Arderique; The Quest for the Holy Grail, with the Marvellous Feats of Lancelot and of Galahad His Son; Sir Silves of the Forest; and Yvain, the Knight of the Lion, among others. One of them would read and the rest listened and all of their imaginations were lit aflame, making them feel they themselves were knights trained to kill Turkish armies, and hydras, and gorgons, and forest gnomes, and titans, and dragons, and that they were destined to rescue princesses and make friends with flying unicorns.
Subdeacon Jaume Amades was a Satanic-looking clergyman, white with dark circles under his eyes. He always brandished a boxwood stick for those distracted students. When he saw little Joanet reading instead of working, he would grab his stick and … thrash his buttocks! The teacher had earned a fearsome reputation.
“Let’s see now, Joanet: What is one + one?”
“Three.”
Bam! Another blow to the buttocks.
“Pray let us try it again: One + one?”
“A hundred!”
All the children laughed. Bam, bam, bam. Three blows and Joanet was sent into the corner.
There was no way in hell he could study with all that thrashing, and little Orpí started to skip school. He preferred to watch the hustle and bustle on the main street and in the town square. His mouth would drop open as he watched the peasants loading up the beasts of burden with sacks of grain, the fishmongers and butchers shouting, the pilgrims doing penance on their way to Montserrat, the vendors with their thumbs on the scale, and the men-at-arms who protected the area from bandits and highwaymen. Sometimes, they would catch a few and hang them in the main square, where their corpses would sway for days, little kids throwing rocks at them, until they started to rot. These sorts of extracurricular activities were turning little Joanet into a slugabed of brobdingnagian proportions.
Desperate, ole Orpí hired a roving tutor to teach his son something of value. The young squire, a short, squat, bald and fat-faced man, turned out to be one of those know-it-alls who called themselves humanists and suggested alternatives to the ecclesiastical education methods employed in schools. The wiseacre windbag believed that education must be active, not passive. Influenced by Erasmus and his thesis on the Plan des Études, he emphasized ancient texts while appealling to the boy’s intelligence and respecting his individual freedom. The Orpí family didn’t give a toss about those new methods as long as Joanet started using his brain for once. The tutor put into practice his teaching method: translate, repeat, analyze, and recompose, in that order of importance. Picking up Homer’s poetry, young Orpí was thrust into translating from Greek to Latin (and not the degraded Latin of the Middle Ages, but Cicero’s!), as he recited the verses aloud, poeticizing the plot of his own education. The tutor explained nothing because, according to him, there was nothing to explain.
Or to put it another way, “Non est discipulus super magistrum nec servus super dominum,” declared the teacher. “Whych is to saye, thy intelligence shall be not subordinated to mine, but rather we must commence upon a plane of equal and equitable ignorance. Got it?”
No, little Orpí didn’t understand a thing, but together, teacher and student, they read and translated Seneca, Plutarch, Diogenes Laërtius, Herodotus, Xenophon, and other Greek, Latin, and Corinthian classics, and they studied the sacred texts directly without the clergy censorship.
“Mort principium est, young Speusippus9,” said the highly metaphysical tutor.
“Quot erat demonstrandum,” replied Joanet. “Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas!”
The boy from Piera soon forgot Catalan and spent his days mumbling unbearable Latinisms, with his nose in dictionaries, overwhelmed by a désir de savoir. His newfound love of logos made young Orpí the perfect subject for such an all-encompassing education, but at school little Joan was also quickly excluded, for knowing too much. The other kids taunted him and the teachers flunked him in every course (except for Latin) because they considered him a brown-noser.
One day, his father asked him, “Son, what didst thine tutor teach thee today?”
“I knowth not what thou dost mean withe that question, father, since as Sextus Empiricus wrate, and I paraphrase: If all that is taught can be both true or false, and both conditions are subject to doubt, I can only conclude that naught can be taught.10 And I wouldst also append: O miserum te si intelligis, miserum si no intelligis!”
In the face of that mysterious response, old Orpí chose to smack the boy. He was beginning to suspect that the private lessons were transforming his son into a truly unbearable pedant. What’s more, old Orpí discovered that the tutor, arriving home from
the tavern fuzzled, would enter the bedroom of his eldest daughter, Maria Anna, to do unmentionable things. One day he decided to hide in his daughter’s armoire, watching and waiting. Two hours later he caught the dominem with his pants down, in flagrante, in front of Maria Anna, who looked upon the scene as if she’d stumbled into the wrong theater. Old Orpí thought that the perfect excuse to fire the pervert. And so he did: he fired him immediately. Despite the professionalism of the tutor, who pulled up his skivvies and left the girl’s chambers with all the aplomb the situation demanded, wagging tongues say that he left Piera crying and cursing his fate. Whatever the case, that was the end of young Orpí’s humanist education and the start of his laboring on the family lands, which as the eldest son were to become his, until one fine day … one fine day, as I was saying … bah, now I’ve lost my train of thought! Probably best then just to skip directly to Chapter V.
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9. i.e. A disciple of Plato.
10. Greek philosopher and doctor. From his book Against Professors.
Chapter V
In which we tell of Joan Orpí’s adolescence and his discovery of a “vagina dentata”
Ah, yes, that’s what I was going to say. Take a good hard look at Joan Orpí, and then look again: at thirteen years of age, he is a daydreamer with raging hormones, neither here nor there. More tall than short, more thin than fat, and with cheeks more red than pale. His face is banana-shaped and his big eyes—the color of an absconding mutt—don’t miss a beat, despite being hooded by bushy, undomesticatable eyebrows. Honestly, it’s best not to even mention his moustache: it just began to sprout one day and didn’t stop until someone took pity on him and taught him the art of shaving. Regarding his aquiline nose, on the other hand, everyone had some sort of opinion. He is slim of body but brisk in his movements, sending his messy hair flopping over his forehead. In sum, young Orpí most resembles a bundle of hairy bones with legs.
We now find our young hero in tender adolescence, an age in which hormones accelerate, an age in which everything seems bright and magical, an age in which boys start to feel something growing in them. And I’m not talking about their brains. Thus our hero was faced with an important enigma: what was the purpose of that hanging bit taking up space between his legs? For some strange reason, it seemed to have a life of its own and would grow big and shrink as it saw fit, and sometimes, upon first waking, he would find it throbbing beneath sheets all mucked up with a white, gummy substance. The whole business was quite disconcerting to young Orpí.
One day, as he was walking through the orchards on the outskirts of Piera, he saw a very lovely young girl by the name of Gisela Coll de Cabra, a neighbor from town, washing her teenage thighs on the riverbank. Dressed though she was like an ordinary peasant girl, in the eyes of our hero she seemed a true damsel. As it was hot, the young woman was splashing water into her low neckline onto breasts white as cheese, and our hero noted that bit between his legs rapidly inflating. As he watched her, mouth agape, for a good long while, he stuffed his hands into his pants and pulled on his pud in a fit of instinctive onanism. Gisela Coll de Cabra, seeing him shaking behind a bush, waved him over with a wag of her finger. Our young hero, nervously buttoning his pants, obeyed.
“Whatsoever were thou up to backe there, ye swine?” she said, realizing the state of affairs. “I see yer full-mast, eh? Yer knick-knack, yer gimcrack, yer crimson chitterling …”
“I … I … didd-nnt knowe … I didnt knowe that … that sooo … so very many … names existed … fore … fore … that ‘bit’ …”
“What’s wrong wid yer mouth? Are ye dumb or wut? Ye shud see all da t’ings one canst do wid dat dere ‘bit’!” she asserted, laughing joyfully.
“Are thee no vergen, Gisela?” Orpí asked naively.
“Ha, ha, ha … ! Only virgin I knowe is atop Montserrat. Point a fact, the right whole virtue business war invented by da churche to controlle girls. I caint even recall when mine hymen braked, all I knowe is the one who did it war indowed withe a giant prick, and I shriek’d like a sow withe pain & pleasure! Ere since I nair misst a chance ta fadoodle. Dost thou wish to learne to fucke?”
“Verily …” panted our hero, his knick-knack still pointing at the heavens beneath his pantaloons.
“Firstmost, ya gotta warm up what’s betwixt these hamhocks,” she ordered, didactically pointing to her crotch.
That said, wanton Gisela took his hand and stuck it under her skirts. Young Orpí felt something akin to a hidden creature, although he couldn’t say whether it was a rough rat or a soft ferret. In any case, he was convinced it was alive because it was quite damp. When he looked under those skirts all he saw was this:
Seeing those teeth on the girl’s erogenous zone was such a deep disappointment to the young Orpí that his crimson chitterling immediately and irremediably deflated. And not only that, but he also came to the conclusion that what Gisela had between her legs was nothing less than a kraken. And thus, he rapidly reached yet another conclusion: Gisela was in grave danger as long as that monster was stuck between her legs like a leech. So our hero grabbed a boxwood stick, lifted up all those skirts and petticoats and then started beating the girl’s crotch, thinking that he would save her from being devoured by the fearsome beast.
“What be ya doin’, ya son of a camelopard! Ya stunted speck of shit!” bellowed Gisela Coll de Cabra, leaping out of the brambles to avoid the stick. “Hallp … hallp me this ydiot is set ta kille me!”
Hearing her shouts, a group of young men from a nearby town came to her aid, singing a song the whole while:
Come round, ye lads, and gather
Damsell in distress there bee!
Tyme to saveth her honour
Yea, her honor and her glory
For we art the hardy foes
of abstemia & anemia
We art the favored sons
we make a right goode team, yeah!
Come round, ye lads, and gander
Fore this here coprophagist
is beggin’ fer a lather
Let’s check him off our list!
Young Orpí thought those young men were coming to help him kill the skirt monster, and he devoutly joined their song. But soon he realized they were not coming to his aid, nor did they want him in their choir. The young men pounced upon him and gave him such a drubbing it is quite easy to picture what state he was in afterward. However not as easy to imagine was the state Gisela Coll de Cabra would be in. After she thanked the vigilantes, that selfsame swarm of fiery lads raped her, one after the other, until they were sated. After the brutal attack, Gisela joined a nunnery, where she lost her mind, convinced she was fornicating with the Devil. So she took her leave of the convent, returned to Piera, and ended up selling vegetables at the market in the square. But that’s a story for another day.
Chapter VI
In which young Orpí attempts every trade to no avail and, finally, has his fate determined by his father
Our hero, traumatized by his terrible first sexual encounter, had taken a quite solemn vow of chastity, swearing that he would never again venture a hand under a petticoat and that, henceforth, he would only serve the glory of the Lord Our God. And as such, he applied himself strictly to the fiercest, most refined methods of askesis.11 He no longer read chivalric novels, instead reading the rosary and books of saints, and spent his days praying like a bedlamite. However, it turns out that working the land like the rest of his family was no job for our hero. Workdays at the Orpí farm, despite the hired hands, were arduous: reaping and threshing the barley, feeding the animals, tilling the rough fields from sun to sun, cleaning the stable, negotiating the tithes, paying the workers, husking the corn, fixing the tools, fertilizing the fields, taking the goats out to pasture, milking the cows, planting the vegetables, etc. Not to mention that in winter it got very cold, and in summer it was altogether too hot for such undertakings.
One day, when little Joan’s mother caught him praying to the Virgin
of Montserrat after the Angelus12 hour had already passed, she said, “This lad is not befit to worke the lands. All the livelong day besotted with religiouse books, and allways praying Ourfathers. Alas and alack … we might haven a chaplain in the familly.”
“Or a right sissyboy. In that case, it’d be best to kill ’im,” complained his father. “Whatevere sort of milk dud he be, something must bee dun withe ’im.”
So they brought Joanet before the town priest, a dark, twisted man. The priest interviewed him personally to see if his was true Christian faith or a passing fancy, for the boy’s little head was filled with a mishmash of Biblical proportions.
“Come nowe, Joanet, whom dost thou ween created the worlde?” asked the priest.
“Well, I reckone at first all was chaos, when, ’ittle by ’ittle, sollid material started to amasse and …” our little hero interrupts his narration to look at the statue of Christ with its sad eyes and bloody wounds and then continues, “… a solid mass, as I was sayething, whence da utmost worms of very life itself aemerged & turnt inna angels, and one of those wurms was God, whom created thee world.”
The priest gave him a clout on the head.
“Joanet, that’s hereticall & impious! Repeat after mee: dost thou accept Jesus Christ as thine son of God and dost thou believe in the shrift of sins, the resurrickion of the body, and life everlasting?”
“Methinks that Jesuset wuznt nary hoping ta start a sect, iths only a dolthead could believe all that pike ’bout virgins having chillren what don’t emerge whence that hairey monster betwixt their legs. Whomever whatsoever wishes to swallow that story, may. Moreover I’ve a bridge to sell to them.”