by Max Besora
“Milord, I seeth that thou art a newcomer to the Kingdom of Hell.”
“Helle? Holy Mother of the Vyrgin of Seven Sorrowes! I reckont I war somewhitherelse!” exclaimed young Orpí.
“Ssshh! You can’t invoke saints & virgins down hither! And as fore thy location, in his Aeneid, Virgil placeth it in the Sybil’s cave. The Orlando Furioso sayeth it be beside the source of the Nile. Others doth claime its entrance be at Bouchet Lake, in Auvergne, or Lake Avernus, or at the Gole dell’Infernaccio in Italy. Others ween it in the Alt Urgell, in the town of Segur and the Baix Empordà or the Torrent de l’Infern in Tavèrnoles, just ta nameth some local places; Mount Etna be a hellmouth, too. I could verily bee hither alle the day long listething names till blood cometh out mine nose.”
“Thank ye for thee unnecessary inf’rmation,” said Orpí. “I caint reckon iff I done kicked the bucket or wut, but I doth not like this lodging in the slightest. And it’s too muggy.”
“Exactly, exactly! I totally concurr. Methinks they shouldst pop the doores (wherever they be), and aire this place out. Helle is verily an academy of heat.”
As the two men walked amid the fires and scorched souls, they greeted Gilgamesh, Seth, Odysseus, Hermes Psychopompos, Virgil in Hell, and a bunch more illustrious figures, all surrounded—poor things—by flies, excrement, and flames. Then, continuing along on their infernal Grand Tour, Pere Portes showed Orpí some rooms equipped with all of the latest generation of torture instruments and filled with souls shrieking in perpetual suffering. Then Satan himself materialized before the two men. He was a hideously ugly being, all reddish and covered in spikes, accompanied by an entourage of incubuses and succubi.
“Verily well, I see we hast a new guest at our hallowe home!”
“Thou art mistaken,” said Orpí. “For I’m not meant to beest here.”
“That’s what they all say!” bellowed the Devil. “Thou dost not repent thine sins, henstealer? For if ye plan on accreting up worldly riches & accolades, then this hither shall surely bee yern final stoppe.”
“How canst I repent, when I’ve committ’d no sinne?” responded Orpí. “And seeing ath I be in charge of mine own selfsame, therewithal I’ll beest leaving on mine own two feet withoute running it by anyone.”
“Aha, crappy peasant, bethinks thee escape soe easy?” roared the Beast. “I’ll lash thee so harde thou shallt ne’er feeleth thine posterior again, and then thou shalt knowe who’s in charge of thine own selfsame.”
Just as the Prince of Darkness was about to stick his pitchfork into him from behind, young Orpí ducked out of the way and, with a quick goodbye to ole Pere Portes, he slipped like a hare through the tortured souls. The Devil was close on his trail until, there in the distance, Orpí saw a light and the light turned out to be the mouth of a cave, a yawning mouth amid the rocks. And through it, our hero managed to escape certain eternal damnation amidst the fires of hell.
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16. A famous character in Catalan literature, from the anonymous work The Strange Case of a Man Named Pere Portes, from the Town of Tordera, Who Entered and Exited Hell, written in the year 1611.
Chapter IX
In which young Orpí is nigh nearly beat to death, first by some entirely nasty priests and then by a frenzied ascetic
When young Orpí awoke from that subterranean reverie, he heard a rowdy group of pilgrims coming along the forest road playing handbells. When he realized he was nude, he covered his pudenda with dried leaves. Following the clip-clop clip-clop of the horses, our hero discovered a two-wheeled cart in the middle of the road, driven by three vicars who were headed to the city. Beside the cart walked two young aspiring priests, one dressed as a cretin and the other a numbskull, complete with dunce caps, who were shaking bells. And a little farther on were two penitents accompanied by two friars who whipped their backs. And all these men of God were drinking wine and singing pious songs to praise their Lord:
Lift your cups, brethren, let us toast
fill our cups to the brim
mull our wine, drink it in
we’ll warme ye right up to the holee ghost
Oh, they calle us the Council Brotherhood
we’re convince’d it be not superstition
for we dare to declare that Godd be good
He’s director of our Holy Inquisition …
He commandeth we doth dresse in sacks
yea, they call us the Council Brotherhood
ye knowe us by our fame or well ye should
… and a word to the sinners: watch thyne backs!
One of the vicars started dancing an entirely lay fandango with the two sacerdotal aspirants. Upon hearing the festive music, they promptly hitched up the skirts of their habits to shake legs so white and covered in varicose veins that even God shielded his eyes.
Young Orpí made sure this time that they were true clergy and not highwaymen in disguise and then—despite the risk of catching his death of a cold—went out into the very middle of the road, lifted his hands, and yelled, “Halt, for the love of God!”
“Vade retro, Satana! Who art thou?” shouted one of the vicars. “And why goest thou nude through these worlds of God verily like an Adam without an Eve?”
“Gentlemen, be not misled by mine unfortunate appearance,” said Orpí, whimpering. “For I be but a young student robbed of mine steed and maravedis, and violated by witch-kind. I demand succor on compassionate grounds, for I be heavily burden’d … !”
When he described all the vexations he’d suffered, the three pious vicars, who’d been drinking wine for hours and had just witnessed an execution by the Inquisition, quickly came to the conclusion that that young ne’er-do-well was actually possessed by the very Devil himself because of his terrible stench.17 The clergymen got out of the cart and began to chase him through the forest howling, “Horror diabolicus! Death to the Antichrist … !” and throwing rocks and sticks for a good long while. Since they were not able to catch him, the vicars returned to the cart to drink even more and continue mocking the two costumed novitiates.
Saddened by the vicars’ response and wounded by the rocks they’d thrown at his head, young Orpí wandered like a specter through the wood for a week, nearly spent and covered in scabs of dried blood. His clothes were so tattered and his face so dirty that he looked like a wild beast, and that whole aesthetic question made him so sad that he wanted to die. But without coin or steed he had no possibilities of improving his appearance, and he was plagued by hunger. Luckily, wandering through the wood, he came across an old hermit with a long white beard, originally from Germany, who had been a soldier in Flanders and was now living a true life of spiritual retreat in the forests of Catalonia. The hermit invited him into his humble cabin, which he’d built with his own hands, and where he lived in holy solitude. There he cured our hero’s wounds with St. John’s wort. It so happened that the ascetic was an expert in humors18 and remedies: he had elixirs for toothaches and rheumatism, he could heal smallpox, fevers, vomits, adolescent acne, chillblains, fistulas, hemmorhoids, myopia, glaucoma, scabies, and mange. He could even set your colon back in place if it was slipping out your back end.
Orpí explained all his misfortunes as the ascetic listened absently.
“… and I war totes nekkid ere the flames begunne and the earth opened up and I spyed Lucifer and errebody and all at one I felle faint and all becamme black and when I didst awoken from mine voyage down into Hell, well, as I said, I founde meeself in the middle of the greenwood just as my mother brought me into this world (I blush just thinking about it!) and that war when I heard the cart of the vicars what wanted to slay me because they were convinced I was the Devil. By the way, what sect be thou a member of?” asked Orpí while the hermit cured his wounds. “The Ionic, the Cynic, the Pyrrhonic, the Sceptic, the Epicurean, the Eclectic?”
“I am simply Sklave19 to the Author of Life, yon dead and crucified.”
After healing our hero, the hermit, who was a man of few w
ords, invited him to stay in his humble shack for a few days to recover. Young Orpí gratefully accepted the offer. He dressed in a sack like his host and teacher, and imitated everything that holy man did. The only meal of the day was a soup made out of roots, and that vegan diet led young Orpí to a kind of spiritual sanctity he’d never before experienced. Our hero stopped washing, let his beard grow out and, in a matter of weeks, looked entirely undomesticated. He felt filled with joy, and quickly assumed the life of a mystic of the forest. He would pray alongside the ascetic every morning, afternoon, and evening before a cross that hung in the cabin.
However, one fine day, when his body had grown accustomed to that diet of rhizomes, young Orpí’s guts began to move. He let out a burp and some little farts followed by a liquid bowel movement so noisy and rank that all the birds in the forest took flight at once. And all because of that raw food diet, which had literally destroyed his stomach and sphincter, his nether regions now were all bescumbered. The sound of his flatulence and the stench of his excrements alarmed the vegan hermit so much that he jabbered, “Um Gottes willen! Canst thou notte goe to the Toilette & aire out yer backeside, ya swine?”
Having said that, the hermit then reached the harsh conclusion that so much flatulence could truly only be the work of the Devil. He grabbed the bread knife and prepared to eviscerate our hero in order to get the Evil out of him. Since he couldn’t reach the other end of the table where Orpí was, he began to pursue him, running circles first left, then right. “Comme hither, I’ll get the deville out of you!” ordered the ascetic. “I didnst mean it!” bawled Orpí, “I verily swear I have no suche demon in mine body … it’s all the fault of eating soo many roots!” he said, his haunches all dirty as he ran round the table, until he got up on a stool and leapt out of the shack through a back window. As soon as he got up, the hermit appeared behind him again, brandishing the knife, “Thee shant escape mee … Schwein!20” After running like a hare for a while, his ass smarting from the gas and excrements that continued torrentially from his posterior, young Orpí managed to lose sight of the hermit, escape the forest, and run like a decapitated turkey for a long hour through the brambles. It was then another hour in the dark through a series of marshes before he came up against an enormous rock: that rock was part of a wall, and that wall surrounded the city of Barcelona.
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17. i.e. It was believed that smelling bad was a sign of demonic possession.
18. i.e. According to classical physiology the human body is comprised of four humors: phlegm, blood, yellow bile, and black bile, associated with phlegmatic, sanguine, aggressive, and melancholic natures, respectively.
19. “Slave” in German.
Chapter X
In which young Orpí tries to enter Barcelona but is denied everyhow and is almost devoured by the plague-stricken
Young Orpí did what everyone does when trying to enter a civilized place: he searched for a door. When he found one, it had two guàrdies del morbo21 armed with harquebusses blocking his way in.
“Not so fast. Quo vadis?” said one of the guards.
“Joan Orpí del Pou, from Piera. I’ve cometh hither to study at the university.”
“Poppycorks!” said the other, kicking him in the ass. “Studying be for those with wage, or for priests, not foreign vagabonds.”
“Aye,” added the first guard. “Besides, haven’t thee heard that there are epidemics everywhere? As they say in Girona: Gloriós Sant Roc, guardeu-nos de pesta i de foch.22 And now, avaunt, for thine odour be unendurable.”
Young Orpí, whose clothes (really just a sack) were indeed still covered in shit, was easily confused for a plague victim. He moved away from the door and watched as a ton of elegant people came in and out: hunters on horseback with wolf-hide coats, soldiers armed with long rifles, muskets, pikes, cutlasses, and halberds, vendors pushing carts of fruit, and hideously homely Sisters of Charity. Saddened at not being able to enter the city, our hero approached a group of tramps by the wall who were grilling an obese black rat, in a cloud of horrific pestilence.
“Good tidings, godly folk. Couldst ye tell me how I canst enter the city and not be mistooken for a plague victim?”
It should have been abundantly clear to him that those people were not normal folk. Yet, in fact, unbeknownst to Orpí, he’d ended up in the middle of a group of lepers whose black bile was making all the humors of their bodies emerge in horrible secretions of blood and pus. Both the men and the women were gangling and bearded, and each missing at least one limb. This one an arm, the other a nose, another’s eye hung from its optic nerve, and one was just about to expire, still standing up. They shared everything, in a true brotherhood of scabies, lice, and purulence. A man with his face deformed by fatal tumors, his body covered in infected scabs and with two gangrenous stumps for arms, came over to our hero and began to kick him with shoes full of holes. Young Orpí kept him at a distance with a stick. In the commotion, a circle of bloodshot eyes and deformed bodies formed around our hero, staring at him suspiciously. The plague victims, seeing him so young and tender, approached slowly with the innocent intention of eating him alive (despite his lower half being covered in shit), but our hero, agile as a cat, slipped through the legs of the crowd, leaving them disappointed. Driven mad by their hunger, they pounced upon the most cadaveric of their fold, to tear out his cheeks (which were, according to some, a real delicacy). The sacrificed tramp fell to the ground squealing like an eviscerated pig and the others leapt upon him, devouring the poor wretch, every last bit, even his testicles.
A bit further on, young Orpí saw a series of men and women impaled on pitchforks and others swinging from the trees in iron cages that were usually reserved for insolent children, disobedient soldiers, thieves, and vagabonds. Some of them were dead, others were still stammering.
“Esteemed criminals,” began Orpí. “Wouldst ye bee so kinde as to tell me how I might enter the city?”
“Ooyyyy, dat’s très difficile,” said one.
“Specially if thine purse clinketh not,” specified a second.
“As they sayeth in olde Castille: ¡dineros son calidad!” exclaimed a third.
Young Orpí, sat beneath a tree, depressed. He didn’t know what to do and wanted only to cry. Just when he was about to give up and return to the forest to live like a wild beast, someone called to him.
“Pssst! Pssst! Joan Orpí de Piera! Over here!”
He turned and noticed the same dwarf with pierced ears who had robbed him in the wood a week earlier, calling to him from a cart, waving with his hat. He was richly decked out in a black velvet shirt with sleeves embroidered in white; a gold embroidered vestaloon, a hat with a duck-feather plume, and a large gold chain hanging from his neck, crowned with a precious stone. There was definitely a slight patina of distinguished nobility in that there small personage.
“Triboulet!” exclaimed Orpí, picking up a rock to get some payback with the dwarf. “Thee damn crook, behold what thee’ve done to me … I shalt kill you!”
“One moment!” The dwarf stopped him. “Recall yon I saved your life. Tweren’t for me, those highwaymen would have surely finished thee off.”
“Alright. We’ll leave the subject of murdering thee for anon then.”
“What’s more, I must confess I nowe longer live in penury. Turns out I did leave behind the life o’the highwayman and reinvent myself. Since they put mine boss Antoni Roca in the clink, I did pick up the dice and start to play craps professionally, and God knoweth I was born for it: I bee now filthily rich and liveth quite the noblemans life!”
“Isn’t that lucky for you, halfman,” said young Orpí. “But that doesn’t make me want to breaketh thine neck any less.”
“Listen, Orpí, let us not be cross wid each other, naught goode shall nair come of it. Behold thine owne luck: I be not only rich, but a good person. I shall retornne the maravedis I didst nick from you, plus interest. And I’ll even throw in this: ask for any one thing and
I shall grant it.”
“I wish to enter the city.”
“Wish granted. Hoppeth onto mine coach.”
And thus Orpí, at the ripe old age of sixteen, entered Barcelona hidden in the back of Triboulet’s carriage, and there witnessed what occurs in the next Chapter.
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21. i.e. Guards that kept infectious diseases from entering the city.
22. Glorious Sant Roc, pray let us not expire protect us from the plague and fire.
Chapter XI
In which young Orpí sees the city of Barcelona for the first time and then engages in his first duel to the death
Once he had made it through the walls bedecked with flags, gleaming pennants, and multicolored oriflammes, young Orpí stuck his head out of the coach, which was moving slowly along barely lit streets, and observed the roar of the metropolis. As they drew closer to the Cathedral, the streets grew more lively and filled with people: illustrious ladies hidden behind the curtains of small carriages led by dapper pages, knights sporting shields, haughty royal guards armed with musketoons and advancing to the beat of a drum’s forward march, Frenchmen, Hungarians, Milanese, Pythagoreans, Peripatetics, magicians, lunatics, dukes and counts, plebians and courtesans, donkeys shooing away flies, beggars begging and dogs scratching their mange. All that and more, and young Orpí took everything in as if he were discovering an unknown continent.
Triboulet the Dwarf offered our hero a room at the inn where he was to stay that night, and Orpí accepted. Once they were washed and dressed in new clothes, they both went out for a walk, straight up Carrer Nazaret to Carrer del Carme and through the Porta Ferrissa. The poorly laid-out streets of Barcelona were filled with knaves, bald women hiding in doorways, soldiers armed to the teeth and itching to kill and pulverize, rickety young squires, pulpiters predicting the imminent apocalypse atop rotten wooden crates, contorted old men splashing in the mud with sows, sailors flirting with prostitutes, and orphans stealing everything in reach and then sitting on the docks to look at the caravelles moored in the port and skip stones. Then young Orpí and Triboulet the Dwarf passed through the Plaça del Blat,23 where they watched the market vendors burdened down with work and misery, and saw alleys filled with urine and animal blood from the furriers’ guild. A cloud of tavern inebriation and fried fish floated in the dense, suffocating air, making our hero want to vomit. Beggars deformed by disease dragged themselves along and were spit on by porters hauling carts filled with sacks. Everything spun, distracting and stunning young Orpí amid the constant muddle of shouting whores, coachmen spurring on horses, disoriented newcomers, servants bustling about on impossible errands, Trinitarian friars trotting to church, argumentative commentators passionately yakking about the latest news of the Court, domestics smoking at windows, poor widows asking for alms, vendors squawking out the latest deals in a thousand different languages, folks outside the city walls plotting thwarted revolutions, and tightrope walkers and acrobats charming their spectators.