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

by Max Besora

  “Master Lluís de Peguera,” said Orpí. “I must read his Liber quaestionum criminalium over this next sennight …”

  “Ah, that one’s a doozy … he be the worst of all the professors. He allways assignes his own books obliging us to runneth out and buy them. Sure coin!”

  “Sooth is I’d rath’r readeth Lazarillo de Tormes or Guzmán de Alfarache, they art more of a comfort to me, being as they be comickal & simple.”

  “Very well & goode, Orpí,” said Cirrhotic Liver. “But surely this be enoufh class for the present day, we needeth a little drinky-poo more so than a lesson from the Council.”

  Young Orpí ended up in a famous tavern called the Thirsty Student, surrounded by itinerant artists, wanton poets, and law students like him who belonged to the Brotherhood of the Nocturnal Academy, where everyone was known by pseudonyms like Temerity, Chaos, Shadow, Fear, Silence, etc. There they mingled with other fraternities and unaffiliated followers of the licentious life, drinking and singing until some students from the Cordelles Jesuit School came in, looking for trouble. The conversation between the two fraternities soon soured.

  “Look to it,” said one of them. “These greenhorn gaudints think they hath the same rights as soldiers. Be there any man more pedantic & bamboozling than a lawyer?”

  “And furthermore, they’re singing bits of the Coena, a book Rome hath long included in the Index of Banned Books.”

  “Were I to choose, Id send them all to work in the stables ad hoc.”

  “For thine information, we lawyers hath the same rights as soldiers,” bellowed Cirrhotic Liver. “And withall, in mine humble opynion, ye traitors should allst be ympaled throughout the anus.”

  In less than a minute everybody was fighting. Chairs and beer steins were flying, asses were hitting the ground, things were shattering, mouths were bellowing … t’was pandemonium! Young Orpí, who no longer knew if he was striking his own team, the opponents, or himself, ended up on the floor. Someone was just about to run him through with a sword when his friend Ernst of the Cirrhotic Liver stopped it, swashbuckler that he was.

  “How is it that thou art more inclined to the sword than the toga?” asked our hero, as he dodged a flying beer tankard.

  “The pen & the sword art compatyble occupations,” said Cirrhotic Liver, smashing a chair onto a man’s head. “How other canst thou explain Garcilaso de la Vega’s end, in 1536, following the siege of the Le Muy fortress in southern France?”

  Thenceforth young Orpí made that declaration of principles his own, considering a good brain as valuable as knowing how to use a weapon. So he began to practice the art of fencing with Cirrhotic Liver, and in a matter of a few weeks he was already besting his friend in the use of black swords.28 But that was the only ambit where he bested him, because as for studying and good grades, his was not the door to knock on.

  After drinking beer every afternoon with his friends from the university, young Orpí would stagger home in the wee hours to the house of Lord Carmona. His room, in the pigeon loft, was cold and dirty. As its name indicated, all of the city’s pigeons came there to roost and our hero had to share his room with all those repulsive birds and their horrible guttural noises and their shit everywhere. Add to that, dear reader, the fact that young Orpí’s university studies were a bitter pill for him, and thus he spent the following months drinking from afternoon to night in the taverns and, upon returning home to Lord Carmona’s house, shooing away pigeons and pissing in a wash-basin for lack of a latrine. After tolerating the situation for some time, his clothes stinking to high heaven, young Orpí gathered up his belongings and left that house to move into an inn where his friend Cirrhotic Liver was living with some other students from the university. The change was significant. From that point on, he discovered true college life in all its splendor. There were parties every night and the young student’s diet consisted entirely of alcohol and opioids. All the funds sent by his family were spent on these and other dubious objectives. In fact, our young hero, impetuous and naive, became a true rapscallion thanks to the company he kept, a parasite of the night who couldn’t get enough gluttony and wassailing, plotting out hole-and-corner routes to attend all sorts of parties, and generally laboring harder to earn a degree at the school of debauchery than at the school of wisdom, as we shall see play out in the following manner, forthwith:

  ___________

  26. i.e. Later called the Santa Madrona bastion, at the end of the Rambla, at the city’s wall.

  27. i.e. Name of the current Ramblas, which run from the Plaça Catalunya to the Statue of Columbus.

  28. i.e. Name for the swords used in fencing.

  Chapter XIV

  In which young Orpí finds the fantastic world of bodily pleasure hindered by a serious erectile problem

  It is in this student context that young Orpí discovered Barcelona’s extensive spectrum of opportunities for distracting the mind with a focus on the body. One day, Cirrhotic Liver brought him to Carrer dels Mirallers, famous for hosting, in buildings with red markings, most of the city’s prostitutes. A very lively street that welcomed sailors into dance halls with open windows that secreted various types of music and joyful laughter. The smell of fried food melded with cheap perfumes, and women with cheeks aflame, dressed to attract attention, drank and smoked to the health of those who sought them out. They swirled through the narrow streets, gesturing with a finger or a wink of the eye, offering up tongue-in-cheek propositions and scrumptious suggestions to the men in need of their humanitarian services. Dark doorways were marked by the carved stone face of a bearded man, the unmistakable sign for a brothel.

  “Yee’ve gotte the typical harlots,” explained Cirrhotic Liver in a didactic tone, while young Orpí listened attentively, “the hookers (these ones ye see here, on the street) who accepte any client, howsoever disfigured or bestank. Then ye have the escorts (the most dear), or the strumpets or the ladies of the evening, who for two copper coins will let thou verily do it all, such as that wench over yon,” he said, and pointed to a doorway, where a man was mounting one of these professionals from behind. “Then there be the call girls, who deliver and the …”

  “Enuff!” exclaimed our hero, quickly losing his patience. “Mye God … this be Sodom and Gomorrah!”

  “Yea, and there be plentee for all,” said his friend. “Even priests doth come here on the down low to wet their willy ever and anon.”

  “I hath ne’er seen souch lewdness in so few square meteres …” murmured our hero.

  “It’s not ’bout seeing it, Orpinet, it’s ’bout givin’ it ye olde whirle,” said his friend, waving goodbye as he took one of those young ladies by the arm and disappeared into a building. “Standeth thither not with thine mouth hanging open! Hie and selecte one!”

  Our hero wandered a few yards on, stopping at the Carrer de les Trompetes in front of doorway where a slovenly and malformed woman, heavily made-up and perfumed ad nauseum, stood. Her plunging neckline revealed perfectly round breasts as she signaled with her index finger for the young man to approach. The big-bosomed woman was very depleted and wore cheap lace lingerie. Unable to escape, Orpí was dragged toward that apparition with red-painted cheeks who, in a shrill voice, warbled out a song:

  Marry a right gentleman

  A prince in the boudoir

  a perfumed wealthy specimen

  who’ll neva call ye whore

  He’ll pay for every last whim

  as long as ye doth werk that willy

  Fill yer cup up to the very brim,

  And ride ye like a right filly

  Oh, ye and we shall have it all

  we shall drippe with jewels and lace

  When that fine man comes to call

  And doth see our lovely face-es!

  But if by chance things should sour

  And he doth beat us for mere sport,

  ye know we shant eere cower

  but stab him in the ven’eral wart-s

  That’s how a lady
doth behave

  Oh, yes, that’s how a true woman be.

  I’ll keep my secret to the grave

  Oh don’t ya wanna marr-rry meee!

  The prostitute, who was named Roberta, continued to sing as she dragged Orpí up the creaking stairs of a crumbling building, to a desolate room that smelled of human genitalia and sweat, where the only furnishings were a bed and a basin to wash your private parts.

  “Up and at ’em,” said the slattern, pinching Orpí’s bottom before sitting on the bed to take off her shoes. “Let us commence to fuckeing, since these days of marital abstention are when I hath most work, not counting the fourty days fore Christmas, the eight ere Pentecost, Sundays, Tuesdayes, and Frydays during Lent and etcetera, etcetera. So let’s get a move on!”

  Without further ado, the woman brusquely took off all her skirts and petticoats, allowing a glimpse of her body, as deformed as it was ghostly, slathered from head to toe with cerus.29 She had been destroyed by the various diseases inherent to her profession, was covered in folds of fat, varicose veins, and stretch marks, her breasts hanging down to her belly like two cattle-bells. Our Orpí was shocked, his mouth agape, upon seeing, for the second time in his life, the monster women kept between their legs.

  Roberta the prostitute pulled down his stockings and britches and her eyes grew wide as saucers.

  “For Mary Magdalene, patron saint of all whores!” she exclaimed, her face in front of Orpí’s prick. “What a truncheon! I’ve ne’er seen one quite so well endowed! Let us hop into bed forsooth, ya rascal, but take care whenst thou cume as I don’t wish to nurse no babies, ya hear? Point a fact, tis best thou weareth a Venus glove30 and we’ll be safe from French caries31.”

  Having said that, she started to rub on our hero’s lobcock, but it failed to respond in the slightest.

  “How now, don’t thee like wenches?” asked Roberta, polishing young Orpí’s arborvitae so hard that it got all wrinkled and small like a chickpea. “Thou arent no invert, be theu? Watch out cuz the pecado nefando will get you burnt up at the stake, eh? Or be thee fond of beasts, perchance? I once knew a peasant who had a comely younge wife and still fellt in love with an ass. One day they caught ’im mounting it from behind and the poor manne ended up roasted like a chicken by decree of the Fuero Juzgo.”

  “Nay, that’s not it, ma’am,” he said, ashamed. “But heretofore I doth hatte an egregious experience with a lass from mine village, and thereupon ‘that bit’ hasn’t risen to the occasion.”

  “Aha, I see …” the whore murmured pensively, rummaging in her bag and pulling out a card. “This be a rite typickal case of sexual trauma. But I hath the remedee thou seeketh, discombobulated young man. Lucky for thee, I’m half strumpet and half saint: here, take this card.”

  Alfons The Healing Wizard

  Solves all health and love problems, unites couples, ex-couples and lovers in general. For divorces, getting rid of overzealous lovers, attracting the love you seek without collateral damage and side effects. Increase feelings and the desire to be loved, faithful and obedient. Deflects bad vibrations and the evil eye, increases sexuality and cures male impotence. Salvages businesses and companies and all with immediate results and 100% guaranteed in two days time. And if you’re not completely satisfied, we’ll return a part (to be determined) of your money.

  “Get thee to see this man, he’ll fix the problem with your lobcock … and then returnne to finish thine task industrious32 and payeth me mine due!” she said.

  Our hero, tying his breeches, swore that as soon as he was cured, he would come back. And thus, still pursued by the laughing stammer of the prostitute as she twirled her hair on the bed, he walked through the door of that room, with all the dignity the occasion demanded, in search of the healer.

  ___________

  29. i.e. A cosmetic made of lead to “whiten” skin, since paleness was a symbol of distinction in the period, that had serious health consequences.

  30. i.e. Condom of the period, invented by the Italian surgeon Gabriel Fallopius in the sixteenth century.

  31. i.e. A term for syphilis.

  32. i.e. Diligently and assiduously.

  Chapter XV

  In which Joan Orpí seeks out a remedy for his problem and meets up with an old acquaintance who dares to play God

  As he searched for his genital cure, night fell upon our hero; all was solid blackness and Orpí moved slowly now along the city walls, toward the Raval, careful to avoid scallywags, through farm patches and corrals33. He was feeling his way along when suddenly a light appeared from above: it was the healer’s home. He knocked on the door but got no answer; nonetheless it was ajar and our hero took the license of entering.

  There were open books everywhere in that marvelous room: copies of the Kabbalists and the ancients such as Heraclitus, Parmenides, Democritus, Lucretius, and Plotinus; among the moderns there was the omniscient Ramon Llull, his disciple Ramon Sibiuda, and the magnanimous Copernicus in an atmosphere crammed with dusty objects including armillary spheres, test tubes, barometers, and varied mystical and orphic devices appropriate for the hermetic disciplines. Young Orpí heard someone singing in another room.

  How fare the gods?

  How fare the elves?

  All Jotunheim groans,

  Isn’t it rich?

  Loud roar the dwarfs

  masters of the rocks on the ground

  by doors of stone34

  When he entered he saw a tiny being jumping all around the room, doing some sort of arrhythmic tap dance.

  “This cain’t be …” murmured Orpí.

  The other man turned upon hearing his voice. And indeed, there in the middle of that room was none other than Triboulet Dvergar the Distasteful.

  “Orpí, what bringeth thee here?”

  Two years had passed since our hero had seen the dwarf and he was shocked by his decline, which included a three-day beard, a hole in the crotch of his trousers, and a deerskin hunter’s cap askew upon his head. Orpí explained the sorry incident with the lady of the night and his sexual problem.

  “There be a facille solution,” declared the dwarf, who had a pet snake and an amulet coiled around his neck. “What thou needst is this potion, made with extract of the Cantharis vesicatoria fly; the cantharidin produces a congestive action upon thine member. Just drink up the brew and watch as it sharpens thy cutlass!”

  “Thanks be to thee, Triboulet,” said our hero, putting the flask in his pocket for safekeeping. “Gosh, I never would have tooken thee for a homeopathic wizzard!”

  “Natch,” said the little man, with a bow. “Every dwarf has a bit of the magician in him. Bye the by, what bee the name of the prostitute who recommended you mine Gay Science?”

  “Roberta, methunks.”

  “Ahh, mine belov’d Roberta … !” murmured the dwarf, who then proceeded to explain to young Orpí how, after fleeing the casino over the whole bamboozling business two years earlier, he came to realize that he needed urgent psychological help. He found the answer to the meaning of life alongside an old alchemist who took him in and taught him demonology, scatology, angeology, and sotierology, and all the secrets of the arcana. “There be no accidents, mine friend,” his master teacher told him one day. “Tis fate in control, and as such, in an order’d huniverse, coincidences forme part & parcel of the Great Creator’s cosmic plan.” And having said that, destiny or the aforementioned fate played the master alchemist a dirty trick: he took two steps and slipped on a banana peel, breaking his neck in the fall and dying instantly.

  “A strange manner of exit. So be this the house of thine master teacher?” asked Orpí.

  “Precisely. He passed last winter but I continue his work and successfully so. Followe me,” said the dwarf, returning to the first room, where he showed Orpí a glass vessel our hero hadn’t noticed when he came in.

  “In this vessel,” explained the dwarf enthusiastically, “I hath managed … to create life! Employeing more than nine-score forms of
traditional divination, which include bibliomancy, chrysopoeia, crystallomancy, gyromancy, and philomancy and symbolic arithmancy gathered from Agrippa, the Pre-Socratics, and the atoms of Democritus, Heraclitus’s doctrine of flux, the ‘everything in everything’ of Anaxagoras, the sublime plurality of worlds from Epicure and Lucretius, Zoroaster’s Chaldean Oracles, the Asclepius by Hermes Trismegistus, Lucifer’s autobiography The Book of Fallen Angels, the Tabula Smaragdina of Jabir Ibn Hayyan, Ficino’s De Vita Coelitus Comparanda, and others … in order to rehabilitate matter and present it as one of the three indivisible foundations: hyle, nous, and God … in brief, utilising the splendid dictates of mathematics, physics, proto-critics, anti-systematics, and other pantomimes … I hath broat forth a homunculus through various surgickal experiments combining suche elements as saliva from an empty stomach plus Paracelsus’s recipe using a bag of bones, spermatazoides, skin fragments, and animal hair.”

  “Wondrous!” exclaimed Orpí, drawing near to the vessel until he could make out a figure small as an acorn, in the shape of a human and with yellowish skin, moving amid the coagulated fluids. “But this be wholly antinatural! Anticlerical! A direct attack on the idea of divine creation!”

  “Contemporary alchemists hath lost faith in imagining creation ex nihilo,” complained Triboulet. “They no longer believeth that metals can transmute, or that the elixir of life be more than mere chimera. False, I sayeth! Not only be it possyble but here is the upshot … the stone of the philosophers! And that’s not the word of some sciolist nerdde, but a verittable prophecy.”

  “Mine eyes cannot believe such a marvelle … what sort of magic be this?”

  “Pray let me elucidate: if we assume that the univerce be infinite (in other words, eccentric, where everything be centre and there be no peripheries) and no physickal division betwixt the sublunary & supralunary spheres, then one canst extrapolate that there be no difference between the world comprehend’d as a totality and divinity. Ergo, God canst not have created the universe, nor life, for God be a tautology and existeth not. Even mine mother (God rest her soul) could apprehend that.”