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 handing 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?”
“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.