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.”
“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.