Chapter XVI

In which young Orpí celebrates Carnaval with his fraternity and ends up dressed as the Stag King

It was our hero’s last year of university and, having failed almost all his subjects, he found refuge only in debauchery. Calends, Whitsunday … any excuse for merrymaking was a good one and, particularly, Carnaval, which lasted three days, beginning on Carrer de la Palla and ending where shrimps whistle. A grand procession of parade figures featuring devils, dragons, giants, and cardboard horses were followed by brotherhoods dancing to the beat of drums along the city streets, illuminated by countless torches. The festivities also included Tarasques, hoop games or pala mall,³⁵ bull fights, minstrels singing and dancing the contrapàs, sotties with some people dressed as demons and others as madmen, yet others as funambulists with bells on their legs, reciting gibberish and repetitions, dizzying lists and satirical allusions to the clergy as they threw fireworks. The celebration also included jousts, circus numbers, tastings, and executions left and right of the riffraff filling the city’s prisons. Just then there was an announcement, along with trumpet fanfare, of the execution of ten dangerous highwaymen who had their flesh torn off with pincers, then were hung by their arms, had their genitals amputated, and finally were quartered. The whole city was in motion: the Frogs were bustling about angrily because they’d been forbidden to carry weapons (crossbow, lance, or shield), while some gentlemen idled, walking their purebred doggos, and some Holy Thursday penitents who’d gotten the day wrong and were dragging themselves through the streets flagellating their own backs with iron whips until they bled while the ning-nang of cathedral bells could be heard in the distance. A band of musicians, strumetty-strum, blowetty-blow, advanced as costumed people danced around them in a muddle of arms and legs in sweet harmony.

So, as the multitude partied down the streets of Barcelona, young Orpí and his brothers in the fraternity of the Nocturnal Academy got drunk on piment³⁶ in one of the taverns in the Born, on Carrer de les Mosques. There they could listen to parodies of the Easter Week Sermons improvised by fake priests in chaps, and guilds planning all sorts of hooliganism, and singing old Goliardic songs.

Vivat nostra societas!

Vivant studiosi!

Crescat una veritas,

floreat fraternitas,

patriae prosperitas.

Vivat et Republica,

et qui illam regit.

Vivat nostra civitas,

Maecenatum charitas

quae nos hic protegit.³⁷

“Hold up, waite a minute,” said Cirrhotic Liver. “This song is passé. We hath no patrons. Nor do we believeth in the Republic or the Church.”

“Nay, but protegit rhymes with regit, man!” said a student from the University of Salamanca who was on an exchange in Barcelona.

“Hey, guys, why donst we procure a few kiloes of oranges and bombard the home of the dean, Abbot Cuckhold?” said one who answered to the name of Fear.

“Goode idea,” exclaimed another, whom they called Shadow. “There be no body more vain and orgulous than the dean.”

“Any day now he’s like to ban laughing in the university, as Plato attempted in his Academy,” put forth Silence.

“He hath already separated the liberal artz (doctrine, theory) from the mechanic artz (painting and sculpture), which methinks deeply grosswitted,” noted young Orpí.

“And how they maketh us read the fourth eclogue of Virgil’s Aeneid as a proffecy of the coming of Christ is right bunkum!”

“They do the selfsame with Genesis, melding theological trut’ and sense to validate their monopoly on knowledge and gette a paycheck at the end of the month!”

“The university bestinks of fustylugs!”

“And withal, we liveth amid the darke ignorance of Vatican idolatree!”

“Let’s do up his house in oranges and fecations!”

“Let us play pranks & capers!”

That being decided, the student fraternity filled up baskets of rotten oranges and even some excrement from a sick dog, and went to the dean’s home, near the Rambla. When they got there they threw the oranges against the walls of his house while singing lewd songs. The darkness of the night helped the student gang, which even painted obscene drawings on the walls and smeared feces on the door. In fact, the “oranging” was a tradition repeated each Carnaval for centuries, even though it had been prohibited by the Consell de Cent, and the dean had long grown sick and tired of those nocturnal serenades come February.

“How now, students?” the rector bellowed like an ass, sticking his head out the window as a bag filled with liquid diarrhea splashed his clenched face.

The students, scattering, were relentlessly chased by the Mossos de l’Esquadra. Luckily, young Orpí was able to camouflage himself amid a group of people coming down the street singing songs and dressed up as cows, monkeys, goats, and birds.

Someone handed a deer mask to Orpí and they covered him with an animal hide. Following the cavalcade, laughing, baying, bellowing, our young hero ended up in the cemetery, where the entire gang of joyous revelers engaged in the most varied array of obscenities, with the invaluable help of copious amounts of alcohol. Some licked others’ anuses, others ate fruits and tomatoes they’d rubbed on their genitals, and yet others drank sacramental wine and masturbated and danced with the improvised music of flutes and tambourines. Surrendered to the collective liturgy, they offered up their bodies, standing, kneeling, opened legs, nipples pointed skyward. Most of them were peasants who worshipped the trees and the rocks … the fake beards, gleaming silk clothes, masks with giant noses, feather headdresses, goat horns, and silk masks stimulated the sinners’ lust and everyone sang, shrieked, shouted, offered themselves up, muddy and half-naked … ducks and rabbits fell … some hens were raped and gutted … some smeared themselves with the blood of the dead animals … women spread their legs revealing hairy, damp vaginas that were penetrated and hosed down with industrial quantities of semen … anuses dilated and bled as a squad of policemen in rooster costumes sang Nun, Little Sister, we’ll bust yer teensy hole … ! and she, coquettish, lifted her habit to flaunt a round, white ass while another woman shat in the mouth of a large peasant man who opened his jaws (somewhat repulsed) as one of the roosters jerked him off … and in that widespread transfiguration of pagan inversion, our Orpí was the Stag King, brandishing, like a knight his lance, his now definitively cured foreskin, prepared to meet all the indecent demands of the lovely courtesans in heat that Carnaval night, if not for—exactly—if not for the fact that the Mossos de l’Esquadra interrupted that colossal orgy and everyone scattered into the foggy night as quickly as they’d come.

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35. i.e. A game similar to today’s croquet.

36. i.e. White wine infused with honey and spices.

37. Long live our association! / Long live those who study! / May the single truth grow, / may brotherhood flourish, / as well as the prosperity of our homeland. Long live the Republic, / and its governor. / Long live our city, / and the generosity of its patrons / who take us under their wing.