Miss Buddha Read Free Page B

took birth as an
Italian: Giordano Bruno.

:: 4 :: (Renaissance Rome)
     
    He had trouble breathing.
    The year was 1600, the month was February,
and its third Sunday had barely risen.
    The procession making its way from his Nona
Tower prison to the Campo dei Fiori was headed by the pike men
guard followed by an enthusiastic trumpeter shooting fanfares into
the air to let everyone know that Bruno, the heretic, was
approaching.
    And after the trumpeter came he, secured to
a donkey.
    He hugged the animal’s neck with difficulty,
for his arms were too short for the robust neck. He was, however,
not in danger of falling off, for his helpful jailors had ensured
his embrace of the animal’s neck by wet leather straps linking his
hands, straps now drying and tightening, shortening, and sending
streams of pain his way. Not that he really cared, for these pains
were as if nothing—barely whispers of those to come.
    Flames and death were only half a procession
away.
    His feet, too, were tied by drying straps
under the beast’s belly, sending sister streams of pain up his legs
and sides for him to savor.
    And he had trouble breathing, for his nose
was clogging with mucus and terror and the wooden block they had
forced into his mouth made passage of air all but impossible.
    He could not cough.
    Nor could he talk.
    Nor could he scream.
    Each clip and each clop of donkey hooves
brought him closer to death, and for a while he listened to them as
if they were part of some natural clock counting down the seconds.
Clip. Clop. Clip. Clop. Then he twisted his head a little to his
left to see what could be seen.
    What he saw was that even at this hour—the
sun was not yet risen—the route was lined with the curious, the
awe-struck, the grinning-in-relief that this was not they tied to
this donkey, heading for death.
    He was naked under the large canvas they had
dressed him in, a sack painted with devils and flames of hell—his
eventual destination a foregone conclusion.
    And beside him, easily keeping pace with the
slowly clop-clopping donkey clock, walked the mercy men, members of
the Confraternity of San Giovanni Decollato—Saint John the
Beheaded—whose task it was to stage a last ditch effort to save his
soul from eternal damnation by shoving crosses under his nose and
urging, begging, imploring him to repent. This was a ridiculous
exercise of futility, of course, since even had he wanted to—which
he did not—he couldn’t speak, could hardly move, could not even
meaningfully nod his head; it was too tightly forced against the
pungent hide of the ass who seemed to resent being pressed into
this revolting duty—it was Sunday after all, and his rightful place
this day of rest was in the fields, or in the stables, helping
himself to a day-long lazy meal of grass or hay.
    And here they came again, these idiots and
their crosses, dancing the dance macabre to impress the abbots and
priests who had gathered, too, to make sure that Filippo Giordano
Bruno, also called the Nolan, did indeed suffer the ultimate
indignity this morning for trying to make a fool of the Mother
Church.
     
    He knows that all will be ready for him at
the Campo. The brushwood and pine logs will be piled around the
stake in a gruesome welcome, soaked with fetid oils the better to
burn. On arrival they will cut him free of this animal and then,
unceremoniously, as if he were some thick-skinned fruit, peel him
naked of this sack for all to see before they strap him to the
stake and set fire to the wood, but not before making sure the
wooden wedge remained secure in his mouth: for screaming is not
allowed.

:: 5 :: (Renaissance Rome)
     
    It is said that a man can review his entire
life between the moment he leaps—or is thrown—off the cliff and the
moment he lands, heaping into life-departed flesh and broken bones
on the ravine floor. Bruno had heard it said more than once, but he
had never stopped to consider whether it might be true or
false.
    But as the