GOTAMA RETURNS
Miss Buddha — 5
Chapter Five — Renaissance Rome
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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 donkey grudgingly clip-clopped between the ever-thickening files of anticipating — if not salivating — celebrants, his life came rushing back and it simply made the time to be re-lived, in scope if not in detail.
When the Pope’s tribunal finally, and officially, pronounced its sentence — the dark and pendulous thing that had hung over him as an all but certainty for over seven jailed years — he nonetheless almost fainted, his knees almost buckled, his heart almost stopped. Almost, but not quite. Not the Nolan. He refused to give them the satisfaction. Instead, he had found the will and the resources to stiffen, to gather voice, and to hurl it at the arrogant asses that had the audacity to judge him — fools to a man, slaves to the dogmatically triumphant beast of ignorance and blind doctrine they all served.
Hurling it thus, with severity, loudly, clearly, “You, I can see, pronounce sentence against me with a fear greater than that with which I receive it.”
And he was pleased that even with death now a certainty, his voice had held firm, without even a trace of quiver.
It had fallen upon Flaminio Adriano, the Notary of the Inquisition, to do the final honors: the putting into words what long since had already been decided by the Pope, and so by the tribunal as well; and it was not without relish that the absurdly self-important little man almost sang in high-pitched Latin from the document he held high before him for all to see:
Having invoked the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, and of his most Glorious Mother Mary ever Virgin, in the cause of the aforesaid causes brought before this Holy Office between, on the one hand, the Procurator Fiscal of the said Holy Office, and on the other hand, yourself, the aforesaid Giordano Bruno, the accused, examined, brought to trial and found guilty, impenitent, obstinate and pertinacious; in this, our sentence, determined by the counsel and opinion of our advisers, the Reverend Fathers, Masters in Sacred Theology and Doctors in both laws, we hereby, in these documents, publish, announce, pronounce, sentence, and declare you, Brother Giordano Bruno, to be an impenitent heretic, and therefore to have incurred all the ecclesiastical censures and pains of the Holy Canon, the laws and constitutions, both general and particular, imposed on such confessed impenitent, pertinacious and obstinate heretics, wherefore as such we verbally degrade you and declare that you must be degraded.
And we hereby ordain and command that you shall be actually degraded from all your ecclesiastical orders, both major and minor, in which you have been ordained, according to the Sacred Canon Law; and that you must be driven forth, and we do drive you forth from our ecclesiastical forum and from our Holy and Immaculate Church of whose mercy you have become unworthy.
And we ordain and command that you must be delivered to the Secular Court, that you may be punished with the punishment deserved, though we earnestly pray that it will mitigate the rigor of the laws concerning the pains of your person, that you may not be in danger of death, or of mutilation of your members.
Cursed with nearly perfect memory, he could hear sentence drone on while little echoes confirmed and confirmed it from among the walls and windows as the little man continued his pompous singsong, to in the end even officially wash the hands of the Holy and Immaculate Church of the fate that was to befall him; “though we earnestly pray…” what gibberish. What play-acting and pretense, since they all knew that once he was handed over to the Secular Court, the Holy Standing Order was but one: to enforce as strictly as possible “the rigor of the laws concerning the pains of your person,” and the lay court would certainly ensure that he was put in danger of death, if not, in this particular instance, of mutilation of his members.
And so, in vivid memory — as it continued to make its own time atop the donkey, the little man droned on, now taking aim at all his writings:
Furthermore, we condemn, we reprobate and we prohibit all your aforesaid and your other books and writings as heretical and erroneous, containing many heresies and errors. We ordain that all of them which have come, or may in future come, into the hands of the Holy Office shall be publicly destroyed and burned upon the Square of Saint Peter, before the steps, and they shall be placed on the Index of Forbidden Books.
And as we have commanded, so shall it be done.
And thus we say, pronounce, sentence, declare, degrade, command, and ordain, we chase forth and deliver, and we pray in this, and in every other better method and form, that we reasonably can and should.
Thus pronounce we, the Cardinal General Inquisitors, whose names subscribe this document.
And then there was silence.
Down to the last scurrying echo, echo, gone. Silence.
The little man done braying, and now sitting down, Bruno took solace and strength from his anger, from his detestation of farce, and that kept him erect and standing, that let him find his voice, and his words, and quiver-free retort.
But within: the final traces of hope took dark wing, for now only the Pope could halt the rush of this deathly river, and Bruno knew that Pope Clement VIII would do nothing to slow, much less halt, the onrush of his death, that the Pope had, in fact, made it abundantly clear that he wanted Bruno erased, not only from the annals and memories of the Holy Church but from the Earth. Bruno was to die, he, the Pope, willed it so.
And so he recalled — cursed memory atop the donkey — the prediction he had made in his own De Monade so many years prior:
I fought a lot; I thought I could win, but fate and nature repressed my studies and my efforts. But it is already something to be on the battlefield because to win depends very much on fortune. But I did as much as I could and I do not think anyone of the future generation will deny it. I was not afraid of death, I never gave in to anyone, I chose courageous death instead of a coward’s life.
I chose courageous death instead of a coward’s life. This was not exactly true, but a fine sentiment nonetheless, and an even finer prediction — uncanny, in fact.
For he had in fact recanted and repented and apologized and retracted as much as his conscience allowed, and he would most likely have — though now somewhat relieved that this was never actually put, or would never be put to that test — he would most likely have retracted everything, would it have made a difference. But he had seen, known in his battered heart, that no matter what he said, no matter what he did, no matter what books or comments or views he recanted he would burn, so why give these asses the satisfaction. That was the truth of the matter. He saw that, acknowledged that, knowing self-deception to be man’s deepest vice.
Truthfully, courageous death was not his choice. Here, strapped to the donkey, he’d rather live, anything to live, anything to continue as the Nolan, in whatever shape or circumstance. Death was not a pleasant prospect, and he could not accept it peacefully.
And here they came again with their crosses and sanctimonious faces pleading again and again — what hypocrites — that he would recant and so avoid the eternal flames of hell. Ah, if he could only spit.
And all of this in perhaps ten or twenty donkey clip-clops toward the still distant square.
The animal rocks a little one way, and then the other, as it lifts and then brings down yet another hoof, clip, and then another, clop, and now Mademoiselle Francoise Solanges appears for him: the only woman he truly loved.
And the one woman he never took to bed.
“I want your instructions to set them dreaming,” she had told him when they first met. She was referring to the girl students in her charge, which he had agreed to tutor. But Bruno, blinded and deafened by her beauty, had not registered those words and still did not hear, though she was still talking: “I want you to open a garden in which they can walk for the rest of their lives.”
Finally, he found the thread of her request, and then his voice, “And what makes you think I can do that, Mademoiselle?”
“Monsieur Gorbin calls you a cloud walker,” she said. “And I would like you to take my girls on a walk among them, and then through the blue beyond, and then to the stars even farther beyond.”
“Why?” he heard himself ask.
“They need a future of hope.”
When he looked perplexed, she laughed, and her laughter sounded to him like silver bells that rang as with understanding of what he had to give. And then he, too, understood what he was to give.
And so he gave, as often as he could, her charges all the wonder, all the knowledge, and all the fascination he possessed; and she, often as not, would sit in a corner, listening in, smiling to him, smiling to herself. By all accounts happy with his gifts.
In the end, when he could no longer contain his love for her — for it threatened to rupture him would it not reach air; when he could no longer suppress his honest passion for this woman, he declared it, to another of her beautiful smiles and slow movement back and forth of her head. “My dearest friend,” she said, taking his warm, moist hand in her two fine and cool ones, “there is no place in my life for a man. My needs, and gifts, are different.”
“I don’t understand.”
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Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she unclasped a silver chain from around her neck, and, after another brief hesitation, unfolded her hand to show him the chain and its famous medallion, marking her as, yes, he knew all about the medallion and what it meant: a Cathar.
He nodded — or, rather, felt himself nod. He did not want to understand, but he did.
Beside him, still holding his hand in hers, sat one of the few to survive the intense massacres launched by Pope Innocent III, and the subsequent and thorough extermination efforts by the Inquisition; though not thorough enough, never thorough enough. Pockets had survived. Always do.
She was one of the survivors.
“Now I have entrusted you with my life,” she said. “For truly, I do love you.”
At that, he had cried, for the first time and last time as a grown man, cried like a child cries when overcome with incomprehensible loss, for he realized that he would never possess this woman, and in that moment, counter to every one of his physical fibers, he no longer wanted to possess her, for he, in turn, loved her too much.
He had laid his head in her lap then — child in mother’s, the only thing he could do to ease the pain — and she had cradled it with her hands, and perhaps she had even hummed some comforting melody or incantation, for he felt surrounded by more than tender fingers and warm cloth.
Here comes more wood shoved in his face, stirring him back to the present. “Please, please, I beg of you,” shouts the monk holding the cross, no more than a boy, “repent. Save your soul.”
Oh, how he wishes he could spit in the ugly youth’s face.
The boy — as if startled by his thought — withdraws the crude symbol and leaves him to his reverie.
Leaves him to return to Nola, his childhood town, which comes rushing back, pushing aside crosses and throngs and jeers and trumpet blasts up ahead, while the square draws nearer with each clip, with each clop.
Nola, by the foot of his beloved mountain — Mount Cicala they called it; Nola, the little town gifting him its name: for he was to be known as “The Nolan.” The little town where life was lived before trouble grew too dense and clawy to be survived.
He could smell, taste even — despite wooden splinters piercing lips and cheeks and tongue — olives, chestnuts, poplars, rosemary, vines, elms, myrtle, even the earth itself out of which Cicala sprung like a vast but guarding spirit. He was running across fields with his friends, fresh wind in his face, re-living the exploits of his soldier father (always away, it seemed). And here, in this land of memory, the sun always stood high in the sky, sweeping away any cloud before it. There was no shadow upon those days. No shadow.
He had been a brilliant student — at least in his own estimation, though none disagreed with that assessment. But his family was poor, and there was no question of higher schooling for the bright boy. A soldier’s pay did not go far; the funds were not there.
Were he to study further — something he deemed his God-given right — he had only one option: The Church, which, in his opinion, was the far lesser of the two relevant evils.
The other, far greater evil, was to forfeit his education and settle for a menial life. This was out of the question.
Thus, just turned seventeen, he also turned monk.
If only he had learned to hold his tongue well enough to actually hold it.
He was not pious, nor did he claim to be. Not even to appease his teachers, most of whom saw and accepted him for what he was: a young man ambitious for learning, for that was all it took — in their estimation and experience — to fashion, in the end, an obedient monk, true to dogma and the Holy Church: a useful instrument.
He would, however, soon topple their complacent views for they had misjudged his desire for learning, which was by no means limited to orthodox teachings, but was a deep and irrepressible desire to know the truth; and truth, he was soon to realize, was not constrained by the codex of canon law and the constitutions of his order.
Seeing this, he deeply and honestly rebelled against the diktat that he adopt and exclusively subscribe not only to the Gospel truths — as found in the Good Book itself — but to every and minute interpretation of those truths by Roman Authority, boringly and at length spelled out in crabbed Latin by long dead theological scholars. This is the truth, decreed his order, and there is no other, down to the very last holy inflection, comma and period.
Without variation, world without end, amen.
Not to his taste.
Oh, if only he had learned to hold his tongue.
And to tolerate stupidity.
And to hide things better.
The drop to finally overflow this rebellious cup of dissent was his illegal acquisition of Erasmus of Rotterdam’s commentaries on the works of Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Jerome. Erasmus, as he well knew, was on the Index of Forbidden Books, but a brother from Venice had whispered his name, had told him of truths told by Erasmus but denied by the Church, had offered to smuggle him a copy of his book and Bruno had agreed, of course, his thirst would have it no other way.
He had hidden the book in one of the monastery privies, well concealed, he thought. But before too long it was found, and eventually traced to him, led there by his own stupidity: Too anxious to prevail in debates, and too eager to display his brilliance, he had taken to quote from this forbidden book — not by name, obviously, but most certainly verbatim (his excellent memory, already in evidence, had seen to that). And most certainly to the recognition of those elders who did not look upon him too kindly, for they, too, had read Erasmus, the better to expose the errors of the heretic’s views. And so, hearing young Bruno expound upon something or other with the help of Erasmus, it was clear to them who had hidden the book in the privy.
And after this, it was not long before the Prior asked to see him, again, and this time told him that the Neapolitan Inquisition had now initiated judicial process against him. He was charged with insubordination to the monastic authorities, and with heresy. He was urged to reflect long and hard upon his misdeeds.
The impatient young man reflected only briefly.
Then he fled.
Into years of exile.
Ever searching, ever seeing, ever finding, ever writing, ever fleeing, ever moving on when the Church hounds picked up his scent and alerted their masters to his whereabouts.
Against the ceaseless clip-clops below, the many cities parade before him, each at first a welcome, each in the end an unwelcome: Rome, Genoa, Turin, Savona, Noli, Venice, Milan, Chambery, Lyons, Geneva, Toulouse, Paris, London, Oxford, Marburg, Wittenberg, Prague, Frankfurt, where his traitor-to-be, Giovanni Mocenigo, finally reached him with an invitation to return to Venice, offering him both work and protection, which Bruno — homesick by now, and weary of constant flight — could not resist.
A few months later, Mocenigo — thirty silver pieces richer — handed him over to the Inquisition as a heretic.
Seven underfed and miserable years later. Many, many visits to the rack later. Many failed attempts to make him recant later. All these now see him tied to the back of a donkey choking on wood, and now nearing the Campo dei Fiori.
He caught the drifting song of oil-drenched kindling mixed with the thirst for blood of the growing throng, of end approaching.
And still, they shoved the cross in his face. Pleading, as if they had the faintest clue about what they were asking.
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