Miss Buddha Read Online Free Page B

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
father 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.”
    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