Holy Fools Read Online Free PDF Page B

he had not begun his career as a performer. He must have studied; he could read Latin and Greek, and was familiar with several of Giordano’s philosophers. He could ride a horse as well as any circus equestrienne. He could pick pockets like a professional, and he excelled at all games of chance. He seemed able to adapt to any circumstance, acquiring new skills as he went, and however much I tried, I was unable to pierce the layers of fiction, fancy, and outright lies with which he surrounded himself. His secrets, whatever they were, remained his own.
    There was one thing, however. An old brand high up on his left arm, a fleur-de-lis faded almost to silver over the years-which, when I questioned him, he dismissed with a smile and a claim of forgetfulness. But I noticed that he took care always to cover the mark after that, and I drew my own conclusions. My Blackbird had lost feathers in that encounter and did not care to be reminded of it.

6
    JULY 10TH, 1610
     
    I have never
believed in God. Not in
your
God anyway; the one who looks down onto his chessboard and moves the pieces according to his pleasure, occasionally glancing up at the face of his Adversary with the smile of one who already knows the outcome. It seems to me that there must be something horribly flawed in a Creator who persists in testing his creatures to destruction, in providing a world well stocked with pleasures only to announce that all pleasure is sin, in creating mankind imperfect, then expecting us to aspire to perfection. The devil at least plays fair. We know where he stands. But even he, the Lord of Deceit, works for the Almighty in secret. Like master, like man.
    Giordano called me pagan. To him this was no compliment, for he was a devout Jew, believing in a heavenly reward for his earthly sufferings. To him, to be pagan was to be immoral, ungodly, to indulge freely in the pleasures of the flesh, to delight too frequently in the other hazards encountered on the road. My old teacher ate sparingly, fasted regularly, prayed often, immersing himself for the rest of the time in his studies. He was a good companion-our only grievance was that on his Sabbath he refused to help with the work around the camp, preferring to go without a fire, even on a winter’s night, than to take the trouble to light one. Apart from this peculiarity, he was just like the rest of us; and I never saw him eat the flesh of children, as the Church claims his people do. In fact he rarely ate any kind of flesh at all. Which simply goes to show how misguided the Church can be.
    Perhaps Giordano was misguided too, I told myself, as I strove dutifully to be more like my mentor. His Jewish God seemed so very like the Catholic God-which One True Religion seemed to me almost indistinguishable from that of the Huguenots or the Protestant heretics in England. There must be something else, I told myself repeatedly; something beyond sin and solemnity, dust and devotions; something that loved life as indiscriminately as I did.
    My thirteenth birthday brought a kind of awakening. All that summer was a languorous procession of delights: a new awareness, a boundless energy, a heightened sense of taste and smell. For the first time, or so it seemed, I really noticed the flowers along the roadside; the scent of night falling by the seashore; the taste of my mother’s new bread, baked black in the coals but tender inside the crust of ash. I noticed too the delicious friction of my clothes against my skin, the icy splash of stream water as I bathed…If this was to be pagan, then I wanted more of it. The world had become maternal almost overnight, and her mysteries were boundless. I opened myself to her initiations. Every shoot, every flower, tree, bird, creature filled me with tenderness and joy. I lost my maidenhead to a fisherman in Le Havre and the world exploded in a revelation no less momentous to me than that of Saint John.
    Giordano shook his head sourly and called me shameless. For a