The last remaining was this one, which the Rasmussen Foundation (Rosalind Rasmussen herself, actually, the executive director) asked Pierce to take up again: to edit, fix up and trim up and cap off so that it could be brought out too, finish the story, she said.
I don't think I can, Rosie, he'd told her (though here it was, piled beside the computer into which he was entering or keyboarding it, page after endless page); things, he said, had changed so much for him, she should get a real writer to do it, there were plenty. So Rosie said all right, she understood; and then when a couple of days and sleepless nights had passed he wrote to her to say that well after all he would. He owed it to her, he said, for all that she had given him, all that he had left unfinished and unreturned. When he undid the wrappings and opened the box that contained the thing, though, he knew his reluctance hadn't been misplaced, the whole bad time in which it had figured so largely so long ago was in it, and he found he could hardly touch it for some time even in this clean new form, not the rotting corpse itself, just the bleached bones.
He marked now the place in it to which his transcribing (rewriting too, a bit) had reached, and dug down into the later, the latest, parts, and turned them out to read.
At two in the morning on the 18th of February, brothers of the Headless John Society assembled at the Convent of St. Ursula in the depths of night, as was their habit, and processed to the fortress where Bruno was imprisoned, to awaken him, to “offer up the winter prayers” and give comfort and correction, maybe even snatch the man back from the abyss at the last instant. But no, he stayed up through the night with them talking and disputing, “setting his brain and mind to a thousand errors and vaingloryings” (But what were these really? What did he say at the last?) until the Servants of Justice came to take him.
There was a little gray donkey tied up outside in the dawn light, where the crowds were being held back by the Servants.
A little gray donkey: yes. Whose common work this was, perhaps, a functionary himself in a way, employee of the Holy Office or of the secular arm, the Servants of Justice. How many condemned men had he borne on his back to the place of execution? Actually, though, there weren't that many, despite the Black Legend. Maybe none, then, none ever before.
He was mounted backward on his steed to cheers of loathing, and a tall white paper hat put on his head, a fool as well as a devil.
The crowds along the way were vast; it was a jubilee year, and all the City was being renewed, just as the Holy Catholic Church itself was. Fifty cardinals from all over Christendom were assembled here; there were processions, high masses, new churches dedicated daily. The little ceremony at the square of the flower sellers was not even the best attended.
He was stripped naked after being tied to the stake. It's reported that a cross was held out to him at the last moment, but he turned away from it.
Pierce turned over the page. Yes: the man was going to get away, he was.
The little ass that had borne him stood by the scaffold; after the man had been dragged from his back the ass had been forgotten about, his rope not even tied. Jostled by those pushing forward to have a better look and those pushing back who had seen enough, the beast kicked once, and pranced away. No one stopped him, no one noticed him. He left the Campo dei Fiori (not pausing even at the unattended stalls where winter vegetables were sold, whose greens hung down temptingly) and entered the narrow streets beyond, Hat-makers’ Street, Locksmiths’ Street, Crossbow-makers’ Street, Trunk-makers’ Street, out beneath the high walls of palaces and churches, skirting the crowds that filled the Piazza Navona, finding another way, north, always north. Now and then boys or shopkeepers chased after him, housewives tried to snatch his lead, but he kicked out and brayed, and they laughed and fell behind; none could catch him. Some noticed the dark cross in the hair of his shaggy back, the cross that all asses still bear in honor of Our Lord, whom one of their kind once carried; but this cross was not the same, no not the same.
Pierce knew what cross it was, what complex figure rather, one that contained the cross of Christ and of the elements, and more: indeed everything, everything in one thing, a Monas, or rather the sign for it, the sign for its unimaginable unfigurable plenitude. No ass but this one ever bore it, and this one hadn't till this day. Giordano Bruno, though, had followed that sign since he had run away from Rome the first time, twenty years before, and now the sign was his, he was the sign, and it was he who was borne.
After many years had passed, the Vatican authorities would begin to claim that they hadn't burned Giordano Bruno at the stake at all, that what was burned that day on the square was a simulacrum or effigy. As all the papers relating to the trial and the execution had disappeared into deep and unbreachable archives, those who wished to believe this could. Something burned there in the Campo dei Fiori for sure, for a long time.
But not he. He was gone out of the city before those ashes were cold, on roads like those in Italian genre paintings: rural crossroads somnolent in the sun, a tavern, a guard with a pike, a broken arch from which saplings sprout and wash is hung. The high-piled ochre houses with their red roofs; a pot of basil in a window, and a woman daydreaming in another. Say, whose beast is that?
And from there, where? Kraft didn't say, hadn't written that, wasn't granted the time or the compos mentis.
Pierce put down the page.
A Y sprang from that scaffold on the Campo dei Fiori in Rome. One horn of it led to the one that led to the one that came eventually to here where Pierce sat, the world he lived in; but the narrow rightward horn went on just as far, growing ever farther from its broader mate, running into alternity forever, generating its own fartherness as it went.
Which Pierce could see, which Kraft surely always meant to write: that must be what some of the homeless and sometimes unnumbered pages were that constituted the typescript's end.
Which Pierce could write, almost, if he wanted or dared to, or were being asked to, as Boney Rasmussen had in fact once asked him to do in the year of his death. But no he was editor only, annotator and tidier of the other man's work.
For a long time Pierce sat at the desk, or lay on his bed, or stood in his walled garden, while that other farther story unfolded before or within him as plainly as though he could really read it there in the writings he possessed. He sat and stood and lay and laughed until the eternal bells called the brothers, once again, to prayer.
3
It was exceedingly odd, thought the Ass, to be thinking the thoughts he was thinking, or indeed to be thinking any thoughts at all, seeing as he had never done so in his life before, as far as he could remember; then again he had never before tried to remember anything either.
He, who had never considered himself to have a self, now found himself thinking that he was possessed of more than one, an old one and a new one, and that they didn't agree on how to go forward from here. They did not, or could not, agree on how to move at all. In his run for freedom he had given it no thought, but when he was far from the city crowds he stopped, weary yet exalted, to rest at last, foam on his lips and his flanks trembling; and then when he commanded himself to go on, he couldn't think exactly how it was done. Did he move the two feet on the left side of his body, then the two on the right? Or did he move the four of them each in turn, like four men shifting a heavy trunk? Or the right front leg and the back left together, then the other two?