Wang Miaomiao (High School Exercises)
Gloom hung over Paris, and the wind bitterly blew the flags hanging above the palace. It was as if the two lions on top with their teeth and claws were going to come back to life and jump out at any moment to tear the people in the square to pieces. The smell of death permeated the surroundings, and I was practically suffocated as I walked through the square.
In the distance came that strange silhouette, twisted, tall. Maybe it wasn't a person? On top of the right side of this living thing was another white thing, a white cloth, right? As I got closer I couldn't help but call out, "Quasimodo!"
The visitor nodded as he raised the tiny left eye that was stuffed with brownish-red eyebrows. At the same time I could see that over his right shoulder was the unfortunate young girl who had just been executed.
"Quasimodo, where are you going?" There was this voice from his horseshoe shaped mouth, "I'm taking Esmeralda out of here!"
His face was so solemn. "But she's already dead!"
After half a moment of silence, he lifted his head, "No, she's not dead! You see her face is rosy, her little mouth is still open, she ...... she's just asleep."
He tried to be happy, but his tears rolled and kept coming out of that left eye, and his face twisted even more as a result.
"Quasimodo, do you really love her?"
Casimodo stopped his sobbing, "In my mind she is a goddess in the sky, and I am only weekday and ugly. I ...... am not worthy to love her!"
He hung his head and scrutinized Esmeralda in his arms, as if he were speaking to himself and to me, "Look how beautiful she is! It was she, goddess-like and lovely, who appeared to me when I suffered the whip shape and fed me water, and I am grateful to her, but it is as if she were afraid of me--"
"Quasimodo, did not the Vice-Archbishop of Narmoludo adopt you and bring you up to to manhood, yet people say you pushed Esmeralda off the high bell tower of Notre Dame for him."
The flesh on Quasimodo's face twitched and seemed to dissolve into a statue as he said, "Perhaps he raised me, but he did not give me the right to be a human being. I was just his slave! He was outwardly moral, as if he had not taken all the virtues of God, but how ugly he was inwardly, and it was he who destroyed Esmeralda. O lending God's hand to put the noose of death around her neck. He deserved his death."
My heart was shaken, and I could not imagine that this ugly bell ringer, who was called "the devil," could have such a beautiful heart, let alone that the bishop, who was called "the messenger of God," had such an ugly soul.
While I was still hesitating, Quasimodo had already left the square with Esmeralda on his back.
I called out to him, "Quasimodo, where are you going?" But he was long out of earshot. Abruptly, the strange silhouette disappeared at the end of the street. I could only pray for him silently in my heart, "May God bless you."
In later years I never saw Quasimodo's hobbling figure again, and when the bells of Notre Dame rang once more, it was long past the original familiar tune. Whither, Quasimodo?
Remember to change it if it's from South X. I used it