The Confessions of X

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  He called me Little Bird because my eyes were always bright and watchful, he said, my head cocked to one side as I squatted next to him. When he placed the first tile I would hold my breath, for this, to me, was the beginning of the magic.

  “What is it going to be, Papa?” I would ask.

  “Wait and see,” he would say.

  He would lay another tile beside the first and then another and another until, suddenly, as if sprung from the very earth itself, there appeared the delicate curve of a stem bending under the weight of its bell-like flower or the jagged points of a tiger’s teeth or the rounded scales of a golden carp barely glimpsed beneath a gauzy, azure pool. I see him still, stooped, intent, laying whorls and lines until an image grew—bird, fish, tracery of frond or vine, worlds flowering piece by piece before my eyes, a miracle of making, the motion of his fingers deft, continuous.

  “How do you do that?” I would ask.

  “Ah, Little Bird,” he would say. “It is the art of broken things.”

  I thought, then, that he was remembering my mother, and perhaps he was. But now that I have lived more than twice his lifespan, have picked through the shards of a broken life, fitting them to a pattern that, once set in time, I cannot change, I know that he was speaking of himself. Most rarely blessed by the gods with an eye for beauty and the gift of making, he had taken to drink in grief over my mother’s death, and slowly, inexorably, his gift began to fail. Once held to be one of the finest mosaic makers in all of Africa Province, sought after by senators and noblemen to adorn their villas or the churches and temples they endowed, his fame dwindled, and before he died his hands trembled so he could barely lay a tile and the only work he found was in adorning the tombs of farmers and freed slaves. I know now that he kept me by him not only because he loved me but also because he knew he would not live to see me grown.

  As I grew older, I was given more important tasks than fetching water. I would sit cross-legged before heaps of tiles and sort them into piles of similar colors, terra-cotta at first as these were cheaper than stone and it did not matter if I broke a few. Next I was entrusted with stone, slave-quarried from living rock and brought in ships from distant parts of the empire or in mule-trains from the southern mines. Sometimes, using a tiny hammer and chisel, I was allowed to chip little squares of tile from rods of terra-cotta, for it seemed that however big the heaps of tesserae awaiting the day’s work, by noon each was gone and the workmen were shouting for more, the tic, tic, tic of the chisel’s edge the sound of summer and my childhood passing.

  When I was ten, my biggest and most important job was when the mosaic was finished and had been allowed to dry, only a few hours in the fierce, dry heat of our African summer. Under the direction of my father who worked by my side, we scrubbed the tesserae with brushes dipped in sand and oil and then rubbed them with leather cloths, smoothing and burnishing until the whole floor shone, my father explaining that any roughness in the surface would catch on sandals, dislodge the tiles, and destroy the mosaic over time. Such polishing we do to our memories so they will not snag on our souls and cause us to stumble.

  Thus in spring and summer my childhood was spent outdoors going from place to place, my father kneeling in bathhouses, churches, the atria of Romans to make pictures they would tread upon. And after the day’s long labor, a settling round the fire, bats stitching the moon’s white cloth above my head, the chuck-chuck of sleepy birds, the uplifted wineskin against the firelight, my father’s swallow my lullaby.

  “Sleep, Little Bird,” he would say. “Sleep.”

  At the large estates of the wealthy we would turn from the road, toiling with weary hope up paths sentineled with poplars. Slaves in belted tunics bent in the fields, their children crouched doglike in the ruts, a shy wave or greeting called and we would know the master kind. Mute stares told us otherwise, the overseer’s brute vigilance, his whip coiled snakelike at his belt. I’d take my father’s hand and watch my feet lift up, set down, until we passed that grove of human shapes, my liberty a pain that made me gasp, the wings of a trapped bird beating in my chest.

  Sometimes I glimpsed the domina on a balcony or terrace, stretched out upon a couch under a fringed canopy, pleated, draped, sandals tipped with gems, her bracelets clashing as she moved, jewels jouncing in her ears like Minerva come to earth, her maids reverent acolytes of grace. It seemed to me an Elysium unparalleled.

  Slaves’ and laborers’ children were my playfellows on those summer days, a hooting rabble let loose in field and vineyard or squatting sphinxlike on muddied banks, braiding the current with nets we wove from reeds, the fish we sought silver-coined and lithe, some river god’s teeming progeny. We vied with crows at harvest-time, arms aloft, flapping parodies of flight, mouths empurpled with the juice of grapes. Tearfully I fed the ducks and chickens outside the kitchen door and told them of their deaths, then watched with longing as the spits were turned before the fire.

  CHAPTER 3

  One house I remember in particular for there I made a friend, a boy a year older than I and the eldest son who did not scorn to play with laborers’ brats. I did not know this dark-haired, barefoot boy, who first showed me a book and how to say the symbols figured there, an alphabet my mother’s ancestors, the Phoenicians, had bequeathed to us, how to snare rabbits, and which berries were good to eat and which gave us a bellyache, would return to me when I was a woman to succor me when the world turned to night.

  We arrived at an estate just as the rising sun cut through the poplars edging the road, striping the ground with shadow so it seemed we trod on steps. Slaves dressed in white were watering plants set in urns under the long, cool colonnade that fronted the house, the floor tiles winking in the sunlight like a thousand jewels, the trickle of water a reminder that my throat was dry from the parching dust of high summer, my feet gritty from the roads.

  A dog was barking at the back of the house. When a foreman approached my father and they fell into conversation about the work he was to do, I set off in search of a well. I did not fear losing him, for he had told me that the job was large and would take many weeks, and I was used to shifting for myself in strange places while he worked.

  The kitchen well I sought lay at the back of the house within a small courtyard surrounded on three sides by walls against which plum trees had been trained to grow, their branches wide like candelabra with tapers of heavy purple fruit. The scent of thyme and lavender thickened the air, and from within an open doorway came the sound of voices chatting, clattering pots, and someone’s cheerful whistle.

  The dog I had heard stuck a shaggy head out of the doorway and growled, his lips curling above yellow teeth, brindled fur erect along his back. I stopped dead in my tracks and looked down, knowing not to challenge him but keeping a wary eye on the door. A face appeared, saw me, and spoke sharply to the dog. He shook his head as if puzzled and then lay down with a great sigh, his chin resting on his paws, his eyes still fixed on me as if to say: I am not allowed to eat you . . . yet.

  A bucket rested beside the well and in it floated a gourd for drinking. As I dipped and raised it to my lips, a boy darted from the kitchen and clipped my shoulder, sending icy water down my tunic. Furious, I picked up the bucket and dashed its contents in his face. He stood blinking through tendrils of hair that clung to his face like the seaweed my father fashioned in his pictures.

  “I was going to the river,” he said, “but it seems it’s come to me.” Then he spun on his heels and took off running. “Come, Naiad,” he called over his shoulder. I followed, my thirst forgotten.

  I found the boy wading in a stream, which to our childish eyes seemed as wide as a river. A small bird suddenly rose squawking and flapping from a hollow under the bank and the boy jumped. We looked at each other and laughed. In that moment we
were friends.

  “Look,” he said, pointing to silver slivers flashing along the current wriggling around his toes like pondweed. “Minnows.”

  The water was cool, the mud at the bottom clouding our toes until we stood motionless, holding hands, to let it settle. I felt a tickling like when my father stroked a blade of grass over my feet when I was drowsing and did not want to wake. I wiggled my toes and the fish darted away.

  “My name is Nebridius,” he said, when we were sitting on the bank warming our numbed feet in the sun. “I will call you Naiad.”

  Naiad. Spirit of the river, the fountain, the stream. My first word in Greek, a language other than the Punic my father spoke or the Latin of the Roman landowners, my first word in that literature of bards and philosophers I would grow to love and would give me solace in the years to come. I repeated it carefully as if I held an unknown food in my mouth. It was Nebridius’s first gift to me.

  How could we know, he and I, in that faraway of our innocence, that water and the crossing of it would become an emblem of our devotion to another, the one who would take our love and then discard it when he found a greater? But that was far in the future, and those days of high summer passed as if each were a year, each moment an hour, so wholly did we live inside our bodies whose only pain was thirst or hunger or weariness and those soon mended. Like rocks in a riverbed we stood in time, heedless of its flow, and did not dream that one day we would be swept into a current and carried to the shores of an unknown place.

  For the first time I was invited as playfellow into the home of a rich landowner, Nebridius’s father. At first his mother looked askance at my tunic with the braid coming loose around the hem, my tangled hair and dirty face and feet, until she discovered that she and her maids could spend endless hours cleaning me up and dressing me in the softest and most brightly hued clothes I had ever worn. Nebridius would lie on his stomach on the rugs at his mother’s feet in her boudoir, his chin cupped in his hands, and watch this transformation with a mock adoring face that made me giggle until I was bade hold still.

  I think his mother longed to have a daughter and I was her substitute for a time, a doll to dress and bathe and adorn with trinkets from her jewel box. I gave myself up to her ministrations with a tiny inward swoon, for her hands were gentle, her voice soft, and I had never before been mothered.

  The luxury of that house dazzled me and made my senses quiver: couches piled with cushions so that to lie on them was to drown, the softness of the rugs beneath my feet, which before had trod only earth and stone. She kept perfumes in tiny glass vials, which she let me smell one by one—spikenard, myrrh, balsam, sandalwood, cinnamon, oil of crocus—if I was careful and replaced the stoppers tightly, for each cost more than an Arabian stallion, she told me, saddled with Spanish leather tooled in gold. All my life since, a fugitive waft from the perfume-maker’s stall in the market or the drifting veils of senators’ wives carried in their litters by ebony slaves would transport me back to that room where I first learned what beauty was and why sculptors give it female form.

  Best of all, there was a burnished silver mirror that showed me for the first time what I looked like. I stared transfixed at the bleary image of a girl whom I had only glimpsed before in water that scattered into a thousand shimmers when I bent to see more closely. Now I saw that my nose was small, my eyes large, and my hair a dark cloud about my head.

  In the mornings Nebridius was closeted with a tutor, an elderly Greek with mild, watery eyes and a wispy beard, who made him memorize and recite aloud endless reams of what Nebridius later told me were Greek authors—Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides—and the Roman lawyer and rhetorician, Cicero. Later in life I would read all these authors for myself, but then the names sounded strange and exotic except for Cicero’s name, which made me giggle. It meant “chickpea,” a nickname he had been given because of the shape of his nose, Nebridius told me with much hilarity. In honor of our first meeting, he dubbed himself “Nereus” meaning “wet one”—Greek for god of the sea. For the rest of our lives, when we wrote to one another or talked in private, I would call him “Nereus” and he would call me “Naiad.”

  Despite our friendship, forged by our loneliness and an innocence that did not make distinctions of rank or sex, I could not help but notice, for the first time in my short life, how much distance there was between Nebridius’s life and mine. As a male child and heir to a rich father, he was taught his letters and numerals, had never known hunger or cold or uncertainty, and consequently possessed an air of confidence that derived from knowing his future place in the world. As an unlettered girl, the daughter of a craftsman, who lived hand to mouth when work was available, I was beginning to realize that I would have a very different path in life. I sometimes overheard Nebridius’s mother speaking to her maids about how, as I was poor and not a Roman citizen, I would have to rely on my looks to get a husband as I would, sadly, have no dowry. Whenever she made these comments she would be especially solicitous of me and give me sweetmeats and lengths of embroidered ribbon. When I asked Nebridius what a dowry was, he told me that it was gold or land the betrothed girl brought to her husband. How good a husband depended on how much gold and land.

  “You mean he buys a wife?” I said.

  Nebridius frowned. “I suppose so,” he said.

  “And your father will buy you a wife?”

  He shrugged. We were lying side by side on the riverbank chewing on grass stalks. A breeze stirred the leaves in the trees over our heads, but it was still and hot and airless where we lay. He sat up and put his chin on his knees.

  “Not for a long time yet,” he said. “I’m not interested in girls. They’re silly.”

  “I’m a girl.”

  “You are different.”

  When the days grew shorter and cold clenched tight around the campfire, my father and I turned our faces back to Carthage, I weeping to be parted from my friend.

  “In the spring,” I called as he stood waving at the gate. “I will come back in the spring.”

  But five years were to pass until I saw him again and by then we were no longer children.

  CHAPTER 4

  Each time we returned, my father’s sister in the city, a potter’s wife, bitter from the barrenness of her womb though she was a Christian, clicked her tongue with horror at my state.

  “She’s wild,” she said and set to taming me, each winter’s task, with ungentle hands that yanked the comb through the knots in my hair until I howled. My hair was washed and braided tight against my neck, my feet were shod; I learned the woman’s arts and went to church although my father was a pagan and raised me to honor the gods. My father, meantime, would be gone for days, returning shuffling, heavy-limbed, my aunt’s scolding the unheeded accompaniment to my joy.

  “Take me where you go,” I begged.

  And when the air blew balmy and kind across the sea, the rains ceased falling and all the world lay greening, I forgot my coffined life and grew brown again under the sun. We did not return to the estate where I first met Nebridius despite my entreaties, for my father drank away his earnings and we had to go wherever there was work. We walked now, our mule and cart sold against my father’s debts, for he would gamble when he was in his cups, trying vainly to make amends for our increasing poverty.

  In the winter of my twelfth year, two years after meeting Nebridius, I began to bleed, a thing neither my father nor my aunt had told me of. In my childishness I thought that I was dying and with the wisdom of innocence I was not wrong, for my childhood died that day. Hiding the rags I stuffed between my thighs, I sensed betrayal, my nipples flowering buds, my belly curving, a changing I could not stop, the marketplace and street a strange and awful disrobing before the beast-like eyes of men. One night, my a
unt confronted her brother.

  “She’s child no more,” she said. “Come spring, she stays.”

  Between us lay a lamp, the flame twinned in my father’s eyes. Closing them, he put out the light as if a door had closed, and surrendered me without a fight to the world of women. The next day after the evening meal when we were sitting around the kitchen table, my aunt announced to my father that if I were to become a proper lady and not a savage I would have to have my ears pierced. She took a bone needle and a piece of cork from her pocket and rose from her stool.

  I scrambled to my feet, placing both hands over my ears. “Papa,” I implored.

  I expected him to forbid it, to tell my aunt that I was not like other girls who cared only for ornaments and finery, that I was his help and his companion and what use were earrings when we were traveling the countryside looking for work, that the ears of infant girls were pierced when they were too young to know or to remember but that I would suffer cruelly. But he remained silent, his eyes fixed on his beaker, which he turned and turned again in his hands. My aunt signaled my uncle to take hold of my head between his hands and hold it still. I screamed as the needle passed through each ear and copper wire was threaded through the holes to keep them open, but the pain of it did not burn more hotly than the silence of my father. When it was over I fled the room and flung myself on my bed. I did not weep but clenched my eyes shut to block out the sight of my father’s face. Even the throbbing of my ears, the blood that ran down my neck onto the pillow, was as nothing compared to the pain in my heart. Presently, I heard my father come to the foot of my bed.