The Confessions of X

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

“Let’s call him Janus,” I said.

  “Mmm?” Augustine was almost asleep.

  “Janus,” I replied. “Because he has two faces.”

  The next day Alypius turned up at our door at daybreak. We had forgotten that Augustine and Nebridius had arranged to go to the games with him, but Alypius had vowed that if his friends accompanied him this one time he would quit his compulsion forever.

  “One last time,” he pleaded.

  My father had never taken me to the games. He believed that the arena was an accursed place of death. He could not understand the willful destruction of anything that was beautiful—man, beast, or artifact.

  “Your father was a wise man,” Augustine often said.

  But I was curious to see what my ears had often heard—the roar of animals rising from the amphitheater—and I confess that I wanted to see the other face of Janus. So I persuaded Augustine to let me accompany them.

  In my heart I was afraid to witness the suffering of others but most of all I was afraid I might discover that I enjoyed it. My aunt and her Christian friends condemned the spilling of blood for sport, said it was barbaric, unnatural, that human life was sacred. I knew that in the time of the Emperor Diocletian, thousands of Christians had been executed in the arena, some whole families burned to death or torn to pieces by wild animals, babes in arms and little children clinging to their mother’s skirts in terror. I have heard that, in Rome, so great was the slaughter, so unending, that the crowds began to riot, and the emperor, fearing for his life, made a proclamation that the purge be ended, that Christians waiting in cages underneath the arena be given amnesty. People in Carthage still talked of the black pall of greasy smoke that hung over Rome for weeks, the stench of burnt flesh that clung to clothing and permeated the taste of their food. Even though we had a Christian emperor now, the horror of that time was remembered, and the power of the emperor’s edict feared.

  When we descended to the street from our apartment, we joined others who were already walking toward the amphitheater. The trickle soon to become a torrent as the morning wore on. On game days, the city was like a giant lake slowly draining down roads and alleys, flowing to the stadium. The shops were shuttered, the usual commerce of the day suspended, the city as silent as at a time of plague. On the air the roar of the gathering crowd came to us distantly, the sound as familiar to citizens of Carthage as the booming of the sea against the cliffs of our coastal city.

  Alypius strolled beside us blithely talking of his future winnings, how he would pay his landlord and pay Augustine back for the money he often lent him, in spite of the fact that we were poor and barely scraped by on the meager stipend his father could afford his younger son. I glanced at Augustine, eyebrows raised, but he shook his head to warn me to remain silent.

  I stole a glance at Alypius as he walked beside me. He was indeed a different person, putting a hand on my arm while we walked. Augustine noticed I was uneasy and, with a graceful movement of his arm, swept me across to his other side so I now walked between him and Nebridius. I gave him a grateful smile. Nebridius took my other arm and we continued.

  Alypius led us to a private box. His family was rich, his father influential on the city council and I, a woman, was allowed to sit in it because of this. Otherwise, I would have been forced by custom to stand with slaves and poor male citizens on the very top tier of the stadium. I was glad of this. It allowed me to hold tightly to Augustine’s hand, but it also meant that I was much closer to the arena and could make out the faces of those doomed to die. I determined that I would keep my eyes shut, although I could not block out the sounds even with my stole drawn close about my head. But when I heard the roaring of a lion and the rasp of metal as it was released from its cage, my eyes flew open.

  An enormous yellow lion emerged, its mane tattered, its side scarred from previous battles. Its flanks were sunken with hunger, one of its ears torn like a battle standard after the fight.

  The crowd began to chant, “One Ear, One Ear,” and I saw it run at a barrier between the crowd and the arena, causing the people sitting there to scramble back. Then the beast lay down in the sand, motionless except for the tip of its tail, which twitched lazily from side to side, yellow eyes surveying the stands with a kind of indolent contempt. The lion instantly sharpened to alertness when a gate creaked open and a rhinoceros trotted out, its gray hide plated like armor, its nostrils blowing as it picked up the scent, a cruel tusk set between tiny black eyes.

  I glanced at Alypius, who was sitting forward in his seat shaking the bone betting tokens in his hand, his body taut, his eyes feverish as if another inhabited the house of his body. Even Augustine’s eyes were fixed on the arena and his hand had tightened around mine.

  The lion was stalking the rhinoceros now, moving slowly, shoulders hunched, belly close to the ground, its huge paws taking almost delicate steps. Its prey snorted uneasily and lowered its head. Then the lion sprang, clawing at its prey’s soft underbelly, a great gash opening in its flanks. The crowd roared. Giving a great bellow, the rhinoceros lashed its head from side to side, its horn scything wickedly through the air. But the lion leapt easily out of its reach and continued to circle the rhinoceros, waiting patiently for a chance to inflict another terrible wound.

  I could watch no more and buried my face in Augustine’s shoulder while the sounds of the death-struggle below beat at my ears and the copper smell of blood grew stronger. At last it was over, and when I looked again, the rhinoceros was a gray hump in a welter of gore, the lion tearing great gobbets of flesh from the carcass. At last its handlers appeared and, prodding it with long spears, forced it away and into its cage. Attaching hooks to the corpse, they harnessed it to mules, rearing as they caught the scent of the blood, and dragged it away, a great smear of red trailing behind.

  I glanced at Alypius, who had the look of a man sated by sex, eyes now dulling, forehead beaded with sweat, mouth slackening. I looked away, sickened.

  The trumpets sounded and the gladiators strutted into the arena. Every man, woman, and child in the Roman world knows what they look like even if they have never seen them fight: the retiarius, armed with trident and net, his left shoulder covered with armor; the murmillo, a fish-like crest upon his helmet; the thraex, carrying a scimitar and small square shield. Small boys squat in the street and, within a circle drawn in the dirt, enact fights with figures made of sticks, the net a scrap of muslin. Alypius stirred from his torpor and leapt to his feet, and when the clank of weapons echoed around the stadium he screamed out encouragement to the fighter he had put gold on that day.

  I rose and pushed along the seats, out of the box and up the steps to the back of the stadium, the highest tier, fighting my way through, pushing at the crush of bodies, deafened by the screams. Behind me I heard Augustine call my name, but his next words were drowned out by the roar of the crowd.

  The fight to the death horrified me, but the bloodlust of the crowd who moments before had been ordinary citizens horrified me even more. I saw the girl with the cat’s eyes from the stall at the harbor, the one who had lent us the water jar. Leaning out across the barrier she was screaming, “Iugula! Iugula! Kill him! Kill him!” lips peeled back, teeth glistening, her painted eyes crazed with a kind of murderous joy. I bumped into her as I tried to force my way past, and she greeted me gaily although she did not recognize me, all trace of her monstrous passion slunk back below the depths. I shuddered to think of what hidden horror crouched in other people’s breasts waiting to be let out, like the trapdoors in the arena of the Colosseum in Rome where lions, crocodiles, hyenas, and all manner of fearsome beasts would suddenly appear at the feet of those destined to die. It frightened me to think that beneath the surface of ordinary life nightmares lurked. I wondered what evil lay coiled within my own breast.

&n
bsp; Augustine was right: the world was a place of evil. Only love could transform it and make it beautiful and good.

  Appearing beside me, Augustine took me in his arms and held me to him, holding my head tight against his chest as I have seen mothers of newborns do.

  “Forgive me,” he whispered. “This is a terrible place. I should never have let you come. Nebridius says he will stay with Alypius while I take you home.”

  As we left the amphitheater, I looked down into the arena despite myself. A slave in the guise of the god Mercury was touching one of the gladiators, now crumpled in the sand, with a red-hot cauterizing iron to see if he was dead. He did not move. Slaves dressed as Pluto, god of the underworld, dragged the corpse away by the heels. The sweepers began to rake the sand level like a scribe scraping his wax tablet clean so he can mark it again, like Alypius erasing all memory of his losses and placing another bet, like my father sickened with drink only to raise the wineskin to his lips yet again.

  I wondered then at the compulsions men lay upon themselves—violence and the lust for power—while women bore the burden. My life, I vowed, would be different.

  CHAPTER 9

  There was no more shadow cast on our happiness that autumn except for Augustine’s increasing frustration at what he regarded as the pointlessness of his studies. He railed against the method of learning passages from rhetoric and literature by rote and the lack of critical discussion about content in the classroom. Nebridius’s city house increasingly became a meeting place for the more serious students, an ad hoc university, where discussions of literature, philosophy, and theology raged long into the night. The brotherly affection with which Nebridius treated me rubbed off on the others and I became a kind of sister to the group: Nebridius first and last amongst our friends; Possidius, at fourteen the youngest of the group; gentle Antonius, who every time I looked at him blushed to the roots of his hair; stubborn Marcellus, who would not be budged from his argument by reason yet would suddenly abandon it on a whim and laugh uproariously about it after; Zosimus, who was to become a serious and revered bishop though I knew him as a great teller of jokes. All those future lives held in that courtyard long ago and at the center, Augustine. He was the sun around which we lesser planets danced, the great light of his intelligence, his wit, his humor, and his unfailing generosity, the radiance he shed effortlessly.

  In this way I was thrown more into male company than female, a rarity for our time when men and women spent much of their lives separate converging only at table or in bed. The talk about philosophy and literature, astronomy and religion was intoxicating although my untrained mind was frequently bewildered.

  During this time I mastered letters and began to read and write Latin and Punic with fluency. All those soft late summer and fall evenings we spent seated at his desk forming words or I reading them aloud, hesitantly at first and with many errors, my finger moving slowly along the page and then faster with more confidence. I would be perched at the foot of the bed, Augustine stretched out on his belly, his chin propped on his arms, murmuring a correction here and there but mostly quiet, listening. And when I looked up his eyes were fixed on me and filled with light, the same look he gave me before I knew he loved me.

  “Don’t stop,” he would say. “Don’t stop.”

  My father had talked of beauty in a way that was not abstract but made incarnate by his art. He spoke of colors and lines and how shapes should complement one another, how proportion was all important, and as he spoke his fingers showed me what he meant, sketching figures in the dirt beside the campfire or arranging bits of tile.

  When I first met Augustine, he spoke of beauty as if it had no material form but was something invisible but necessary, like air. But his actions told a different tale. I remembered the way he had stooped and touched my father’s mosaic in the church as if by touch he could feel the beauty of what was made and so come to know my father’s spirit. He loved to take down my hair and run his hands through it, and holding its weight back from my face he would kiss my forehead, my nose, my neck and throat, and then slowly undress me, planting kisses on each part he uncovered, my falling hair a cover for us both as he knelt before me, a veiled place, a tabernacle in which we found each other. He worshipped the beauty of my body with his body but talked about it with his mind. And he was never so lost in speculation that his eyes did not seek me out, his look saying: “I am a fool to talk thus. I know it.” And he would give that ironic quirk of the mouth I loved so much, a look so boyish, so self-mocking, that it was all I could do not to throw my arms around him.

  One morning we left the city and, passing though the western gate, walked out into the countryside beyond the walls. It was late autumn now and the evenings were often chilly so I took along the cloak Augustine had given me on my birthday two weeks before. It was of emerald wool—to go with my eyes, he said—and lined with fur. He also gave me a silver ring to wear upon the fourth finger of my left hand and on the inside it was inscribed: “My heart rests in thee.” I learned later he had paid for the cloak and ring by selling some rare scrolls he possessed to a dealer in the forum. When I found out I wept for I knew how much he loved them.

  His own birthday was approaching—November 13—and I already had a special gift to give him.

  It had cost me nothing; it was to cost me all.

  A road ran from the gate straight as an arrow toward the west where first the Phoenicians, those seafaring ancestors of my mother’s Punic race, landed. Wide enough to let two carts pass side by side, the road was busy with vehicles of all sorts: lumbering carts piled high with stacked amphorae of olive oil from olive groves that grooved the lowlands and lower slopes for miles; other carts laden with bushel upon bushel of apples, plums, pears, and grapes, the mountains to the south and the sea to the north kind to crops and fruits of every kind. Once we were passed by a messenger on a galloping horse, its hooves sending up a roiling dust storm that made us cough and covered us with grit; a person of wealth was carried by in a litter but whether man or woman we could not tell, for the curtains at the windows were drawn shut.

  We walked hand in hand, my cloak over my arm, a basket of food over Augustine’s, but soon I tired and we left the road just as it descended into a shallow valley no more than two miles from the city where a tiny stream meandered busily to and fro like a little dog nosing for a scent.

  I spread my cloak beneath an apple tree near the stream and we lay down on our backs and, shielding our eyes, looked up at the sky.

  “An elephant,” I said, “about to raise its trunk.”

  “Where?”

  “There,” I said, pointing to the north where serried banks of clouds were rolling in from the sea.

  It was a game we sometimes played leaning on our window in our room, a game my father and I had played to pass the time when we walked from site to site. He called it making “cloud mosaics.”

  “That’s a rhinoceros,” Augustine said, squinting. “See. It has a horn not a trunk.”

  “You took so long to find it, the cloud changed shape,” I protested.

  He laughed. “An elephant, then, who got his trunk caught in a door.”

  I thumped him on the shoulder and he laughed again.

  Perhaps it was the sound of his laugh that made me ask what I had puzzled over for months. Shifting closer to him, I laid my head in the crook of his arm. Immediately he pulled me closer and taking up the edges of the cloak covered me for he had felt me shiver. We lay there for a while, cocooned together, the only sound the trilling of the stream, the distant cry of a hawk.

  “Augustine?”

  “Mmm?”

  “Why are you a Manichee? Mani teaches that this world is evil, yet you love it so.”

  During ou
r walk I had watched how his eyes took in the late flowers growing in the ditch, the bare branches of the trees swaying in the wind, their shadows checkering the stones beneath our feet. I recalled how he had watched the furling of the ocean on the shore, rubbed silk between his fingers in the market, held lemons to his nose to smell their scent. Never have I known a man so attentive to beauty nor so tender to all living things. Once when I was looking out the window into the courtyard watching for his return, I saw him pick up a baby bird where it had fallen to the ground and, climbing the wall that ringed the courtyard, place it gently in its nest.

  He was silent for a while and I knew he was thinking. Never did he dismiss the questions I asked as stupid or banal as I had heard some men do to their wives but always considered them with utmost seriousness. So much so that I sometimes smiled to myself when I saw two little frown lines appear between his brows, his eyes taking on an inward gaze as if he looked at pictures in his mind.

  “I look at the world and as well as beauty, I see sadness and evil. My mother’s God is supposed to be all knowing, all loving, but how could such a God allow us to suffer? It seems to me that only an evil God could delight in our pain. Ergo: To posit one good and one bad deity perpetually at war is the only rational explanation.

  “My mother says that we have free will and that God allows us to do evil but then brings good out of that evil. I cannot understand how that can be so. Good and evil are opposites and one cannot lead to the other. They can only coexist separately.”

  “What about the Christian God, who is said to be all good, all knowing?” I asked. “My aunt says it is we who have transgressed, bringing evil into the world. There’s a story the Christians tell about it in the book the Jews have.”

  “Adam and Eve?” He laughed derisively. “That’s just a folktale dreamed up by an illiterate tribe.

  “Plato is interesting,” Augustine went on. “He tells a story, too, but it is much more sophisticated and free of contradictions. He said the world is like a cave and outside the cave is a great fire. The gods—not people, you understand, but great ideals like Truth and Justice and Goodness—pass back and forth across the fire, and within the cave we only see the shadows on the walls and that is how we know that they exist. This metaphor makes much sense to me as well.”