Adeodatus, we named him. Given by God. And leaning forward Augustine put a timid finger in our son’s crumpled fist, which curled around it like a morning glory at dusk and made him laugh out loud so tight the grip.
Cybele sat with me and brewed up potions for me to drink to stop the bleeding and ward off infection, bitter cups of bark and leaves and nameless somethings taken from a calfskin pouch around her neck and powdered in a pestle, her lips moving spell-like all the while. My young flesh grew stronger hour by hour and the next day I was taking steps across the room, Augustine’s arm about my waist to support me, Cybele nodding in approval from her chair. My breasts swelled up like gourds as my milk came in and it was such exquisite agony to feel my baby’s tender mouth draw off that throbbing fullness, his tiny throat pulsing like a sparrow’s heart, eyes closed as if in disbelief of such abundance.
I was nursing Adeodatus when Monica came and asked if she could sit with me.
“I love to watch you,” she confided. “It reminds me of when I was a young mother like you.” She smiled at me and smoothed down the covers on my bed. “I shocked Patricius by insisting on nursing my own babies, did you know?”
I shook my head.
“Oh, yes. He told me I had to hire a wet nurse.”
Looking down at my son, the warmth of his swaddled body like a tiny package in the crook of my arm, I could not imagine giving up this moment even if Augustine asked me to, nay commanded as Patricius had done.
“What answer did you give him?” I asked.
Monica laughed. “I said that if he wanted to give birth to the next child then he was welcome to do so. Until then, he should keep his mouth shut.”
I could not imagine Monica saying such words to her husband and told her so. She laughed.
“Neither could he. You should have seen his face.” She watched as I put Adeodatus on my shoulder and patted his back.
“Here,” she said, slipping a cloth between his cheek and my shoulder. “You’ll need this.”
As if on cue, Adeodatus gave a tiny hiccup and a thin trail of milk ran out of the corner of his mouth.
“But you know,” said Monica, “a woman becomes a tigress when she becomes a mother. There is nothing she will not do to protect her cub.”
She took him from me then and laid him in the cradle, which had been pushed next to the bed.
“Now,” she said. “Try and get some rest. It is wise to sleep when he sleeps as he is likely to be awake all night.” She kissed me on the forehead as if I, too, were a child. “He has spent so long in the dark warmth of your body, he thinks night is day and day is night.”
One day, when I was drowsing in the sun, Adeodatus sleeping in a basket at my feet, the lavender I had been tying in bunches so they could be hung on a beam in the kitchen to dry spilling off my lap forgotten, Monica sat down in a chair beside me. Picking a stem off my lap she rubbed the blossom between her fingers then brought it to her nose, inhaling its fragrance. Leaning her head against the chair, she closed her eyes against the sun.
“When I was carrying Augustine, I had a dream,” she said quietly. “I was walking in the lane behind the farm and I came across a youth, a beautiful boy on the cusp of manhood with dark hair and quick, sad eyes. He was very thin but his clothes were not ragged and his sandals were tooled leather, expensive. Reclining on the grass beneath a pear tree heavy with fruit, he seemed to be waiting for someone. I greeted him but he did not reply. I asked him whom did he seek?”
I glanced at her at the mention of the pear tree. I was certain Augustine had never told her about his adolescent crime. Monica’s eyes were still closed and she did not notice my disquiet.
She went on: “ ‘I am hungry,’ the youth said. I gestured at the pears. ‘Eat,’ I told him. ‘I cannot pluck them,’ he replied. ‘I must wait for them to fall.’ As I was considering these words, strange even for a dream, he changed before my eyes and grew older and more wasted and I knew that time had passed though I was the same. I knew that he would die if he did not eat so I reached up and plucked a pear to give to him but the young man had vanished and when I looked in my hand so had the pear.”
Monica opened her eyes and looked at me. “I was much troubled by this dream so I went to a priest and asked him what it could mean. He told me the young man was the child in my belly, a boy, who would not receive true nourishment until he was a man and that I would offer him what he craved. ‘But he disappeared,’ I told the priest. ‘It was not he who went away but you,’ the priest replied.
“I thought the priest was speaking nonsense,” Monica said, a tiny smile on her lips. “ ‘How can a child starve and live until he is a man?’ I asked. The priest said that there were many things that kept us alive and that food was only one of them. After that he would say no more and I feared it meant my son would not live to manhood and he could not bring himself to tell me outright.”
She reached for another stem of lavender and twirled it in her fingers. “I remember when I birthed Augustine. The labor was long and hard like yours. Everyone thought I would die, for he was large and I was small and I had lost much blood. There was much wailing and carrying on, the midwives wringing their hands, Patricius burning incense to the household gods he honored.”
She laughed. “The smoke almost choked me,” she said, “but he thought he was helping so I said nothing.
“I was not afraid,” she said, “for I knew I would not die. I knew this child, of all my children, would be great although he is the most difficult.”
I was about to protest when she leaned forward and touched my arm. “Forgive me, my dear. ‘Difficult’ is a harried mother’s word.” Leaning back again in her chair, she continued. “I knew not how but that he would come to rule over others with his words and that his name, Augustus, Great, would live on down the ages.”
She laughed. “And so while the others were rending their clothes and planning our funerals, I delivered this great child and lay back exhausted. It was his cries that roused the others and they rushed to tend him, quite forgetting me.
“Men need women to push them out into the world. But the labor does not end when they are delivered from our bodies. Indeed, it has only just begun. It continues throughout their childhood and adolescence, even into their manhood. As our children increase, so we decrease. When they are ready to be born into the world, into the life that God ordained for them, that is when our task is done.”
Monica settled back in her chair, fingering the cross at her throat. “Augustine is the second son, as you know. It is Navigius who has inherited all this.” She waved her hand taking in the courtyard, the house, and the fields beyond. “Augustine must carve a way for himself in the world. Even his father understood this and was willing to pay dearly for his education.”
Monica turned to face me. “You are wondering why I am telling you this?”
I nodded.
“I tell you,” she said, “so you will understand that Augustine has a destiny.” She ran her hands over her skirts as if by smoothing out the creases she could erase the hitch and snag of her thoughts. “I do not know what that destiny is but I know that he is, even now, starving for something he has not yet found.”
I picked Adeodatus up and as my milk let down, the exquisite relief of it made me dizzy as if pressure were being drawn from around my heart.
Monica knelt and began to gather up the spilled lavender, laying each stalk carefully in a basket so as not to shake the flowers loose.
“You must forgive me for speaking,” Monica said. “But I am a mother and I must. Augustine is my child as Adeodatus is yours.”
I looked down at my son’s face and thought there was nothi
ng I would not do for him. Nothing at all.
“You remind me of when I was young, of a time when my life was before me and I could have chosen to be better, to have loved better.”
She put the last of the stems in the basket and stood. Suddenly she stopped and leaning down she touched my cheek lightly with her knuckles as a mother will do to a sleeping child to see if the fever has abated, fearful lest she wake him.
“When the day comes when you perceive the hunger in him, I hope you will forgive us.” She made as if to go back inside the house and then stopped again. “I am sorry for the death of your father,” she said. “It is hard to be a woman without protection.”
When she had gone, I sat rubbing stray lavender blossoms between my fingers much as Monica had done but not to release their scent, more to feel something in this world alive the way my father was not, for even his memory was less tangible than this single stem and the seeds falling onto the stones. I knew what she was telling me, that without a father I was alone. Her son could be no true husband to me under the law and that his destiny—his hunger as she had called it—would take him from me. Not now, not tomorrow perhaps, but one day.
The shadow of the roof had moved across the courtyard and the sun now fell directly on my son’s face. Screwing up his eyes, he began to wail so I stood and, shushing him, paced to and fro, where Monica herself must have paced with her children in her arms. The image of her young motherhood, here in this very place, my feet treading the very tiles upon which she walked, transposed itself as if I were she and this, my son, Augustine. And all at once I felt unmoored, drifting, without home or husband or standing in this world, with only the warm weight of my child in my arms and my absolute necessity to his life to anchor me. I wondered at Monica’s talk of what was needed to stay alive, for when I looked at the face of our son, I knew that therein lay all my heart’s nourishment and I had no more need to search for it than I did for the sun above my head. Like my newborn son now gazing on my face with blind necessity, I had fixed all my happiness on him whom I loved and the fruit of that love. Of the riddles Monica spoke, I knew only the faintest shadow. What I did know was that I was on one side and Monica’s God was on the other. And Augustine was in between.
CHAPTER 13
I never saw Monica angry but once in late summer when the wheat stood high in the fields, rippling in waves when the wind blew, and the grapes began to plump and darken on the vine. Adeodatus was now two months old.
A childhood friend of Augustine’s from Thagaste, I forget his name, fell sick with a fever and looked to die, so his parents brought the priest to him, though he was a Manichee. I was not there myself but heard that at his bedside Augustine argued with the priest, denouncing the sacraments of the Church as so much hocus pocus and the priest left in a rage, the friend unshriven. Word soon got back to Monica.
A few days later I was walking at the back of the house near the paddock under a giant oak. It was shady there and quiet and Adeodatus had been colicky and restless all that day. As I turned the corner of the barn, I heard voices.
“A pagan I could understand.” It was Monica and her voice was raised more with fear than with anger, it seemed to me, “for the worship of false gods is naught but ignorance. Your father was such. But you of all people should know better, you with all your learning, your philosophers, your great intellectuals.”
This last said with utmost scorn.
“But to deny Christ and all the goodness of this world, that beautiful girl and your little son included, when you know better is not mere foolishness but willful heresy.”
“Mother,” Augustine said, and I could picture him writhing under the lash of her words, trying in vain to make her stop.
“Do not ‘mother’ me,” she retorted sharply. “Since when have you minded anything I tell you? No, for once listen to me, Augustine, and listen well. I was willing to overlook your heresy for the sake of that sweet girl and her baby, my grandson. Yes,” she said. “Do not look at me that way. For them. No matter you have made promises to her that you cannot keep. No matter you brought a child into this world with no means to support them.”
“I have been offered a teaching post in Carthage,” Augustine said stiffly. “The messenger came this morning.”
I knew of this. He had told me that very morning. A part of me was overjoyed to be returning to Carthage for I missed Nebridius and the city, but, most of all, I missed being alone with Augustine as we had been before. A part of me was also sad to leave this peaceful place and the company of Monica and, most especially, Perpetua.
But Monica continued as if she had not heard him. “No, that is nothing compared to the happiness of these two souls you have so carelessly taken into your hands because you must have what you must have.”
“I love her,” Augustine replied. “She is the only woman I will ever love.”
My heart leapt at that. He had often told me so but to hear it spoken to another was an exquisite joy.
“I know,” Monica said. “But can’t you see that makes it so much worse? For if you loved her you would never have entangled her in your life. You would never have given her a promise you could not keep.”
Monica’s voice came to me clearly. She spoke the words with great clarity as if she knew it was her only chance to say them.
“And so I sought to repair the damage you had done her. With love. And care. And, God be praised, those two beautiful children survived the ordeal of birth when they so easily could have died.”
“I thank you for that, Mother,” Augustine said.
Monica continued, “She is a child. But you, my son, are not.”
“Enough, Mother!” Augustine shouted. “She came to me freely. You make it sound as if I tricked her. I did not. I told her of my situation and she came to me of her own accord. Truly, you know nothing of her or me or of our love for one another.”
Never had I heard him speak so to his mother. Nor had he ever raised his voice to me in anger.
He said more quietly and I could hear him striving for control: “I will not listen to you speak of her that way, Mother. She is no child. She and our son are my life.”
“By child I do not mean simple in her mind or heart, Augustine.” Monica’s voice was patient though infinitely weary. “I meant she is innocent as a child. And you have put both her and your son’s happiness and their immortal souls in danger through your selfishness.”
“I will not listen to this,” Augustine said.
I thought then he would walk away but he did not. Instead there was a silence that stretched on and on so I could hear cattle lowing in the fields and far off the tock-tock of goat bells on the mountain slopes. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked. It seemed strange to me the world was so indifferent to the human drama in its very midst, so lovely and serene it was on this late summer’s day. If overhead black thunderclouds had suddenly appeared and hurled down lightning bolts it would have been more fitting.
“Think my son, I beseech you. Think.” I could imagine her grasping the front of his tunic and shaking him.
“Your father, God rest his soul, was a man who gave himself up to the world and all its delights. He drank. He whored. Do not look so shocked; of course I knew. No, my son, do not look away in shame. I was a wife before I ever was a mother. Children, especially sons, forget this. It is the truth and I am not afraid of it.”
“I hated him for what he did to you,” Augustine said in a low voice. “For what he was.”
“I know you did, my son. And perhaps I am to blame for many a time I played the wronged wife, the martyr. I only know I forgave him in the end.”
I caught a glimpse of her dress as she showed br
iefly at the corner of the barn then turned and disappeared. She was pacing up and down, her hands clasped before her.
“That was your father,” she said. “And then there is me. I am a Christian, commonly thought throughout the neighborhood to be a saint. Hah!” Her laugh was bitter, filled with desolation. Suddenly I glimpsed Monica’s dreadful loneliness and, commensurate with it, her courage.
“I raised you in the Church and thought I taught you well. What pride! What I really taught you was to see your father’s face imprinted on the world and make you fear it. Fear you would become like him. And so you follow the teaching of Mani, for it gives you a perfect mirror in which to see the division in your nature your father and I created.”
Monica continued: “I was willing to bear all this because it is, in part, my own doing. I hoped that with the death of your father you would learn to forgive him and forgive that which is like him in your own nature. But you have not forgiven. Augustine, my dear, clever son, you are no longer a child. Only a child makes a mirror of the world and thinks his own image is the only truth. You are a man, Augustine. You are now a father. You must look through a window and see the world as it really is, not split like two halves of a broken cup but whole and undivided. How else can it hold wine?
“But even if you persisted in your childish beliefs, I could bear it and simply pray harder for your soul. What I cannot bear, my son, is when you put another’s soul in mortal danger. You had no right to send the priest away from the bedside of your friend. He is dying and will not recover. Even if you do not believe in the Church’s sacraments, a true friend would give a dying man whatever he desired to bring him comfort. His soul stands on the edge of this world and the next. Are you so arrogant you place your own intellectual purity against the happiness and salvation of another? That is wrong and I will not stand for it. It is good that you have won this post for you cannot remain under my roof.”
Her voice was so low I could barely make out the words.
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