The Confessions of X

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  At night our music was shouts and too-loud laughter in the courtyard outside our door, cries of tired children refusing to go to bed, and when the men had emptied their wine skins and gone in to their wives, the rhythmic pounding and groans of sex through the parchment thinness of the walls.

  Augustine would put down the scroll he was reading and we would exchange a glance. Then he would grin at me, saunter over to where I sat curled in a wicker chair pretending to ignore him and nuzzle my neck, nibbling my ear until in mock exasperation I put down the book I was reading.

  “Let’s join in,” he would whisper. “Feel free to make all the noise you want.”

  To my surprise I did not fall with child again as if the trauma of Adeodatus’s birth had dealt me a secret wound. I think Augustine was relieved. He had been in terror for my life. Except for the crones, the women in the insula were all in a perpetual state of breeding and when I saw their hollowed eyes and the lines etched cruelly on their faces, grown swiftly old with all their cares of motherhood, I was glad to keep my youth for yet a little while. They pitied me in a kindly way and one girl no older than myself, already swelling with her third babe, offered me temple remedies made of disgusting things that I thanked her for and secretly poured away. I won their trust by minding their young ones so they could rest in the searing heat of our summer noontime and in this way gave playfellows to my son and earned friendship for myself.

  My closest friend in the insula was Neith, older than myself by a decade and married to a leather-worker. A large-boned woman and rather plain of face, she had such grace of body she drew the eyes of men. She had four children living but had miscarried two while another had died of fever while yet an infant. When I placed my hand upon her own in sorrow, she shrugged and said her mother had birthed nine sons and herself, a daughter, the only one to live.

  “It is our destiny,” she told me.

  We were in the courtyard. It was now December, cold at night and in the early morning but warm enough at midday to sit outdoors. I was seated on my doorstep where a shaft of sunlight warmed the stone; Adeodatus was sleeping in a basket by my feet, lulled by the sound of Neith grinding almonds with a mortar in a stone pestle.

  “It’s for a cake,” she explained. “Mena’s birthday is today.”

  Her three-year-old daughter, Mena, was squatting in a corner of the courtyard digging up dirt between the tiles with a stick and humming tunelessly to herself. At the mention of her name she did not look up as any ordinary child would. Mena was deaf. She had been born with hearing and was just beginning to babble when she caught a fever. When she recovered, Neith noticed that she no longer turned her head when she called her daughter’s name.

  “It nearly broke our hearts,” she told me. “It was like she fell into a dark well.” Her eyes had filled with tears but she shook the memory off and picking up her daughter, cuddled her. “But it could have been worse,” she said. “At least she lives.”

  That was typical of Neith and one of the reasons I loved her. Beneath her no-nonsense ways, she had great courage. I suppose she reminded me of Monica.

  Though Neith loved all her children dearly, Mena was the one she cherished most and would fly into a fury if she caught the others teasing her. Their favorite game was to shout into her ear and when she didn’t jump, they whooped with glee and pulled mocking faces behind her back. Neith would come storming outside, her youngest on her hip, and deal out slaps all round even to children not her own, the courtyard that had echoed with the sound of childish laughter a moment before now loud with lamentation.

  It was Neith who taught me how to fold a cloth and sling it round my front to hold Adeodatus.

  “Now you have both hands free,” she said, knotting it behind my back and tugging on it to make sure it was secure. “And when he gets bigger and can hold on, you can swing him round the side onto your hip or on your back.”

  I looked down at Adeodatus’s face peeking up at me out of the cocoon against my heart and smiled. Now I could read a book and hold him at the same time, a problem I had tried to solve in vain.

  Neith studied me with hands on hips, head cocked to one side. “You don’t know much about mothering,” she said.

  I confessed that I did not. And when I told her I had no mother she clicked her tongue as if I were one of her children who had carelessly dropped something in the street and lost it.

  “I’ll have to take you in hand then,” she said. “As if I don’t have enough to do.”

  Despite her gruff words I knew she was quite pleased to have an apprentice.

  My barrenness set me apart from the women of the courtyard, who spoke of men as if they were a different species, strange in all their habits, prone to snap and snarl, creatures whom they must humor and feed and clean up after if they would keep them tame. It was not so between myself and Augustine and I often saw a wistfulness come into the other women’s eyes when they saw us together, how we laughed and joked, how we touched each other in passing as if we always had to bridge the gap that separated us, no matter it was only air. Especially they noticed how Augustine treated me as an equal and when he was at home performed tasks they deemed women’s work like cleaning leeks or changing and bathing the baby. One girl, Lena, even asked me if I had given Augustine a charm to make him so compliant. I laughed out loud but then saw that she was serious, for her husband was a man most simple—sex and food, she told me sadly—and when he was sated did not seem to notice her at all.

  Neith’s husband, Tazin, was a decent man, hard-working and much in love with his wife, following her every movement with a dog-like gaze, adoring and devoted. Augustine would sometimes sit out in the courtyard with him, a cup of wine at his elbow, and watch admiringly as Tazin worked a piece of leather he brought home in scraps to make his children’s shoes.

  “Tell me more of this man you follow,” Tazin said, matching upper and lower strips of leather and grunting in approval. “He sounds a bit of an oddball to me.” He began piercing the edges of the leather sole with an awl.

  Augustine took a sip of wine. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t know why I bother. To tell the truth, I’m becoming impatient with how tidy he makes everything appear, split neatly down the middle—good and bad, flesh and spirit, what have you.”

  Tazin grunted again. He was not a learned man but not stupid by any means and asked deeply intelligent questions, ones that sometimes left Augustine at a loss at how to answer them.

  “I can’t see it myself,” Tazin said, biting off the waxed thread he was using to sew the leather and threading another length through the bone needle. “Seems to me the world is too much of a jumble, too messy, to be put in boxes like different colored buttons. Take our daughter Mena for example.” He held up the little pair of turquoise slippers he was making. “These are for her, by the way. It’s her favorite color.” He smiled briefly to himself as if he were picturing her face when he gave them to her and resumed stitching. “Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, Mena. According to the world, Mena’s nothing—not only a girl-child but deaf as well. One person actually asked us why we hadn’t exposed her outside the walls when we learned she’d lost her hearing.” He said this last with the barely controlled rage I had seen in his eyes when people pitied his daughter and treated her as if she were an imbecile.

  “I’m sorry,” Augustine said.

  “What seemed to Neith and me a curse turned out to be a blessing. Her ears may be deaf but her heart hears everything. Mena is special. She is a gift from the gods.” He put down the shoe and leaning forward looked directly at Augustine as if to challenge him. “Tell me how something so good can come out of something so bad?”

  When Augustine made no answer, Tazin sat back. “It seems to me,” he said, “that altho
ugh the roots may be in darkness the flower grows toward the light. Root and flower are one, not separate. Mena is our flower.”

  Neith was a devotee of Astarte, the Punic goddess of fertility and war, and one day in early spring she took me to her temple to give an offering of honey for my failure to quicken. I did not tell her I was relieved I was not pregnant, for it was an honor to be invited to her worship.

  “You must not tell your man,” Neith said, as we hurried through the streets. She did not know Augustine was a Manichee but she knew he was different from the other men and held his learning in great esteem. My own love of reading she thought odd, a strange aberration brought on by my failure to get with child.

  “You’ll soon be cured,” she said.

  I was carrying Adeodatus in the sling swiveled round on my hip for he was ten months old now and heavy. With one chubby hand clutching tightly to my dress, he pointed with the other at all he saw, his little imperious finger a demand to name the strange new world to which he had awakened from his dream of infant-hood. Recently, he had learned to pull himself up on furniture and, holding on, had begun to take little steps, grinning madly as if he were the first person on earth to discover he had legs. In the evenings when Augustine was home, Adeodatus had made up a game where he would totter stiffly from my chair to Augustine where he sat at the desk reading essays his pupils had written. At the touch of his little hand, Augustine would lay down his pen and grab him up. Then, with a whoop, he would lift him high above his head.

  “He flies!” he would say, zooming the little body to and fro. “He’s turned into a bird!”

  I would look up then from my book and watch them and my heart would beat with violent love, my son’s joyous shrieks, his father’s teasing, the sweetest music I ever heard except for Augustine’s soft “I love you” when he and I lay holding one another after lovemaking or if I should happen to glance up and find his eyes upon me.

  “He’ll be walking soon,” Neith told me one day after she had seen Adeodatus pull himself up and take two steps. “Then watch out.”

  Aside from frequent trips to the market to buy food and twice weekly visits to the women’s baths, once when Neith and I went alone, once when we took all the children to bathe them in the children’s pool, it was almost the first time I had left the insula all winter and the spring sun felt heavenly on my face and shoulders, the colors of the street so bright they almost hurt.

  “The goddess does not look kindly on the ways of men,” Neith said as we were walking, “for they swim on the surface and know nothing of the deeps.”

  I thought of Augustine and all his ardent talk of things far above the life we women live and knew that Neith spoke true, that somehow the wisdom of which he so often spoke lay not above in realms of light but in the deepest things of blood and flesh and bone.

  And in that instant and for the first time since I loved him, he appeared to me lost or, rather, seeking something he could not find. I thought of the quarrel I had overheard between him and Monica when they spoke of his father, Patricius, that man of appetite, and the contempt for him I heard in Augustine’s voice. It came to me then as I walked with Neith that Augustine was searching for a father he could respect and love. I wondered if perhaps that had been one of the things that had drawn him to me—except that I had known a father’s love before I lost it whereas Augustine had never known it. I wondered if one could lose something one never had or perhaps find something one didn’t know was lost.

  The temple of Astarte stood in an area of the city unknown to me. Not built in the Roman style with portico and columns, all hard lines and masculine symmetry, it seemed to emerge out of the very earth itself, an ancient rounded cairn with a dark opening in the center through which we passed by bending low. The air smelled sulfurous, decaying, and I could hear the faraway sound of water as if a river gushed beneath our feet. Hosts of black flies circled in the noisome air, crawling horribly on Adeodatus’s face until I covered his head with my veil to keep him from breathing them in.

  Neith bowed low with palms pressed together and, edging forward in the gloom, placed a tiny clay pot of honey upon the rough stone altar and then backed away, chanting in a low and guttural tongue, one I did not recognize. The statue on the altar was of a woman in a pleated dress with the crescent moon upturned upon her head like the horns of a great bull. Her lips were smiling but her eyes, wolflike, regarded us with feral and pitiless intent. Eggs lay broken on the altar, some fresh, some rotting, and heaped upon the floor a coil of glistening offal, a woman’s afterbirth. More dreadful still the tiny corpses of stillborn children like dolls discarded carelessly after play, their blackened faces cauled as if they peered through membranous windows to another world.

  I watched as Neith touched her forehead to the altar then backed away. Outside in the blinding sunlight, she put a hand on my shoulder. “Now you will quicken with child again,” she said.

  I thanked her but found that despite the warmth of the sun I could not suppress a shudder. The temple seemed more to me a place of death than of life—of flesh but not of soul. Breathing in the clean air again, I understood why Augustine preferred the airy realms of spirit.

  CHAPTER 16

  Those years we lived at the insula were some of the happiest of my life, marred only by one incident that broke my heart.

  It was in September almost two years to the day since we had moved in. It had been a hot day and I had been looking after Neith’s children for she was in her ninth month of pregnancy, big as a whale, hugely swollen about the legs and ankles, and finding it hard to catch her breath. I had moved my wicker chair outside for her and she was sitting in the shade of the fig tree in the courtyard fanning herself with a palm leaf, her feet up on a footstool. She reminded me of myself that summer so long ago now it seemed. Adeodatus was just over two and had changed from a sweet little baby into a rampaging toddler. I had a task just keeping him under my eye, let alone Neith and Tazin’s little tribe.

  Five-year-old Mena was sitting at her mother’s feet, tickling them with a chicken feather she had found and laughing when Neith wiggled her toes, an odd sound like the creaking of a gate.

  “You look like the Queen of Sheba sitting there,” I said, handing Neith a cup of water I had just drawn from the well so it was icy cold. I dipped a cloth in the bucket and laid it on her breast to cool her.

  “A fat sow is more like,” she said with a tired smile.

  I stroked her sweat-soaked hair back from her face. “It won’t be long now,” I said. “You’ll soon be sylphlike again.”

  “Hah!” she snorted. “I was never sylphlike to begin with, as well you know. But,” she added, touching my hand, “it’s nice of you to lie. I don’t know what I’d have done without you.”

  “Coped,” I replied, squeezing out the cloth and dabbing her forehead. “As you always have. As we women always do.”

  “Isn’t that the truth.”

  At that moment a crash came from my apartment followed by a howl and running in I found Adeodatus lying on the floor, a stool upturned beside him, his father’s oak gall inkpot overturned and a black lake already spreading over his papers and the desk.

  “Oh, Hades!” Picking up my son, I checked for damage but he wasn’t so much hurt as shocked by his tumble and his wails were those of fear of being punished.

  I stuck my head through the door of our sleeping chamber. Neith’s youngest children were sitting on my bed playing with the clay animal figures I had given them earlier. Sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the bed was Gil, their nine-year-old brother, a reluctant watchdog.

  I smiled at him guiltily. So concerned was I for their mother, I had quite forgotten them. “I know you’re bored, Gil,” I said, “but watch them just a
little while longer. I promise you can go out to play soon.”

  He folded his arms and stared stonily at me but did not move from his spot. Despite his surly expression he was a good boy who would grow up to be a good man just like his father, Tazin.

  “Thank you,” I said. “I will buy you something nice tomorrow.”

  Holding Adeodatus on my hip so he wouldn’t paddle his fingers in the ink, I was mopping up Augustine’s desk when I heard another crash followed by a piercing scream. This time it came from outside.

  Running out I saw that Neith had tried to stand and crumpled forward, tipping over a little table with her cup on it. Mena, who had her back to her mother, played on regardless. This picture of Neith in agony and Mena innocently unaware has stayed with me all my life. I see it as a frozen tableau, perhaps entitled: “The Mother.”

  At the scream, the other women of the insula had appeared in the courtyard. They clustered there in a group, looking at Neith, none of them seeming to know what to do. I handed the still wailing Adeodatus to Lena and went to Neith.

  “What is it?” I said, taking her by the shoulders and supporting her.

  “It is time,” Neith said, then doubled over again, gasping. “Ye gods!”

  It was then I saw the water at her feet and mixed with it, blood.

  “Take the children away,” I told Lena, “and send someone to fetch the medica.” To Maris I said: “Send Gil to fetch Tazin.”

  Both Lena and Maris were staring at Neith, their faces fearful and bewildered.

  “Go!” I said and they ran to do as I had bid.

  Mena played on.

  When Augustine returned at sunset he found our apartment a different place. Many lamps from the neighboring apartments had been brought in and all were lit—the inside of the bedchamber was bright as day and stifling. There had been no question of getting Neith up all those stairs to the fourth floor to her own apartment, so I had helped her into mine and laid her on our bed.