The Confessions of X

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  I was seated on the edge of the bed holding Neith’s arm; Tazin was seated on the opposite side, holding the other. When she reared forward in agony, we braced her and held her up. She had been laboring like this for hours. And for hours, her blood had flowed from her body, a deadly little stream, the merest trickle but dark as heart-blood, dark as artery blood is dark.

  Her face was waxen and bloated, unrecognizable, her eyes rolling back, her mouth set in a rictus of torment. I do not think she knew who we were nor what was happening to her. I pray that she did not. We had sent Mena away, but later I spied her crouching in the corner, eyes fixed on her mother’s face, a high-pitched keening issuing from her throat such I have heard a leveret make when it is taken by a fox.

  Tazin’s face across the bed was as expressionless as a carven idol in a temple; from between lips that never seemed to move he chanted invocations to the ancient Punic gods in a guttural dialect I did not recognize, a deeper counterpart to his daughter’s lament as if they prayed in tandem, a sound that stood the hair up on the back of my neck. Sometimes he spoke his wife’s name. That, too, was an invocation.

  Augustine came to me and touched my shoulder. Then he moved me gently away and took my place for he could see I was exhausted.

  I moved to the foot of the bed where the midwife, sleeves rolled up and bloody to the elbows, was wiping her hands. She had just examined Neith, feeling for the child inside her. She looked at me and with a tiny gesture shook her head then she drew me to the door.

  “The baby is dead,” she whispered. “I must cut it out.”

  I shuddered when she explained what she must do but I nodded and straightway began to gather what she required—hot water, clean cloths, a needle, and sheep gut for thread. From her basket she withdrew a linen cloth, which she laid on the foot of the bed; on it she placed the dreadful instruments of her art—a long bronze needle with a blunted end, a length of garroting wire attached to the eye, one end running down the needle’s shaft and wound around a wooden toggle; a long-handled bronze spoon and knife, its blade serrated and razor sharp. She was as calm, as practiced, as if she laid a table for a meal.

  When all was ready, I lifted Mena in my arms. “Come, little one,” I said though I knew she did not hear me. “This is something you should not see.” I carried her, unresisting, to Lena’s apartment three floors up. Entering, I passed her to Lena then checked on Adeodatus; mercifully, he was sleeping. I stood a moment looking down at him, then briefly touched his head. He shifted and put two fingers in his mouth but did not wake.

  “Will my mother die?” a voice asked from the darkness.

  In the light from a single oil lamp I saw Gil. He was hunched on the floor by the side of the bed, his back against the wall, his knees drawn up against his chest, minding his siblings still as if I had forgotten my promise earlier to let him go out and play. I went to him and, kneeling, touched his shoulder. I do not know why I did not gather him in my arms and crush him to my breast as any mother would who seeks to comfort a child who is frightened, lonely, and bereft. Perhaps it was his faithfulness, the dogged patience of his vigil, the way he spoke so calmly, but it conferred on him a kind of dignity. In that moment, he seemed to me full-grown and not a child at all. And so I told him the truth.

  “The baby is dead,” I said. “We are trying to save your mother now.”

  He nodded once then turned away, dismissing me.

  The sight of him, alone and watchful, came near to breaking me.

  When I returned to the bedchamber, the midwife had already begun.

  “You must help me,” she said. She handed me a cloth and pointed to a bowl of water. “You must wipe away the blood so I can see.”

  And so I did, closing my mind to what she withdrew piece by piece from Neith’s body though my eyes remained wide open.

  Neith was quiet now, sunk almost in a coma, her breathing shallow, her eyes flickering behind swollen lids, her only movement now the pull and tug inside her belly as the midwife went about her bloody business.

  No longer needed to hold her up, Augustine had moved to stand behind Tazin who sat on as before, his hand on Neith’s arm, as if he had not noticed his wife no longer needed his support.

  At last the midwife stood back and, with the edge of her sleeve, wiped her forehead. “It is done. I can do no more.”

  Like a butcher in the market who hands a housewife the calf’s liver she has just purchased for her family’s dinner, she folded the corners of the waxed cloth around Neith’s desecrated child—it was a daughter—and gave it to me. “Take this and burn it,” she instructed.

  “I will do it,” Augustine replied. He took the bundle and left the room.

  For three days we sat, Tazin, Mena, and I, by Neith’s bedside. Augustine left in the morning and returned at dusk to silently hold my hand or briefly rest his hand on Tazin’s shoulder. Every day when he returned, he went upstairs to spend time with Adeodatus who was missing us; at night he slept holding him in his arms.

  As for myself, my own child I barely saw except when Augustine brought him to me to nurse from time to time and hold tight, too tightly, for he fussed and squirmed upon my lap until his father took him away.

  Tazin did not move nor speak nor would he eat the food I brought him. I sometimes dozed in my chair but when I opened my eyes, I saw Tazin’s face, withdrawn into itself, blank as before, and knew there was no change. Neith slept on, neither moving nor even seeming to draw breath so I had to lay my ear close to her lips to hear if she still lived. The bleeding between her legs had stopped the second day and spots of color showed now in her cheeks; the swelling, too, had vanished. We hoped then she would recover. But despite the herbs I mixed in water and trickled between her bloodless lips, on the second night she took a fever and soon was burning up, her head moving fretfully from side to side on the pillow, mumbling words we could not understand as if she were an actor in a dream.

  Then on the third day, a little after sunset, she opened her eyes and they were lucid.

  “Bring my children to me,” she commanded.

  I left to fetch them and then gathered them around her bedside, watching from the shadows as Neith bid her children farewell one by one, laying hands on each and kissing them. Then she reached for her husband’s hand and Tazin bent over her. When he raised his head again, Neith was gone.

  CHAPTER 17

  Dry-eyed I washed Neith’s body and wove flowers in her hair; dry-eyed I stood beside the funeral pyre outside the city walls and watched her burn, her ashes sealed into an urn; dry-eyed I welcomed mourners to my home and served them wine and funeral meats.

  Augustine and I took away the bed in which she died and bought another. I scrubbed the floor where she had bled and the courtyard tiles but no matter how hard I rubbed there still remained a stain.

  “Do you want to move?” Augustine asked one evening. It was a month after Neith’s death.

  I was sitting in my chair, the same chair I had carried outside for Neith so she could rest in the shade of the fig tree. I remember how hot she had been, how she had wiggled her toes to make Mena laugh.

  Mena. She could not hear and so had never learned to speak. Now she no longer smiled or laughed but watched the dumb show of the world with too serious eyes and made her silent judgment upon it.

  “No,” I told Augustine. “Neith’s children need me.”

  Since their mother’s death, I had become a sort of stepmother to Neith’s children, nursemaid rather, for they did not treat me as a mother, their little bodies stiff in my arms when I embraced them, eyes that followed me without interest. All the fun, all the noise and naughtiness of normal children had died with Neith and in its place a perfect and mos
t unnatural acquiescence.

  “Eat this, little one,” I would say. Or: “Wash your hands.” “Time for bed.” In each and every thing required of them they were compliant to a fault. Like wild animals kept too long in captivity, their spirits dwindled with each passing day, their movements became more sluggish, their eyes more dull. I watched them turn to shades before my very eyes and could do nothing.

  I had tried to speak to Tazin about my fears but he just stared at me as if, like Mena, he saw my mouth moving but heard no words.

  After the funeral, he shut himself away in their apartment with the children. No sound emerged, not even the sound of weeping. After three days, I knocked and entered.

  Tazin was sitting in a chair with Mena on his lap, the other children huddled at his feet. The room stank of unwashed clothes and bodies, a slop bucket in the corner was filled to the brim with human waste, rotting food lay uneaten on the table, all the meals I had prepared. The only sound, the buzzing of a thousand flies. But the most disturbing thing of all was not the filth but the stillness: Tazin was a man whose hands were seldom idle, always he was working on something or other whether it was shoes for the children, a leading harness for the latest baby newly walking so, looped over her arm, Neith could keep the child from stumbling, a leather jerkin for Gil, the boy’s pride and joy because it was a miniature of the one his father wore. Now Tazin’s hands lay empty, lifeless, not even lifted to caress Mena’s curls as he had been fond of doing so that in her silent world she could feel the touch of her father’s love.

  Turning on my heel I went straightway to fetch Augustine. Tazin did not resist when Augustine pulled him to his feet and sleepwalked him down the stairs to the courtyard. I followed with Siri, the three-year-old, in my arms, leading Mena by the hand. The others came after, Gil bringing up the rear. While Augustine fed them, I knocked on Lena’s and Maris’s doors and told them what I’d found. Their husbands fetched us bucket upon bucket of water from the well and we scoured Tazin’s apartment—I did not think of it as Neith’s—from top to bottom.

  After that, despite the lateness of the hour, we women bathed the children in the courtyard, washed and combed their matted hair, and dressed them in clean clothes we borrowed from those neighbors who had children the same or approximate age. By this time the other women of the insula had joined us, even old Sylvia who seldom emerged from her top-floor apartment for her joints pained her and she found the stairs difficult. For the first time since Neith’s death the courtyard echoed with the sound if not of happiness, then a kind of contented hum we women make when we go about some common task.

  “Do you have any scissors, Maris? These knots are impossible to comb out.”

  “Has anyone seen the oil flask? I swear I put it down a moment ago.”

  “Stand still, honey, while I dry you. Sylvia, pray pass me that dry towel.”

  Tazin watched dull-eyed, nine-year-old Gil standing beside him. The boy’s childlike body proclaimed him subject still to women’s rule yet since his mother’s death his soul had passed beyond our hands. By some collective mother’s instinct we knew this and left him in peace.

  The water from the well was cold and could not be heated; the children squealed and did a little dance of protest, making us women smile. Perhaps it was this childish sound that roused Tazin; perhaps he heard Neith’s voice, her brisk, no-nonsense way of speaking, echoed in our own; perhaps her shade compelled him. I only know that all at once he stirred and taking a bucket and sponge from Lena, silently began to wash his children’s bodies. Gil watched him for a moment then began to do the same.

  After the little ones were bathed, Augustine and I carried them indoors and sat them round our table. I closed the door so Tazin and Gil could strip and wash unmolested by women’s eyes. Then I heated wine, sweetened it with honey, and gave it to the children to warm them and make them sleepy.

  “You are worn out,” Augustine said, putting his arms around me.

  “The children need me,” I repeated.

  I had the words but I could not find the strength to tell him why I had not yet wept for my friend.

  If I could, I would have told him the torch the priest thrust deep into the oil-soaked wood of Neith’s funeral pyre, he thrust deep into the center of my soul. Neith’s body burned and turned to ash; my soul burned still.

  Two days before the Roman festival of Saturnalia, when master and slave exchange roles and the world is topsy-turvy for one brief night of the year, Tazin knocked on our door.

  “Come in, my friend,” Augustine said.

  It was four months since we had lost Neith and Tazin was much changed, thinner in the face, his beard going to gray, the skin around his eyes perpetually creased with tiredness and whereas once he had been a straight-backed vigorous man, he now walked with a somewhat shambling gait as if he were twenty years older. He had not done what many widowers with young children do—marry again. Indeed, he had confided to Augustine when they had sat out in the cold under the stars one night that he would never wed again.

  I had just put Adeodatus to bed and was folding laundry at the kitchen table. I paused to listen.

  “For Neith was all the mother they ever knew or wanted and all the wife,” Tazin said. “She can never be replaced. Not to them, not to me.”

  A long silence followed, then Augustine’s voice, so low I strained to hear: “The measure of love is to love without measure.”

  I heard the soft chink of cups as if they saluted one another.

  This time Tazin refused the drink Augustine offered him. Declining a chair, he stood somewhat awkwardly in the middle of the room as if he were about to make a speech.

  “I have come to bid you good-bye,” he said. “And to thank you for all you have done for us. We are moving to Hippo Regius. I have a cousin there.” He took my hand shyly. “A better friend Neith never had,” he said, his voice becoming hoarse. “She told me once, soon after you moved in, that you were a woman made of iron.”

  I smiled at that for Neith had said the same to me one day when she came upon me on my knees in the courtyard rinsing out Adeodatus’s breechcloths in a bucket. I had been irritable, exhausted from nursing an infant all night, and liberally splashed with dirty water. When I would have politely thanked her for the compliment—for although a familiar face in the insula, she was still a stranger to me—she spoilt it by adding: “Prone to rust when wet.”

  We howled with laughter, holding onto one another and upsetting the bucket. That seemed even more hilarious and set us off again. We only stopped when six-month-old Adeodatus cried with fear at seeing his mother act so strangely. I think that was the first time we knew we would be friends.

  “I made your son these,” Tazin said. He handed me a pair of child’s boots made of soft kid, dyed leaf-green and tooled with gold arabesques and stars; the tassels on the ends of the laces had silver bells. Truly the shoes were a work of art and much too beautiful to wear.

  “Thank you, Tazin.” I kissed his cheek.

  He ducked his head in embarrassment, then pressed a tiny object into my hand. “This is Neith’s. I found it when I was packing. I know she wants you to have it.”

  I looked down and saw a tiny bronze figurine of a Punic goddess. It was not Astarte, for it did not have a crescent moon, but another goddess.

  “She is the consort of Anzar, the god of rain,” Tazin explained. “Neith had a special devotion to her.”

  I kissed it, then closed my fingers around it. It fit perfectly in my palm, entirely hidden in my flesh. Bereft of words, I nodded. For the first time since Neith’s death I felt tears cloud my eyes. Perhaps it was the rain god who blessed me, perhaps Neith herself, but suddenly I was weeping, a flood I could not sto
p, a tempest so violent it made me shudder. I held onto myself and collapsed forward. Like my aunt. Like Neith when her pains had come upon her. Then Augustine’s arms were about me, holding me.

  Neith, I wept. Friend. Woman of Iron.

  And then all at once I was laughing, tears raining down my face.

  Prone to rust when wet.

  The next day I bid Tazin and the children good-bye, holding the little ones tightly one by one. I stroked Mena’s head and put a honey cake in her hand. She looked at me as her father lifted her into the cart and fluttered sticky fingers at me, a tiny gesture of farewell. Gil I did not shame by hugging but shook him solemnly by the hand.

  “Take care of your brothers and sisters,” I told him.

  He nodded, hitched his belt the way his father did, then swarmed onto the bench beside Tazin all arms and legs and scabby knees. I hid a smile. Augustine, Adeodatus, and I, Lena and Maris and their families, and even ancient Sylvia leaning on her stick waved until they turned a corner.

  CHAPTER 18

  It is good to see you smile again,” Augustine said, stroking my cheek. We were lying in each other’s arms worn out, close to sleep. I had come to him parched, starved for his touch, a wanderer in a desert who, half-crazed, glimpses city walls in the distance but fears it is a mirage. The frenzy of our joining, the sweet long drawn-out violence of it told me it was no illusion but fact. And from the ardor of his caresses, I knew that Augustine, too, had been in exile though I did not know then how far he had roamed within the desert of his mind.

  It was the night of Saturnalia and the streets rang with drunken laughter and shouts. We did not celebrate Saturnalia with pagan customs but by going to the theater, something we had done often before our son was born but seldom since we returned to Carthage.