The Confessions of X

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  One evening we got dressed up—I in a new dress Nebridius had given me for my eighteenth birthday in the autumn, Augustine in a tunic I had embroidered at the neck and hem—and strolled through the darkening streets to the theater. The night was cold and I walked with my green cloak wrapped around me. Adeodatus was riding on his father’s shoulders, his splendid green boots drumming on his father’s chest, eyes fever-bright in the moving torchlight, a chubby finger pointing out things for naming—“What that?” forever on his lips—the whole world a puzzle and delight until we took our seats. The cadence of the poetry soon lulled him into drowsiness, his chin sinking, then jerking upright, then sinking again, two fingers slipping slickly from his mouth as he sank deeper into slumber from which nothing, not even the audience’s thunderous applause, could disturb. I drew my cloak around him and the warm hump of his body curled against mine made me long to be with child again.

  I sat with my son in my lap, Augustine’s arm around me, and listened to Virgil, that greatest of all the Roman poets, tell of the tragic love between Dido, Queen of Carthage, and Aeneas, who forsook her for a kingdom, a story engraved on every Punic heart down to the last syllable and trope, be it the most scabrous beggar on the temple steps or the wealthiest citizen in Africa Province, a story that bespoke a Roman’s callous disregard for our native soil, that most lush of all soils, a land despoiled and then abandoned. This, for me, was heaven.

  I close my eyes and Dido is in her tower, the ships of Ilium unfurling in the offing, the air so bright, so glassy, she sees her lover, Aeneas, standing at the prow, so clear she can almost touch him though his back is turned. He gazes toward Italy, the Rome that is yet to be.

  And behind the Queen, in her chamber, the bed where once he lay still holds his shape, the pillow the hollow of his head though the sheets are cold. No child of his to hold.

  The audience groans, a woman sobs aloud, and no one silences her. Our hearts are Dido’s, her anguish our own. She our queen and we her people, who know what the Romans will never know—that love is more than duty. That love is all there is.

  Augustine’s arm tightens about me and I lean against him.

  “I love you,” Augustine whispers in my ear.

  “As I do you.”

  After the performance we stood on the terrace overlooking the ocean, as the theater was set on the clifftop east of the city. A vast blackness stretched before us, behind us the still-illuminated theater and the lights of the city. Augustine was holding Adeodatus, for he had grown too heavy for me to carry when he was sleeping.

  “Remember I said that one day I would leave Carthage and cross the ocean to Italy?” Augustine said.

  The gale blowing off the sea was bitter but I did not move closer to him, instead I shifted a little farther away, only a step, but it seemed a great distance. I nodded but I did not know if he could see me in the dark.

  “I have decided to apply for a position in Rome,” he said. “Carthage is too far from the center of things. There is no future for me here.”

  The wind buffeted me and I braced myself against it, my veil snapping out behind me like a banner. But it was not the wind that chilled me as I waited for him to continue but a terrible fear. The nothingness that stretched endlessly away would be my life if he should go away. I gripped tightly to the balustrade.

  I will not stand in his way, I thought. If I have to I will let him go.

  When I still did not look at him, Augustine put himself between the parapet and me. The wind instantly stilled.

  “You are thinking,” he said, “that I would leave you here.”

  When I did not reply, he encircled me with one arm and drew me to him while with the other he still cradled our child. He laughed softly. “Do you think I would go without you? Do you think me Aeneas, my love? And you Dido, Queen of Carthage?”

  I shook my head, ashamed for doubting him, but that vision of the blackness that lay beyond remained with me.

  “Come,” he said. “It is cold. We should go home.”

  Side by side we walked back through the night-lit city, so familiar I did not need to think which turn to take, which street, for I had lived within its walls all my life. Never had I considered leaving Africa, the land of my heritage, the land that was as known to me as my own body, as my lover’s, my child’s. As we walked my fears receded and were replaced by an eagerness so intense I had to stop and catch my breath although the hill we climbed was not so steep. Not to tread on different soil, hear different tongues, taste different foods, see different customs, suddenly was a thing unthinkable though I had not been discontented before. I took Augustine’s hand.

  For you, I vowed, I will go to the farthest reaches of the empire. Say but the word and I will gladly make the wilderness my home.

  In my simplicity and ignorance of how the world works, I thought that when Augustine spoke of Rome it was a fact accomplished, for I could not imagine him wanting something and it not straightway being given him. But after he began applying for teaching posts in Italy and wrote endless letters to would-be patrons who might sponsor his career, stand friend to him at the imperial court in Milan, months dragged by and soon it was more than a year since we had stood that night on the terrace.

  Augustine was increasingly discontented with his position as rhetor in Carthage. He often told me hair-raising tales of what his students got up to in the classroom, their rudeness, their drunken pranks—once they put a dead puppy in his scroll case—their cruel bullying of the younger students, fourteen-year-old boys away from home for the first time and easy prey.

  “The jokes I can put up with,” he told me one night as we were having dinner. “Even their immense ignorance. But the worst is they change tutors behind my back to avoid paying my fees, these so-called sons of noblemen who have no respect for anything except their own pleasures.”

  He looked at me despairingly across the table, and for the first time I noticed dark circles under his eyes put there by the burdens he carried, how to clothe and feed us, his guilt over the poorness of our lodgings but most of all, his monumental boredom in his job, a torture for one so intelligent, so quick to apprehend the world. And deeper than mere boredom, a restlessness of spirit that drove him ever to seek that which was just beyond reach and, when he grasped it at last, to discover that it was not what he wanted after all. Sometimes, in the darkest part of the night when I could not sleep, a voice whispered that one day he would find that I was not what he had wanted after all and he would seek another.

  “Unless he is rich and can do as he likes,” he said, “a man is like a mule harnessed to a heavy load and beaten up the road. He longs for freedom, to be forever free of the whip that drives him, the taste of the iron bit in his mouth, the blinders over his eyes so he can only see the path laid out before him.” He gave a small smile. “Forgive me,” he said. “I am more than usually self-pitying tonight.”

  I touched his hand. “Mule is right,” I said. “But that is a good thing: you are more than stubborn enough to find a way.”

  He laughed as I had intended he should and we spoke of other things. But I did not forget his restlessness and prayed that he would find what he was searching for and soon.

  At this time, he was engaged in writing a treatise on aesthetics entitled De Pulchro et Apto—On the Beautiful and the Fitting—dedicated to Hierius, a man he had never met but who was famed in Rome for his oratory.

  “I must flatter him before he will assist me to a post.” He pulled a face. “I think academics are the vainest creatures alive. They long to be admired.”

  “I thought women were supposed to be the vainest?” I teased, sitting down beside him and scooting along the bench so I could read what he had been writing.

  �
��That’s a myth invented by . . .”

  “Academics,” we both said in unison and burst out laughing.

  He flung down his pen, pulled me to him, and buried his face in my hair, his favorite position when we were alone and sitting side by side. I could feel his weariness in the tension of his body.

  I read aloud a few sentences of what he had written.

  “ ‘What then is beauty and in what does it consist? What is it that attracts us and makes us love it? Unless there be beauty and grace in those things, they would be powerless to win our hearts.’

  “The yeast in the bread,” I murmured, almost to myself.

  Augustine raised his head from my neck. “What did you just say?”

  I repeated it.

  He frowned. “Explain.”

  I smiled inwardly, for I had heard him use the same tone when Nebridius said something that puzzled him but piqued his interest. I could imagine him commanding his students in the same voice, intense, almost stern, his eyes fixed on them like an arrow, like a hawk ready to drop down on a hapless rabbit. No wonder they played tricks on him. He must terrify them.

  “I mean,” I said, “that the Manichees are wrong when they say the material form is a cage in which the soul is trapped like a bird beating its wings against the bars. Beauty or soul, it seems to me, is more like yeast in bread. When I bake bread I mix it into the flour and the dough rises, but if I cut the bread I can’t find the yeast like some lump in the middle. It’s mixed right through because it is the bread. Ergo . . .”

  Augustine had taught me this term and I was quite proud of using it, especially when I saw him blink.

  “Beauty and form,” I went on, “soul and flesh cannot be divided except perhaps by death. As you say, it is the form that draws our love but that form is indistinguishable from the beauty. Or rather, it is the beauty.”

  I felt a little breathless after this speech and a little ridiculous. He was the teacher, after all. Touching his face, I felt the roughness of his unshaven jaw, smoothed my thumb over the dark circles under his eyes. “I do not love merely your body nor do I love merely your soul. I love them both but not as halves of one whole, but one whole itself, as yeast and bread are one loaf. Both are you. Both are Augustine.”

  He was looking at me in a way I could not interpret and then he threw back his head and laughed, so long and so loudly I feared Adeodatus would waken in the next room.

  “I don’t believe it,” he said at last, wiping tears from his eyes.

  “It makes no sense?” I asked.

  “On the contrary,” he said. “It makes perfect sense. Your analogies have taught me more than all the philosophers put together, including Cicero.”

  “I think best in pictures,” I said.

  CHAPTER 19

  Some days later, an old friend of my aunt’s came to me and told me my aunt was dying and asked to see me. While my conscience had told me I should make my peace with her, I had not had the courage to visit her since returning to Carthage.

  It was strange to walk the streets alone in the district where my uncle’s house lay, for I had not returned to the neighborhood since the day I left with Augustine almost seven years before. No one spoke to me or raised a hand in greeting, so changed was I from that wild girl who roamed the city years before. Even the fountain looked the same, the chips on the rim that I used to run my fingers over so familiar I could find them with my eyes shut. I marveled that so much could remain the same when I was so changed.

  With each step I had taken across the city, I was retracing my past, returning to the place where, for good or ill, I had begun my life. Now I must return and somehow set things right. The image of my aunt in the courtyard, my last sight of her, haunted me. My own motherhood, the bright flame that burned within me for my child, a flame devouring all other loves except two, my love for my child’s father and my own, had also burned in my aunt. This I now knew beyond all certainty. For what else could cause such agony, such sorrow in a woman unless she be parted forever from her child?

  A lump rose in my throat when I remembered the hardness of my heart when I left her house. That I had done so partly out of fear, to proclaim that her sad woman’s life had no correspondence with my own, did not absolve me.

  When I arrived at that familiar door, I hesitated. I think if I had heard my uncle’s voice from within I would have turned and walked away, but I could hear no sound of voices except the noises from the street.

  The door was unlatched, so I entered. No lamps were lit, and dirt gritted the floor beneath my sandals, a sad decline as my aunt could never abide disorder and filth in her home. The kitchen, usually so immaculate, was in disarray with dirty pots and knives piled on the table, a platter of stale bread and olives, a wedge of moldy cheese, and the appalling smell of rancid fish heads in a cauldron on the hearth as if my aunt had been making soup when she suddenly took ill.

  I pulled aside the curtain to the bedchamber at the back of the house. In the half-light I could make out my aunt lying on the bed, a tiny shrunken figure like a doll, a soiled coverlet molding her sticklike body like a shroud that scarcely rose and fell so light her breath.

  “It is I,” I said, crossing to the bed.

  Her eyes opened and fixed on me.

  As when a breath of wind shivers the surface of a pool, so her eyes seemed to flicker, change, become at last quiescent as she recognized me, and her sparrow-bone hand rose up from beneath the coverlet and grasped my gown with surprising strength. I bent low and put my ear against her working mouth.

  “You,” she said and closed her eyes.

  I thought at first she had gone but then her eyes opened again.

  “When my brother brought you to me, a motherless scrap, filthy and neglected, I thought that God had answered my prayers.” She spoke in a harsh whisper so I had to strain to hear.

  Panting as if she had run a long race, she gestured at a clay cup that stood on the floor beside the bed. I filled it with water from a jar in the kitchen and held it to her lips. She followed me with her eyes as if she feared I would abandon her in that wretched room with the sounds of the living heard but distantly, the sun falling on neighbors, friends, strangers, even the very stones in the street outside her door, never again to warm her skin, the hearth in her kitchen cold and unswept.

  I did not know where my uncle was but I wondered that two lives, albeit lived in enmity all those years, could have become so separate, so estranged, that one would let the other cross beneath that dread portal, death, alone and quite friendless.

  I sat down beside the bed and took her hand in both my own.

  “Hush,” I said. “I am here.”

  “When your father brought you to us, you were so beautiful,” she said as if she hadn’t heard, as if she had a speech by heart and must get it out before memory failed. “I sat by you while you slept and could not believe how perfect you were, the creases in your wrists, your ankles, your hair mussed and rubbed away from sleeping on your back, your tiny hands, your sweet, milky breath on my neck. You were the answer to my prayers. I loved you. And I longed for you to love me as well.” Exhausted, she fell back on the pillow gasping. I helped her to another sip of water and dabbed her mouth with the corner of my veil, she who had prided herself on the cleanliness of her home now lying in a nest of squalid rags.

  “When your father returned from his travels,” she went on when she had recovered, “you forgot me. He who had not bathed you or sat in the doorway with you on his lap so you could see the sights or sung to you to make you sleepy, now he was the one you turned to as a sunflower lifts its face to the sun. And when you were four he took you away.” Her voice su
nk to a whisper as if the words bruised and must be handled gently. “Ever after, this home became a prison to you, I your jailor. I wanted only to protect you, to save you from the life of disappointment and grief that has been my own lot.” I knew what I must say but I could not. My pity and remorse were sharp flints in my mouth.

  “Lift me up,” she commanded. “There is something under my pillow.”

  I put my arms about her shoulders and lifted her, the weight of her body no more than my six-year-old child’s, and felt beneath her pillow. I withdrew a small box and put it in her hands.

  She lay awhile holding it. “Take it,” she said at last.

  Inside was an iron key, the key to her bank box, her savings, the money she had received at all the births she had attended over the years, she said, hidden from a husband who would drink it up as he had drunk up her heart’s blood and all her hopes. Lying at the bottom of the box beneath the key was the copper bracelet and the length of ribbon threaded through it, the same as I had left the day I quit her house forever.

  “Only give me a Christian burial,” she said. “The rest is yours.”

  She closed her eyes. I stayed with her as evening fell and lit a lamp so she would see me keeping vigil. I held her hand and whispered to her though I do not think she heard.

  Sometime in the night a tremor shook her and her eyes flew open. When she saw me she smiled, a look of great beauty and tenderness. “My daughter,” she said. Then: “I would have loved to see your child.”

  “Mater,” I replied, stroking her face. “Forgive me for not loving you as I should have.”

  But her eyes fixed like agates in a frieze and looked on me no longer, neither did she hear my too-late confession.