Kissing her on the forehead, I crossed her hands on her breast. Then I took the wooden cross she had nailed to the wall above the bed and, placing it on her chest, tenderly drew the coverlet over her face. The rest of the night I spent sweeping and cleaning her home so she would not be shamed. At dawn I went to fetch the priest.
I spent most of the money my aunt had left me on a lavish funeral. Her bier was placed before the altar in the church in the center of her brother’s—my father’s—glorious mosaic; the lion, the angel, the eagle, and the ox a fitting escort from this world to the next. With a priest leading the way, choir boys singing so sweetly, the bell-like purity of their voices so ravishing passersby stopped in the street to listen, some crossing themselves, some weeping openly, we processed to the church of St. Flavius by the southern gate beneath which lay the catacombs of Christians. Here my aunt was interred in a stone sarcophagus I had had carved, instructing the stonemasons to adorn it with putti, chubby infants with creased wrists and ankles, dimpled knees and elbows, romping in a field of flowers. Denied babies in life, denied the sight of Adeodatus, in death I gave her children of stone. It was both a tribute and a penance, for I had given her a heart of stone when I should have given her one of living flesh.
CHAPTER 20
Another year passed, one in which we heard Augustine’s treatise on beauty had been received with admiration and acclaim in Rome and in Milan, but still he received no word of a teaching position.
Then one morning in spring, a messenger arrived at the house with the offer of an academic post in Rome.
Suddenly, after all this waiting, we were leaving. This longed-for event brought a kind of sweet melancholy. It made me look on Carthage, the city of my birth and all my life, with different eyes. Perched above the ocean and open to the cooling winds and scorching Numidian heat as if it hung suspended in the heavens, it came to seem a place of light and grace. The opulence of its colors enraptured me as when Augustine and I were first in love and saw with the self-same eyes oranges piled in the market place, blood-red pomegranates in their woven baskets, their seeds Persephone’s brief parole, blue linen curtains snapping in the breeze, in the forum brocaded cloaks of every hue clasped with jeweled brooches about the throat, everywhere a richness as if the city said: “Remember me.”
The prospect of leaving Carthage acted like a tonic on Augustine and he grew cheerful again. I heard him humming to himself sometimes when he was grading student papers in his study, a thing he had never done before.
Each night when we lay in each other’s arms we talked of Rome, what it was like, its ancient history, the sights that we would see there.
“It is not the seat of government any longer. The court is in Milan,” Augustine said. “But the Curia where the senators voted is still there. The rostra outside the Curia is still there, the very place where Cicero stood and gave his speeches to the mob, where Caesar and Mark Antony stood. And Sulla surrounded by the heads of his enemies taken in the proscriptions. All this remains.”
“I would visit the Temple of the Vestals,” I said. “But not the Colosseum.” I shuddered remembering the killing I had seen in the amphitheater in Carthage.
“We will visit all but that,” Augustine replied. “Oh, my love, this is a new life for us.”
I kissed him. “Yes,” I said. “But it will break your mother’s heart. And Nebridius will be sad too.”
“Nebridius says he will come and visit,” Augustine said. “He is as eager as we are to see Italy. So have no fear for him, my love.” Augustine knew how much I would miss my friend. I would miss Monica, too, for I had come to look on her as a mother.
We had sent a message to Monica letting her know of our plans, and she came to us at once. Except for that one time in Thagaste when I overheard the argument between Monica and Augustine, I have always known her serene like a still pool on a summer’s day, its surface only riffled by the wind but not disturbed. But when we told her of our move, it was as if we had heaved a stone into the middle of that calm. Monica was proud of Augustine for being offered such a post, but she was also troubled. For Christians, Rome was an evil place, the site of great suffering and persecution. And for the Punic people, Rome was the ancient enemy of Carthage, conquered by Scipio Africanus five hundred years before.
“But also a holy site, Mother,” Augustine reminded her. “For Peter and Paul were martyred there.”
I was sitting beside her on a couch and had taken her hand when Augustine had begun to speak. Adeodatus was at school. He had been excited as only eight-year-old boys can be, seeing adventures around every corner. When we told him we would have to take a ship and sail across the ocean his joy knew no bounds, and that night we heard him moving about in his room and talking to himself when he should have been asleep.
“I am happy for you, of course,” she said, “I shall miss you but that is nothing. The only thing that troubles me is that I feel your destiny lies here, my son. In Africa.”
“Mother,” Augustine said, coming to sit the other side of her on the couch and taking her hand. “Why else did you and father pay so much for my education if not for advancement? Carthage is well enough but it is still so far from the center of things.”
Then she sat up straighter, the stiffening of her spine a kind of spiritual resolve. “Of course you must go,” she said. She laughed, a little shakily. “Of course you must. Forgive me. I am a selfish old woman.”
She kissed Augustine then turned to me and did the same. “I will miss you both.”
In this way, she gave us her blessing. She never seemed braver to me than at that moment. Later, I would remember her courage and seek to emulate it.
On the day we were to sail we left in the late afternoon—for high tide was at dusk—and descended to the outer harbor where a merchant ship lay, which would carry us to Rome. Monica and Nebridius accompanied us. I held Adeodatus by the hand, Monica held his other, Nebridius was on my other side. Servants followed behind, pulling a cart carrying our few belongings, mostly clothes and scrolls.
When we arrived at the harbor we walked out along the long stone jetty to the very end where the ship was moored. Up close it seemed enormous to me, the portals along the hull above the water line where the oars would emerge, dark empty holes. Within were benches where slaves were chained, their strength the power that would speed us through the water if the wind failed.
Now that the moment to depart had come, I felt a lifting of the heart as if the wind filled it and strained it at its mooring, eager to be gone. But I dreaded saying good-bye.
I hugged Monica tightly and when I would not let go she gently disentangled my arms. “God be with you, dear daughter,” she said and briefly rested her hand on the top of my head as if in blessing.
Then Monica turned to her grandson and kneeling put her arms about him and pressed his head tight against her breast. Adeodatus was freely crying now but I saw Monica whisper something in his ear that made him smile. Releasing him she put her hand briefly upon his head and then drawing out a little wooden ship from the folds of her skirts she gave it to him. “Here,” she said. “Now you are Captain Adeodatus.”
I embraced Nebridius.
“Do not weep, Naiad,” he said. “I will come and visit soon.”
Then turning to Augustine. “My friend,” he said. “Make sure you live up to your name.”
Next he picked up Adeodatus. “So, Captain,” he said. “Remember to steer by the stars and make sure you keep these landlubbers, your parents, in check.”
Augustine went to speak to the captain and when he returned told us the sailing was delayed because a shipment of wine had not arrived from the vineyards north of the city and the captain had to wait for it before casting off.
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br /> “He says we can stow our belongings now,” Augustine said. “But if the shipment doesn’t arrive in the next hour, he says, we will miss the tide and have to wait until the next high tide tomorrow.”
Monica looked into Augustine’s eyes for what seemed a long time. Then she embraced him. She looked so small in his arms as if she were the child and he the parent. I looked at Adeodatus’s curly head at my elbow and knew that one day it would be the same for me—he a full-grown man, me an old woman stooped with age, although Monica was not bent but ever straight like a centurion’s spear.
“You get your things on board,” Monica said. “I will visit the shrine of St. Cyprian to pray for a safe voyage. I have never been and have always wanted to go.” She turned to Nebridius. “Would you mind accompanying an old woman?” she asked.
Nebridius took her hand and put it through his arm.
“We will return in time to see you sail,” Monica said.
Augustine put his arm around my waist, his hand resting on our son’s shoulder as we watched Nebridius and Monica walk away. Once Monica stumbled but Nebridius steadied her and, looking back over his shoulder, nodded at us. She will be all right, his gesture said.
We boarded the ship and the captain showed us to a small cabin in the stern, hardly more than a kind of cowhide tent stretched on a frame. Inside were sleeping pallets and two buckets. Immediately on stepping from the gangway onto the deck I knew I was in another world. And in my breast I felt a kind of strange unraveling, which terrified and exulted me all at once. When I pictured that upturned fishing boat on the shore under which Augustine and I had sat in the weeks before our union, I saw it as a sign, a portent of the future. We had so often talked of what lay beyond the sea’s gray line, the coast of Italy, Ostia, Rome’s great port, that now it seemed as if the strength of our imaginings, of Augustine’s longings, had conjured up the fact.
While I stowed our things inside the tent, Augustine followed Adeodatus around the deck to make sure he did not get in the sailors’ way as they continued their loading.
The loading had been completed and the sun was saffron in the west when the captain raised his voice.
“Cast off,” he shouted. “Ready to weigh anchor.”
I turned to Augustine in surprise. “I thought we were waiting for a shipment of wine? Monica and Nebridius will return and find us gone.”
He looked away and said in low voice, “I could not face seeing my mother weep as we sailed away.”
I stared at him and imagined Monica arriving and finding the ship sailed, her son gone. I thought of how I would feel if my son deceived me and stole away.
Standing at the rail we looked back toward the shore and watched as the lights of the harbor receded then winked out, drowned in darkness so inky vast it seemed we floated in a void.
CHAPTER 21
That first night on board Augustine was quiet, and I knew he hated himself for the way he had deceived his mother. I was silent, too, still angry at him for causing Monica such sorrow.
“I can’t help seeing my mother’s face when she found the ship gone,” he said to me when we were lying side by side on our pallets, our son snuggled in between us, the curtain drawn across the opening.
I did not reply.
“You are right to be angry,” he said after a moment. “I should not have done it.”
The misery in his voice made me relent a little. As with the theft of the pears in his youth, he was brooding on what he had done and felt a terrible remorse, a punishment far greater than my censure. When I told him this he replied: “My relief that we could slip away without my mother knowing convicts me in my heart.”
“Write her a letter begging her forgiveness and give it to the captain,” I said. “I heard him say his ship returns to Carthage as soon as they unload and take on more cargo at Ostia. She will receive it in a month.”
This comforted him a little and soon he slept.
Augustine, Adeodatus, and I spent many hours standing at the bow watching as, bladelike, the ship cleaved the waves, shouldering up great gouts of spray that sometimes drenched us, making us laugh out loud. We saw schools of sleek gray fish racing alongside the hull as if to outstrip us to our destination, leaping gleaming and supple from the waves as if they sought to fly. I knew them to be dolphins for I had seen them figured in my father’s mosaics in the bathhouses of the rich, but to my son all he saw was a miracle and a delight, and I thrilled with him as he drank this new world in with shining eyes, the sorrow of his parting from his grandmother all forgotten as is the way with children. One moment they are inconsolable, the next, lit up with joy.
I had often taken Adeodatus to the harbor to watch the boats, and now his joy knew no bounds that he was sailing in one. He spent hours squatting beside the sailors watching what they did, cording and coiling rope, turning great capstans, fishing off the side. I would hear his voice high and continuous, questioning them in all they did, and their replies, gruff but kind and astonishingly patient. When I rebuked him once for pestering the sailors, a seaman, whose face was so seamed by the sun he looked ancient though his movements were supple like a much younger man, said: “He don’t bother me, mistress. I have one just like him on shore.”
At night, the sailors would sit on the deck and tell stories of their seafaring, some so fantastical that I smiled to myself although Adeodatus’s face was solemn and rapt. Tales of enormous fish that could swallow ships whole, of fish that flew, and others with swords for snouts, and of great storms when Poseidon heaved up the waves like mountains so high the sailors called on their mothers and the gods.
“You’ll give him nightmares,” I said.
“He’s a little man is what he is,” one sailor said and ruffled my son’s hair.
One morning Adeodatus shouted, pointing over the side and there before us swam a swordfish just as the sailors had told him. He looked with triumph at me and the sailor who had told him grinned.
I learned then that stories that seem improbable can oftentimes be true and that what we think we know about the world is just a tiny portion of what lies therein, and I wondered if in other lands there lived beasts that could live in water and in air, could cross that frontier of elements that keep us back from so many of our desires, and if the boundary between them was so frail, perhaps so too is the one that separates the living from the dead, from myself and all those I love whom I have lost.
A dreamlike state enveloped us, days filled with sunlight, the creamy churn of waves as the ship plunged and reared like a mettlesome horse, the flash of silver spray against our faces and, at night, a canopy of white-hot stars in a blackness so deep it seemed as if I could stretch out my hand and plunge it wrist-deep into the velvet of it.
Only one thing marred our crossing and this was the misery of the galley slaves. Becalmed for a time after leaving port, I found myself staring trancelike at the oarsmen as they strained continually at their task, their muscles bunching, their sweat blackening the benches on which they were shackled, a brutal yet even motion that moved us swiftly through the water despite there being no breath of wind. Men chained to their relentless work, an overseer prowling constantly among them on a gangway set between the benches, his whip flicking over their heads, drawing beads of blood on their arms and shoulders, the monotonous boom of the drum like a monstrous heartbeat as much a tyranny as their chains. Their ceaseless labor reminded me of Sisyphus in hell.
When Adeodatus would come and stand beside me to watch, I put my arm around him and moved him away, pointing out something else.
“Let him be,” Augustine said. “It is good for him to know there are poor unfortunates in this world. Otherwise, he will have no gratitude for his own happiness.
”
Despite this shadow, the crossing was to remain in my memory a brief, idyllic interlude when we had laid down one burden and not yet taken up another, when all seemed possible and the gods seemed to smile on us, when our ship pointed north toward a coast as yet invisible but waiting.
On the fourth day the wind picked up and the sails were unfurled. The next morning we came in sight of land, a thin wavering strip like a line of charcoal drawn hesitantly on the sky where it meets the sea. Fishing boats clustered about us as we drew nearer the shore, and a huge flat-bottomed barge approached that was to tow us into the inner harbor, its many oars lifting and falling in tandem like the legs of a giant water beetle scudding on the water. As we drew closer I saw a sprawling metropolis spread out along the shore and thought I looked on Rome. I had heard it had seven hills and was puzzled by its flatness. When I asked a sailor who was coiling rope nearby, he grinned, revealing a mouth filled with rotten stumps.
“Ostia,” he said, spitting over the side, “the port of Rome.”
It began to rain, the first we had felt since our African spring, and as we tied up to the jetty low gray clouds rolled in from the sea concealing the wharves as we made our way to the pier, arms clutched around our belongings, uncertain of our balance on the slippery gangplank. The entire voyage had only taken five days, yet I felt as if a hundred years had passed since I had left Africa.
My first step on Italian soil was unremarkable, earth like any other. It was the smell that was different, an overpowering stench of rotting things, a choking miasma that seemed to settle on that low-lying place like a suffocating blanket.
“It’s built on a salt marsh,” Augustine said when he saw me wrinkle my nose. “It’s always silting up. The Emperor Claudius had it dredged, but that was a long time ago and the sea is reclaiming it again.”
By comparison, the port of Carthage smelled sweet, scoured clean by wind and salt, the city on the cliffs above airy and untainted. I had imagined Italy to be a place of marble and gold-leaf and endless tinkling fountains. Instead we emerged from the harbor into a bewildering maze of fetid streets with people pushing rudely past cursing us in a Latin dialect hard to understand.
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