The Confessions of X

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  We paid a stonemason carting huge slabs of stone to take us to Rome, for we did not have means to hire a fast mule-drawn carriage. A barrel-chested man dressed in a one-sleeve workman’s tunic with his belly spilling over his tightly cinched belt by the name of Fulvius, he told us we were lucky. He had intended to load his stone onto a flat-bottomed barge and sail it up the Tiber, but when he arrived that morning at the appointed time and place, the barge was not there and he could find no other boat. As his cargo had been paid for by Rome’s City Works—mostly fine quality marble for decorative work, that being his specialty, he told us—he dared not delay its delivery. But he was more than happy to take our coin as it would offset what he had lost to the bargeman.

  We left Ostia heading east along the Via Ostiense, the great paved road that connected Rome and the port, the Tiber on our left.

  “It’s only nineteen miles,” Fulvius informed us, “but the rate these sluggards move it’ll take us all day.”

  Augustine and Adeodatus jumped down from the cart and walked, in no danger of falling behind as we traveled so slowly.

  After a while I joined them and it was a joy to stretch my legs after the confined quarters of the ship. Shortly after setting out, the rain stopped, the clouds parted, and the sun came out. The marshy ground along the banks of the Tiber steamed and the reed beds stretching out toward the sea were alive with birds, many of which I had never seen before, and long-legged herons and waders stepping fastidiously on stilted legs.

  Adeodatus ran beside the cart like an overgrown puppy sometimes going up the road so far ahead I had to call him back for fear he would turn a corner and be run over by a cart or trampled by slaves carrying a litter. I was astonished at the volume of traffic on the road as if the whole world were either going to or coming from Rome.

  “It’s true what they say,” I said to Augustine.

  “What is?”

  “That all roads lead to Rome.”

  “I hope so,” Augustine said. “For it is here I mean to come to the notice of important men.” He was silent for a time. “The trouble is,” he said, “I cannot help but feel I am here under false pretenses.”

  I glanced at him and saw he looked troubled. “Because you are no longer a Manichee,” I said.

  He nodded. “My patron is a Manichee and so is our host in Rome. I have not told them I have broken with the sect.”

  “But you will be a teacher, not a spokesman for the Manichees,” I said.

  “Yes. That is the only thing that comforts me.”

  We were walking hand in hand behind the cart but sufficiently far back and to the side so we were not splattered by the mud the ironbound wheels threw up. Augustine squeezed my hand.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I haven’t dragged you all this way for nothing. I’m not going to resign the post before I’ve even taken it up.”

  The sun was sinking at our backs when Fulvius pointed straight ahead. “See those trees upon the hill,” he said. “The city is beyond.”

  I glanced at Adeodatus who was curled up behind me in the cart, worn out by the day’s events. I touched his head.

  “We are almost there,” I said, softly.

  He nodded sleepily and rested his head against my back.

  Because night had fallen, Fulvius explained he could drive through the streets once we entered the city. There was a law against wheeled traffic in the daytime. Augustine told Fulvius the address of our destination. We would stay at a house on the Palatine owned by a rich Manichee until we found an apartment of our own. This we would do as soon as Augustine received his first fees. He clicked his oxen on, their hooves clopping hollowly on the slab-paved streets that twisted and turned. Eventually he drew up at a door, torches burning in cressets on either side, a door-slave squatting on the step, his chin sunk on his breast, fast asleep. When we pulled up, he opened bleary eyes and, reluctantly getting to his feet, stepped forward to help us with our baggage.

  Augustine jumped down, lifted Adeodatus over the side of the cart, and then gave me his hand. I clambered down and Augustine paid Fulvius.

  “Welcome to Rome,” he said. He nodded shyly to me. “Mistress.”

  The slave, a youth from the Northern tribes with straw-colored hair and startling blue eyes, piercing even in torchlight, admitted us to the house, and we stood waiting awkwardly in the atrium until the steward arrived, a man with a shriveled monkey face and stiff, haughty manners.

  “The master and mistress are in bed,” he informed us, “but all is prepared. Come this way.”

  We followed him down what seemed a labyrinth of corridors until he led us into a small room—a bedchamber and tiny courtyard looking out onto what I could just make out was a row of huts, which I later learned were storage sheds. The steward lit a lamp, the flame guttering. There was no brazier to warm the room. Shielded from the sun by the courtyard and a high wall at the back and the sides that blocked out the sky, the room was cold and damp.

  “I will send food,” the steward said and left.

  When he had gone I sat on the bed and looked around. The plaster on the walls was bubbling and peeling from the damp and parts of a decaying fresco of merry woodland nymphs and satyrs did nothing to enliven the meanness of the room. In a corner a pile of pottery shards and dried lentils were swept into a heap as if the room had once been used for storage and had been carelessly cleaned. Adeodatus had collapsed on a sagging couch pushed against the wall and immediately fallen asleep, the bags he was carrying still clutched in his arms.

  Augustine sat down on the bed and put his arm around me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We won’t be here long. In a few days I will have my fees, and we can find rooms of our own.”

  I leaned my head against him and closed my eyes, shutting out the squalor of the room. We were in Rome at last. That was all that mattered.

  CHAPTER 22

  Despite Augustine’s promise, we spent those first weeks entombed in our dingy room. Augustine’s students endlessly delayed paying him, making up all manner of excuses.

  I did not complain about our situation as I saw that the hope he had had of teaching a better class of students here in Rome was beginning to dwindle.

  “The fecklessness of youth is the same the world over,” he said sadly one evening after waiting all day in the classroom for his students to show up. Eventually, two had straggled in just before sunset, both looking seedy and the worse for drink. He should have had twenty students in his classroom that day.

  He was lying on the bed with his arm over his eyes. I sat down beside him and placed my hand on his chest. I had never seen him so despondent, so defeated.

  “Have patience, my love,” I told him. “It’s early days yet.”

  “I wonder sometimes,” Augustine said, “if I have mistaken my calling. Surely a teacher should love his students, whereas all I feel is contempt for their stupidity.” He removed his arm from his eyes and looked at me but I had no answer to give him.

  When Adeodatus was not with his father, he and I would explore Rome, the city that had brought the entire world to heel. One day Augustine said he would join us. We decided to go to the Forum Romanum.

  “After that,” he said, “we can wander about and visit the Temple of Vesta if you want.”

  “Can we see the place where Caesar was killed, Papa?” Adeodatus asked with a young boy’s ghoulish relish.

  “He was killed in the Theatre of Pompey where the Senate was meeting at the time,” Augustine said. Seeing Adeodatus’s disappointment, he added, “The Senate House is the place where Cicero gave his most famous speeches.”

  But Adeodatus wasn’t interested in
Cicero. His head was filled with the martial exploits of Caesar and Mark Antony and Caesar’s betrayal by Brutus. He skipped on ahead of us. Augustine and I were walking arm in arm behind him making sure he didn’t vanish from sight amongst the crowds.

  I had never seen so many people from foreign lands as I saw in Rome, people of all different kinds of ethnic dress, the most astonishing variation of skin, eye, and hair color: ebony-skinned Nubians wearing brilliant orange, blue, or pink robes, towering over the native Romans and walking with such straight-backed dignity and grace of movement they seemed to float above the ground; Parthians with pointed beards glistening with oil and dark, clever eyes and wearing baggy trousers cinched with gold-embossed belts with great curved knives on their hips—“scimitars” Augustine told Adeodatus when he came running back to ask; Northern men like the door slave at the house with blond or red hair, beards braided into plaits and adorned with beads and tiny bird skulls, a barbaric sight that made me shudder. These men were huge, towering above us, their limbs as wide as tree trunks, their faces tattooed with intricate swirling patterns of blue.

  “Celts,” Augustine said. “They are said to worship trees.”

  “They are certainly as tall as trees,” I replied. Augustine laughed and we emerged into the Forum hard by the Curia.

  First we walked to the Comitia, the hollow in front of the Curia where senators had given speeches to the mob and where the original tribes had voted back when the Republic was founded before Rome grew too huge to accommodate them. Here Mark Antony made his famous speech after the murder of Caesar. Before we could stop him, Adeodatus scrambled up to the Rostra and stood there, posing, flinging the end of his short cloak over his shoulder as if it were a toga. He grinned at me and ran toward the Curia, skidding to a stop in front of it and waiting for us to catch up.

  “It’s called the Curia Julia and replaced the old Curia Hostilia. You can see the site of the old one there,” Augustine said, pointing to the one on the left as we were facing it.

  “So Caesar built this one?” Adeodatus asked.

  “Well, not exactly,” Augustine replied, walking over to him and putting a hand on his shoulder.

  I stopped a little way behind them. Father and son framed by the symbol of Rome’s might, both dark-haired, Augustine’s hand straying as it always did when they were together to his son’s head to caress it, Adeodatus looking earnestly up into his father’s face.

  “The one Caesar built burned down during the time of the Emperor Carinus and was replaced by Diocletian,” Augustine was saying. “So what you see is a copy.”

  “Oh,” Adeodatus said, clearly disappointed. “So no blood.”

  “Blood?”

  “Caesar’s blood.”

  “Remember I explained he was killed in the Theatre of Pompey?”

  When Adeodatus looked confused, Augustine sighed. “Even if this had been the original building,” he said, “there would be no blood after all this time. I imagine someone cleaned it up, don’t you?”

  “I suppose so.”

  I caught up with them as they entered the Curia.

  Soon, Augustine finally earned enough fees that we moved into our own apartment on the Aventine, two rooms divided by a curtain in a six-story tenement alive with shouts and the sound of children playing. It was paradise after our squalid room and dank courtyard in the Manichee house. The constant noise and activity of lives going on around us reminded me of our rooms in the insula on the street of the silversmiths.

  At last, I thought, I will have women to chat with and my son will have playmates.

  Our lives soon settled into a routine much like our life in Carthage. Augustine taught in classrooms near the Circus Maximus at the foot of the Great Aventine Hill on which we lived, so close that he would often come home for a midday meal of bread, cheese, and olives washed down by a cup of wine.

  We enrolled Adeodatus in the neighborhood school, the schoolmaster a young Greek named Hiero who charged reasonable fees but, more importantly, seemed gentle and not the type to beat his students. Augustine had terrible memories of his own boyhood beatings at the hands of a cruel schoolmaster. He had been sent away to school in Madaura at Adeodatus’s age and had hated it.

  “The man was a Greek,” he told me. “And to this day, I cannot hear or read Greek without a shudder of loathing at that man’s cruelty.”

  “What did Monica say?” I asked. I could not imagine her allowing such a thing to happen. The very thought of someone laying violent hands on my son made me sick to my stomach.

  “I never told her,” he replied.

  Sometimes Augustine would take Adeodatus to his classroom with him where he would sit quietly at the back, or so his father reported to me, a stylus poised above his tablet, eyes fixed on his father’s face as if committing every word to memory.

  And Augustine, seeing his rapt attention, the way he was trying so hard to understand, began to speak only to him as if his other students were not present.

  “Adeodatus may be only nine but he could teach my students a thing or two about respect,” Augustine told me, proudly.

  In the evening when the lamps were lit my son would come to me and, kneeling, lay his head in my lap with his arms about my waist the way he used to do in Carthage. I would stroke his hair, no word between us spoken, none needed. Then he would rise and kiss my cheek and gather up his books and go silently to bed, and I would watch him draw back from the little pool of light around my chair and melt into the shadows before he entered the door of his bedchamber and was gone. This, I knew, was the fate of every mother: that she must watch her son go from her world to his father’s as if she gave him birth again and watched them cut the cord that bound them. I knew that he would soon grow to be a man, that the years of childhood passed swiftly even though the days seemed to pass so slowly, so I treasured these moments of unutterable sweetness to store up in my heart in the years to come like a thrifty housewife preparing her storeroom for winter.

  In the autumn of the same year, Augustine heard of an opening in Milan for the prestigious position of orator, and best of all the post and all the traveling expenses would be paid for by public funds, freeing us from dependence on his pupils. Lividus, the rich Manichee in whose house we had stayed when we first arrived in Rome, had recommended Augustine to Symmachus, the Prefect of Milan and a secret Manichee but also a cousin of the influential bishop of Milan, Ambrose. Milan was the seat of the Imperial Court, the place where Constantine had issued an edict almost seventy years before, granting freedom of religion to Christians after the terrible persecutions of previous emperors. Monica, I knew, considered Milan the beating heart of Christendom, although many pagans and followers of other religious sects called the city home.

  When Augustine put himself forward for the job, he was chosen almost immediately. And so, once again, we packed our meager belongings and began the long overland journey to Milan before winter set in and the roads grew muddy and impassable.

  That winter Adeodatus fell gravely ill. Returning one day from his lessons at the neighborhood grammar school, his eyes were bright with fever, the skin of his forehead when I laid my cheek against it, fiery hot. He was vigorous and healthy in all his parts and ever impatient of stillness, but when I told him to go lie down upon his bed, he did so without a murmur, and I was greatly troubled. Checking on him from time to time during the afternoon, I noted he was still hot. Worried, I left him to sleep, hoping that he was merely overtired and would wake restored and ravenous for supper.

  In the early evening when I went in to rouse him and light the lamps I spoke his name, but he did not recognize me and lay moving his head from side to side and speaking words I could not understand, his breath laboring in ragged gusts, his eyes
half open and rolling backwards in his head. In terror, I ran to Augustine and bade him fetch Vindicianus, former proconsul and a doctor. Then I returned, stripped Adeodatus naked, and began to bathe his body with cooling water. But the fever did not abate.

  When Vindicianus arrived he had me hold Adeodatus still while he leaned his ear against his chest and listened.

  “There is something moving in his lungs,” he said at last. “Black bile. You must cool him when he is hot and warm him when he is cold. And give him tiny pellets of moldy bread to bring the fever down.”

  When I looked revolted he said, “I learned this from the Jews, who are skilled healers and I have seen it work. More I cannot do.”

  My eyes implored him.

  “He is strong and healthy,” he said, patting my hand. “Take heart.”

  For days I watched in anguish as Adeodatus tossed and turned, his flesh melting off his bones until he had the aged look I have seen in children who are starved. When not writing speeches for the court, Augustine spent every moment at his bedside and did not bathe or shave or eat.

  “You must rest a little,” I told him late one night.

  “I will not leave,” he said, and sat on, his eyes sometimes closing then flickering open as if he made a supreme effort of the will to stay awake.

  I was worried that he, too, would take sick and told him so.

  He looked at me across our son’s bed, his eyes dark. “And what of you, my love?” he said. “What if you take sick?”

  “I am his mother,” I replied.