The Confessions of X

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  I stopped pacing and once more stood before him. “Marry,” I said.

  I did not mean for it to come out so bluntly, but the word was spoken and could not be recalled.

  “What?”

  “Marry.”

  “We cannot.” He stood and came toward me but when he tried to take my hand, I stepped back. The look of hurt and bewilderment on his face almost finished me. I turned my back on him so I would not see his pain.

  “I am not speaking of myself,” I said. “I am speaking of a proper wife for you, someone of your own class. Someone Symmachus and the emperor would approve of.” This last I regretted as soon as it was spoken, the reminder that I was but a poor, journeyman’s daughter from the provinces with no dowry, no legal status, not even Roman citizenship whereas he was a patrician’s son, known and admired at the imperial court.

  He took my arm and swung me around so I was facing him. I tried to twist away but he held me there. “What are you talking about?” he said. “I have never wanted any but you. You know this.” He was shaking me, but out of fear not anger.

  “You have wanted many things,” I said. “And always when you have them it is not enough.”

  He turned away from me then.

  “Listen to me, Augustine,” I said, grasping at his sleeve. “You are stuck here. You will never be considered for that post if you remain as you are.” I gestured at the room, at me, at him. “You will be shut out of the highest positions. Positions which you deserve. But it’s more than that. You cannot go back to teaching because you must write, you must speak. If you cannot use words to speak the truth you will be miserable.”

  He gave a despairing laugh. “My God,” he said, “I am caught by my own logic. All those years when I complained of my students, when we talked of how I could rise in my profession. And this is your solution?”

  “It is not mine nor yours,” I said. “It is the world’s solution. It is the only solution.”

  He turned back to me, his face drawn, drained of color. “There must be another way.”

  “There is no other way. For us to love without measure is not enough. The world has a measure. It has weighed us in the scales and found us light.”

  He was shaking his head.

  “Yes,” I said. “You know it is true. That is why you have delayed resigning your post. You know you cannot go back, only forward.” I caught hold of his sleeve again, desperate for him to understand. “We are not wanting but the world judges us so. And we must live in the world. You must live in the world. Do you see?”

  A great calmness had come over me now the words had at last been spoken, the permission to the surgeon given, the sword arm amputated. I knew it was a kind of numbing shock I felt, that the pain would soon return tenfold, worse because it was so useless, a pain so utterly without remedy, the phantom pain of an arm that my mind told me was there although my body knew it was gone. Such I have overheard beggars tell each other in the street, crippled legionaries missing limbs.

  Like a sacrificial ox struck between the eyes by the priest’s sacred hammer, Augustine was silent now, stunned.

  I put my arms about him and rested my forehead against his. “Do not grieve,” I whispered. “Oh, my love, do not grieve. I knew what I did when I accepted you. Neither of us could imagine denying our love for an impossibly distant future. But that future is now here. I chose to do it. I would do it again now, this very instant. Never have I regretted it.” I shook him slightly. “Do you hear me? Never. And never have you given me cause. I said then that I did not care what others think of me. That is true. But I care what others think of you, of our son. They think—Symmachus thinks—you are weak to bind yourself to me.”

  “I do not care,” Augustine said in a low voice.

  “Yes,” I said. “You do.”

  “You think I am ashamed of you?”

  I smiled, even at that moment I marvel I could smile. “No,” I said, “I’ve never thought that. But you know as well as I that you will rise no higher than orator if you do not marry. And marry well.” Unconsciously I echoed the words he had said in the church all those years ago.

  “And Adeodatus? What of him?”

  At our son’s name, I flinched. It was as if he had struck me in the face with his clenched fist. “Do you think I do not know?” I cried, releasing him and stepping back. “I would rather be torn to pieces in the arena than to leave my child.” I groaned aloud as if, even now, I were in labor. “Do you think I do not know that to him my love will look like hatred?”

  Augustine laid his hand on my arm but I shook him off. Like a butterfly alighting on an open wound, his touch—so sweet, so necessary, so finite to me now—was unbearable. I fled the room.

  Augustine let me go.

  I had thought the hardest part was over but I was wrong. The hardest was yet to come, to tell our son—a task so arduous, so killing to us both, we shrank from it. Yet we could delay no further for when he and Monica and Nebridius returned from their visit to Nebridius’s kinsman that night, Adeodatus knew something was terribly wrong. His father was silent and withdrawn, shut up in his study. I kept to my room and let Monica see him to bed. I only went in to kiss him good night.

  “Who has died, Mama?” he asked, his eyes wide with fear.

  “No one,” I said, tucking him in. “Everything will be all right. Now go to sleep.” I kissed him then bent to blow out the lamp.

  “Can you leave it burning?”

  “All right.”

  Adeodatus had not feared the dark in years.

  The morning after Augustine and I spoke together, Nebridius was quiet and Monica’s eyes were red with weeping. It was as if we were a house of mourning, which indeed we were.

  The day dawned bright and warm as if to mock our sorrow.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” I said to Adeodatus at breakfast. “You, me, and Papa. It is such a beautiful day.”

  When Adeodatus ran off to fetch his cloak, Monica laid a brief hand on my arm. Nebridius got up abruptly and left the room.

  “Are we going to the market?” Adeodatus asked as we walked hand in hand down the street, my son on one side, Augustine on the other.

  “I thought we would go to the wood,” I said, “to see if the bluebells are out.”

  That seemed to satisfy him and he let go of my hand and raced ahead, doubling back when we lagged too far behind. I watched him run, his strength now fully returned after his illness though he was still too thin, and marveled at how much he had grown over the winter. Soon he would be eleven and his limbs were already beginning to lengthen out, a prelude to an adolescent’s awkward lankiness. The next time I see him, I thought, he will be a child no longer.

  “I must be the one to tell him,” I told Augustine.

  He said nothing but squeezed my hand tightly.

  We passed out of the city and came to the wood, an ancient growth of oaks once worshipped by barbarian tribes come down into the plains from the distant Alps before the time of Caesar.

  “Look, Mama,” Adeodatus called. “You were right.”

  In a small grassy dell shadowed by a vast canopy of leaves, the ground was blue with flowers, so many it seemed the very air absorbed their hue. Against the roots of a tree, Augustine spread his cloak and we sat down.

  Adeodatus began to gather flowers and link them in a chain by splitting the juicy stems with his thumbnail the way I had showed him many years before and threading them through the stalks. He had a look of complete absorption on his face, the way children do at play, and I saw the care with which he strung the flowers making sure not to tear or bruise them, the d
eftness of his busy hands, the sideways glance when he felt my eyes upon him, his grin.

  “I’m making you a crown,” he said, thinking me impatient for my gift.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “I’ll make one for Avia after.”

  “What about me?” Augustine asked, smiling. But when he glanced at me I saw his eyes glittering with unshed tears.

  Adeodatus sent him a pitying look. “You’re not a queen,” he said.

  “True.”

  Watching my son, I wished with all my heart that time would stop and not move on, that forevermore he would be like this, a child making chains of flowers with which to crown me and his grandmother, the two women who loved him best in all the world.

  “There,” Adeodatus said. “All done.” He put the circlet on my head, adjusting it so it was straight. Then he touched my cheek with his finger. “Why are you so sad, Mama? Don’t you like it?”

  I grabbed him into my arms then and held him fiercely. “I love it,” I said. “I love you.”

  I let him go and sat him down beside us. “We must tell you something,” I began. “Something very important. And you must try to understand. Promise?”

  He nodded solemnly looking first at me and then at his father.

  Even then I knew I could leave my words unspoken, that we could go home and that somehow we would find a way. But once I spoke to my son, there was no going back, no turning from the fork in the road, as once I had known there was no going back when Augustine asked me in the church to be his and I said yes. A terrible temptation came to me to keep silent. His face so trusting, so full of love, was looking at me and I told myself that for me to speak the words I had brought him here to speak would be no less than murder.

  Without thinking, I put my hand up to touch the flowers but Adeodatus stopped me. “It is best not to,” he said. “They are already wilting.”

  A bird began to sing in the branches above our heads, a blackbird’s song so sweet and singular it was like a shaft of light.

  “I must go away,” I said. “Back to Africa.”

  At first he cried and then he grew angry, hitting out at me with his fists and pushing me away when I would hold him. Then he grew quiet. That was the worst.

  “So you see,” I said, “it is not because I do not love you that I must go away.” Even to my own ears, this sounded like a cruel riddle with which to confuse a child, the kind adults make when they rationalize their actions yet know them to be wrong.

  I tilted up his chin. “Do you understand?”

  He raised his eyes to mine. They were his father’s eyes.

  “I am your father’s concubine not his wife. Under the law I have no rights. Even as a wife I would have no legal right to take you with me.”

  “It is not fair,” he said, tearing up great fistfuls of grass and letting them blow through his fingers.

  “No,” I said. “It is not.”

  He turned to his father. “It is your fault,” he said. “I hate you.”

  Suddenly he tore himself away from me and got up. “I am going home,” he said and walked away. Never had he done such a thing before. Hastily, we gathered up the cloak, shaking the bluebells from it, and silently followed.

  He looked back from time to time to see if we were behind him but he did not walk beside us. By the time we entered the house, he had shut himself in his room.

  CHAPTER 26

  It was high summer when I took a ship for Africa but my heart lay deep in winter. The preparations for my departure took but a few days so little did I own in my own right—clothes and remembrances of Adeodatus chiefly, a broken wax tablet upon which he had traced his first letters; the sandals Tazin had made him, the leather dry and cracked with age, one strap broken; the earrings my father had given me long ago. And all the books and clothes—the green cloak that was my first birthday gift—and jewelry Augustine had given me, the tokens of his love over the years, as well as Neith’s little figurine, which since her death had always rested by my bed. The shell Augustine had given me that day at my aunt’s house—his first gift to me—I could not find.

  Neither Augustine nor Adeodatus could bear to see me pack. Only Monica helped, moving silently about the room folding clothes and handing them to me.

  We were almost done when Nebridius knocked and came in.

  “I would speak to you alone,” he said.

  Monica nodded and left the room.

  “Naiad,” Nebridius said crossing the room and taking both my hands. “I have not involved myself in what you and Augustine have decided to do because I felt it was not my place.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him that he was my brother, my family, and had every right, but he squeezed my hands hard in his and I remained silent. I knew he needed to get out what he had resolved to say, that he was in great anguish of heart and I would not prolong his suffering for the world. A vision of him waving to me at the gate, when my father and I left his father’s country estate all those years ago, flashed into my mind.

  “I will return,” I had shouted.

  He did not reply but watched, a small still figure standing in the road, until I passed out of sight. His face was, as now, stricken.

  “I have deeded you the farm outside Carthage with slaves to run it and a yearly pension plus whatever profit you can make on it,” he told me. “Since my father’s death, it is my right to dispose of all properties the way I see fit as I am now the paterfamilias.”

  The legal terms seemed out of place coming from his mouth. For the first time, I realized Nebridius was a landowner of considerable wealth, that he had many responsibilities and burdens. Always I had thought of him as the boy who had spilled water on me, who was my companion as a child, my friend as a young woman in Carthage. Now I saw that threads of gray had appeared in his hair, that his face was prematurely lined and careworn as if some inner fire had eaten up his youth.

  “I have the papers here.” He took a rolled piece of parchment from his belt and handed it to me. I recognized the imprint of his seal on the outside—a water nymph with long wavy hair. We had laughed at that, Augustine and I, when we first glimpsed it on his ring finger in Carthage many years ago, Augustine asking him if it was his girlfriend, but he had closed his fist to hide it and refused to answer. Abashed and obscurely aware that we had offended him, we quickly held our peace. Since then I have never seen Nebridius without the ring.

  “This is an instruction to my lawyer in Carthage,” he was saying. “You must give it to Anaxis, the steward, who will meet you at the harbor and take you to the farm. He will make sure it is delivered.” He handed me another piece of parchment. “This is for Anaxis. It informs him of my wishes and that all authority, both legal and moral, is now ceded to you in your own right. You are provided for,” he said. “You shall want for nothing for the rest of your life.”

  “I cannot accept such a gift,” I said, tears coming to my eyes. It had been arranged that I would stay at Nebridius’s Carthage home in the city until I could rent a small apartment of my own. I had even wondered if the insula in which we had lived in the street of the silversmiths might have a vacancy, but then I discarded that idea for it would be unbearable to be reminded of Augustine and Adeodatus there even if the memory of Neith would sustain me.

  “You must accept it,” he said. “It is mine to give.”

  I put my arms around him, and, after a moment’s hesitation, I felt his arms encircle me and crush me to him.

  “Oh, Nereus,” I said. “I will miss you.”

  “And I you, Naiad,” he whispered. “I will miss you more than you will ever know.”

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p; I stepped back then and looked up at him. For a brief moment it was as if a door opened and through it I glimpsed an anguish as great as my own. Then the door closed and I did not know if I had imagined it or not.

  “You are not responsible for me.” My words sounded cold to my ears, but intuitively I knew he needed me to create a distance between us now, to move back a pace from what I saw, or thought I saw, in his eyes.

  “Maybe not under the law . . .” he said.

  I waited for him to finish but he did not.

  Under the law Augustine was not obliged to support me even if he had had the means, which he did not. I was not his wife and had brought no dowry to our union. All I had were the clothes on my back and a few possessions.

  I realized that he and Nebridius had taken counsel of what to do to provide for me. I had thought that when I heard them talking in low voices in Augustine’s study, it was of Augustine’s pain at losing me.

  As ever, Nebridius was the means of our rescue. Such he had ever been and suddenly I was filled with shame at the way we had used him, had always counted on his generosity and friendship.

  “Forgive us,” I cried, flinging my arms about him again. “Forgive me.”

  “Hush,” he said, stroking my hair. “There is nothing to forgive. It is little enough I can give. I would do more if I could.”

  At the time, I thought he was speaking of the farm.

  On the day of my departure, I left before dawn. I had said farewell to Monica the night before. She had come into my bedroom where she found me sitting on my bed, numb that the time had now come, that only a few hours remained. I was trying to steel myself to go to Adeodatus and kiss him good night for the last time.

  “It is not right that I intrude when you say good-bye to Augustine and my grandson in the morning,” she said, sitting down beside me. “But know, my dearest daughter, that my heart will always be with you.” She shook her head and the tears that shone there fell like rain onto my hands. “Know that never, in all my long life, have I known nor will ever know such courage, such love. We are not worthy of such love.”