The Confessions of X

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  I looked down. I did not feel courageous; I felt like a coward running from a battlefield, abandoning his brothers in arms.

  She put her hand under my chin and tilted up my head, the same as I had done with my son in the wood. “What you have done, my child, what you are doing, has taught me more about love than any sermon I have ever heard. ‘No greater love hath a man than to lay down his life for another.’ ” She smiled as I flinched a little. “Forgive an old woman for quoting scripture at you again. But it is true nonetheless. I will never forget you and what you have done. If God grants it, I will see you again.”

  She kissed me with great ceremony and deliberation on each cheek then once on the mouth, tenderly as a mother kisses her child. Then she made the sign of the cross on my forehead. “Go with God,” she said and left.

  My bags were loaded into a mule-drawn gig Augustine had hired; he had also hired the man to see me safely to the ship as I had refused to have anyone go with me. This was expensive but the fastest and safest way to travel overland from Milan to Ostia where I would take ship back to Carthage. When Nebridius had offered to pay for it, Augustine had reacted with anger and despair.

  “Must I always be beholden to you?” he cried. Then putting out his hands to Nebridius, “Forgive me, my friend. I did not mean that.”

  Nebridius clasped his arms. “Forget it,” he said.

  I knelt before Adeodatus. Since I had told him of my leaving he had been aloof and cold with me. It broke my heart but I understood. His eyes glittered with unshed tears; I saw a muscle in his jaw working as he fought not to cry. My heart was torn as I saw that he had become a little man.

  I lifted the iron citizen’s ring Augustine had given me, as a pledge of his love, from around my neck where I wore it on a chain and looped it over Adeodatus’s head.

  “Wear this for me,” I told him.

  “I will never take it off, Mother,” he said. Since that day in the wood, he had refused to call me Mama, preferring now the correct and cold formality of Mater.

  The ring I gave him, I have now. It was returned to me later and it lies hidden against the breast that once gave him suck, against the heart that beat with love for him, still beats though his heart is stilled. This piece of metal was once warmed by his living flesh, an endless circle with no beginning and no end, the hollowness at its center a space in which my love for him is contained. The silver ring Augustine gave me is still on my finger.

  I took Adeodatus in my arms and held him fiercely as if I could press his body back into my own as when I carried him inside me.

  He held his body stiff and resisting but made no attempt to pull away.

  At last I released him and stood.

  Now I turned to Augustine.

  “I will never love another,” I told him. He took me in his arms and the feel of him was as familiar as my own body, our flesh one flesh, our hearts one heart.

  “I love you,” he said. “I will always love you.” His fingers dug into my flesh, his whole body shook as if with a fever. “You must believe me.”

  “I do,” I said.

  When he released me it was as if my very self was torn in two, one part remaining with Augustine and my son, the other, I know not where.

  I remember nothing of my journey to Ostia, nothing of where we put in for the night, of what I ate, what I wore, what I thought. I moved as a shade not yet passed over the river Styx to the Underworld for lack of a coin to pay the ferryman. I remained on the earth but I was no longer tethered to it.

  At Ostia, the crash of cargo, the shouts of stevedores, and gulls screaming overhead and then flashing down to feast on offal and bicker at my feet returned me briefly to the world of the living. I thanked the driver and paid him off. Then I boarded the ship.

  CHAPTER 27

  On the second day out of port, a storm arose, its coming heralded by a blackening sky and a shrieking wind, the waves rising and curling like mountains to engulf the ship. The captain shouted for me to take refuge in the cabin on the deck but I refused. He looked at me as if I were mad then ran to save his ship.

  A day and a night the storm raged and my spirit exulted in its elemental howling. After so many months of silence, of keeping my sorrow locked tight inside me, it was as if the lid of Pandora’s box had been lifted, as if all my pain were released into the world.

  The Christian sailors crossed themselves and called me a Jonah, the pagans made the sign to avert the Evil Eye. When the sky cleared and the sea became quiescent once more, none would come near me but cast me sidelong glances. I did not care nor did I rejoice that we were saved. With the storm’s passing a huge lassitude had come upon me as if its violence had drained me of my spirit and left me a shell. When I disembarked at Carthage I was fevered and weak; I, who had nursed my son through his near mortal sickness and survived, was now gravely ill.

  Later I learned that Anaxis, the steward, carried me delirious from the ship and laid me in the cart. Then he drove to the farm outside Carthage and I was put to bed. All this was like a dream to me, fragments of sky above my head, the branches of trees in full leaf, a strange jolting motion so I sometimes thought I was still on board the ship and the storm raged on.

  I lay near death for weeks, sometimes floating in a void as if I journeyed yet on a flat misty sea without form or delineation or end, sometimes on a swell that lifted and bore me down, the great indrawing and exhalation of the world’s breath the only sound I heard. Other times I was assailed by faces that loomed out of the fog and spoke to me: My father saying, “Sleep, Little Bird”; my aunt telling me to take the box, open it; my infant son babbling his first “Mama”; Monica’s “I dreamed of a young man” and Nebridius’s “Naiad.”

  Augustine saying, “I will always love you.”

  I regained my wits only after summer had passed and the grapes were purpling on the vine, the wheat cut and shaken onto the threshing floor and gathered into the barns. I awoke to a world of plenty under a sun that dripped amber over fields and orchards, a final sweet blessing before the pinch of winter. It was the time of year my father always returned from his travels, and as I lay looking through a window at the beauty of a world divesting itself of its gorgeous apparel before its long sleep, it came to me that I had willfully done to my son what my father, against his will, had done to me.

  That first winter at the farm I remember as a monochrome of gray and black, a charcoal drawing of lines and empty space—the white square of my room, the window that, on warmer days, darkly framed the outline of a yet darker tree; on colder days, wooden shutters blocked out the light and left me in perpetual dusk, the red eye of a brazier in the corner of the room a sun forever sinking. I lay in half-light in a half-world, the sounds of life beyond my door of footsteps, hushed voices, the clatter of wooden bowls, and, once, the snuffle of a dog before a sharp command drew it away as alien to me as words spoken in a foreign tongue.

  During the worst of my illness, a woman tended me and often, when I opened my eyes, she was sitting by my bed. She smiled and called me Domina, but I turned my head away confused, not knowing to whom she spoke. She lifted me, bathed me, fed me, and sometimes I thought I was a child again, that she was my aunt, and all that I remembered as the past but a dream of things to come.

  One morning when I was strong enough to sit up and eat, the woman who was tending me put a rolled piece of parchment in my hand.

  “This came by messenger when you were sick,” she said. “It has been waiting for you to read.”

  She smiled at me as she picked up the tray lying on the bed. “My name is Tanit, Domina,” she said. “I am the housekeeper.”

  I stared at her, not fully comprehending. For a moment, I did not understand, then
comprehension slowly dawned. The voices I had heard beyond my door were the people of my household. I was their mistress. And it came to me that the time had come when I could no longer be a child, that I could no longer hide in my room while the life of the household, the farm, continued without me. I must rise from my bed and be a woman, a true domina like Monica, not a pampered, enervated thing like Nebridius’s mother, waited on by servants.

  “Thank you, Tanit,” I said. “I think I will get up today.”

  She was a tall, strongly built woman of about my own age and of my own race with hair that shone like polished onyx. Named after the consort of Ba’al Hammon, the Punic sky god, she reminded me of Neith.

  She looked surprised. “Are you sure, mistress?” she asked. “Are you strong enough?”

  I drew back the covers and swung my legs to the side of the bed. They looked pale and sticklike. I drew down my shift to cover them.

  “I am quite sure,” I said, although now that I was standing I was not. I felt as weak as a newborn kitten.

  Tanit put down the tray and quickly came to me, throwing a warm robe about my shoulders. With an arm around my waist, the way Augustine had held me when I was recovering from childbirth, she helped me to a wicker chair under the window. When I was safely seated, she drew up a footstool, placed my bare feet on it, and covered me with heavy sheepskin rugs.

  “There,” she said, putting her hands on her hips and looking down at me. “That should do.” She placed a beaker of honey water on a table beside me and a small bronze bell. “Ring if you need anything,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  She smiled at me again. “It is good to see you up,” she said shyly. “There were times we thought we would lose you.”

  “I am well now,” I said.

  “Yes,” she replied. “I can see that you are.”

  “And Tanit?”

  She stopped in the doorway.

  “Thank you for nursing me through my sickness.”

  A look of surprise briefly flickered over her face and then she nodded quickly and left the room.

  When she had gone I sat looking at the parchment in my hand. Then with fingers that shook, I unfurled it and read:

  Dearest Love,

  What can I say? I have no words. This great Orator of Milan, this eloquent wordsmith, has no words. For you left so I would rise in my profession, to make possible what my restlessness craved, yet now I am struck dumb. All that I wanted before—position, fame, the praise of influential men—is so much chaff in the wind. A marriage to advance my career? The very thought appalls.

  Yes, my love; it was my ambition that drove you away.

  Forgive me: I should have done more to persuade you to stay; I should have prevented you from leaving.

  I know now that my mother was right when she said I seduced you on a path that would bring your ruin. For I made you leave your child and so your heart also bleeds from a wound that may never heal. Your courage overwhelms me, humbles me, shames and rebukes me. Compared to you, I am nothing. Less than nothing.

  You told me I never lied to you but that is not true: I lied to myself and so I lied to you. In my pride, I thought I could have whatever I desired. The first moment I saw you in the church with the light enveloping you like a gorgeous mantle, I knew you were the one. And I determined to have you. Like the pears, I stretched out my hand and you, in your innocence and trust, took it. But not content with having you, I despoiled the tree, the source of life itself. My restless heart has destroyed all that is good and true and beautiful. It was not Eve that plucked the fruit, but Adam.

  My heart is cut and wounded, a trail of blood stretching between us from Italy to Africa.

  I can write no more. Forgive me if you can.

  Always,

  Augustine.

  I traced his name with my fingers. The same extravagant flourish of the A and g compared to the neatness of the other letters, the thousand times I had seen him make this mark, as familiar to me as the color of his eyes, the feel of his body against mine. And I could hear his voice in his words as clearly as if he were standing there.

  Smoothing out the parchment I saw a postscript at the bottom. Instantly, I recognized the hand:

  p.s. Papa is sad. I am too. We miss you. I am sorry I did not hug you when you left. I was angry then but am not angry now. Just sad. I love you.

  Your son,

  Adeodatus

  p.p.s. Papa says I can come and visit soon.

  CHAPTER 28

  In early March I was strong enough to sit outside and turn my face toward the soft African sun, and as the earth revived so did my body but my spirit remained stricken. I longed for the sight of Augustine and my son more than I longed for the warmth and light of summer, more than for life itself. During the winter, the shipping lanes were closed and I received no more letters. The one I had was so worn with reading and rereading that I feared it would disintegrate in my hands.

  As my health returned so did an interest in the farm. Despite my travels with my father, I had been a city child and knew little of country ways. The house itself was of moderate size and comprised a single story set around a courtyard in the Roman fashion: a small entrance hall led into a modest-sized atrium with a rectangular pool and fountain open to the sky; to the right under a pillared walkway lay three bedroom cubicles with only the master bedroom large enough for windows set in two adjoining walls at the corner of the house. My bed was beside one window and a wicker basket-chair and footstool stood before the other, a table and chest the only other furniture. A reception room was situated to the left of the atrium opposite the bedrooms with a kitchen and small vegetable garden at the back of the house.

  Compared to the cramped apartments in which I had lived most of my life until we moved to Milan, this house was more spacious than I could have hoped. Best of all, set a little way from the main house but joined to it by a trellised walkway was a tiny bathhouse. During my long convalescence I spent many hours sitting in the steam room as if the sweat that ran from my body could purge me of the poison in my soul.

  With the house came slaves who I learned, when I was strong enough to go to Carthage to consult Nebridius’s lawyer, were now transferred to my ownership. This was the first time in my life I had owned property, and I recalled the estates my father and I had visited, the slaves we saw there, some happy and well-fed, many starved and beaten, and the strange feeling, almost of guilt, that I was freeborn. I wondered then, as I wonder now, what makes the gods decide who shall be free and who a slave, who will conquer and who will be overthrown. It seemed a cruelty beyond all cruelties that when I was poor I was free and now I had means I was a nothing. Gradually, my shame of ownership grew to love, especially when I recalled my servants had saved my life when I lay sick, performing all those intimate tasks while I lay helpless as a newborn.

  More than anything else, it was the life of the farm that revived me, the life of its people. Tanit I began to know during my illness, the other members of my household during my convalescence: Anaxis, the steward who had fetched me from the ship and brought me here; Anzar, the foreman of the farm, a man most skilled with his hands who could fashion a new pump for the well just by looking at the broken one. Often I would see him crouching down before something he had disassembled and spread out on the ground before him, turning over this piece or that in his hands and then squinting at the sky for long moments.

  “He tells me he is thinking when he does that,” Tanit said when she caught me watching him. “He says Ba’al Hammon inspires him. Me? I just think he’s puzzled.” And she laughed and when she saw me smile she nodded to herself as if she had acco
mplished what she set out to do.

  Anzar and Tanit, I soon saw, loved each other although they thought I did not notice. I would see them looking at one another across the kitchen table, hot, hungry looks, and once, when I had gone for a walk along the road at sunset, I saw them outlined against the red of the sky holding hands, their heads bent close as if they talked. As I walked back to the house, I felt a kind of happiness, the first since leaving Italy, and I determined to do all in my power to help them. From that moment a plan began to form in my mind.

  A few weeks later I summoned them to me. I had had my bed moved to the far wall and a table and a straight-backed chair placed under the window. It was the exact placement of Augustine’s desk in our apartment in the street of the silversmiths, and sitting at it with the afternoon sun falling on my books, I felt close to him, would often sit gazing out of the window, unseeing, wondering what he did, what he felt, if he had forgiven himself. Seeing my son. It was here at the desk that I wrote to him and Adeodatus every week, saving up the letters until the trade routes opened in the spring.

  Tanit arrived wiping her hands on her apron, Anzar with a streak of dirt across his forehead from repairing a wall in the lower pasture. They stood a little apart, and aside from the briefest glance at one another, there was no indication they were a couple. I smiled a little to myself at that and thought that Augustine and I must have been just as transparent.

  “Tanit, Anzar,” I said. “Do you love each other?” I had decided the direct approach was the best.

  Then they did look at each other and their glance was so full of longing that the brisk demeanor I had decided to adopt almost failed me.

  “We do, mistress,” Tanit said.