The Confessions of X

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  Papa and I were baptized by Bishop Ambrose—the nice man who came to my birthday dinner. We had to take off all our clothes—it was cold in the room in the back of the church where the font is—and then walk down some steps into a deep octagonal pool; then we ducked down under the water three times as the bishop said prayers. When we came up the third time, we were made new in Christ. Afterwards, we dressed in white robes and processed into the church. Avia was crying. I don’t think I have ever seen her cry before. She told me they were happy tears, which I thought was an odd thing.

  The ceremony was exciting but I don’t feel any different inside, which surprised me. I thought I would feel holy, clean somehow. But I am happier now, Mama, although it is painful not seeing you every day, not feeling your arms about me . . .

  Here, I had to lay the letter down, for tears blurred my eyes and I could not read on. After a while, I resumed:

  . . . not hearing your voice or your laugh. The hardest time of the day is when I go to bed, for then everything is quiet and it is as if there is a big hole in the world. How I long for you to come in and say good night as you used to. Avia said that this is the time I should think of you especially and say a prayer for you, that your broken heart will soon mend, that you are well and happy, that I will see you soon. So I do.

  Papa has some good news to tell you so I will not say anything but let him tell you himself but only say, I am happy about it. I was very angry with him at first; I blamed him for sending you away. Then Avia told me that you and he were forced to do it for Papa and his career. Then I was angry at the world for being the way it is. I think I will always hate the world but I can never hate you and Papa.

  Avia says that she has never seen such great love as yours in all her life. I think so too. It reminds me of Jesus’s mother giving her son for the salvation of the world and watching him die on the cross. I think it must have been a kind of death for you to leave us. I know it felt like death to me and Papa. I keep seeing you alone on the ship taking you back to Africa and it makes me cry. I am sorry I did not understand it then but I do now.

  Avia has been a little sick but she says she is over that now. I think she still feels a bit poorly but she won’t admit it. She is funny that way. I try to help her as much as I can around the house, and we go to market together and I carry her basket.

  My studies are going well; Papa and I are reading the Scriptures together. I like the stories a lot, especially the one about the Prodigal Son.

  Avia is calling so I must go. I love you Mama. I miss you. Write soon and tell me all about the farm. Nebridius has described it, but I want to hear about it from your own lips. May God bless you and keep you safe. Avia sends her love. So does Uncle Navigius.

  Always, always your dearest son,

  Adeodatus xxx

  Now it was my turn to cry tears of joy. Yes, my son, I thought. It is a strange thing that happiness makes us cry. As if at the heart of every joy there is a loss but somehow this makes it all the sweeter.

  It was as if Adeodatus had been speaking to me in my room so clearly did I hear his voice. I marveled at the wisdom of his heart, the depth of his understanding, could see how much he had matured, how much the boy was growing into a man. In a few weeks he would turn twelve. I kissed his name and the three little crosses he had made over and over, careful not to wet them with my tears and smudge the ink. Then I sat perfectly still, loath to break the spell, the sense that he was a living presence in the room with me. A night bird sent its piercing song into the darkness and the tree outside my window rustled, a faint breeze stirring its leaves. The sweet scent of jasmine came to me on the air.

  After a long time, I laid the letter down and picked up the one from Augustine.

  Dearest Love:

  If you are reading this then Nebridius will have told you that I am betrothed. And Adeodatus will have told you that I have something important to tell you, for I know that your mother’s heart will read his letter first.

  Know that I have broken off the betrothal.

  I broke off the betrothal, for it was nothing but a stepping stone to higher preferment at court and utterly abhorrent to me for a woman to be sold so I could rise in the world, although her father was eager to do it. I have informed Symmachus that I am resigning from my post as orator. He is disappointed in me, but Ambrose says I am doing the right thing.

  Once I had rid myself of the burden of my ambition, I began to ponder the meaning of my life, of how I had come to be in the place I found myself, losing everything I held dear. For my profession I found I did not care a straw.

  Slowly I began to understand what you taught me by loving me. When I spoke of beauty and love before, they were just ideas, but you taught me to know them as experiences. The beauty of you is indistinguishable from your love. Or, to put it another way: love is the beauty of the soul. This you have always known; this I have come to understand late.

  But who can map the various forces at play in our souls? Man is a great depth; the hairs of his head are easier by far to count than his feelings, the secret movements of his heart.

  I was hidden from myself but I was not hidden from you. And in the mirror of your loving gaze I saw myself. And I am not hidden from God. And in the mirror of His loving gaze I now see myself.

  But even then I held back from accepting a higher truth—Love itself—for I was afraid of another fall, another loss. And in this condition of suspense I felt myself dying inside.

  In the months before you left me—that terrible winter—I know now that God was calling and shouting and trying to break down my defenses, the pride in my own reason, in my cleverness, in my soul. He flashed, shone, and scattered my blindness. He touched me and I burned.

  In your sacrifice I saw the sacrifice of Christ, a love so perfect He was prepared to die on a cross to save a wretched sinner such as myself.

  Your going was a great evil to me—the greatest I have ever known—but good has come out of it. At least, I begin to feel the good although I am often wracked by fear and doubt and longing. Such longing for you I sometimes fear I will go mad.

  Forgive my rambling. Nebridius is even now booted and cloaked for his journey to you, so I must finish this long letter more hastily than I intended.

  What the future holds I cannot tell. I only know that I will trust in God’s mercy and grace.

  When Nebridius returns to Milan we will go—Adeodatus, Nebridius, Navigius, my mother, and I—to a friend’s villa near Lake Como in Cassiciacum. There I hope to make a retreat so I can more clearly see my way.

  I do not ask you to forgive me. I only pray that you may find happiness.

  Augustine

  Blindly, I put down the letter. If to love another is to desire their happiness above all things no matter what the cost, then my soul rejoiced that Augustine had found a kind of peace. But my heart was sorrowful unto death. He had broken his betrothal only to make another more indissoluble than the first: He had betrothed himself to God.

  CHAPTER 31

  Nebridius stayed at the farm for two weeks. We did not speak of the letters, and I was glad, for my heart was still heavy with sorrow and I could not find the words. Instead, each day we walked the property lines of the farm with Anzar. Five winters older than me, he and Tanit had been born into servitude on another property owned by Nebridius’s family. Tanit looked on this as their good fortune, for, she told me, the master was kind and just, never beat or starved them, and they had never known another life. She spoke of Nebridius’s family as if it were her own, with pride at their accomplishments and wealth.

  “They love you,” Nebridius said.

  We were sitting outside on the last
night of his visit, both loath to go to bed but with hearts too heavy for conversation knowing that, in a few hours, we must part. A full moon cast a light like early dawn, pale, tentative, and ghostly, only the silence of the birds a sign it was full night and not the beginning of a new day, so quiet I could hear the hollow clack of the cattle bells in the far pasture and, nearer, the soft whinny of a horse in the paddock.

  “This is my home now,” I said. “I will never leave.”

  I heard Nebridius turn toward me but kept my eyes on the road which, like a silver arrow, pointed due north toward the sea and to Italy.

  “You know Augustine loves you,” he said. “Will always love you.”

  “I know.”

  “But he is set on a different path now.”

  “I know.”

  He touched my shoulder.

  “I must to bed,” he said, getting up and stretching. “I have a long ride in the morning.” He was returning to his country estate and from thence to Carthage to see his lawyer about redrawing his will. “For you never know,” he said.

  I shivered and drew my shawl more closely around me although the night was warm.

  “Do not talk of dying,” I said.

  He laughed. We embraced.

  “Dear Nereus,” I said. “Take care.”

  “And you, my Naiad.”

  My son turned twelve in midsummer, and I celebrated by reading his letters and began to make him a new tunic from wool I had woven, dyed a brilliant shade of crimson, although I feared it would be too small. Tanit found me sitting with it in my lap in tears.

  “I do not know his size,” I said.

  She put her arms around me. “Don’t fret, Domina,” she said. “Boys that age grow like weeds. No mother can keep up. When he visits you can adjust it.”

  Comforted by her words, I resumed stitching.

  Late summer began its slow slide into autumn, the days shorter but still hot, the nights cool. I had now been at the farm a year and still had not set eyes on my son. I dreaded the turning of the seasons, for then the seas would close to ships and I would neither see nor hear from my son until spring. I would be like Proserpina in the underworld, longing for the touch of sunlight on her face.

  One afternoon I was in the orchard gathering windfalls, a basket propped against my hip, my skirts twisted up through my girdle so my legs were free, feet bare so I must tread carefully amongst the wasps. Tanit had injured her back lifting a heavy cauldron off the fire and she could not lift the baskets. I had made her sit in a cane chair with her feet propped up as once I had done at Monica’s house long ago. She protested, saying it was not right that I, the mistress, should work and she, a mere servant, should take her ease, but I told her that gathering fruit on a golden day in fall was not hard labor, and besides, she could sort the apples into those we would keep for drying from those too bruised and wormy. Mollified, she consented to sit, and, glancing at her soon after, I saw she had fallen into a doze, the apples she had been sorting fallen off her lap onto the grass.

  The day was warm, the air heady with the scent of fomenting fruit, Anzar’s voice sounding now and then behind the house as he directed Rusticus and Marcellinus. After freeing my household, I had ordered new dwellings to be built—a small house with two bedchambers for Anzar and Tanit and for Maia—Tanit insisted Maia live with them as she did not trust Marcellinus to keep his lustful hands off her. A long, low building divided into individual rooms and a central living space and kitchen was for the single men. We would all, I announced, use the bathhouse, mornings for the women, afternoons for the men as it was done in Carthage and Rome. They gaped at me and I did not know whether it was because of the luxury of hot water instead of the icy water from the well or the prospect of daily bathing that astonished them the most.

  Soon after I had manumitted them, Marcellinus took it in his head to see the world. I gave him a purse of money, Tanit gave him food, and Anzar gave him an earful of advice, which I could see Marcellinus ignored. He returned a month later, his money all spent on wine and games of dice, sheepishly asking to be taken on again. Anzar winked at me over his head as the youth stood looking at his feet, a picture of dejection.

  “I think we can find you something, lad,” he said. “How does cleaning out the pigs sound?”

  I was smiling to myself as I remembered this and thinking that Marcellinus was like the Prodigal Son, Adeodatus’s favorite parable, when Tanit awoke and cried: “Domina! Someone is coming.”

  I heard the sound of hooves. Dropping my basket, I ran to the road and saw a mule-drawn gig approaching. There were two people in it. As it drew nearer I felt a joy so fierce I could not breathe. “Adeodatus,” I whispered. Then a great cry: “Adeodatus!”

  And his aunt was seated next to him. “Perpetua!”

  Adeodatus drew up the mules so suddenly they sat back on their hind legs, their front hooves pawing the air, eyes rolling white.

  “Steady, nephew,” Perpetua said. “You’ll kill us both and we have only just arrived.” Then she, too, was scrambling down.

  Adeodatus threw himself off the gig and, running to me, gathered me in a fierce embrace that drove all the air out of my lungs.

  “Mama,” he said, his face buried in my chest. “Oh, Mama.”

  I was laughing and crying. I could barely speak. “My son, my son.” I could not believe I had the feel of him again, more solid than when I held him last, his shoulders broader, his head on a level with my own. I kissed him over and over again, my tears wetting his face so I did not know if he wept or if it was only I.

  “I am come to visit,” he said and then laughed at the obviousness of his words.

  “Your father?”

  “He is still in Milan,” Adeodatus said. “He has chosen another path. I will tell you about it by and by.”

  I marveled at the firmness of his tone, an assuredness that had not been there before. His eyes, brown and serious, studied mine.

  “All will be well,” he said. “I promise.”

  Perpetua was standing back a little. Over Adeodatus’s shoulder I saw her smiling with tears flowing down her cheeks. At last I released my son and embraced my friend.

  “Perpetua,” I said. “How I have missed you.”

  “And I you, dear sister.” Then she held me away from her and looked at me with her head on one side, pretending to be critical. “Humph,” she said. “We must fatten you up. I will give you some of my flesh. I have enough.”

  She was now a mature matron, her waist thickening a little as she grew into middle age.

  “You are beautiful,” I said. “Blooming.”

  “You are too,” she said. “I am so glad.”

  “How many children now?” I asked as we walked back to the house, Adeodatus on one side and Perpetua on the other, our arms linked. I didn’t think I could ever let go.

  “Five,” she replied. “And, God help me, they are a handful. A bunch of savages.”

  “I know exactly what you mean.” I jerked my head at Adeodatus. “This one drove me near mad at times.”

  And we all burst out laughing and went into the house where Tanit, bless her, was already laying out food and wine in the atrium.

  CHAPTER 32

  Never have I known time to pass so quickly as those weeks I spent with Adeodatus and Perpetua. As I look back, it seems as if each day was haloed by a light more golden than the sun, the heat of it the love that wrapped us round and illumined everything we touched. We were not to be parted, my son and I, nor indeed with Perpetua, although she would sometimes go off by herself to give us time alone. We spent the days sitting side
by side in the orchard or walking the lanes and fields about the farm, talking, always talking, the days too short to tell of all we felt.

  Adeodatus had changed greatly in the year we were apart, not just in outward appearance, but in his inmost self. The boy I said good-bye to in Milan was gone, even the boy who wrote me that letter saying how much he missed his mother; a young man stood in his place. I mourned the death of his childish ways, his guileless need of me, but more I felt a pride in him, an enormous thankfulness that I could now depend on him for strength when my courage failed. The only blight upon our time was its brevity, the fact that we knew it must end.

  He told me he was present in the garden when Augustine heard a child singing, “Take it and read, take it and read,” although my son heard nothing.

  “Opening up the Bible, Mother,” he recounted, “Father read: ‘Not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ.’ ”

  “Monica must have been happy,” I said, thinking of the dream she had related all those years before. The young man starving for food she could not give him. My mother’s heart was glad for her, for what mother can watch the suffering of her child?

  “She was,” Adeodatus replied simply. “She said it was a miracle that as St. Paul was freed of his chains by an angel while the guards stood amazed, so too her son had been freed from the chains of his doubt. Afterwards,” he went on, “Father, Nebridius, and I were baptized. We are to go to Cassiciacum on my return to Italy.”

  At the mention of his departure, I grew quiet. He put his arm about my shoulders. “Do not grieve, Mama,” he said. “I will come back. Papa says he will return to Africa, that his future is here and not in Italy.”

  Then he made me laugh by turning cartwheels on the grass, his wise heart knowing that to act the boy would be my greatest comfort.

  Perpetua was interested in every aspect of the farm. She and Tanit spent hours in the kitchen discussing recipes, how best to braise lamb with apples, how to cure a ham whether with applewood or other. She wrote down the recipe for Tanit’s pomegranate preserve.