The Confessions of X

by Suzanne M. Wolfe

  “I should squeeze the juice from these,” I said, indicating the pomegranates on the trees in the atrium. “I owe you.”

  She laughed. “Tanit’s recipe is sufficient recompense, my dear.”

  I had given Adeodatus the tunic I made for his birthday. It was a little short but it fit him in the shoulders.

  “That’s the main thing,” Perpetua said. “I see you wisely left a good hem.”

  I smiled at Tanit, for that had been her suggestion.

  “It can be easily let down,” Perpetua said. “Turn around, nephew.”

  We had made Adeodatus get up on a chair in the middle of the atrium, and Perpetua, Tanit, and I were walking around him, pulling on the material and measuring it critically with a piece of yarn. I especially wanted to be sure to get the right fit and jotted down his measurements on the silver-framed wax tablet Monica had given me all those years ago in Thagaste. Come winter, instead of pining for the spring, I intended to make him a full set of new clothes, which I would present to him on his next visit. I was already anticipating his delight.

  Adeodatus was a little embarrassed at being the center of all this female attention but he endured it stoically, obediently turning and straightening his shoulders when we told him he was slouching. But at last, even his patience wore thin.

  “Mama,” he said, “can I get down? Rusticus wants to show me the new foal.”

  And so we had pity on him and let him go. He ran outside and I could hear him shouting for Rusticus. The sound was so sweet to my ears that I suddenly felt dizzy and had to sit down.

  “Are you all right?” Perpetua asked, concerned.

  I nodded.

  “It’s because your blood is still thin after your illness,” Tanit said and she went to fetch the apple cider she had made from last year’s crop.

  At mealtimes I loved to watch Adeodatus eat, his appetite insatiable, Tanit nodding with approval as he cleaned his food bowl twice and asked for more. When at last his hunger was sated and the lamps lit, we would sit in the atrium, me in a chair, my son at my feet, his head laid sleepily against my knees as he was wont to do when a boy, Perpetua sewing quietly in a corner. Tanit, Anzar, and the others would sometimes join us but not often for they knew how precious my time was with my son. This was just one of many loving courtesies they showed me and Adeodatus and my heart was filled with gratitude.

  My son spoke of his father, hesitantly at first because he knew it gave me pain, then with more assurance when I reassured him that I loved to hear his father’s name on his lips, that the pictures he drew for me would be my solace in the years ahead.

  He told me how much happier Augustine was, how filled with faith, how the doubts that had plagued him were quite gone.

  Listening in the darkness with the lamps guttering and the shadows flickering on the walls as if we sat, secretive, in the center of my heart, he conjured Augustine to me, and I could even believe that at any moment he would walk in from his study where he had been writing and bend to kiss me and ruffle his son’s hair.

  I sat quietly and let Adeodatus talk, grateful just to have him with me and make believe we were three together again.

  “Mama,” he said, as if the past and present, boy and man, could mingle in this hushed and half-lit space. “He loves you, misses you every moment, but has found a happiness he did not know before. I can see it on his face. No longer does he strive for something out of reach, like Tantalus, but now holds fast to something real.”

  The purity of his love, of his desire to make things right, his young man’s ardor I had known and loved in Augustine when first we met, pierced my heart. Adeodatus lifted his head to look at me.

  “Losing you broke him,” he said. “But it was needful for him to come to God. He had to lose the thing he loved the most to find what he had been seeking all his life. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, my son,” I said, stroking his head. “I do.”

  Before I was prepared to part with him, the time of Adeodatus and Perpetua’s departure came. Perpetua was to see him to the ship in Carthage and then return to Thagaste and her children.

  “Navigius is still in Milan with Augustine,” she said. “Oh to be a man and travel the world.” For a moment she looked sad and I realized that the life she led in Thagaste must sometimes be dull for her.

  We embraced with many tears. “I will visit again soon,” she said. “If I don’t fall pregnant again, that is.”

  “Not much chance if Navigius is in Italy,” I joked.

  “There’s a thought,” she said, suddenly brightening. “I must admit I am a bit sick of always being with child.”

  Adeodatus helped his aunt into the gig and then turned to me.

  We embraced. Holding him I did not think I would ever have the strength to let him go but, after a long time, I did. I held him at arm’s length so I could look him in the eyes, so tall he had grown.

  “I love you more than I love the world,” I said. “More than I love myself. Remember that I love you, my son.”

  “I love you always,” Adeodatus replied.

  A final kiss, a hand lifted in farewell, and they were gone.

  CHAPTER 33

  After Adeodatus and Perpetua’s visit I was filled with a contentment I had not known since I left Italy. The shortening days of fall, the crops harvested, the fruit picked, the grapes pressed and stored, all this seemed a benediction, a promise that the harvest of my life’s labors was full. I heard there was plague in Carthage but here in the country we passed unscathed. Neither did I fear for my son as he was in Italy, even more removed from the city than I.

  The winter came and, with it, very cold days such as we had seldom known. But Tanit said it was a good sign, that the cold would kill the plague in the city and stop it spreading to the countryside.

  It was at this time that I realized Tanit was with child. I noticed a rounding of her belly when she was stretching to reach a bowl off a high shelf in the kitchen. I should have known before, I chided myself. She had been more tired of late and once I caught her retching in the yard behind the house.

  “You are with child,” I said. “That is wonderful.”

  She smiled shyly. “Yes, Domina. If the gods will it.”

  “How far along?”

  “Four moons,” she replied and I was reminded of Cybele asking me that exact question long ago.

  I determined that nothing would go wrong. I would watch over her like a hawk. With Neith, I had been so ignorant, so inexperienced, I had failed to see the signs that all was not well, at least I had told myself this over the years. Tanit and her baby, I vowed, would live.

  After supper one evening in late spring I was walking along the road, the sun sinking in swathes of crimson in the west, the coolness of the coming night soft against my skin, when I heard a horse approaching. I called out, afraid I would be trampled. A letter, I thought, although I had not hoped to get one so soon. The horse reined in, blowing hard, feet skittering in a shower of stones that stung my ankles.

  “Augustine?” He was just a faint outline against the darkening sky, but I would know him even in pitch blackness.

  He threw himself down from the horse and in the next instant was holding me. I could not believe he was alive and in my arms. Then I drew back. There was something different about him, something dark and terrible in the feel of him.

  Gripping my shoulders hard, he said: “Our son is dead.”

  I did not, could not, understand him. “No,” I said. “The plague was here. It was not in Italy.”

  “We returned to Thagaste two months ago.”

 
“No,” I said again, shaking my head. “No.”

  Ever after, whatever he told me that night about my son’s last days, how the fever had come upon him all at once, one day healthy, the next hot and feverish, how he lay in a delirium for days and then woke one morning serene and lucid with a great thirst, his only thought to be forgiven by God, his last words to me: “Tell Mama I will always love her,” then slipping softly away, as the lamps were lit against the night as if he were a child falling asleep—these images returned always, like the ocean beating on the shore, to the first words I heard: “Our son is dead.”

  The fact of it, those dreadful, final words, was like a mountain rearing in my path, huge, immovable, impossible to climb or circumvent, a dark mass against which I was stopped.

  “It cannot be,” I said, over and over. “It cannot, cannot be.”

  “We buried him,” Augustine told me, “five days ago beside his grandfather in Thagaste. A priest said prayers at his gravesite with incense and the sprinkling of water, all that was proper.”

  I would have climbed down into the grave and held him to my breast, for he was always fearful of being confined, would cry out at night if he became entangled in his sheets. I saw him lying there, gravecloths covering his face, his body wrapped in shrouds, that quickening body I held against me so little time ago, had always held in my heart’s embrace, and now would hold no more, the dark earth falling till he was hidden forever in the ground and me above it.

  I also learned that Monica had died the previous year at Ostia. I bowed my head at this, but my heart was so stunned with grief over my son that I did not know what I felt. My only thought: at least she was spared the sorrow of her beloved grandson’s death.

  We had walked to the house and were standing in the atrium in darkness, our arms around each other, Augustine’s voice, the voice I had longed to hear, now speaking words that were the end of everything. “Our son is dead.”

  We clutched each other as shipwrecked sailors clutch at flotsam in a roaring sea and when they look for land see only a vast emptiness.

  At last we could stand no longer and sank down onto the floor still holding onto each other. We stayed like that all night. I cannot remember if I wept; I cannot remember if Augustine wept. What I can remember is that I knew this was the end, that I had reached the utmost limit of everything I thought I knew or was. All was darkness.

  I must have slept, for when I awoke on the floor of the atrium it was dawn and I was alone. Augustine had covered me with a cloak and laid a pillow under my head. On the floor beside me was a piece of parchment folded into a square. When I opened it, Adeodatus’s ring, the one I had given him when I left Milan, his father’s citizen ring, fell out and rolled across the tiles. I watched it go. It came to rest beneath a table, but I did not stoop to pick it up. Opening my hand, I let the note fall unread. Then I went into my room and closed the door.

  I kept to my room and neither ate nor slept nor did I weep. It was as if time had ceased to flow, as if my son had taken the world with him when he died and left a blankness in which I could not measure my proximity to any living thing nor navigate which direction to go. My body was a nothing, a mere shell, its needs irrelevant, unheeded. I did not even long for death, for if consciousness there was beyond the grave, I was already dead and did not fear it.

  I do not know how the soul survives such things, how the heart still beats, the nerves and sinews obey the mind’s commands and move the limbs though the will is dead. When Tanit came to tend me, I said, “My son is dead,” as if I could explain the whole of it, could make her understand that nothing mattered any longer, that this time my sickness would not depart.

  A year ago my body had revived, grown stronger with the passing of the seasons, linked as it was to the life of all that was, hidden in winter, coming forth in spring when the sleeping earth awoke. Now I was forever invulnerable, cut off from humankind, a thing immortal which neither time nor death could touch. In this way, my son’s death freed me from all fear, for while he was living I had care for him, was fearful of harm from accident, sickness, and the evil of men. Now I felt myself indifferent to life’s sorrows, its vicissitudes, the cruel games it played on men.

  Time passed. In my mind’s eye I saw my son as he had been the last time I saw him, an agony so great I groaned aloud as if I were once again in labor. I saw him running in the fields, his arms held wide as if he were a bird, crying, “Catch me, Mama.” I felt the weight of his head against my knee on those summer nights we talked and then, sometimes, at my breast as if he were a babe again and I were nursing him, his tiny fingers playing with my hair. I heard his laughter, his chatter when a boy telling of a bird’s nest he had found with eggs so blue they looked made of summer sky. I kissed his scrapes and tied his little sandals, watched him fall asleep while my story was yet half-told, one hand curled in mine, the other flung wide across the covers. A thousand images played before my eyes more true than those I saw in the theater at Carthage where I laughed and wept to see the tragedies and comedies of men upon a stage, knowing them for make-believe.

  CHAPTER 34

  I do not know how many weeks passed only that I might have crouched there forever in my room had a piercing cry not shattered the night and tore the bindings from my shrouded heart. It was an animal’s cry, long drawn out, utterly wild until suddenly cut off. Then it came again and, after it, the frenzied barking and howling of the dogs. Throwing on a cloak I ran out into the night toward the house where Tanit and Anzar lived.

  The scene was utter confusion, the air choking with incense, someone’s muttered incantation, a crowding of bodies around the bed and on it Tanit, half lying, half sitting, knees drawn up, her face a tragic mask, her hair like Medusa’s, her mouth a black hole out of which that inhuman keening started up again.

  “Mistress, mistress,” someone implored.

  “Anaxis,” I said. “Silence those dogs.” I pushed Anzar down on a stool by the head of the bed. “Hold her hand,” I commanded. “Speak to her.”

  His lips moved but no sound came out, his face ashen. Then, as if awakening from a trance, he took his wife’s hand and leaned in towards her. “My love,” I heard him whisper. “My strong goddess.”

  An image of Neith laboring in vain with Tanzar praying beside her came to me.

  “Maia,” I said, “run to the main house and heat water; take the sheets from my bed and tear them into squares.”

  Her eyes were fixed with horror on Tanit, her hand covering her mouth as if to stifle a scream. Barely out of girlhood, she had shrunk into the smallest spaces of her mind the way a woodland creature will crouch motionless in the hollow of a tree when a predator is near.

  “Go,” I said, pushing her. “And bring a sharp knife. Make sure you boil it first.”

  I leaned over Tanit, waiting for her pains to ease, speaking softly. “I am going to feel inside you to see if the baby is stuck. It will hurt and I am sorry for it but it must be done.”

  Her eyelids flickered for a moment and I thought I saw her nod. Then she was gone again into that red vortex, swept down against her will, her head rolling from side to side, that awful feral sound issuing again from her lips.

  I waited until Maia returned carrying a bowl of hot water and towels then washed my hands, dried them, and took a flask of olive oil and poured it over my hands until they glistened in the lamplight.

  Tanit lay still.

  “Now,” I said and gently felt between her legs, the flesh taut and hot, impossibly stretched and, at the opening, a round hard lump, the baby’s head. She groaned as I probed deeper, blindly feeling for the face, downwards to the neck then my fingers touched something ropelike. I sat back and wiped my hands.

  Anzar’s eyes were pleading wi
th me but he did not speak. I motioned for Maia to take her place by Tanit’s side then drew him to the door and spoke in a low voice. “The cord is wound around the baby’s neck,” I said. “That is why she cannot push it forth.”

  “You will save them,” he said. “I know you will.”

  “I will try,” I replied. “Stay with her a moment.”

  I left the house and went to find Rusticus. He was standing by the barn; I could hear the dogs whining and scratching at the door behind him but, mercifully, they had ceased to howl.

  I explained the position of the baby. “You must help me,” I said.

  “Domina,” he replied, panic in his voice. “I know only animals.”

  “Please,” I said, placing my hand on his arm.

  “The gods help us,” he muttered. Then, as if gathering himself: “You must slip the cord over the young one’s head before it chokes,” he said. “Leastways, that is the way of it with calving.”

  “Show me.”

  When we reentered the house I saw Tanit had used up all her strength. Her cries had sunk to moans, her eyes when they flickered open were vacant and unseeing. She was retreating to that place that is the antechamber of death, her body with us still, her soul already on the wing. Anzar’s face in the lamplight, a rictus of despair, but he did not cease his litany of love, a murmured plea for her to rally and to live.

  “You must do it,” Rusticus said. “My hands are too big.”

  Once again I washed my hands and bathed them in oil then, heedless of the pain I would cause, slid them inside Tanit on either side of the baby’s head. Slowly, carefully, with the tips of my fingers groping for purchase, I began to ease the cord toward me over the child’s head. Many times it slipped from my grasp and I had to begin again. Tanit had ceased to move; Maia was crying quietly in the corner. The others clustered silent in the doorway.