The Confessions of X (14 page)
After dinner, Monica took me aside.
“This is for you,” she said. “It was my father's.”
It was a wax tablet bound in silver with a silver stylus attached to it on a silver chain. As I turned it over in my hands it grew indistinct for my eyes had filled with tears.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.” Suddenly I was sobbing, a mirror image of the day I arrived, me crying, Monica comforting me. Yet this time I wept out of a kind of sorrowful joy. Sorrow to be leaving, joy to have found someone such as she. It was a far different leave-taking from the one I gave my aunt.
“If you rub the silver with chalk from time to time,” Monica said. “It will keep bright.”
I smiled then through my tears. This piece of practical advice was so like Monica.
“Good,” she said, wiping my cheeks with her thumb. “That is better. Now get some rest, my dear. You have an early start in the morning.”
We left when it was still dark, the birds still silent, the stars still not faded from the sky. Marcus, the steward, and Cyrus held torches. Monica and Perpetua with their hair still in sleeping braids stood with Navigius in the doorway. I hugged Perpetua one last time and Navigius gave me a chaste peck on each cheek.
“Be well, sister,” he said.
Then I turned to Monica. We embraced in silence and then she drew me a little apart from the others.
“Remember this,” she said softly. “Men think themselves strong, though they are weak; women are strong, though we are thought weak. It falls on us to bear the sorrows of this world.” Then she made a tiny sign of the cross with her thumb on her grandson's forehead and kissed him. “Take good care of them both.”
“I will,” I said.
Augustine kissed his mother's hand and bowed to her. I saw the pain at his formality flit across her face though she smiled at him. Then she reached up and cupping her palms on either side of his face she looked deep into his eyes.
“A wise man once told me,” she said, “the son of so many tears will not be lost.” And pulling down his head she kissed him on the forehead. “Go with God.”
Augustine embraced his sister-in-law and brother, shook Cyrus's hand, and helped me up into the cart.
As we pulled away, I looked back. Monica and Perpetua stood there waving; then we turned a bend in the road and they vanished from sight.
T
hus we returned to Carthage, retracing the road we had traveled five months before, I holding our child upon my knee or suckling him in my arms, Augustine driving the mules that pulled our cart, the darkness that had settled on him since the death of his friend lifting fraction by fraction as the miles flowed beneath our wheels. In a wicker basket on the seat between us I could hear the jostle and knock of the wooden bosses of Augustine's scrolls, those most precious instruments of his livelihood containing tales of others' lives like Dido and Aeneas, Orpheus and Eurydice. With the securing of a position as a teacher of rhetoric in Carthage, Augustine was full of hope that at last all his desires would come to pass. And because he wished it, so did I.
Monica had pressed amphorae of wine, food, and cooking utensils on us as well as a gift of fine linen baby clothes woven by her own hand. I held them to my cheek, their scent and softness, the tiny regularity of the stitches, a remembrance of all that I loved about this woman. She had given us the names of Christian landholders who would be glad to shelter us on our journey, but we seldom stopped there, preferring to sleep out in the soft African
night with an ocean of stars above our heads like myriad eyes, bright and watchful.
We were young and hopeful as only the young can be. Augustine's bruised soul soon mended, and after its ordeal in childbirth, my body soon healed and one soft night, the air fragrant with the smell of apples and cut wheat, I took him once again to my bed.
There were many travelers on the road: farmers on their way to market driving patient oxen pulling loaded wagons. Field slaves bending in the vineyards straightened up, fists knuckling their backs in brief respite from their labor, and stared at us as we passed. We pulled aside when the rich passed by, their body-slaves roiling up the dust as they tramped by shouldering their mistress's litter, and sometimes a curtain would twitch aside and a lady's face would look out and smile to see my son so round-eyed at the spectacle. The land lay rich and replete as far as the eye could see, the wheat stirring and riffling in the wind, the vines marching in serried ranks to the furthermost distance where terra-cotta tiles glowed among the deepest green of ancient pines like molten honey in the sun.
The heat of our African summer had faded the land to yellow, but all about us, in hedgerow and ditch, field and orchard, flowers grew rampant. As my father and I had walked together on our journeys, we would play a game, matching colors we saw with stones he used to make his pictures: jasper for poppies, lapis for streams, ivory for jasmine, amethyst for violets. Seldom was I at a loss and my father laughed with pride at my knowledge of his craft. Now I pointed to flowers and cattle and sheep and birds and named them for my son in Punic, my mother's tongue. Augustine
laughed and told me he was too young to understand, and, besides, Latin would be his language, but I replied that words were music and when he was older he would recognize their melody like a lullaby sung to him while he slept and, in so remembering, give honor to the grandmother he never knew.
One afternoon near the end of our journey, after a trying day with Adeodatus who had cried and cried, his face flushed, his body hot and squirming in my lap so I could hardly hold him, we turned into a gate that led to a large estate. As we passed the regular plantings of poplars on either side of the road, I remembered a summer long ago when my father and I had trudged wearily up this same road at dawn.
When the house came into view I knew it. It was Nebridius's.
“We must rest here,” Augustine said. “The babe is unwell. Perhaps there is someone here who can physic him.”
The same steward who had approached my father to consult with him on the work he was to do came out to greet us. He did not recognize me so changed was I from the scabby-kneed urchin who had once run riot with the master's son seven years before. The dominus had received a letter from his son saying that we might visit, the steward said, and bowing led us indoors.
This was the first time I had entered through the front entrance but inside it was as familiar to me as my own home. The polished marble floors where Nebridius and I had run and slid, whooping with merriment until shooed away by cross servant-girls who said we tracked in dirt from outside and the floors only just swept. The rooms where we played hide-and-seek behind the stiff, gilt-legged couches, their plump and tasseled cushions handy missiles for us
to throw. The fountain in the central atrium where we had sat on blistering noontimes when the rest of the household lay flattened by the heat, idly flicking water at each other before drifting to the kitchens to see what we could filch, for in those days we were perpetually hungry and the cook was kind and winked at our thefts. Our preferred playground, however, was the gardens, woods, and fields that surrounded the property and I determined to explore all our secret places on the following day, the landscape of a time before Augustine and I met yet linked to the future by our love for Nebridius.
The steward informed us that the family was away, staying at a hunting lodge in the mountains to escape the heat of the plains surrounding Carthage. He showed us to a guest room. As I laid Adeodatus on the bed to change him I wondered if it was fate or chance that had returned me to this place.
Augustine had never been to Nebridius's family estate before so it was I who led him to the bathhouse behind the main building.
Strange it was to return to this place with my own child, my father's grandson. As I stepped from the dazzling light of outside into the half gloom of the bathhouse, I half expected to hear the sound of my father's voice calling to me to hurry, Little Bird, bring water, the plaster sets; I expected to hear the chink of tiles being sorted, the slosh of water in a bucket just put down.
It was here my father had labored so long and painstakingly that summer, and I entered with a prickling of my scalp as if I would see him crouching there still fixing the tesserae into the mortar before it dried, quickly yet precisely, the motion of his fingers never faltering. It was a wonder to me that however small the
area he worked, he could always keep the greater design in his head even without the underdrawing he had sketched in charcoal before the plaster was spread. He told me the lines he made with charcoal were drawn onto the tablet of his mind and so he could remember them even when obscured. I thought then that all his love and patient teaching were the shadowy lines that lay beneath the design of my life, hidden yet immutable, never to be erased, dictating who I was and would always be.
Adeodatus fussed and moved restlessly in my arms. Kneeling, I placed him gently on the floor and took off his clothes, and then I undressed myself until I was only wearing my shift.
“I must cool him,” I told Augustine.
“Be careful,” Augustine replied. “The steps are slippery.”
Augustine steadied me as I carefully descended the steps into the pool, Adeodatus naked in my arms. Sitting on the middle step, the water lapping around my waist, I held Adeodatus in the crook of my arm and scooped water over his limbs with my hand, stroking his hot little body to gentle him. At first he flinched to feel this strange sensation on his skin and then he began to move his arms and legs as if he were trying to swim.
Augustine laughed. “My son the water beetle.” Stripping off his clothes, he slipped into the pool beside me. Taking our child from me, he stepped down until his feet rested on the bottom and waded out to the center of the pool where he stood, chest-deep, holding his son in his two hands on the surface of the water.
Adeodatus was quiet now and blinked up at Augustine astonished that his world should suddenly turn to liquid as if he had been changed into a fish. I laughed out loud at his look of surprise,
so comical and innocent it was, the sound echoing in the vaulted chamber. A shaft of sunlight slanting through an upper window drew Adeodatus's eye from his father's face down to where the sun shone full on me.
“Look,” Augustine said softly.
My infant son was smiling at me, the first smile he ever made, as if astounded to discover his mother's face. Laughing with delight at this miracle of his first knowing, I waded out toward him.
“Your grandfather made this place,” I told him, tickling his tummy. “Isn't it beautiful?” Then I put my arms around Augustine's bare back so I could hold them both and laid my cheek against it.
In the center of the ceiling was Neptune, god of the deep, part man, part fish, trident raised aloft, sea monsters curled around his torso, giant sinuous bodies, webbed, scaled, and finned, monstrous mouths agape, the design seeming to churn yet ever still, the bright reflection of the pool rippling continuously over its surface so that the ocean seemed alive.
Not for my father a mere catalogue of creatures raised in nets and brought dripping to the marketplace, a sight unremarkable to any householder or market slave. He had reached inside his mind and made a drama of his own devising, a thing of power and mystery, a language for the awe that mariners felt, the tales they told in taverns of monsters glimpsed through waves as tall as mountains as if they swam behind a wall of glass.
Although the bathhouse was roofed and had windows set in each wall to aid in heating, my father had ordered extra windows cut high up near the roof so sunlight fell upon the floor. As the sun altered its position in the sky, a shaft of light lit up the precious
stones he used as accents and flung back brilliants of amethyst, carnelian, and lapis lazuli.
“This is his greatest work,” I said. “He never made a better.”
“No, you are mistaken,” Augustine replied. “
You
are his greatest work.”
W
e stayed four days at the home of Nebridius, until whatever childhood ailment that had afflicted Adeodatus passed, and then continued on our way toward Carthage, such a familiar route the shade of my father seemed to walk beside me as if I were a girl again and we were going home, the job done.
We reached Carthage as the west flamed crimson like a praetorian's cloak flung carelessly across the sky, the last in a long line of weary travelers eager to pass through the city gates before curfew, the soldiers stationed there shouting at us to get along, impatient for the taverns. Behind us the northern gates groaned shut, the crossbar clanged on iron brackets then the creak of leather greaves, the tramp of hobnailed boots as the soldiers marched away.
We made our way to the apartment Nebridius had rented for us. It was on the ground floor of a six-story insula near the street of the silversmiths where in daytime the air was filled with the sound of the workmen's tiny hammers, the soft clash of wares hanging from their stalls, and the bitter odor of molten metal. It was not far from the shop where my father had made the memorial for the little girl not many years before.