The Confessions of X (18 page)

I looked down and saw a tiny bronze figurine of a Punic goddess. It was not Astarte, for it did not have a crescent moon, but another goddess.

“She is the consort of Anzar, the god of rain,” Tazin explained. “Neith had a special devotion to her.”

I kissed it, then closed my fingers around it. It fit perfectly in my palm, entirely hidden in my flesh. Bereft of words, I nodded. For the first time since Neith's death I felt tears cloud my eyes. Perhaps it was the rain god who blessed me, perhaps Neith herself, but suddenly I was weeping, a flood I could not stop, a tempest so violent it made me shudder. I held onto myself and collapsed forward. Like my aunt. Like Neith when her pains had come upon her. Then Augustine's arms were about me, holding me.

Neith,
I wept.
Friend. Woman of Iron.

And then all at once I was laughing, tears raining down my face.

Prone to rust when wet.

The next day I bid Tazin and the children good-bye, holding the little ones tightly one by one. I stroked Mena's head and put a honey cake in her hand. She looked at me as her father lifted her into the cart and fluttered sticky fingers at me, a tiny gesture of farewell. Gil I did not shame by hugging but shook him solemnly by the hand.

“Take care of your brothers and sisters,” I told him.

He nodded, hitched his belt the way his father did, then swarmed onto the bench beside Tazin all arms and legs and scabby knees. I hid a smile. Augustine, Adeodatus, and I, Lena and Maris and their families, and even ancient Sylvia leaning on her stick waved until they turned a corner.

CHAPTER 18

I
t is good to see you smile again,” Augustine said, stroking my cheek. We were lying in each other's arms worn out, close to sleep. I had come to him parched, starved for his touch, a wanderer in a desert who, half-crazed, glimpses city walls in the distance but fears it is a mirage. The frenzy of our joining, the sweet long drawn-out violence of it told me it was no illusion but fact. And from the ardor of his caresses, I knew that Augustine, too, had been in exile though I did not know then how far he had roamed within the desert of his mind.

It was the night of Saturnalia and the streets rang with drunken laughter and shouts. We did not celebrate Saturnalia with pagan customs but by going to the theater, something we had done often before our son was born but seldom since we returned to Carthage.

One evening we got dressed up—I in a new dress Nebridius had given me for my eighteenth birthday in the autumn, Augustine in a tunic I had embroidered at the neck and hem—and strolled
through the darkening streets to the theater. The night was cold and I walked with my green cloak wrapped around me. Adeodatus was riding on his father's shoulders, his splendid green boots drumming on his father's chest, eyes fever-bright in the moving torchlight, a chubby finger pointing out things for naming—“What that?” forever on his lips—the whole world a puzzle and delight until we took our seats. The cadence of the poetry soon lulled him into drowsiness, his chin sinking, then jerking upright, then sinking again, two fingers slipping slickly from his mouth as he sank deeper into slumber from which nothing, not even the audience's thunderous applause, could disturb. I drew my cloak around him and the warm hump of his body curled against mine made me long to be with child again.

I sat with my son in my lap, Augustine's arm around me, and listened to Virgil, that greatest of all the Roman poets, tell of the tragic love between Dido, Queen of Carthage, and Aeneas, who forsook her for a kingdom, a story engraved on every Punic heart down to the last syllable and trope, be it the most scabrous beggar on the temple steps or the wealthiest citizen in Africa Province, a story that bespoke a Roman's callous disregard for our native soil, that most lush of all soils, a land despoiled and then abandoned. This, for me, was heaven.

I close my eyes and Dido is in her tower, the ships of Ilium unfurling in the offing, the air so bright, so glassy, she sees her lover, Aeneas, standing at the prow, so clear she can almost touch him though his back is turned. He gazes toward Italy, the Rome that is yet to be.

And behind the Queen, in her chamber, the bed where once he
lay still holds his shape, the pillow the hollow of his head though the sheets are cold. No child of his to hold.

The audience groans, a woman sobs aloud, and no one silences her. Our hearts are Dido's, her anguish our own. She our queen and we her people, who know what the Romans will never know—that love is more than duty. That love is all there is.

Augustine's arm tightens about me and I lean against him.

“I love you,” Augustine whispers in my ear.

“As I do you.”

After the performance we stood on the terrace overlooking the ocean, as the theater was set on the clifftop east of the city. A vast blackness stretched before us, behind us the still-illuminated theater and the lights of the city. Augustine was holding Adeodatus, for he had grown too heavy for me to carry when he was sleeping.

“Remember I said that one day I would leave Carthage and cross the ocean to Italy?” Augustine said.

The gale blowing off the sea was bitter but I did not move closer to him, instead I shifted a little farther away, only a step, but it seemed a great distance. I nodded but I did not know if he could see me in the dark.

“I have decided to apply for a position in Rome,” he said. “Carthage is too far from the center of things. There is no future for me here.”

The wind buffeted me and I braced myself against it, my veil snapping out behind me like a banner. But it was not the wind that chilled me as I waited for him to continue but a terrible fear. The nothingness that stretched endlessly away would be my life if he should go away. I gripped tightly to the balustrade.

I will not stand in his way, I thought. If I have to I will let him go.

When I still did not look at him, Augustine put himself between the parapet and me. The wind instantly stilled.

“You are thinking,” he said, “that I would leave you here.”

When I did not reply, he encircled me with one arm and drew me to him while with the other he still cradled our child. He laughed softly. “Do you think I would go without you? Do you think me Aeneas, my love? And you Dido, Queen of Carthage?”

I shook my head, ashamed for doubting him, but that vision of the blackness that lay beyond remained with me.

“Come,” he said. “It is cold. We should go home.”

Side by side we walked back through the night-lit city, so familiar I did not need to think which turn to take, which street, for I had lived within its walls all my life. Never had I considered leaving Africa, the land of my heritage, the land that was as known to me as my own body, as my lover's, my child's. As we walked my fears receded and were replaced by an eagerness so intense I had to stop and catch my breath although the hill we climbed was not so steep. Not to tread on different soil, hear different tongues, taste different foods, see different customs, suddenly was a thing unthinkable though I had not been discontented before. I took Augustine's hand.

For you,
I vowed,
I will go to the farthest reaches of the empire. Say but the word and I will gladly make the wilderness my home.

In my simplicity and ignorance of how the world works, I thought that when Augustine spoke of Rome it was a fact accomplished, for
I could not imagine him wanting something and it not straightway being given him. But after he began applying for teaching posts in Italy and wrote endless letters to would-be patrons who might sponsor his career, stand friend to him at the imperial court in Milan, months dragged by and soon it was more than a year since we had stood that night on the terrace.

Augustine was increasingly discontented with his position as rhetor in Carthage. He often told me hair-raising tales of what his students got up to in the classroom, their rudeness, their drunken pranks—once they put a dead puppy in his scroll case—their cruel bullying of the younger students, fourteen-year-old boys away from home for the first time and easy prey.

“The jokes I can put up with,” he told me one night as we were having dinner. “Even their immense ignorance. But the worst is they change tutors behind my back to avoid paying my fees, these so-called sons of noblemen who have no respect for anything except their own pleasures.”

He looked at me despairingly across the table, and for the first time I noticed dark circles under his eyes put there by the burdens he carried, how to clothe and feed us, his guilt over the poorness of our lodgings but most of all, his monumental boredom in his job, a torture for one so intelligent, so quick to apprehend the world. And deeper than mere boredom, a restlessness of spirit that drove him ever to seek that which was just beyond reach and, when he grasped it at last, to discover that it was not what he wanted after all. Sometimes, in the darkest part of the night when I could not sleep, a voice whispered that one day he would find that I was not what he had wanted after all and he would seek another.

“Unless he is rich and can do as he likes,” he said, “a man is like a mule harnessed to a heavy load and beaten up the road. He longs for freedom, to be forever free of the whip that drives him, the taste of the iron bit in his mouth, the blinders over his eyes so he can only see the path laid out before him.” He gave a small smile. “Forgive me,” he said. “I am more than usually self-pitying tonight.”

I touched his hand. “Mule is right,” I said. “But that is a good thing: you are more than stubborn enough to find a way.”

He laughed as I had intended he should and we spoke of other things. But I did not forget his restlessness and prayed that he would find what he was searching for and soon.

At this time, he was engaged in writing a treatise on aesthetics entitled
De Pulchro et Apto—On the Beautiful and the Fitting—
dedicated to Hierius, a man he had never met but who was famed in Rome for his oratory.

“I must flatter him before he will assist me to a post.” He pulled a face. “I think academics are the vainest creatures alive. They long to be admired.”