The Confessions of X (19 page)

“I thought women were supposed to be the vainest?” I teased, sitting down beside him and scooting along the bench so I could read what he had been writing.

“That's a myth invented by . . .”

“
Academics
,” we both said in unison and burst out laughing.

He flung down his pen, pulled me to him, and buried his face
in my hair, his favorite position when we were alone and sitting side by side. I could feel his weariness in the tension of his body.

I read aloud a few sentences of what he had written.

“ ‘What then is beauty and in what does it consist? What is it that attracts us and makes us love it? Unless there be beauty and grace in those things, they would be powerless to win our hearts.'

“The yeast in the bread,” I murmured, almost to myself.

Augustine raised his head from my neck. “What did you just say?”

I repeated it.

He frowned. “Explain.”

I smiled inwardly, for I had heard him use the same tone when Nebridius said something that puzzled him but piqued his interest. I could imagine him commanding his students in the same voice, intense, almost stern, his eyes fixed on them like an arrow, like a hawk ready to drop down on a hapless rabbit. No wonder they played tricks on him. He must terrify them.

“I mean,” I said, “that the Manichees are wrong when they say the material form is a cage in which the soul is trapped like a bird beating its wings against the bars. Beauty or soul, it seems to me, is more like yeast in bread. When I bake bread I mix it into the flour and the dough rises, but if I cut the bread I can't find the yeast like some lump in the middle. It's mixed right through because it
is
the bread.
Ergo . . .
”

Augustine had taught me this term and I was quite proud of using it, especially when I saw him blink.

“Beauty and form,” I went on, “soul and flesh cannot be divided except perhaps by death. As you say, it is the
form
that
draws our love but that form is indistinguishable from the beauty. Or rather, it
is
the beauty.”

I felt a little breathless after this speech and a little ridiculous. He was the teacher, after all. Touching his face, I felt the roughness of his unshaven jaw, smoothed my thumb over the dark circles under his eyes. “I do not love merely your body nor do I love merely your soul. I love them both but not as halves of one whole, but one whole itself, as yeast and bread are one loaf.
Both
are you. Both are Augustine.”

He was looking at me in a way I could not interpret and then he threw back his head and laughed, so long and so loudly I feared Adeodatus would waken in the next room.

“I don't believe it,” he said at last, wiping tears from his eyes.

“It makes no sense?” I asked.

“On the contrary,” he said. “It makes perfect sense. Your analogies have taught me more than all the philosophers put together, including Cicero.”

“I think best in pictures,” I said.

CHAPTER 19

S
ome days later, an old friend of my aunt's came to me and told me my aunt was dying and asked to see me. While my conscience had told me I should make my peace with her, I had not had the courage to visit her since returning to Carthage.

It was strange to walk the streets alone in the district where my uncle's house lay, for I had not returned to the neighborhood since the day I left with Augustine almost seven years before. No one spoke to me or raised a hand in greeting, so changed was I from that wild girl who roamed the city years before. Even the fountain looked the same, the chips on the rim that I used to run my fingers over so familiar I could find them with my eyes shut. I marveled that so much could remain the same when I was so changed.

With each step I had taken across the city, I was retracing my past, returning to the place where, for good or ill, I had begun my life. Now I must return and somehow set things right. The image of my aunt in the courtyard, my last sight of her, haunted me. My own motherhood, the bright flame that burned within me for my child, a flame devouring all other loves except two, my love for my child's father and my own, had also burned in my aunt. This
I now knew beyond all certainty. For what else could cause such agony, such sorrow in a woman unless she be parted forever from her child?

A lump rose in my throat when I remembered the hardness of my heart when I left her house. That I had done so partly out of fear, to proclaim that her sad woman's life had no correspondence with my own, did not absolve me.

When I arrived at that familiar door, I hesitated. I think if I had heard my uncle's voice from within I would have turned and walked away, but I could hear no sound of voices except the noises from the street.

The door was unlatched, so I entered. No lamps were lit, and dirt gritted the floor beneath my sandals, a sad decline as my aunt could never abide disorder and filth in her home. The kitchen, usually so immaculate, was in disarray with dirty pots and knives piled on the table, a platter of stale bread and olives, a wedge of moldy cheese, and the appalling smell of rancid fish heads in a cauldron on the hearth as if my aunt had been making soup when she suddenly took ill.

I pulled aside the curtain to the bedchamber at the back of the house. In the half-light I could make out my aunt lying on the bed, a tiny shrunken figure like a doll, a soiled coverlet molding her sticklike body like a shroud that scarcely rose and fell so light her breath.

“It is I,” I said, crossing to the bed.

Her eyes opened and fixed on me.

As when a breath of wind shivers the surface of a pool, so her eyes seemed to flicker, change, become at last quiescent as she recognized me, and her sparrow-bone hand rose up from beneath the
coverlet and grasped my gown with surprising strength. I bent low and put my ear against her working mouth.

“You,” she said and closed her eyes.

I thought at first she had gone but then her eyes opened again.

“When my brother brought you to me, a motherless scrap, filthy and neglected, I thought that God had answered my prayers.” She spoke in a harsh whisper so I had to strain to hear.

Panting as if she had run a long race, she gestured at a clay cup that stood on the floor beside the bed. I filled it with water from a jar in the kitchen and held it to her lips. She followed me with her eyes as if she feared I would abandon her in that wretched room with the sounds of the living heard but distantly, the sun falling on neighbors, friends, strangers, even the very stones in the street outside her door, never again to warm her skin, the hearth in her kitchen cold and unswept.

I did not know where my uncle was but I wondered that two lives, albeit lived in enmity all those years, could have become so separate, so estranged, that one would let the other cross beneath that dread portal, death, alone and quite friendless.

I sat down beside the bed and took her hand in both my own.

“Hush,” I said. “I am here.”

“When your father brought you to us, you were so beautiful,” she said as if she hadn't heard, as if she had a speech by heart and must get it out before memory failed. “I sat by you while you slept and could not believe how perfect you were, the creases in your wrists, your ankles, your hair mussed and rubbed away from sleeping on your back, your tiny hands, your sweet, milky breath on my neck. You were the answer to my prayers. I loved you. And I longed
for you to love me as well.” Exhausted, she fell back on the pillow gasping. I helped her to another sip of water and dabbed her mouth with the corner of my veil, she who had prided herself on the cleanliness of her home now lying in a nest of squalid rags.

“When your father returned from his travels,” she went on when she had recovered, “you forgot me. He who had not bathed you or sat in the doorway with you on his lap so you could see the sights or sung to you to make you sleepy, now he was the one you turned to as a sunflower lifts its face to the sun. And when you were four he took you away.” Her voice sunk to a whisper as if the words bruised and must be handled gently. “Ever after, this home became a prison to you, I your jailor. I wanted only to protect you, to save you from the life of disappointment and grief that has been my own lot.” I knew what I must say but I could not. My pity and remorse were sharp flints in my mouth.

“Lift me up,” she commanded. “There is something under my pillow.”

I put my arms about her shoulders and lifted her, the weight of her body no more than my six-year-old child's, and felt beneath her pillow. I withdrew a small box and put it in her hands.

She lay awhile holding it. “Take it,” she said at last.

Inside was an iron key, the key to her bank box, her savings, the money she had received at all the births she had attended over the years, she said, hidden from a husband who would drink it up as he had drunk up her heart's blood and all her hopes. Lying at the bottom of the box beneath the key was the copper bracelet and the length of ribbon threaded through it, the same as I had left the day I quit her house forever.

“Only give me a Christian burial,” she said. “The rest is yours.”

She closed her eyes. I stayed with her as evening fell and lit a lamp so she would see me keeping vigil. I held her hand and whispered to her though I do not think she heard.

Sometime in the night a tremor shook her and her eyes flew open. When she saw me she smiled, a look of great beauty and tenderness. “My daughter,” she said. Then: “I would have loved to see your child.”

“Mater,”
I replied, stroking her face. “Forgive me for not loving you as I should have.”

But her eyes fixed like agates in a frieze and looked on me no longer, neither did she hear my too-late confession.

Kissing her on the forehead, I crossed her hands on her breast. Then I took the wooden cross she had nailed to the wall above the bed and, placing it on her chest, tenderly drew the coverlet over her face. The rest of the night I spent sweeping and cleaning her home so she would not be shamed. At dawn I went to fetch the priest.

I spent most of the money my aunt had left me on a lavish funeral. Her bier was placed before the altar in the church in the center of her brother's—my father's—glorious mosaic; the lion, the angel, the eagle, and the ox a fitting escort from this world to the next. With a priest leading the way, choir boys singing so sweetly, the bell-like purity of their voices so ravishing passersby stopped in the street to listen, some crossing themselves, some weeping openly, we processed to the church of St. Flavius by the southern gate beneath
which lay the catacombs of Christians. Here my aunt was interred in a stone sarcophagus I had had carved, instructing the stonemasons to adorn it with
putti
, chubby infants with creased wrists and ankles, dimpled knees and elbows, romping in a field of flowers. Denied babies in life, denied the sight of Adeodatus, in death I gave her children of stone. It was both a tribute and a penance,
for
I had given her a heart of stone when I should have given her one of living flesh.

CHAPTER 20

A
nother year passed, one in which we heard Augustine's treatise on beauty had been received with admiration and acclaim in Rome and in Milan, but still he received no word of a teaching position.

Then one morning in spring, a messenger arrived at the house with the offer of an academic post in Rome.

Suddenly, after all this waiting, we were leaving. This longed-for event brought a kind of sweet melancholy. It made me look on Carthage, the city of my birth and all my life, with different eyes. Perched above the ocean and open to the cooling winds and scorching Numidian heat as if it hung suspended in the heavens, it came to seem a place of light and grace. The opulence of its colors enraptured me as when Augustine and I were first in love and saw with the self-same eyes oranges piled in the market place, blood-red pomegranates in their woven baskets, their seeds Persephone's brief parole, blue linen curtains snapping in the breeze, in the forum brocaded cloaks of every hue clasped with jeweled brooches about the throat, everywhere a richness as if the city said: “Remember me.”

The prospect of leaving Carthage acted like a tonic on
Augustine and he grew cheerful again. I heard him humming to himself sometimes when he was grading student papers in his study, a thing he had never done before.

Each night when we lay in each other's arms we talked of Rome, what it was like, its ancient history, the sights that we would see there.

“It is not the seat of government any longer. The court is in Milan,” Augustine said. “But the Curia where the senators voted is still there. The rostra outside the Curia is still there, the very place where Cicero stood and gave his speeches to the mob, where Caesar and Mark Antony stood. And Sulla surrounded by the heads of his enemies taken in the proscriptions. All this remains.”