The Confessions of X (22 page)

But Adeodatus wasn't interested in Cicero. His head was filled with the martial exploits of Caesar and Mark Antony and Caesar's betrayal by Brutus. He skipped on ahead of us. Augustine and I were walking arm in arm behind him making sure he didn't vanish from sight amongst the crowds.

I had never seen so many people from foreign lands as I saw in Rome, people of all different kinds of ethnic dress, the most astonishing variation of skin, eye, and hair color: ebony-skinned Nubians wearing brilliant orange, blue, or pink robes, towering over the native Romans and walking with such straight-backed dignity and grace of movement they seemed to float above the ground; Parthians with pointed beards glistening with oil and dark, clever eyes and wearing baggy trousers cinched with gold-embossed belts
with great curved knives on their hips—“scimitars” Augustine told Adeodatus when he came running back to ask; Northern men like the door slave at the house with blond or red hair, beards braided into plaits and adorned with beads and tiny bird skulls, a barbaric sight that made me shudder. These men were huge, towering above us, their limbs as wide as tree trunks, their faces tattooed with intricate swirling patterns of blue.

“Celts,” Augustine said. “They are said to worship trees.”

“They are certainly as tall as trees,” I replied. Augustine laughed and we emerged into the Forum hard by the Curia.

First we walked to the Comitia, the hollow in front of the Curia where senators had given speeches to the mob and where the original tribes had voted back when the Republic was founded before Rome grew too huge to accommodate them. Here Mark Antony made his famous speech after the murder of Caesar. Before we could stop him, Adeodatus scrambled up to the Rostra and stood there, posing, flinging the end of his short cloak over his shoulder as if it were a toga. He grinned at me and ran toward the Curia, skidding to a stop in front of it and waiting for us to catch up.

“It's called the Curia Julia and replaced the old Curia Hostilia. You can see the site of the old one there,” Augustine said, pointing to the one on the left as we were facing it.

“So Caesar built this one?” Adeodatus asked.

“Well, not exactly,” Augustine replied, walking over to him and putting a hand on his shoulder.

I stopped a little way behind them. Father and son framed by the symbol of Rome's might, both dark-haired, Augustine's hand
straying as it always did when they were together to his son's head to caress it, Adeodatus looking earnestly up into his father's face.

“The one Caesar built burned down during the time of the Emperor Carinus and was replaced by Diocletian,” Augustine was saying. “So what you see is a copy.”

“Oh,” Adeodatus said, clearly disappointed. “So no blood.”

“Blood?”

“Caesar's blood.”

“Remember I explained he was killed in the Theatre of Pompey?”

When Adeodatus looked confused, Augustine sighed. “Even if this had been the original building,” he said, “there would be no blood after all this time. I imagine someone cleaned it up, don't you?”

“I suppose so.”

I caught up with them as they entered the Curia.

Soon, Augustine finally earned enough fees that we moved into our own apartment on the Aventine, two rooms divided by a curtain in a six-story tenement alive with shouts and the sound of children playing. It was paradise after our squalid room and dank courtyard in the Manichee house. The constant noise and activity of lives going on around us reminded me of our rooms in the insula on the street of the silversmiths.

At last, I thought, I will have women to chat with and my son will have playmates.

Our lives soon settled into a routine much like our life in Carthage. Augustine taught in classrooms near the Circus Maximus
at the foot of the Great Aventine Hill on which we lived, so close that he would often come home for a midday meal of bread, cheese, and olives washed down by a cup of wine.

We enrolled Adeodatus in the neighborhood school, the schoolmaster a young Greek named Hiero who charged reasonable fees but, more importantly, seemed gentle and not the type to beat his students. Augustine had terrible memories of his own boyhood beatings at the hands of a cruel schoolmaster. He had been sent away to school in Madaura at Adeodatus's age and had hated it.

“The man was a Greek,” he told me. “And to this day, I cannot hear or read Greek without a shudder of loathing at that man's cruelty.”

“What did Monica say?” I asked. I could not imagine her allowing such a thing to happen. The very thought of someone laying violent hands on my son made me sick to my stomach.

“I never told her,” he replied.

Sometimes Augustine would take Adeodatus to his classroom with him where he would sit quietly at the back, or so his father reported to me, a stylus poised above his tablet, eyes fixed on his father's face as if committing every word to memory.

And Augustine, seeing his rapt attention, the way he was trying so hard to understand, began to speak only to him as if his other students were not present.

“Adeodatus may be only nine but he could teach my students a thing or two about respect,” Augustine told me, proudly.

In the evening when the lamps were lit my son would come to me and, kneeling, lay his head in my lap with his arms about my waist the way he used to do in Carthage. I would stroke his
hair, no word between us spoken, none needed. Then he would rise and kiss my cheek and gather up his books and go silently to bed, and I would watch him draw back from the little pool of light around my chair and melt into the shadows before he entered the door of his bedchamber and was gone. This, I knew, was the fate of every mother: that she must watch her son go from her world to his father's as if she gave him birth again and watched them cut the cord that bound them. I knew that he would soon grow to be a man, that the years of childhood passed swiftly even though the days seemed to pass so slowly, so I treasured these moments of unutterable sweetness to store up in my heart in the years to come like a thrifty housewife preparing her storeroom for winter.

In the autumn of the same year, Augustine heard of an opening in Milan for the prestigious position of orator, and best of all the post and all the traveling expenses would be paid for by public funds, freeing us from dependence on his pupils. Lividus, the rich Manichee in whose house we had stayed when we first arrived in Rome, had recommended Augustine to Symmachus, the Prefect of Milan and a secret Manichee but also a cousin of the influential bishop of Milan, Ambrose. Milan was the seat of the Imperial Court, the place where Constantine had issued an edict almost seventy years before, granting freedom of religion to Christians after the terrible persecutions of previous emperors. Monica, I knew, considered Milan the beating heart of Christendom, although many pagans and followers of other religious sects called the city home.

When Augustine put himself forward for the job, he was chosen almost immediately. And so, once again, we packed our meager belongings and began the long overland journey to Milan before winter set in and the roads grew muddy and impassable.

That winter Adeodatus fell gravely ill. Returning one day from his lessons at the neighborhood grammar school, his eyes were bright with fever, the skin of his forehead when I laid my cheek against it, fiery hot. He was vigorous and healthy in all his parts and ever impatient of stillness, but when I told him to go lie down upon his bed, he did so without a murmur, and I was greatly troubled. Checking on him from time to time during the afternoon, I noted he was still hot. Worried, I left him to sleep, hoping that he was merely overtired and would wake restored and ravenous for supper.

In the early evening when I went in to rouse him and light the lamps I spoke his name, but he did not recognize me and lay moving his head from side to side and speaking words I could not understand, his breath laboring in ragged gusts, his eyes half open and rolling backwards in his head. In terror, I ran to Augustine and bade him fetch Vindicianus, former proconsul and a doctor. Then I returned, stripped Adeodatus naked, and began to bathe his body with cooling water. But the fever did not abate.

When Vindicianus arrived he had me hold Adeodatus still while he leaned his ear against his chest and listened.

“There is something moving in his lungs,” he said at last. “Black bile. You must cool him when he is hot and warm him
when he is cold. And give him tiny pellets of moldy bread to bring the fever down.”

When I looked revolted he said, “I learned this from the Jews, who are skilled healers and I have seen it work. More I cannot do.”

My eyes implored him.

“He is strong and healthy,” he said, patting my hand. “Take heart.”

For days I watched in anguish as Adeodatus tossed and turned, his flesh melting off his bones until he had the aged look I have seen in children who are starved. When not writing speeches for the court, Augustine spent every moment at his bedside and did not bathe or shave or eat.

“You must rest a little,” I told him late one night.

“I will not leave,” he said, and sat on, his eyes sometimes closing then flickering open as if he made a supreme effort of the will to stay awake.

I was worried that he, too, would take sick and told him so.

He looked at me across our son's bed, his eyes dark. “And what of you, my love?” he said. “What if you take sick?”

“I am his mother,” I replied.

“And I his father.”

So we took it in turns to stay awake so that our son would see someone who loved him should he open his eyes and recognize us.

One night when I sat awake, Augustine dozing in a chair, exhausted by his vigil, I prayed to the Christian God with all the
anguish of a mother's heart and offered him my body and my soul to do with as he wished, only let my son live.

The next night I knew the crisis of our son's sickness had come upon him and this night would see him either dead or recovered. All day he had thrown his wasted body about, his eyes open but unseeing, his lips cracked, blistered from the fire that raged within him, the words he spoke in his delirium a harsh raven's caw. As darkness fell he became still, subsiding slowly into a sleep so profound I thought he was dead save for the barest motion of the sheet that covered his breast. My heart was numb, my tears all wept, my prayers lay stillborn on my lips. Only my hand mechanically dipped a cloth in water to wipe his face, that face that lay so still and waxen in the lamplight, the sweet face of my little son, to squeeze a few drops between dry lips that had not spoken to me or his father for ten days or more.