The Confessions of X (29 page)
“He's young yet,” I told them. “But keep an eye on him around Maia. She's only twelve and too young to fall with child. I will speak to Tanit also.”
In the end, they all decided to remain on the farm. They took counsel amongst themselves and informed me, shyly, that they would continue to call me Domina.
The acreage of the farm was small but of sufficient size to feed us and have enough left over to barter or sell for the things we lacked like tools and grain and dyes for our wool. We grew no wheat, but grapes and figs, apples, pears, beans, and olives. The grapes and olives we pressed at a neighbor's oil-press and stored in long-necked amphorae bedded down in straw or sold for wheat so we could make bread; the fruit not eaten in season we dried and put up in honey syrup to give a taste of summer when winter came.
For live things we had bees and sheep and poultry, goats, mules, two oxen for the heavy work, and a cow. Anaxis told me that in Gaul where cattle are more numerous than goats, they made cheese, and so he showed me how to make it from the whey and told me his people drank the milk warm from the cow. But this I could not do, preferring wine, teas brewed from borage or mint, and water from our spring, so clear and cold from the mountain snow it made my teeth ache.
With the wool we sheared each spring, Tanit showed me the art of making thread, and I bought a loom so I could weave it into cloth. In the kitchen garden Tanit, Maia, and I planted herbs
for medicines, onions, radishes, and green stuff for our salads and grew raspberries against the southern wall. We boiled endless vats of fruit and poured them into earthen jars, plucked ducks and chickens for the table, and stuffed pillows from their feathers. I helped Rusticus birth a mastiff bitch's pups and lay them blind and mewling on her teats to suck.
In pots in the atrium I planted pomegranate trees, their scent more intoxicating than spikenard, their flowers a heaven for my bees, their fruit so numerous Tanit showed me how to make the surplus into a jam, which she used as a garnish for lamb and chicken throughout the winter. I had planted the trees in memory of when I was with child with Adeodatus and craved pomegranates and Perpetua had found them for me, an unexpected grace and one that sealed our friendship. Over the years, as the trees grew from seedlings to saplings to mature trees, as lambs and goats and dogs and calves and foals were born and grew and engendered their own young, this and a thousand, thousand other things of country life, endlessly ripening, dying, renewing, rubbed away the sharp edges of my grief like waves on rock until only the weight of it remained.
O
ne day in high summer of my first year at the farm, the year my son turned twelve, a cloud of dust appeared on the road leading to the house. I set out toward it, my heart lurching between hope and terror. As the rider drew nearer I recognized his shape, the manner of his riding, before his features at last resolved themselves out of the haze.
“Nereus,” I shouted and began to run.
He reined up at the sight of me and flung himself from the saddle. “All is well,” he said, for he had known my haste to greet him was out of fear that he brought calamitous news and not only the joy of seeing him.
In two strides I was in his arms, laughing and crying at once, until that moment unaware of how fearful I had been, how famished for touch, for the sight of a beloved face.
To my silent question he said, “I have brought letters.” Briefly touching my cheek with one finger as one would touch a robin's egg, he said, “You have changed.”
“I have been ill.”
He frowned.
“I am better now,” I said. “Come.”
He caught up the reins of the horse and we walked side by side toward the house as if we were children again returning from our day's play, tired and hungry and too content to speak.
“How is Adeodatus?” I asked. His name on my lips was sweet but painful. The guilt I felt at leaving him an ever-present torment.
“He is well,” he replied, glancing at me. “He misses you.”
“And Augustine?”
“He is well too.”
As we approached the house, Anzar came to take the horse and stable it.
Anaxis was waiting on the doorstep peering out into the yard as he was shortsighted. “Domine!” he cried when Nebridius got nearer. Tanit was standing back in the shadows behind him, drawn from the kitchen at the back by the commotion.
“Old friend,” Nebridius cried, striding toward him and taking his outstretched hand. “It is good to see you again.”
Then I remembered that all my household knew him, for, since his father's death, he had been their master, and some, Anaxis certainly, must have known him from a boy. He did not yet know that I had freed them, and for the first time, I worried that Nebridius might think I slighted his gift. Anzar returned followed by the others. Maia hung shyly at the back, for she was the youngest and did not remember Nebridius.
“Anzar,” Nebridius replied, clasping him forearm to forearm the way comrades do, the way Augustine had greeted Cyrus when first we arrived at his childhood home in Thagaste. “How are you?”
“Well, Domine,” Anzar replied and then drew Tanit forward out of the doorway by the hand. “We are married.”
If Nebridius was surprised he did not show it but congratulated them both and kissed Tanit's cheek.
Then each of the household came out to greet him one by one, and I watched as he chatted with them, asking after their aches and pains, their concerns about the farm, whether the last harvest had been plentiful and had the neighbors to the west made any trouble this year over the meadow beneath the spring. I smiled at Rusticus idly scratching his chest as he spoke of the livestock under his charge, the number of lambs born that spring, the need, perhaps, for more oxen if this year's harvest was as good as last year's, whether it was more profitable to buy or lease them out from the farm across the way.
Tanit told him the kitchen garden had been overrun with pests but, for all that, she did not despair of salvaging the raspberries and putting them up in syrup for the winter.
At last everyone drifted off to their tasks and Nebridius and I went in to the coolness of the atrium beside the fountain. I saw that Anaxis had left a tray with wine and goblets on it; Tanit, a huge platter of bread and cheese.
From a leather pouch at his side, Nebridius retrieved some letters. These he handed me.
I eyed them hungrily but put them down on a table.
“Aren't you going to open them?” he asked.
“Later,” I said. “You are my guest here and you must be tired from your journey.”
He looked at me while I poured wine. “You remind me of Monica,” he said. “That's just the type of thing she would say.”
I handed him the cup and he emptied it. “Ah, that's better,” he
said. “I must have breathed in the entire African coast on the way here. The roads are tinder dry.”
“It has not rained since spring,” I said, pouring again and adding a generous measure of water. He saw what I was doing and grinned.
“Don't want to get me drunk before I tell you all the news?”
“Something like that,” I said, smiling. “But then again, I know how much you love water, Nereus.”
“Hah,” he said and drank again. “Trust you to remind me of that. Actually,” he said, “the idea of you throwing water at me is quite a pleasant one. I feel as dry as an old boot.” Then he leaned his head back on the chair a moment and closed his eyes.
And as worn
out, I thought. His clothes were covered in the thick yellow dirt of Africa and around his mouth and eyes exhaustion lines were deeply etched. He must have ridden straight from Carthage without spending a single night at his house in the city. He half-opened his eyes. “Speaking of Monica. She sends her love.”
“No message?” I was disappointed. I knew Monica could not write but I had expected her to give a verbal message.
“She has not been well,” he said, sitting up.
In all the years I had known Monica she had never fallen sick. “What is wrong?” I asked, sitting down beside him.
He shrugged. “She says it is nothing.”
“She would,” I replied. I thought of Monica; she was not so old, perhaps in her early fifties now. Although a slight woman she had ever been strong, moving with the suppleness of a much younger woman until, quite recently, her joints had begun to pain her. She walked a little stiffly now but when I had last seen her in
Milan she was as fit as ever. I could not imagine her an invalid, too weak to get out of bed during the day.
“Is it a fever?” I asked, fearing the worst.
Nebridius shook his head. “Just a weakness that will not go away. She gets angry when we fuss.”
I smiled at this.
“She promises to send a message before the end of summer.”
“I will put up some dried herbs for you to take back to her,” I said. “I grow them myself and I know she will not be able to get them in Italy. It will comfort her to have something from home.”
Feeling a little better about Monica, I put a hand on Nebridius's arm and leaned forward.
“Now,” I said. “You must tell me everything.”
Nebridius took another long draught of wine as if to fortify himself, then began: “Right after you left Milan, Monica arranged a marriage for Augustine with a girl from a prominent family.” He glanced at me to see how I would take this but I sat quietly, outwardly calm though inwardly I felt the world spinning.
“Go on,” I told Nebridius for he had fallen silent. “Are they . . .?” I could not say the word “wed.”
Nebridius shook his head. “They were betrothed.”
I had not realized that I was holding my breath. Carefully, I let it out. “So she is still young,” I said. I did not ask how young; I did not want to know. I was almost thirty now, considered well past my prime although my body was whole and healthy now I had recovered from my illness and there was still no gray in my hair. Nevertheless, a surge of jealousy rose in my breast, an image of her
young, perfect body in Augustine's arms. I beat it down. “Go on,” I said again.
“Last winter Augustine broke off the betrothal.”
I stared at him. “Why?”
Nebridius paused. I saw him gathering himself to tell me something, and, again, my heart beat with fear.
“You told me he and Adeodatus were well,” I said, gripping his arm hard. “They are well, are they not?”
Nebridius smiled then and placed his hand on mine. “They are well,” he said. “In body and in soul. Augustine and Adeodatus are baptized. As am I.”
“You are Christians?”
“We are,” Nebridius replied calmly.
I thought back to the dinner we gave for Adeodatus's birthday, of how Ambrose had challenged Augustine when he said the gospels were crude stories written for the unlettered by simple fishermen. Ambrose had called them parables and spoken of paradox. At the time, I could see that his words had deeply troubled Augustine and knew that in the months leading up to my departure, he had talked with Ambrose again.
Part of me had always known he was on this path. I remembered our many conversations about the body and the soul, my metaphors of birds in cages and yeast in bread, his reading of the Neo-Platonist Plotinus, of Cicero.
Seeing the comprehension on my face, Nebridius laughed, a beautiful carefree sound such as he had used to laugh when he was a boy, such a laugh, I realized suddenly, that I had not heard him give for many years. “Augustine told Ambrose you were his best
teacher, better than all the poets and philosophers and so-called theologians combined. And Ambrose said: âI believe it! Women are much wiser than men.' ”
I turned to him. “And what of you, Nereus? A Christian? I thought you were a happy pagan.”
“Not always so happy,” he replied.
“You are my dearest friend, Nereus,” I said, lifting his hand and laying my cheek against it. And we sat that way until the shadows grew long and night fell.
N
ebridius would not talk more of Augustine or my son, saying that their letters would tell me better than he could, and so we talked of other things. I told him I had freed the slaves and they had chosen to stay on.
He looked at me but I could not make out his expression in the growing dusk, for we had not yet lit the lamps. “Yes,” he said. “I can see you doing that.”
“You don't mind?”
He smiled. “Of course not.” He spread his arms indicating the house and the farm. “All this is yours now.”
After dinner we walked around the property. I was eager to show him how well tended the farm was, how thriving, for I considered it only mine in trust rather than in ownership although I did not tell him this. I questioned him closely on all that pertained to the farm and was amazed at how knowledgeable he was, for aside from that summer in our childhood at his country estate, I had only ever known him in the city.
This was another side of Nebridius I had been blind to and I bitterly reproached myself for it. It was as if as long as I had
Augustine I had neglected my oldest friend, had failed to see him as he truly was, a kind and patient man, a man who carried his loneliness deep inside him, hidden from those closest to him for fear it would make them unhappy or cause them to pity him. But I should have seen it, I told myself, as we wandered back in the fast falling darkness. I should have known. And I did not feel pity so much as a kind of awe at his fidelity and bravery.
In the atrium, I kissed him on both cheeks. “Thank you,” I said.
He looked embarrassed. “For what?”
“For everything.”
“I am glad you are happy here on the farm,” he said. “Good night.”
Standing in the atrium alone, I thought:
I was not speaking of the farm.
