The Confessions of X (33 page)

I explained the position of the baby. “You must help me,” I said.

“Domina,” he replied, panic in his voice. “I know only animals.”

“Please,” I said, placing my hand on his arm.

“The gods help us,” he muttered. Then, as if gathering himself: “You must slip the cord over the young one's head before it chokes,” he said. “Leastways, that is the way of it with calving.”

“Show me.”

When we reentered the house I saw Tanit had used up all her strength. Her cries had sunk to moans, her eyes when they flickered open were vacant and unseeing. She was retreating to that place that is the antechamber of death, her body with us still, her soul already on the wing. Anzar's face in the lamplight, a rictus of despair, but he did not cease his litany of love, a murmured plea for her to rally and to live.

“You must do it,” Rusticus said. “My hands are too big.”

Once again I washed my hands and bathed them in oil then, heedless of the pain I would cause, slid them inside Tanit on either side of the baby's head. Slowly, carefully, with the tips of my fingers groping for purchase, I began to ease the cord toward me over the
child's head. Many times it slipped from my grasp and I had to begin again. Tanit had ceased to move; Maia was crying quietly in the corner. The others clustered silent in the doorway.

“A little farther,” I heard Rusticus say.

And then the cord slipped suddenly over the baby's head so that, with my hands cupped on either side of it, I could gently draw the head and then the body forth. A tiny girl-child, her face empurpled, her body a skinned rabbit's, the life-giving cord that had encircled her neck like the iron ring of a shackle spiraled darkly from her navel. She lay quite motionless on the bed.

Rusticus quickly reached over and, taking the baby by the heels with one hand, hung her upside down. Fluid poured from her nose and mouth. Then he struck her lightly on the buttocks, once, twice, and she gave a tiny gasp. Then she drew in a great rasping breath and when she let it out it was as a cry, a thin wavering sound like the bleating of a newborn lamb.

I saw a smile appear on Tanit's waxlike face; Anzar laid his forehead on the bed and wept.

The child was named Ifru after Tanit's mother. For weeks after her birth Tanit lay gravely ill, sometimes raving, sometimes sane, no strength to hold her child still less to give her suck. Anzar was no use to us at all so frantic was he his wife would die; day and night he sat at her bedside cradling his daughter in his arms while Tanit slept. When her bed needed changing he would lift her tenderly as he lifted his child and it was all we could do to take her from
him again and lay her down when the bed was made. His tools lay forgotten in the yard, his face remained unshaved until, one day, seeing him hollow-eyed, his face quite sunken, I ordered him to quit his vigil and sleep.

“What use will you be to Tanit if you die?” I said to him but he refused to leave, remaining hunched upon his stool, his face set, his hands gripping his knees so tightly his knuckles shone white. So I had him carry Tanit to the main house while I walked behind holding the baby. I installed them in my bedchamber, for it was the largest, with a pallet on the floor for Anzar and a basket for Ifru bedded snugly down with sheepskins.

“Now rest,” I ordered.

I tended Tanit and the child while Maia took over the running of the house. It was the first time I had held a babe since I cared for Neith's children, but I found my arm curving just so, her tiny head resting sweetly in the crook of my elbow, my hips swaying from side to side to lull the child to sleep, as if all those intervening years had never been and I was young again, a new mother, as if my body were wiser than my mind. I spent long hours walking her, for she was colicky and would not thrive, seeming always to be hungry yet unable to keep much down. I was determined she and her mother would live, for I had had a bellyful of death and grieving and fought for their lives with a kind of dogged rage.

I found a wet nurse from a neighboring farm, a woman whose own child had died at birth, and then later, when it looked as if Ifru would live, I fed her cream to put some flesh on her tiny, stick-like limbs. In deep winter when the earth lay sunken into its dreamless sleep of waiting, the ebbing of the tide of Tanit's and
Ifru's lives turned and began to run swift and full again and, with it, my own.

Once Ifru was born, time—frozen since my son died—began to flow again. Each milestone of her little life, the day she lifted up her head unsupported, the day her wavering hand closed round her foot when I was changing her, her eyes opening wide in amazement to feel it was her own, the way she would creep along the floor like a little worm, reaching what she sought and grasping it with triumph, these little markers of her growth were drops of time accumulating in a bowl that grew to fullness.

When she began to walk, we drained the pool in the atrium and used it as her play place knowing she could not climb out. In the evening Anzar carved bits of wood into animals for a miniature farm while Tanit, Maia, and I sewed her clothes, for she was growing fast. We made dolls from linen scraps, inked in the faces, and fashioned hair from wool. Now that the danger to her life was passed, she grew robust and strong with sturdy limbs still chubby from her babyhood, black eyes filled with mischief, dark silky curls I tied up in a ribbon, just enough to curl once around my finger even as her tiny fist had curled when she was born and we despaired of her. Sometimes she would lapse into a dreamy state and sit, unmoving, her eyes wide open and unblinking as if she saw things hidden from other's eyes. Tanit believed she possessed the Sight, but I thought it was a weakness left over from the manner of her birth, the cutting off of air, though I never said so out loud.

I have heard Christians speak of grace as if it were something without substance, something which falls on them from the heavens like light or air. Grace, for me, is flesh and blood, bones and
sinew, someone whom my mouth can name: Father, Augustine, Adeodatus, Nebridius. And now, when I thought I had lost all grace: Ifru. And it was not as if she replaced my own son, her birth coming so soon after Adeodatus's death; rather her small life fell like a drop of water on the stone of my heart, in itself so tiny, so ineffectual, but oft repeated over time, with the power to wear it smooth.

Years later, when I looked for the last time on the farm I loved, the faces of those I loved more, I understood what Nebridius's gentle heart had known: that this small plot of land, of all the places on the earth, could raise a crop of love from the stony soil of my heart.

Even the news of Nebridius's death of the same fever that took my son's life soon after Ifru was born did not break me, so accustomed I had become to loss. The legacy of his kindness has sustained me these forty years and I will bless his name forever. I lived longer in this place than in any other and, most wondrous thing of all, came to call it home, a place where I found, if not peace, a kind of deep contentment when I could say: This is the harvest of my life and it is good.

CHAPTER 35

W
hen I was a child each day passed as if it were a year; as I have grown older I have found that a year can pass as quickly as a single month. And so ten years passed. I did not see Augustine again. I heard he had been ordained a priest and then a bishop. Recently he had written a book called
Confessions
, a memory of his life before he was a priest, a chronicle of the journey he had taken to God. He sent me a copy and wrote on the front these words:

“For love who showed me Love itself.”

That is all he wrote; there was no letter, not even his name.

About this time an imperial edict banning pagan worship and ordering the closing of pagan shrines sparked rioting in Carthage. The religious unrest spilled out into the countryside where bands of men and youths, emboldened by the emperor's edicts against heresy and pagan rites, set upon innocent laborers working in the fields or people gathered at gravesites to hold feasting for their dead as was the African custom, one that even Monica had observed
until Ambrose told her it was unseemly. A neighbor who was known to be a worshipper of Baal was murdered, his house and barn burned. One evening Rusticus came home from the fields, his face bloody from a fight.

“It was this that saved me,” he said, showing me a wooden cross he wore on a leather cord around his neck.

After that he made me nail a simple wooden cross above the lintel of the door to show that we were Christian. I did it to protect my people though I felt apostate, as if I had recanted a faith I did not have. Although I did not worship the Punic gods as Tanit and Anzar did, as Neith and my father had done, yet I also did not worship the Christian God. He had taken too much from me. The next day when I was weeding in the kitchen garden, a hawk swooped down and snatched a snake up in its talons. Tanit, who was with me, straightened, one fist pushed into the small of her back, the other hand shading her eyes as she watched the bird's flight.

“It is a sign from the gods, Domina,” she said, though of what she never explained.

Old age approaches slowly step by step, at first so distant as to be unseen, unheard then, one day, it is there. Thus did my old age come upon me, the sudden pains in my limbs when I awoke each morning, the silver strands appearing in my hair until the dark turned wholly gray, then white. My hands so used to hard work, the wringing out of clothes in the icy stream behind the house, the beating of the olives from the trees at harvest, the punching down
of dough upon the kitchen board, grew stiff and gnarled like the branches of an ancient apple tree long since barren. At first I was angry my body would not obey my mind, thinking it a recalcitrant child who refused to do his share of labors, but I grew more tolerant and mild, preferring more and more to sit in the shade of the orchard and watch the chickens pecking at my feet, watch the swelling of a pear upon the branch until—nature's amphora, brimful with juice and sweetness—it was ready to be plucked. The rhythmic chanting of the laborers at harvest would pulse across the fields, reminding me of my childhood with my father, our solitary travels, their singing a signal it was time to return to Carthage for the winter.

In these quieter years I spent many hours reading, my only luxury a library I had collected scroll by scroll and now filling a closet in my room. Ovid's stories of the gods, the tales of Cupid—Amor—and the women he ruined, held me spellbound. Daphne, in her desperation to escape, changed into a tree; Europa, Leda, Arachne, Philomela, all pursued by love and forever changed from one nature into another.

Like these women from the ancient stories, I, too, had changed. I was no longer the young girl who thought a man's desire was love, his caresses proof of his devotion, nor even the young matron proudly carrying his child on my hip who now believed our son would ratify his fidelity. I was now an old but still living tree, tough, resilient, able to bend to winter winds, bare branches awaiting the coming of spring with patience and a longing to hear birdsong once again.