The Confessions of X (12 page)

Then one morning in mid-July as I was bending awkwardly to
wash my face, a filament of pain glowed briefly in my belly, then went out, then came again.

“Augustine,” I called. “Augustine.” But I knew he could not hear me for he had risen early to ride with Navigius to a neighboring vineyard three miles distant to buy an oil press.

The servant girl, Livia, passing by my door heard me and ran to tell Monica and Perpetua and soon all the household knew my time was come upon me. Cyrus was dispatched on a fast horse to fetch Augustine. I was frantic to have him by me despite Monica's saying that birthing and death were mysteries only women had the strength to bear.

At last he came and found me sitting on the bed, my knees drawn up against the pain that came with regularity now though still quite spaced apart. Perpetua was braiding my hair into two long plaits, which she put forward over my shoulders so they lay on my breast.

“It is more comfortable thus,” she said. “When the time comes to push, your hair will not irk you when you lay your head against the pillow.”

Augustine sat down beside me and I laid my forehead against his breast relieved beyond measure that he was there.

“Tell me what to do,” he said.

“Don't leave me,” I implored.

All day I labored, the pain a cresting, roaring thing that bore me up and up until it peaked, then down I rushed panting in its wake to flounder for a while in temporary calms. And as the day progressed the swells increased and I a straw doll on its surface whelmed over, battered down but still afloat, no will at all but to
survive this endless pounding. The others there became another species entire as if I gazed through liquid crystal at a dry terrestrial world in which, once beached, I knew I could not live.

As lamps were lit, I felt a gushing drench my legs. I looked up appalled but Monica smiled.

“Your waters break,” she said. “It is a sign the babe is near.” Then to Augustine, “Help me lift her. We must change the sheets.” And to a servant woman standing by, “Fetch hot water, Marta. Towels. A sharp knife and put it in a flame to cleanse it.”

She then instructed Augustine to sit behind me and lift me so I was half sitting, supported with his hands under my arms.

Sometime during the night, I know not when, my strength gave out and sinking ever deeper down a darkening well, the filmy light receding far above, I would not rise up toward it even for the sound of Augustine's voice saying my name or for my baby's struggling life but let myself be swallowed by the darkness and the peace it brought. I felt my mother near me then and like a moth-wing brushing my ear, someone whispered: “Live.”

“The babe is stuck,” I heard Monica say as if a long way off. “We must turn it.”

From worlds away I felt her reach between my legs and enter there, while with the heel of her other hand she pressed on my belly with unbearable force.

“Now push,” she commanded. “Push hard.”

Like plants whose roots finger rocky desert places yet somehow drink water from the air and live, her words called forth some power within me and I bore down with all my strength, my body splitting, heaving like the earth that throws up mountains and so
redraws the geometry of what we see. And blindly groping down, I felt him slide eellike from my living core, a molten rush,
delivery
of twins, he and I, our new life in this new world announced by wailing and blood and with the afterbirth, dawn breaking.

CHAPTER 12

P
acked with cloths to stanch the bleeding, I held my son in my arms and looked and looked and looked on him, was drunk on looking, as if to stamp each nail, each eyelash, each perfect part so miniature, so complete, this masterpiece of flesh and bone and sinew, blood and pumping valve into my heart's soft wax forever. With misty eyes that peered up at me and frowned in puzzlement to see such radiance there, my little flower upturned to this first sun, his mother's joyful face.

Adeodatus, we named him. Given by God. And leaning forward Augustine put a timid finger in our son's crumpled fist, which curled around it like a morning glory at dusk and made him laugh out loud so tight the grip.

Cybele sat with me and brewed up potions for me to drink to stop the bleeding and ward off infection, bitter cups of bark and leaves and nameless somethings taken from a calfskin pouch around her
neck and powdered in a pestle, her lips moving spell-like all the while. My young flesh grew stronger hour by hour and the next day I was taking steps across the room, Augustine's arm about my waist to support me, Cybele nodding in approval from her chair. My breasts swelled up like gourds as my milk came in and it was such exquisite agony to feel my baby's tender mouth draw off that throbbing fullness, his tiny throat pulsing like a sparrow's heart, eyes closed as if in disbelief of such abundance.

I was nursing Adeodatus when Monica came and asked if she could sit with me.

“I love to watch you,” she confided. “It reminds me of when I was a young mother like you.” She smiled at me and smoothed down the covers on my bed. “I shocked Patricius by insisting on nursing my own babies, did you know?”

I shook my head.

“Oh, yes. He told me I had to hire a wet nurse.”

Looking down at my son, the warmth of his swaddled body like a tiny package in the crook of my arm, I could not imagine giving up this moment even if Augustine asked me to, nay commanded as Patricius had done.

“What answer did you give him?” I asked.

Monica laughed. “I said that if he wanted to give birth to the next child then he was welcome to do so. Until then, he should keep his mouth shut.”

I could not imagine Monica saying such words to her husband and told her so. She laughed.

“Neither could he. You should have seen his face.” She watched as I put Adeodatus on my shoulder and patted his back.

“Here,” she said, slipping a cloth between his cheek and my shoulder. “You'll need this.”

As if on cue, Adeodatus gave a tiny hiccup and a thin trail of milk ran out of the corner of his mouth.

“But you know,” said Monica, “a woman becomes a tigress when she becomes a mother. There is nothing she will not do to protect her cub.”

She took him from me then and laid him in the cradle, which had been pushed next to the bed.

“Now,” she said. “Try and get some rest. It is wise to sleep when he sleeps as he is likely to be awake all night.” She kissed me on the forehead as if I, too, were a child. “He has spent so long in the dark warmth of your body, he thinks night is day and day is night.”

One day, when I was drowsing in the sun, Adeodatus sleeping in a basket at my feet, the lavender I had been tying in bunches so they could be hung on a beam in the kitchen to dry spilling off my lap forgotten, Monica sat down in a chair beside me. Picking a stem off my lap she rubbed the blossom between her fingers then brought it to her nose, inhaling its fragrance. Leaning her head against the chair, she closed her eyes against the sun.

“When I was carrying Augustine, I had a dream,” she said quietly. “I was walking in the lane behind the farm and I came across a youth, a beautiful boy on the cusp of manhood with dark hair and quick, sad eyes. He was very thin but his clothes were not ragged and his sandals were tooled leather, expensive. Reclining on the grass beneath a pear tree heavy with fruit, he seemed to be waiting for someone. I greeted him but he did not reply. I asked him whom did he seek?”

I glanced at her at the mention of the pear tree. I was certain Augustine had never told her about his adolescent crime. Monica's eyes were still closed and she did not notice my disquiet.

She went on: “ ‘I am hungry,' the youth said. I gestured at the pears. ‘Eat,' I told him. ‘I cannot pluck them,' he replied. ‘I must wait for them to fall.' As I was considering these words, strange even for a dream, he changed before my eyes and grew older and more wasted and I knew that time had passed though I was the same. I knew that he would die if he did not eat so I reached up and plucked a pear to give to him but the young man had vanished and when I looked in my hand so had the pear.”

Monica opened her eyes and looked at me. “I was much troubled by this dream so I went to a priest and asked him what it could mean. He told me the young man was the child in my belly, a boy, who would not receive true nourishment until he was a man and that I would offer him what he craved. ‘But he disappeared,' I told the priest. ‘It was not he who went away but you,' the priest replied.

“I thought the priest was speaking nonsense,” Monica said, a tiny smile on her lips. “ ‘How can a child starve and live until he is a man?' I asked. The priest said that there were many things that kept us alive and that food was only one of them. After that he would say no more and I feared it meant my son would not live to manhood and he could not bring himself to tell me outright.”

She reached for another stem of lavender and twirled it in her fingers. “I remember when I birthed Augustine. The labor was long and hard like yours. Everyone thought I would die, for he was large and I was small and I had lost much blood. There was much wailing and carrying on, the midwives wringing
their hands, Patricius burning incense to the household gods he honored.”

She laughed. “The smoke almost choked me,” she said, “but he thought he was helping so I said nothing.

“I was not afraid,” she said, “for I knew I would not die. I knew this child, of all my children, would be great although he is the most difficult.”

I was about to protest when she leaned forward and touched my arm. “Forgive me, my dear. ‘Difficult' is a harried mother's word.” Leaning back again in her chair, she continued. “I knew not how but that he would come to rule over others with his words and that his name,
Augustus
, Great, would live on down the ages.”

She laughed. “And so while the others were rending their clothes and planning our funerals, I delivered this great child and lay back exhausted. It was his cries that roused the others and they rushed to tend him, quite forgetting me.

“Men need women to push them out into the world. But the labor does not end when they are delivered from our bodies. Indeed, it has only just begun. It continues throughout their childhood and adolescence, even into their manhood. As our children increase, so we decrease. When they are ready to be born into the world, into the life that God ordained for them, that is when our task is done.”

Monica settled back in her chair, fingering the cross at her throat. “Augustine is the second son, as you know. It is Navigius who has inherited all this.” She waved her hand taking in the courtyard, the house, and the fields beyond. “Augustine must carve a way for himself in the world. Even his father understood this and was willing to pay dearly for his education.”

Monica turned to face me. “You are wondering why I am telling you this?”

I nodded.

“I tell you,” she said, “so you will understand that Augustine has a destiny.” She ran her hands over her skirts as if by smoothing out the creases she could erase the hitch and snag of her thoughts. “I do not know what that destiny is but I know that he is, even now, starving for something he has not yet found.”

I picked Adeodatus up and as my milk let down, the exquisite relief of it made me dizzy as if pressure were being drawn from around my heart.

Monica knelt and began to gather up the spilled lavender, laying each stalk carefully in a basket so as not to shake the flowers loose.

“You must forgive me for speaking,” Monica said. “But I am a mother and I must. Augustine is my child as Adeodatus is yours.”

I looked down at my son's face and thought there was nothing I would not do for him. Nothing at all.

“You remind me of when I was young, of a time when my life was before me and I could have chosen to be better, to have
loved
better.”

She put the last of the stems in the basket and stood. Suddenly she stopped and leaning down she touched my cheek lightly with her knuckles as a mother will do to a sleeping child to see if the fever has abated, fearful lest she wake him.

“When the day comes when you perceive the hunger in him, I hope you will forgive us.” She made as if to go back inside the house and then stopped again. “I am sorry for the death of your father,” she said. “It is hard to be a woman without protection.”

When she had gone, I sat rubbing stray lavender blossoms between my fingers much as Monica had done but not to release their scent, more to feel something in this world alive the way my father was not, for even his memory was less tangible than this single stem and the seeds falling onto the stones. I knew what she was telling me, that without a father I was alone. Her son could be no true husband to me under the law and that his destiny—his hunger as she had called it—would take him from me. Not now, not tomorrow perhaps, but one day.