The Confessions of X (21 page)

When Adeodatus would come and stand beside me to watch, I put my arm around him and moved him away, pointing out something else.

“Let him be,” Augustine said. “It is good for him to know there are poor unfortunates in this world. Otherwise, he will have no gratitude for his own happiness.”

Despite this shadow, the crossing was to remain in my memory a brief, idyllic interlude when we had laid down one burden and not yet taken up another, when all seemed possible and the gods seemed to smile on us, when our ship pointed north toward a coast as yet invisible but waiting.

On the fourth day the wind picked up and the sails were unfurled. The next morning we came in sight of land, a thin wavering strip like a line of charcoal drawn hesitantly on the sky where it meets the sea. Fishing boats clustered about us as we drew nearer the shore, and a huge flat-bottomed barge approached that was to tow us into the inner harbor, its many oars lifting and falling in tandem like the legs of a giant water beetle scudding on the water. As we drew closer
I saw a sprawling metropolis spread out along the shore and thought I looked on Rome. I had heard it had seven hills and was puzzled by its flatness. When I asked a sailor who was coiling rope nearby, he grinned, revealing a mouth filled with rotten stumps.

“Ostia,” he said, spitting over the side, “the port of Rome.”

It began to rain, the first we had felt since our African spring, and as we tied up to the jetty low gray clouds rolled in from the sea concealing the wharves as we made our way to the pier, arms clutched around our belongings, uncertain of our balance on the slippery gangplank. The entire voyage had only taken five days, yet I felt as if a hundred years had passed since I had left Africa.

My first step on Italian soil was unremarkable, earth like any other. It was the smell that was different, an overpowering stench of rotting things, a choking miasma that seemed to settle on that low-lying place like a suffocating blanket.

“It's built on a salt marsh,” Augustine said when he saw me wrinkle my nose. “It's always silting up. The Emperor Claudius had it dredged, but that was a long time ago and the sea is reclaiming it again.”

By comparison, the port of Carthage smelled sweet, scoured clean by wind and salt, the city on the cliffs above airy and untainted. I had imagined Italy to be a place of marble and gold-leaf and endless tinkling fountains. Instead we emerged from the harbor into a bewildering maze of fetid streets with people pushing rudely past cursing us in a Latin dialect hard to understand.

We paid a stonemason carting huge slabs of stone to take us to Rome, for we did not have means to hire a fast mule-drawn carriage. A barrel-chested man dressed in a one-sleeve workman's tunic with his belly spilling over his tightly cinched belt by the name of Fulvius, he told us we were lucky. He had intended to load his stone onto a flat-bottomed barge and sail it up the Tiber, but when he arrived that morning at the appointed time and place, the barge was not there and he could find no other boat. As his cargo had been paid for by Rome's City Works—mostly fine quality marble for decorative work, that being his specialty, he told us—he dared not delay its delivery. But he was more than happy to take our coin as it would offset what he had lost to the bargeman.

We left Ostia heading east along the Via Ostiense, the great paved road that connected Rome and the port, the Tiber on our left.

“It's only nineteen miles,” Fulvius informed us, “but the rate these sluggards move it'll take us all day.”

Augustine and Adeodatus jumped down from the cart and walked, in no danger of falling behind as we traveled so slowly.

After a while I joined them and it was a joy to stretch my legs after the confined quarters of the ship. Shortly after setting out, the rain stopped, the clouds parted, and the sun came out. The marshy ground along the banks of the Tiber steamed and the reed beds stretching out toward the sea were alive with birds, many of which I had never seen before, and long-legged herons and waders stepping fastidiously on stilted legs.

Adeodatus ran beside the cart like an overgrown puppy sometimes going up the road so far ahead I had to call him back for fear he would turn a corner and be run over by a cart or trampled by
slaves carrying a litter. I was astonished at the volume of traffic on the road as if the whole world were either going to or coming from Rome.

“It's true what they say,” I said to Augustine.

“What is?”

“That all roads lead to Rome.”

“I hope so,” Augustine said. “For it is here I mean to come to the notice of important men.” He was silent for a time. “The trouble is,” he said, “I cannot help but feel I am here under false pretenses.”

I glanced at him and saw he looked troubled. “Because you are no longer a Manichee,” I said.

He nodded. “My patron is a Manichee and so is our host in Rome. I have not told them I have broken with the sect.”

“But you will be a teacher, not a spokesman for the Manichees,” I said.

“Yes. That is the only thing that comforts me.”

We were walking hand in hand behind the cart but sufficiently far back and to the side so we were not splattered by the mud the ironbound wheels threw up. Augustine squeezed my hand.

“Don't worry,” he said. “I haven't dragged you all this way for nothing. I'm not going to resign the post before I've even taken it up.”

The sun was sinking at our backs when Fulvius pointed straight ahead. “See those trees upon the hill,” he said. “The city is beyond.”

I glanced at Adeodatus who was curled up behind me in the cart, worn out by the day's events. I touched his head.

“We are almost there,” I said, softly.

He nodded sleepily and rested his head against my back.

Because night had fallen, Fulvius explained he could drive through the streets once we entered the city. There was a law against wheeled traffic in the daytime. Augustine told Fulvius the address of our destination. We would stay at a house on the Palatine owned by a rich Manichee until we found an apartment of our own. This we would do as soon as Augustine received his first fees. He clicked his oxen on, their hooves clopping hollowly on the slab-paved streets that twisted and turned. Eventually he drew up at a door, torches burning in cressets on either side, a door-slave squatting on the step, his chin sunk on his breast, fast asleep. When we pulled up, he opened bleary eyes and, reluctantly getting to his feet, stepped forward to help us with our baggage.

Augustine jumped down, lifted Adeodatus over the side of the cart, and then gave me his hand. I clambered down and Augustine paid Fulvius.

“Welcome to Rome,” he said. He nodded shyly to me. “Mistress.”

The slave, a youth from the Northern tribes with straw-colored hair and startling blue eyes, piercing even in torchlight, admitted us to the house, and we stood waiting awkwardly in the atrium until the steward arrived, a man with a shriveled monkey face and stiff, haughty manners.

“The master and mistress are in bed,” he informed us, “but all is prepared. Come this way.”

We followed him down what seemed a labyrinth of corridors until he led us into a small room—a bedchamber and tiny courtyard looking out onto what I could just make out was a row of huts,
which I later learned were storage sheds. The steward lit a lamp, the flame guttering. There was no brazier to warm the room. Shielded from the sun by the courtyard and a high wall at the back and the sides that blocked out the sky, the room was cold and damp.

“I will send food,” the steward said and left.

When he had gone I sat on the bed and looked around. The plaster on the walls was bubbling and peeling from the damp and parts of a decaying fresco of merry woodland nymphs and satyrs did nothing to enliven the meanness of the room. In a corner a pile of pottery shards and dried lentils were swept into a heap as if the room had once been used for storage and had been carelessly cleaned. Adeodatus had collapsed on a sagging couch pushed against the wall and immediately fallen asleep, the bags he was carrying still clutched in his arms.

Augustine sat down on the bed and put his arm around me. “Don't worry,” he said. “We won't be here long. In a few days I will have my fees, and we can find rooms of our own.”

I leaned my head against him and closed my eyes, shutting out the squalor of the room. We were in Rome at last. That was all that mattered.

CHAPTER 22

D
espite Augustine's promise, we spent those first weeks entombed in our dingy room. Augustine's students endlessly delayed paying him, making up all manner of excuses.

I did not complain about our situation as I saw that the hope he had had of teaching a better class of students here in Rome was beginning to dwindle.

“The fecklessness of youth is the same the world over,” he said sadly one evening after waiting all day in the classroom for his students to show up. Eventually, two had straggled in just before sunset, both looking seedy and the worse for drink. He should have had twenty students in his classroom that day.

He was lying on the bed with his arm over his eyes. I sat down beside him and placed my hand on his chest. I had never seen him so despondent, so defeated.

“Have patience, my love,” I told him. “It's early days yet.”

“I wonder sometimes,” Augustine said, “if I have mistaken my calling. Surely a teacher should love his students, whereas all I feel is contempt for their stupidity.” He removed his arm from his eyes and looked at me but I had no answer to give him.

When Adeodatus was not with his father, he and I would explore Rome, the city that had brought the entire world to heel. One day Augustine said he would join us. We decided to go to the Forum Romanum.

“After that,” he said, “we can wander about and visit the Temple of Vesta if you want.”

“Can we see the place where Caesar was killed, Papa?” Adeodatus asked with a young boy's ghoulish relish.

“He was killed in the Theatre of Pompey where the Senate was meeting at the time,” Augustine said. Seeing Adeodatus's disappointment, he added, “The Senate House is the place where Cicero gave his most famous speeches.”