The Confessions of X (27 page)
“This is an instruction to my lawyer in Carthage,” he was saying. “You must give it to Anaxis, the steward, who will meet you at the harbor and take you to the farm. He will make sure it is delivered.” He handed me another piece of parchment. “This is for Anaxis. It informs him of my wishes and that all authority, both legal and moral, is now ceded to you in your own right. You are provided for,” he said. “You shall want for nothing for the rest of your life.”
“I cannot accept such a gift,” I said, tears coming to my eyes. It had been arranged that I would stay at Nebridius's Carthage home in the city until I could rent a small apartment of my own. I had even wondered if the insula in which we had lived in the street of the silversmiths might have a vacancy, but then I discarded that idea for it would be unbearable to be reminded of Augustine and Adeodatus there even if the memory of Neith would sustain me.
“You must accept it,” he said. “It is mine to give.”
I put my arms around him, and, after a moment's hesitation, I felt his arms encircle me and crush me to him.
“Oh, Nereus,” I said. “I will miss you.”
“And I you, Naiad,” he whispered. “I will miss you more than you will ever know.”
I stepped back then and looked up at him. For a brief moment it was as if a door opened and through it I glimpsed an anguish as
great as my own. Then the door closed and I did not know if I had imagined it or not.
“You are not responsible for me.” My words sounded cold to my ears, but intuitively I knew he needed me to create a distance between us now, to move back a pace from what I saw, or thought I saw, in his eyes.
“Maybe not under the law . . .” he said.
I waited for him to finish but he did not.
Under the law Augustine was not obliged to support me even if he had had the means, which he did not. I was not his wife and had brought no dowry to our union. All I had were the clothes on my back and a few possessions.
I realized that he and Nebridius had taken counsel of what to do to provide for me. I had thought that when I heard them talking in low voices in Augustine's study, it was of Augustine's pain at losing me.
As ever, Nebridius was the means of our rescue. Such he had ever been and suddenly I was filled with shame at the way we had used him, had always counted on his generosity and friendship.
“Forgive us,” I cried, flinging my arms about him again. “Forgive
me
.”
“Hush,” he said, stroking my hair. “There is nothing to forgive. It is little enough I can give. I would do more if I could.”
At the time, I thought he was speaking of the farm.
On the day of my departure, I left before dawn. I had said farewell to Monica the night before. She had come into my bedroom where she found me sitting on my bed, numb that the time had now
come, that only a few hours remained. I was trying to steel myself to go to Adeodatus and kiss him good night for the last time.
“It is not right that I intrude when you say good-bye to Augustine and my grandson in the morning,” she said, sitting down beside me. “But know, my dearest daughter, that my heart will always be with you.” She shook her head and the tears that shone there fell like rain onto my hands. “Know that never, in all my long life, have I known nor will ever know such courage, such love. We are not worthy of such love.”
I looked down. I did not feel courageous; I felt like a coward running from a battlefield, abandoning his brothers in arms.
She put her hand under my chin and tilted up my head, the same as I had done with my son in the wood. “What you have done, my child, what you are doing, has taught me more about love than any sermon I have ever heard. âNo greater love hath a man than to lay down his life for another.' ” She smiled as I flinched a little. “Forgive an old woman for quoting scripture at you again. But it is true nonetheless. I will never forget you and what you have done. If God grants it, I will see you again.”
She kissed me with great ceremony and deliberation on each cheek then once on the mouth, tenderly as a mother kisses her child. Then she made the sign of the cross on my forehead. “Go with God,” she said and left.
My bags were loaded into a mule-drawn gig Augustine had hired; he had also hired the man to see me safely to the ship as I had
refused to have anyone go with me. This was expensive but the fastest and safest way to travel overland from Milan to Ostia where I would take ship back to Carthage. When Nebridius had offered to pay for it, Augustine had reacted with anger and despair.
“Must I always be beholden to you?” he cried. Then putting out his hands to Nebridius, “Forgive me, my friend. I did not mean that.”
Nebridius clasped his arms. “Forget it,” he said.
I knelt before Adeodatus. Since I had told him of my leaving he had been aloof and cold with me. It broke my heart but I understood. His eyes glittered with unshed tears; I saw a muscle in his jaw working as he fought not to cry. My heart was torn as I saw that he had become a little man.
I lifted the iron citizen's ring Augustine had given me, as a pledge of his love, from around my neck where I wore it on a chain and looped it over Adeodatus's head.
“Wear this for me,” I told him.
“I will never take it off, Mother,” he said. Since that day in the wood, he had refused to call me Mama, preferring now the correct and cold formality of
Mater.
The ring I gave him, I have now. It was returned to me later and it lies hidden against the breast that once gave him suck, against the heart that beat with love for him, still beats though his heart is stilled. This piece of metal was once warmed by his living flesh, an endless circle with no beginning and no end, the hollowness at its center a space in which my love for him is contained. The silver ring Augustine gave me is still on my finger.
I took Adeodatus in my arms and held him fiercely as if I could press his body back into my own as when I carried him inside me.
He held his body stiff and resisting but made no attempt to pull away.
At last I released him and stood.
Now I turned to Augustine.
“I will never love another,” I told him. He took me in his arms and the feel of him was as familiar as my own body, our flesh one flesh, our hearts one heart.
“I love you,” he said. “I will always love you.” His fingers dug into my flesh, his whole body shook as if with a fever. “You must believe me.”
“I do,” I said.
When he released me it was as if my very self was torn in two, one part remaining with Augustine and my son, the other, I know not where.
I remember nothing of my journey to Ostia, nothing of where we put in for the night, of what I ate, what I wore, what I thought. I moved as a shade not yet passed over the river Styx to the Underworld for lack of a coin to pay the ferryman. I remained on the earth but I was no longer tethered to it.
At Ostia, the crash of cargo, the shouts of stevedores, and gulls screaming overhead and then flashing down to feast on offal and bicker at my feet returned me briefly to the world of the living. I thanked the driver and paid him off. Then I boarded the ship.
O
n the second day out of port, a storm arose, its coming heralded by a blackening sky and a shrieking wind, the waves rising and curling like mountains to engulf the ship. The captain shouted for me to take refuge in the cabin on the deck but I refused. He looked at me as if I were mad then ran to save his ship.
A day and a night the storm raged and my spirit exulted in its elemental howling. After so many months of silence, of keeping my sorrow locked tight inside me, it was as if the lid of Pandora's box had been lifted, as if all my pain were released into the world.
The Christian sailors crossed themselves and called me a Jonah, the pagans made the sign to avert the Evil Eye. When the sky cleared and the sea became quiescent once more, none would come near me but cast me sidelong glances. I did not care nor did I rejoice that we were saved. With the storm's passing a huge lassitude had come upon me as if its violence had drained me of my spirit and left me a shell. When I disembarked at Carthage I was fevered and weak; I, who had nursed my son through his near mortal sickness and survived, was now gravely ill.
Later I learned that Anaxis, the steward, carried me delirious
from the ship and laid me in the cart. Then he drove to the farm outside Carthage and I was put to bed. All this was like a dream to me, fragments of sky above my head, the branches of trees in full leaf, a strange jolting motion so I sometimes thought I was still on board the ship and the storm raged on.
I lay near death for weeks, sometimes floating in a void as if I journeyed yet on a flat misty sea without form or delineation or end, sometimes on a swell that lifted and bore me down, the great indrawing and exhalation of the world's breath the only sound I heard. Other times I was assailed by faces that loomed out of the fog and spoke to me: My father saying, “Sleep, Little Bird”; my aunt telling me to take the box, open it; my infant son babbling his first “Mama”; Monica's “I dreamed of a young man” and Nebridius's “Naiad.”
Augustine saying, “I will always love you.”
I regained my wits only after summer had passed and the grapes were purpling on the vine, the wheat cut and shaken onto the threshing floor and gathered into the barns. I awoke to a world of plenty under a sun that dripped amber over fields and orchards, a final sweet blessing before the pinch of winter. It was the time of year my father always returned from his travels, and as I lay looking through a window at the beauty of a world divesting itself of its gorgeous apparel before its long sleep, it came to me that I had willfully done to my son what my father, against his will, had done to me.
That first winter at the farm I remember as a monochrome of gray and black, a charcoal drawing of lines and empty spaceâthe
white square of my room, the window that, on warmer days, darkly framed the outline of a yet darker tree; on colder days, wooden shutters blocked out the light and left me in perpetual dusk, the red eye of a brazier in the corner of the room a sun forever sinking. I lay in half-light in a half-world, the sounds of life beyond my door of footsteps, hushed voices, the clatter of wooden bowls, and, once, the snuffle of a dog before a sharp command drew it away as alien to me as words spoken in a foreign tongue.