The Confessions of X (32 page)
A final kiss, a hand lifted in farewell, and they were gone.
A
fter Adeodatus and Perpetua's visit I was filled with a contentment I had not known since I left Italy. The shortening days of fall, the crops harvested, the fruit picked, the grapes pressed and stored, all this seemed a benediction, a promise that the harvest of my life's labors was full. I heard there was plague in Carthage but here in the country we passed unscathed. Neither did I fear for my son as he was in Italy, even more removed from the city than I.
The winter came and, with it, very cold days such as we had seldom known. But Tanit said it was a good sign, that the cold would kill the plague in the city and stop it spreading to the countryside.
It was at this time that I realized Tanit was with child. I noticed a rounding of her belly when she was stretching to reach a bowl off a high shelf in the kitchen. I should have known before, I chided myself. She had been more tired of late and once I caught her retching in the yard behind the house.
“You are with child,” I said. “That is wonderful.”
She smiled shyly. “Yes, Domina. If the gods will it.”
“How far along?”
“Four moons,” she replied and I was reminded of Cybele asking me that exact question long ago.
I determined that nothing would go wrong. I would watch over her like a hawk. With Neith, I had been so ignorant, so inexperienced, I had failed to see the signs that all was not well, at least I had told myself this over the years. Tanit and her baby, I vowed, would live.
After supper one evening in late spring I was walking along the road, the sun sinking in swathes of crimson in the west, the coolness of the coming night soft against my skin, when I heard a horse approaching. I called out, afraid I would be trampled. A letter, I thought, although I had not hoped to get one so soon. The horse reined in, blowing hard, feet skittering in a shower of stones that stung my ankles.
“Augustine?” He was just a faint outline against the darkening sky, but I would know him even in pitch blackness.
He threw himself down from the horse and in the next instant was holding me. I could not believe he was alive and in my arms. Then I drew back. There was something different about him, something dark and terrible in the feel of him.
Gripping my shoulders hard, he said: “Our son is dead.”
I did not, could not, understand him. “No,” I said. “The plague was here. It was not in Italy.”
“We returned to Thagaste two months ago.”
“No,” I said again, shaking my head. “No.”
Ever after, whatever he told me that night about my son's last days, how the fever had come upon him all at once, one day healthy, the next hot and feverish, how he lay in a delirium for days and then woke one morning serene and lucid with a great thirst, his only thought to be forgiven by God, his last words to me: “Tell Mama I will always love her,” then slipping softly away, as the lamps were lit against the night as if he were a child falling asleepâthese images returned always, like the ocean beating on the shore, to the first words I heard: “Our son is dead.”
The fact of it, those dreadful, final words, was like a mountain rearing in my path, huge, immovable, impossible to climb or circumvent, a dark mass against which I was stopped.
“It cannot be,” I said, over and over. “It cannot, cannot be.”
“We buried him,” Augustine told me, “five days ago beside his grandfather in Thagaste. A priest said prayers at his gravesite with incense and the sprinkling of water, all that was proper.”
I would have climbed down into the grave and held him to my breast, for he was always fearful of being confined, would cry out at night if he became entangled in his sheets. I saw him lying there, gravecloths covering his face, his body wrapped in shrouds, that quickening body I held against me so little time ago, had always held in my heart's embrace, and now would hold no more, the dark earth falling till he was hidden forever in the ground and me above it.
I also learned that Monica had died the previous year at Ostia. I bowed my head at this, but my heart was so stunned with grief over my son that I did not know what I felt. My only thought: at least she was spared the sorrow of her beloved grandson's death.
We had walked to the house and were standing in the atrium
in darkness, our arms around each other, Augustine's voice, the voice I had longed to hear, now speaking words that were the end of everything. “Our son is dead.”
We clutched each other as shipwrecked sailors clutch at flotsam in a roaring sea and when they look for land see only a vast emptiness.
At last we could stand no longer and sank down onto the floor still holding onto each other. We stayed like that all night. I cannot remember if I wept; I cannot remember if Augustine wept. What I can remember is that I knew this was the end, that I had reached the utmost limit of everything I thought I knew or was. All was darkness.
I must have slept, for when I awoke on the floor of the atrium it was dawn and I was alone. Augustine had covered me with a cloak and laid a pillow under my head. On the floor beside me was a piece of parchment folded into a square. When I opened it, Adeodatus's ring, the one I had given him when I left Milan, his father's citizen ring, fell out and rolled across the tiles. I watched it go. It came to rest beneath a table, but I did not stoop to pick it up. Opening my hand, I let the note fall unread. Then I went into my room and closed the door.
I kept to my room and neither ate nor slept nor did I weep. It was as if time had ceased to flow, as if my son had taken the world with
him when he died and left a blankness in which I could not measure my proximity to any living thing nor navigate which direction to go. My body was a nothing, a mere shell, its needs irrelevant, unheeded. I did not even long for death, for if consciousness there was beyond the grave, I was already dead and did not fear it.
I do not know how the soul survives such things, how the heart still beats, the nerves and sinews obey the mind's commands and move the limbs though the will is dead. When Tanit came to tend me, I said, “My son is dead,” as if I could explain the whole of it, could make her understand that nothing mattered any longer, that this time my sickness would not depart.
A year ago my body had revived, grown stronger with the passing of the seasons, linked as it was to the life of all that was, hidden in winter, coming forth in spring when the sleeping earth awoke. Now I was forever invulnerable, cut off from humankind, a thing immortal which neither time nor death could touch. In this way, my son's death freed me from all fear, for while he was living I had care for him, was fearful of harm from accident, sickness, and the evil of men. Now I felt myself indifferent to life's sorrows, its vicissitudes, the cruel games it played on men.
Time passed. In my mind's eye I saw my son as he had been the last time I saw him, an agony so great I groaned aloud as if I were once again in labor. I saw him running in the fields, his arms held wide as if he were a bird, crying, “Catch me, Mama.” I felt the weight of his head against my knee on those summer nights we talked and then, sometimes, at my breast as if he were a babe again and I were nursing him, his tiny fingers playing with my hair. I heard his laughter, his chatter when a boy telling of a bird's
nest he had found with eggs so blue they looked made of summer sky. I kissed his scrapes and tied his little sandals, watched him fall asleep while my story was yet half-told, one hand curled in mine, the other flung wide across the covers.
A thousand images
played before my eyes more true than those I saw in the theater at Carthage where I laughed and wept to see the tragedies and comedies of men upon a stage, knowing them for make-believe.
I
do not know how many weeks passed only that I might have crouched there forever in my room had a piercing cry not shattered the night and tore the bindings from my shrouded heart. It was an animal's cry, long drawn out, utterly wild until suddenly cut off. Then it came again and, after it, the frenzied barking and howling of the dogs. Throwing on a cloak I ran out into the night toward the house where Tanit and Anzar lived.
The scene was utter confusion, the air choking with incense, someone's muttered incantation, a crowding of bodies around the bed and on it Tanit, half lying, half sitting, knees drawn up, her face a tragic mask, her hair like Medusa's, her mouth a black hole out of which that inhuman keening started up again.
“Mistress, mistress,” someone implored.
“Anaxis,” I said. “Silence those dogs.” I pushed Anzar down on a stool by the head of the bed. “Hold her hand,” I commanded. “Speak to her.”
His lips moved but no sound came out, his face ashen. Then, as if awakening from a trance, he took his wife's hand and leaned in towards her. “My love,” I heard him whisper. “My strong goddess.”
An image of Neith laboring in vain with Tanzar praying beside her came to me.
“Maia,” I said, “run to the main house and heat water; take the sheets from my bed and tear them into squares.”
Her eyes were fixed with horror on Tanit, her hand covering her mouth as if to stifle a scream. Barely out of girlhood, she had shrunk into the smallest spaces of her mind the way a woodland creature will crouch motionless in the hollow of a tree when a predator is near.
“Go,” I said, pushing her. “And bring a sharp knife. Make sure you boil it first.”
I leaned over Tanit, waiting for her pains to ease, speaking softly. “I am going to feel inside you to see if the baby is stuck. It will hurt and I am sorry for it but it must be done.”
Her eyelids flickered for a moment and I thought I saw her nod. Then she was gone again into that red vortex, swept down against her will, her head rolling from side to side, that awful feral sound issuing again from her lips.
I waited until Maia returned carrying a bowl of hot water and towels then washed my hands, dried them, and took a flask of olive oil and poured it over my hands until they glistened in the lamplight.
Tanit lay still.
“Now,” I said and gently felt between her legs, the flesh taut and hot, impossibly stretched and, at the opening, a round hard lump, the baby's head. She groaned as I probed deeper, blindly feeling for the face, downwards to the neck then my fingers touched something ropelike. I sat back and wiped my hands.
Anzar's eyes were pleading with me but he did not speak. I motioned for Maia to take her place by Tanit's side then drew him to the door and spoke in a low voice. “The cord is wound around the baby's neck,” I said. “That is why she cannot push it forth.”
“You will save them,” he said. “I know you will.”
“I will try,” I replied. “Stay with her a moment.”
I left the house and went to find Rusticus. He was standing by the barn; I could hear the dogs whining and scratching at the door behind him but, mercifully, they had ceased to howl.