The Confessions of X (35 page)
One young man, blond hair long and braided, outlandish trousers covering his legs such I had seen Germans wearing in Rome, strange tattoos on his arms, steadied me when I stumbled over the thigh bone of an ox. Looking in his eyes, a rain-cloud gray with amber flecks, his lashes golden, I thought:
You are only a little older than my son when he died
.
I had been as far west as Hippo once before with my father when we owned a mule and cart until he gambled them away when he was in his cups. Thereafter we had to walk, lugging his tools, keeping to the countryside around Carthage, the villas set along the coast, the estates of the rich on the inland plain beneath the mountains to the south.
I passed under the gateway, jostled in a crowd of refugees who sought protection within the city walls, rich landowners by the quality of their clothes, who had seen their villas burned, their crops and livestock destroyed, their vines and olive trees hacked down, all their wealth taken in the blink of an eye. I could have told them that wisdom lies in knowing happiness is a fleeting dream, that barns crammed full with oil and grain, gold chains on neck and wrist, costly perfumes to anoint the body cannot sustain
the soul when hard times come. The slaves who stumbled along behind their masters knew thisâI saw it in their eyes, their disenfranchised lives more weighty than their masters' purses, their loss so great a small thing now to lay down their life. In this knowledge they were rich and their full-fed masters poor.
I remember Hippo as a city that smelled sweet, like Carthage, perched as it was on twin hills above the ocean, scoured by its cleansing winds. I remember how Rome, by comparison, had smelled like a midden, its noxious vapors trapped among its seven hills, its alleys stinking with refuse thrown from windows despite its vaunted sewer, the
Cloaca Maxima
, which emptied into the Tiber and made its licker fish the largest in the world, grown huge on human waste.
But now all that had changed; the streets lay deep in the filth of animals penned up within its walls, the alleys oozing runnels of human waste. The buildings' porticos and pillars, made of marble from its glory days when Hippo was the second port of Africa Province, were streaked with soot from the cooking fires of refugees camped under the shade of their wide roofs, the walls of buildings so many eyeless skulls where wooden doors and shutters had been taken for fuel.
Gone was the prosperous hum of barter and haggling over goods, of children playing in the streets, matrons gossiping out of windows, the calls of stevedores from the wharfs. Now the sound was a continuous lament of hungry babies, frantic parents screaming for their children, men raging at each other for a scrap of bread, a sliver of shade, a cup of water to revive their pregnant wives.
The city's great harbor, formed by a river that flowed down to the sea from the inland plains, was choked with all manner of vessels taking people on board, fortunes in gold and jewels exchanged
for a single berth, the jetties of the harbor a heaving mass of bodies clamoring for passage, young children trampled underfoot or abandoned on the wharf, wailing, the old vacant-eyed and lost, all bonds of family obliterated in a conflagration of fear.
I took one such child by the hand, a small boy of three or four, and led him out of the crush.
“Where are your parents?” I asked.
He stared at me huge-eyed, his face tear-streaked, a dirty finger in his mouth. Then I heard a shout and looking up I saw a man push through the crowd. Without a word, he snatched the boy up and plunged back toward the harbor's edge, soon lost to my sight. Abandoning the harbor I made my way back up to the city, resting frequently on the steep steps leading upwards to the forum, keeping to the side so I would not be swept away by people hurrying down, a vast river of humanity flowing to the sea, and I, the only one going up.
The forum was wide, with porticoes on three sides containing shops behind the deep shade of their pillars, statues, temples, and small monuments commemorating Roman generals of long ago. To the north of the forum was a public fountain, flowing sluggishly, around which many had set up camp, erecting makeshift awnings of cloaks on poles to shield them from the sun. Nearby a rectangular-covered courtyard I remembered as the place where markets were held was now crammed with refugees taking shelter in the shade. Behind this, to the east, looming above the Christian quarter a large church, beside it a baptistery and other buildings, which I knew must be the bishop's house and private chapel. Toward these I walked and entered a small courtyard in the center of which grew a pear tree. Beneath its shade I sat down, my journey over.
A
cross from me is a doorway, narrow and dark, out of which the young man comes each morning to fill the water jars. Outside where I sit the world shimmers, mirage-like, a scorching brightness that dazzles the eyes. Beyond the doorway a shadowed world, death's antechamber, through which I must soon pass.
I wait patiently for the sun to set, for the bells to ring out the day's last prayers before the night, the courtyard emptying, growing silent. Now I am alone except for he who lies nearby, all the frenzied world he loved now shrunken to its sounds, the smell of food cooking over the evening fires, the faint flicker of the lamps, the rustling of the pear tree as a wind picks up from the west, the whispers and soft footfalls of the death chamber.
Rising I enter the door. I touch the iron ring on the chain around my neck, my son's last gift to me apart from his love. I take it off and hold it in my fist. In my pocket, the note Augustine left me when he told me of our son's death, a single line: “It is yearning that makes the heart deep.”
Before me is a passageway lit by a single oil lamp in a niche, the flame winnowing along its length as I softly close the door. I
hear faint voices, the sound of footsteps moving away. Behind a doorway to my right I hear murmuring, a soft chant, like someone praying. I push open the door and step into a room, no light within save that which comes from an open window through which I see the pear tree, its branches black against a blood-red sky.
I see a man on a bed, propped up on pillows, eyes closed, lips moving, the voice familiar but his body unknown to me, his face so gaunt the flesh seems molded to the bones, his arms above the coverlet wasted, wrinkled like old leather, his breathing a harsh and painful susurration, chest shuddering with the effort of each breath. On the walls are sheets of papyrus with words written in bold black letters; they rustle in the breeze from the open window. As I get nearer I see that they are the penitential psalms and Augustine is reciting them from memory:
Amplius lava me ab iniquitate mea; et peccata meo munda: Quoniam iniquitatem meam ego cognosco, et peccatum meum contra me est semper.
“Wash me from my iniquity; and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my iniquity; and my sin is ever before me.”
“It is I,” I say.
He smiles but his eyes remain closed. His lips do not cease to move.
I step close beside his bed, take my son's ring, and thread it over the fourth finger of his left hand. His skin feels dry, scaly, so unlike the flesh I knew long ago when we were young, firm and warm and strong, without blemish or taint. Yet the shape of his hand is the same, the bones and sinews, the wrist bones so delicate for a man, almost womanly, the architecture of his body as familiar to me as my own.
He opens his eyes and looks at me. Suddenly Augustine is there, not the broken man upon the bed nor the bishop nor the shadowy figure in the atrium where I did not have the courage to light the lamps and look into his eyes for fear I would see my own suffering figured there, him saying over and over: “Our son is dead.”
Here is the youth I once knew, the man into whose keeping I gave my soul and heart and body, the father of my son. Here is he who caused me such sorrow.
And the years fall away and we are young again in the church where we first met, a shaft of sunlight lighting up his eyes, my gaze dazzled by the sight of him and all pain dies away, all bitterness.
He lifts his left hand and looks at the ring then, slowly, turns over his right hand and opens it. Resting on his palm is the shell he once gave me, the shell I thought I lost long ago.
I lay down Neith's statue on the table beside his bed and take the shell. It is warm from his hand.
“I broke my troth with you,” he says. “Forgive me.”
In answer, I place my lips upon his lips. His flesh is hot with fever but the shape of his mouth is the same, the feel of him the same. I cannot see him for the tears that blind my eyes but I can feel his hand holding mine. I am the living heart of a tree uncovered by the axe, still pliable, still green and full of sap. I stand beside him and hold his hand. Once I lift a cup of water to his lips and he drinks. When the room grows dark I light a lamp so I can look upon his face and he can look upon mine.
In the middle watches of the night Augustine slips into a coma, his eyelids fluttering as if he dreams, his breathing grown intermittent, sometimes stopping then starting up again with long
pauses in between. I smooth his hair back from his face murmuring his name.
“I love you,” I say, but he does not hear me.
The road he trod these forty years was mine, save he had gone on ahead. Perhaps the disappearance of my father and Augustine on the road of my life was fated, that left alone I could become the woman I was meant to be, a domina of an estate, a mother to my people, not just my son. It was as if the pain of loss had widened me, scooped out my heart so it could hold a greater love outside the circle of my kin.
He does not awake again but dies just as the blackness beyond the window is lightening. I kiss his still warm lips, fold his hands over his chest and remain, keeping watch over the body I have loved, the greatness of his spirit more.
Augustine
.
He is the last to hold my shape in the vessel of his heart and with his passing my story dies as if I had never been, like cities fallen in the desert and returned at last to sand. I am become the merest flicker of a shadow, passing fugitive and brief along the edges of another's life.
I
first came across the mysterious figure of Augustine's concubine when I was twelve and a student at Loreto Convent School in Manchester, England. In religion class we read Augustine's
Confessions
. I remember putting up my hand and asking who this woman was, the one Augustine referred to as “
Una”
âthe One. Sister Bernadette replied: “No one knows. She is lost to history.”
That phrase, “lost to history,” stuck with me. I thought: so many great women are lost to history, eclipsed by the lives of the men they loved. So, forty years later, I decided to go looking for the concubine so she could tell her story. Augustine said in the
Confessions
: “Our use of words is often inaccurate and seldom completely correct, but our meaning is recognized nonetheless.”
This is a work of fiction. Augustine scholars will see that, in places, I have taken liberties with the historical facts for dramatic purposes. An example of this is in the character of Alypius. I have made him a contemporary of Augustine whereas, in fact, he was several years younger and not a fellow student but a pupil of Augustine's. I also omit him from scenes in Rome and Milan even though he was an important figure in Augustine's life and went on to become a fellow African bishop.
I have altered the chronology of some events. For example, after being kicked out by Monica, Augustine and the concubine and their son lived in Thagaste for three years where he taught before returning to Carthage. I have them return to Carthage immediately. Historically, Adeodatus is thirteen when they go to Rome; in this story he is nine or ten.
The most obvious change is that I have made the concubine's casting off a little more ambiguous than is strictly historical. The conventional interpretation is that Monica arranged a marriage for Augustine and that the concubine was sent away before the betrothal. I retain this sequence of events, but I have rejected the modern notion that this was a coldhearted and cynical act on Augustine's part. In the
Confessions,
Augustine writes
:
“the woman with whom I had been living was torn from my side as an obstacle to my marriage and this blow crushed my heart to bleeding because I loved her dearly.” Nor is Augustine's refusal to name the concubine equally cold-blooded. Along with the great Augustine scholar Peter Brown, I believe that Augustine's refusal to name the woman he loved was in order to protect her anonymity. He knew the
Confessions
was going to be the fifth-century equivalent of a best seller and would draw unwanted attention to himself and to those he loved. If anything, this refusal to name her leads me to suspect she was still living at the time the
Confessions
was published.
A word about concubinage. To our modern ears “concubine” sounds synonymous with “mistress” or even “prostitute.” In the ancient world this was not the case. Concubinage involved a monogamous sexual relationship when the man and woman involved were not, or could not be, married for societal reasons. It
almost always involved a man of higher social status and a woman of low social status. One of the most famous examples is Caelis, the freedwoman and concubine of the Emperor Vespasian, who was held in high esteem by her contemporaries and had much power at the imperial court. Frequently, concubinage was voluntary on the part of the woman and her family as it involved a means by which she could attain economic security. The resulting union was not unlike common-law marriage today. To be labeled a concubine was not a derogatory term in the ancient world and was often inscribed on tombstones as a title to denote the status of the deceased. Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan and known to be a strict moralist, argued for allowing concubines and their partners to receive the Eucharist. This reveals that he did not consider their union to be sinful so much as irregular.