The Confessions of X (5 page)

“Watch your step,” he said as I stumbled on an uneven paving stone, and when he put his hand out to steady me it burned.

The harbor was quiet, the sun refracting off the stone piers dazzling to the eye, blistering to the touch. The boats tied up against the jetties creaked on the slight swell, the slap of water against their hulls clearly audible, the occasional flapping of a rope a strangely peaceful percussion. In the taverns and bars that lined the quay, sailors and stevedores huddled on benches under faded awnings stretched on poles, elbows on the tables, beakers clutched in their hands, their eyes even at rest turned toward the sea.

With the coppers I saved on the fish, we bought olives and goat cheese wrapped in grape leaves and begged a clay jar from a stall owner which we filled from a fountain and swore to return. The girl smiled at Augustine and tossed her head so her earrings shimmered. She was small and pretty, her eyes outlined with charcoal like a cat's.

“Promise?” she said.

“On my honor,” Augustine replied. She giggled and when we walked away I looked back over my shoulder and saw her watching us with her cat's eyes.

In search of shade we found a boat half-upturned on the beach and sat beneath it, our knees drawn up, the basket and the earthen jar between us. I took off my sandals and dabbled my toes in a tiny rock pool not yet drunk up by the thirsty sun. Lifting my face to the wind blowing off the ocean, I closed my eyes and when I opened them Augustine was looking at me.

“Here,” he said, handing me the water jar.

I drank and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Now you,” I said.

He drank and then placed the jar deep in the shade behind us to keep cool. We were silent looking out at the sea as we had done the first day we met. It was like being on the edge of the world.

“Tell me everything,” Augustine said.

“About what?”

“About you.”

And so I did, beginning with my childhood as far back as I could remember, about my father and his craft, what he taught me, how much he loved me and I him. My voice faltered then and I fell quiet.

“What are you thinking?” Augustine asked after a time.

I turned to look at him. “I chose that fish at the market because it looked like one my father once made. Each silver scale, the red
line along the gills, all exactly the same. But the colors he used were not silver and red at all. He chose white and gray and yellow and black. I remember thinking: Those colors are all wrong; they will never work.” I laughed. “But then it did,” I said. “Work, I mean. It was completely right. When you stepped back and saw it from a distance, it was
alive
.” An unexpected delight, the same as when I touched the miracle of that perfect fish with a child's finger to see if it would move, flamed up in me, and for a brief instant I saw my father walking toward me on the beach, his tablet of sketches looped through his belt bumping rhythmically against his hip.

“You are your father's daughter,” Augustine said softly.

“Yes,” I said. “Are you your father's son?”

He did not reply but leaning back picked up the water jar again and passed it to me, steadying its weight while I drank. I was thirsty after all that talk and drank again.

When I finished he stoppered it and set it down. “My father drinks and whores,” he said. “And so, no, I sincerely hope I am not my father's son.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, touching his hand, which lay between us, palm up, in the sand. Briefly his fingers closed on mine and then let go.

I thought of my uncle and the misery of my aunt's life. “Your mother . . .?” I trailed off, uncertain if this was something I had a right to ask.

“He thinks my mother doesn't know about his unfaithfulness,” he said.

“Perhaps she loves him anyway?”

“Yes,” he said. “Perhaps she does.”

The sun had long since passed its zenith and was sinking in the west when I realized with a start that I had promised my aunt to return before sunset.

“I must go,” I said, fumbling with my sandal straps.

We returned the water jar and Augustine walked me home through streets awakening to the coming evening, workmen returning to work in the last few hours of light, women throwing open shutters to catch the cooling air. At the fountain at the top of my street, I stopped. Augustine passed back the basket and I balanced it on the fountain's rim. We stood there awkwardly; all our ease together on the beach utterly fled.

“Nebridius,” Augustine said. He was dabbling his fingers in the fountain and would not look at me. “I love him dearly and would not hurt him for the world.”

“Me neither,” I said. “I love him too.”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.” He gave a small bow. “Thank you for today.” Suddenly I was the girl with the cat's eyes and he was the young nobleman borrowing an old jar, his faultless courtesy a gleaming armor that concealed the man beneath.

“I love him like a brother,” I said.

“A brother?” Augustine repeated.

“Yes,” I said and, laughing, splashed him with water from the fountain. I turned and ran up the street. At the door of my aunt's house I looked back and he was standing there in the falling dusk looking after me, water running down his face.

CHAPTER 6

W
e've a guest for dinner tonight,” my aunt told me one morning. “I want you home.”

I was surprised for it was seldom anyone visited. My aunt had friends in the neighborhood, I knew, Christian women skilled as midwives, but they never came to the house, for fear of my uncle. In the evenings, after work, he sat at home and drank. Only when he staggered to his bed did I feel safe enough to close my eyes.

I was annoyed that my time with Augustine would be curtailed. I was already late. Every moment I did not spend in his company seemed lifeless, dull, as if all the color had leached out of the world.

By this time, Nebridius had been away a month. He had sent us word that he had been summoned by a messenger from the farm he had been visiting with news of his mother's grave illness. He had hurried to his family estate to be with her and we had not heard from him since.

Since Augustine and I first met, the upturned boat became our place of refuge, our private place. Beneath its curved and salt-scarred hull, shielded from the gaze of prying eyes, we told each
other stories, laid down in words the pictures of our lives, and marveled there had ever been a time when we had not known each other, for life without the other seemed a thing impossible. The word
love
we were careful not to speak with our lips as if to do so would be to take a step irrevocable along a road but dimly figured, yet our bodies spoke it by holding hands, our eyes spoke it by seeking out the other, and when they met our joy at the miracle of the other, of that dear face, spoke it too. Sometimes we slept in each other's arms on breathless afternoons when the murmur of the sea was our distant lullaby; sometimes we wandered along the beach, hand in hand, the water at first so cold it made us cry out; sometimes I lay with my head resting in his lap while he read me poetry, the tragic love of Dido, Queen of Carthage, and her consort, Aeneas. And when he came to the part when Aeneas abandoned her and sailed across the African ocean to the farther shore of Italy, Augustine would touch my face and say: “I would never leave you.”

When I entered the house that evening, I expected to hear my uncle's angry shouts, my aunt's shrill scolding at the lateness of the hour. Augustine and I had lost track of the hour and we had had to run all the way home. I was hot and tired and longed only for bed. Instead, all was quiet except for the low murmur of voices coming from the kitchen. Unwinding my head scarf and trailing it behind me along the floor, I carried the basket into the kitchen. My aunt and uncle were sitting at the table and with them a man I didn't recognize.

“This is my niece,” my aunt said, getting up. The man also rose although my uncle stayed seated. “My dear brother's girl.”

My father had never been dear to my aunt that I could tell and she had never called him anything but lazy and good-for-nothing and worse. I shot her a look and saw that she was smiling at me, a kind of stretching of the lips for appearance's sake but her eyes were black with fury at the way I looked—hair escaping from its coil, my clothes in disarray, my hands and feet grubby, my lips when I licked them tangy with salt.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I'm very tired.” I longed to lie on my bed and think about the day, the waves crashing on the shore, the quality of Augustine's silence when he listened to me talk, the sound of his voice when he replied. I was already turning to go but my aunt had crossed the room and half led, half dragged me to the table, her fingers digging into my arm.

“Have some wine,” she said, pouring me a beaker. “There's someone I want you to meet.”

I glanced at the man. He was wiry and slightly stooped in the shoulders with thinning brown hair combed forward over his brow. His eyes were heavily wrinkled at the corners as if he was always squinting in the sun although his skin was pale. He smiled at me tentatively. He looked very old to me, perhaps thirty or so, but seemed harmless enough. I drained my wine, nodded to him, and started to get up. I had eaten very little that day and the wine made me dizzy.

“Sit,” my uncle said.

“If I may?” the man said, darting a look at my aunt.

She nodded.

“My name is Paulinus,” he said, addressing me. “I am scribe to the bishop.”

Now I realized why the skin around his eyes was so worn. He took dictation all day. That also accounted for the pallor of his skin, for it seldom saw the sun. When he picked up his beaker I saw the fingertips of his right hand were stained with ink. The rounding of his shoulders was from perching on a stool and bending over parchment like the scribes of the Roman tax collectors who sat in the forum recording the coins people dropped reluctantly into the iron-banded money boxes guarded by soldiers.

“Paulinus is a Christian,” my aunt said.

I looked at her and back at him. For a moment, I thought my aunt had hired him to tutor me in letters, and then all at once I understood. This man was to be my husband. This night was to have been our betrothal dinner.

I pushed myself up from the table so that my stool scraped the floor.

“If you will excuse me,” I said.

Paulinus looked down, his face so dejected I almost felt sorry for him.

“You will stay,” my uncle said in a voice I had learned to heed. I sat.

“I understand,” Paulinus said. “It is too sudden.” He looked at my aunt accusingly, and, briefly, I disliked him a little less. He was not a bully.

“She'll do as she's told,” my uncle said. “It's settled.”

From within the folds of his tunic, Paulinus withdrew a small package, placed it shyly on the table, and pushed it toward me. “For you,” he said.

I glanced at it but did not touch it for fear it would be taken as a sign of my consent. It was a tiny alabaster box tied with a red ribbon. I pictured his ink-stained fingers fumbling with the bow, his brave little token of hope. It made me pity him.