The Confessions of X (7 page)
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hen she heard of what I had done, my aunt found out where we were living, and one morning when Augustine was at his studies, she showed up at our door. Thinking Augustine had returned early and forgotten his latchkey, I jumped up and opened it eagerly, ready to fling myself into his arms, for even an hour apart was too long. She pushed past me into the room.
Her eyes took in the way I had pinned up my hair as a married woman, the rumpled bed and sweat-soaked sheets, that I was still in my shift though the sun was high, the day well begun.
“He loves me,” I blurted out before she could throw her accusations in my face.
“So he says now,” she said. “Just wait. Once you become fat or sick with the bearing of his brats, he will cast you aside. Such is the fate of whores.”
She did not sit but walked restlessly about the room so I was forced to press myself against the wall so small was the space. She said I would have nothing, not even my good name, and any children I bore him would belong to him to do with as he wished.
“We are married,” I told her, showing her the citizen's ring on a ribbon around my neck. “This is his pledge.”
“You think that ring will protect you when he casts you off? You think it will save you from poverty and shame?”
Before I could slip the ring back under my shift, she caught at it and pulled. The ribbon broke and the ring fell to the floor, spun, and rolled into a corner. I scrabbled for it and snatched it up, holding it in my fist as I had done when first Augustine gave it to me.
“Why do you hate me?” I said. “Why have you always hated me?”
Like metal foil crumpled by a fist, her face caved in upon itself. Before my eyes she turned into a crone.
Sorrowfully, she looked at me and then slowly turned away.
I leaned out of the window and saw her emerge from the staircase into the courtyard. Although I saw her one more time before her death, this is the image that has remained with me all my life. A woman bereft, arms wrapped about her body as if to hold herself inside, the death-throes of her heart a thing too terrible to behold.
My earliest memory is of a woman singing, a gentle, happy sound that filled me with contentment. When I was four and my father took me with him, I dimly remember being frightened by shouting, tears. After that a distance grew between my aunt and me, the woman who had sung the lullaby vanished and left behind a hard and bitter woman, someone I could not love. May the gods forgive me but I hated her for her unhappiness.
And so I pulled back from the window and closed the shutters. When I looked again, she was gone.
Never have I known such happiness, such joy, as those months of our first love in Carthage, my orphaned heart unfurling like a flower beneath the sun of his loving gaze. The world, it seemed, had poured its riches on us, a cornucopia of youth and love and pleasure, the only shadow Augustine's fear of what his mother would say once she knew of our joining, a melancholy coming over him as we lay in each other's arms at night, the time when fears arise and grow to monsters in our minds.
During the days while Augustine studied, I often took myself to the baths, mornings being the time when women were allowed to bathe, and amidst the squeals of children, the gossiping of matrons, the quiet patter of slaves' rope sandals on tile, I sat solitary in the steam room and hugged my happiness close.
Used as I was to seeing the nakedness of women in the public baths, I now looked upon their bodies with a different eye, one made knowledgeable by the loss of my girlish innocence, a change I did not mourn but gloried in. It was as if I was now part of the continuum of female flesh from youth to old age, the slender bodies of the daughters with their pointed breasts and slim thighs glistening with oil beside their mothers' ruined bodies slack with childbearing, legs marbled with broken veins. The ancient crones seemed nothing more to me than tents of sticks and leather and were so fantastical they did not seem human.
I smile now to remember this. Yet the ruin of women over time did not frighten me for I thought my love exempted me from the drudgery and disease that caused such decay as surely as if I had been blessed with immortality. I was Venus come to earth, the huntress Diana, and looked on mortal flesh with pity
and contempt. At sixteen I could not see the future even as it was figured there before my very eyes. Of the decay of men's bodies I knew nothing. The only man I saw naked was Augustine and when we parted he was in the prime of manhood, his body sleek and muscled, his belly flat, his hair without a trace of silver.
Thus he remains in my mind's eye though I know that soon I will look upon his body's ruin, the end of all our mortal journey if we live so long. As I sit in this courtyard waiting for night to fall, I fear the change that time has wrought in him, that if he has become a stranger it will be like arriving at a place I thought was home to find nothing but an empty building, windows eyeless, walls collapsed, no trace of those who lived there long ago except perhaps a broken cup where once lips, warm and pliant, were laid against the rim.
One night during our early months together, Augustine told me of something he did a year before in Thagaste before he came to Carthage. He said that he and some friends stole into a farmer's orchard and plundered his pear trees.
“We did not do it for hunger,” he said, “but to despoil his trees.”
The farmer, he told me, had a name for pride in the town and often boasted that his fruit was the best in the neighborhood, indeed in all the region thereabouts. He was often seen walking in his orchards handling the fruit that grew upon his trees as if, Augustine said, he were Midas and they were made of gold. That
night he and his friends crept over his fence and climbed the trees. They ate a few pears and deemed they were as ordinary as others they had eaten, and then, laughing, they plucked all they could and threw them down on the ground to carry away for the pigs.
“But something came over me,” he said. “Even as I was laughing with my friends I felt as if I stood apart from myself and saw what I was doing, that I loved not so much the fruit of our theft but the act of destruction itself. Each pear I threw down was like a part of my soul that I despoiled.”
He turned to me, his face troubled. “The worst of it,” he said, “is that the knowledge of this gave me a kind of joy.”
“You were but a boy,” I said. “Now you are a man.”
“I was
myself
,” he said. “And what I did that night, the sheer delight in doing wrong, haunts me.” He clasped me tightly in his arms. “Oh, my love,” he said. “How will I keep you safe?”
“From whom?”
“From me.”
“Do not be foolish,” I said, taking his face between my hands and kissing his brow, the corners of his mouth, his lips. “You will never harm me.”
With daybreak, Augustine's fears of his own nature dispersed. All except one and it was not so much fear as the sliver of a shadow that fell between us, the first one we had known.
During our talks on the beach, Augustine had confessed to me he was a Manichee, a secret follower of Mani who taught the world was divided into good and evil, light and dark, and that these opposing forces were always at war, each striving for ascendency
over the other. All humans, Augustine explained, were little worlds and joined in this great battle, our flesh forever at enmity with our spirit. At first I laughed at this for when he told me we were lying in each other's arms, his hand stroking my hair which he always loosened when we were alone together for he loved it so. And later, when we lay together, his unerring instinct of how and where to touch me and for how long, his delight in my body and the pleasure he could give me, made his notions about the world appear incongruous and absurd. Yet he said that when our bodies convulsed in ecstasy it was because our souls had found release like birds who fly their cages.
One night, as we lay side by side, our bodies not touching for we were sheathed in sweat and the air was too hot, he asked me what I thought of having a child.
“To tell you the truth,” he said, and from the way he said it I could hear that he was smiling, “I do not think I could share you with another. Babies are greedy little things, you know, jealous of anyone else coming near their mothers.”
“I didn't know you were an expert on babies,” I laughed. But then I fell quiet for I realized suddenly that I knew nothing of babies, had never even held one in my arms.
“You forget my brother and his wife have children,” he said. “I would have you know that I have held and walked and jiggled infants plenty in my time. But,” he went on, his voice growing serious, his hand reaching for mine, “it is for you to say, for you only to decide. None other has the right.”
I remember turning my head on the pillow to look at him, his face a dark shadow against the lighter shadows of the room.
“A child,” I murmured. Our child. All at once my heart quickened and turned over. Placing my hand on my belly, I pressed down. I felt the concavity of my womb like an empty bowl waiting to be filled. Augustine placed his hand over mine.
“Yes,” I said, rolling toward him. “I want your child.”
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e had not been able to afford to send a messenger to Nebridius to inform him of our union and so we waited with some trepidation for his return to Carthage. Not knowing whether he would be happy or sad for us was the one shadow in those sun-filled days of our first love. Except when he was at his studies, Augustine and I were now inseparable and we feared Nebridius would feel excluded as if we had gone into a house together and locked the door against him.
He returned late on an early autumn day just as the light was fading.
I did not know that he had returned until I met Augustine in the forum and there he was beside him.
“Nereus,” I cried and flung myself upon him. Then I held his body away from me as he had done to me when we met again in the church months before and looked into his face. It was more gaunt, his body leaner, more angular and there were shadows behind his eyes as if in the weeks we had been apart our happiness had battened on his, diminishing him as we thrived. His mother, I knew, had died.
“Naiad,” he said, kissing me on top of my head. “I am happy for you both.”
When I would have embraced him again, so overjoyed was I to see him, he gently held me away. This new constraint between us at first confused and then grieved me for I remembered how, in childhood, we had swum in the river or sprawled on the bank to dry, wholly unconcerned about our nakedness. But in the time it took for Nebridius's mother to take sick and die and be put in the earth, the girl he once knew had forever vanished, replaced by a woman marked by the intimate touch of his best friend, forever untouchable and set apart to all other men.
As for Augustine, never did he show jealousy of the love between Nebridius and me but accepted that, like twins, we were two trees grown so close their branches appear as one. Nebridius was the link between the time before and the time after, between my childhood and adulthood, and so he became the guardian of my past, the only one who had known my father and his craft and the savior of a future I did not yet know.
As we strolled with linked arms through the streets, I in the middle, Augustine on one side, Nebridius on the other, it came to me that all my aimless wandering about this city, my restless searching for something I could not name, had led me here, precisely to this moment. I knew then that forever I would be held in balance between these two men, that somehow all my happiness and well-being would depend on them, one my dearest love, one my dearest friend. Later, there would be anotherâmy son, Adeodatus. To this beloved trinity, I gave myself body, heart, and soul.