The Confessions of X (8 page)

Augustine and Nebridius had another friend called Alypius, who loved the games beyond all measure and often begged us to go with him to watch men die for sport in the arena. My own age and from a wealthy family in Thagaste, Augustine's place of birth, he loved to wager on the gladiators, who would win and who would die. Later, when I witnessed it for myself, I could not understand his love for carnage nor his delight when the man he had bet against lay defeated in the dirt, the crowd booing and jeering, his life hanging on their whim, the roar of “
Mitte!
” “Let him go!” or “
Iugula!
” “Kill him!” his own man strutting round the ring in triumph, sword held high.

Augustine, too, had no love of the games and I often heard him remonstrate with Alypius, trying to get him to see that to profit off the blood of a man was unclean, sinful even. But Alypius would not heed him. By temperament he was quiet, his manner toward me reserved, and apart from gambling, his interests seemed wholly intellectual. At Nebridius's house—we never invited anyone to our room now—Alypius would talk for hours in the evenings about his compulsion. I would become sleepy and long for Alypius to leave, but he talked on and on until Augustine told him flatly he had to go.

“You should see Alypius when he's at the games,” Augustine told me when I was complaining that Alypius was so withdrawn that it cast a damper on the time we spent with Nebridius when he was present. “He's a completely different person, laughing when his
horse or gladiator wins and then sunk in deepest gloom when they lose. It's bizarre. He is like a man possessed.”

Later, thinking over what he had said about his friend, I concluded he was right. I had never seen Alypius in the grip of this strange obsession but I knew how much my uncle had frightened me when he was drinking, the sudden rages, the way he clenched and unclenched his fists.

“Let's call him Janus,” I said.

“Mmm?” Augustine was almost asleep.

“Janus,” I replied. “Because he has two faces.”

The next day Alypius turned up at our door at daybreak. We had forgotten that Augustine and Nebridius had arranged to go to the games with him, but Alypius had vowed that if his friends accompanied him this one time he would quit his compulsion forever.

“One last time,” he pleaded.

My father had never taken me to the games. He believed that the arena was an accursed place of death. He could not understand the willful destruction of anything that was beautiful—man, beast, or artifact.

“Your father was a wise man,” Augustine often said.

But I was curious to see what my ears had often heard—the roar of animals rising from the amphitheater—and I confess that I wanted to see the other face of Janus. So I persuaded Augustine to let me accompany them.

In my heart I was afraid to witness the suffering of others but
most of all I was afraid I might discover that I enjoyed it. My aunt and her Christian friends condemned the spilling of blood for sport, said it was barbaric, unnatural, that human life was sacred. I knew that in the time of the Emperor Diocletian, thousands of Christians had been executed in the arena, some whole families burned to death or torn to pieces by wild animals, babes in arms and little children clinging to their mother's skirts in terror. I have heard that, in Rome, so great was the slaughter, so unending, that the crowds began to riot, and the emperor, fearing for his life, made a proclamation that the purge be ended, that Christians waiting in cages underneath the arena be given amnesty. People in Carthage still talked of the black pall of greasy smoke that hung over Rome for weeks, the stench of burnt flesh that clung to clothing and permeated the taste of their food. Even though we had a Christian emperor now, the horror of that time was remembered, and the power of the emperor's edict feared.

When we descended to the street from our apartment, we joined others who were already walking toward the amphitheater. The trickle soon to become a torrent as the morning wore on. On game days, the city was like a giant lake slowly draining down roads and alleys, flowing to the stadium. The shops were shuttered, the usual commerce of the day suspended, the city as silent as at a time of plague. On the air the roar of the gathering crowd came to us distantly, the sound as familiar to citizens of Carthage as the booming of the sea against the cliffs of our coastal city.

Alypius strolled beside us blithely talking of his future winnings, how he would pay his landlord and pay Augustine back for the money he often lent him, in spite of the fact that we were poor
and barely scraped by on the meager stipend his father could afford his younger son. I glanced at Augustine, eyebrows raised, but he shook his head to warn me to remain silent.

I stole a glance at Alypius as he walked beside me. He was indeed a different person, putting a hand on my arm while we walked. Augustine noticed I was uneasy and, with a graceful movement of his arm, swept me across to his other side so I now walked between him and Nebridius. I gave him a grateful smile. Nebridius took my other arm and we continued.

Alypius led us to a private box. His family was rich, his father influential on the city council and I, a woman, was allowed to sit in it because of this. Otherwise, I would have been forced by custom to stand with slaves and poor male citizens on the very top tier of the stadium. I was glad of this. It allowed me to hold tightly to Augustine's hand, but it also meant that I was much closer to the arena and could make out the faces of those doomed to die. I determined that I would keep my eyes shut, although I could not block out the sounds even with my stole drawn close about my head. But when I heard the roaring of a lion and the rasp of metal as it was released from its cage, my eyes flew open.

An enormous yellow lion emerged, its mane tattered, its side scarred from previous battles. Its flanks were sunken with hunger, one of its ears torn like a battle standard after the fight.

The crowd began to chant, “One Ear, One Ear,” and I saw it run at a barrier between the crowd and the arena, causing the people sitting there to scramble back. Then the beast lay down in the sand, motionless except for the tip of its tail, which twitched lazily from side to side, yellow eyes surveying the stands with a
kind of indolent contempt. The lion instantly sharpened to alertness when a gate creaked open and a rhinoceros trotted out, its gray hide plated like armor, its nostrils blowing as it picked up the scent, a cruel tusk set between tiny black eyes.

I glanced at Alypius, who was sitting forward in his seat shaking the bone betting tokens in his hand, his body taut, his eyes feverish as if another inhabited the house of his body. Even Augustine's eyes were fixed on the arena and his hand had tightened around mine.

The lion was stalking the rhinoceros now, moving slowly, shoulders hunched, belly close to the ground, its huge paws taking almost delicate steps. Its prey snorted uneasily and lowered its head. Then the lion sprang, clawing at its prey's soft underbelly, a great gash opening in its flanks. The crowd roared. Giving a great bellow, the rhinoceros lashed its head from side to side, its horn scything wickedly through the air. But the lion leapt easily out of its reach and continued to circle the rhinoceros, waiting patiently for a chance to inflict another terrible wound.

I could watch no more and buried my face in Augustine's shoulder while the sounds of the death-struggle below beat at my ears and the copper smell of blood grew stronger. At last it was over, and when I looked again, the rhinoceros was a gray hump in a welter of gore, the lion tearing great gobbets of flesh from the carcass. At last its handlers appeared and, prodding it with long spears, forced it away and into its cage. Attaching hooks to the corpse, they harnessed it to mules, rearing as they caught the scent of the blood, and dragged it away, a great smear of red trailing behind.

I glanced at Alypius, who had the look of a man sated by sex,
eyes now dulling, forehead beaded with sweat, mouth slackening. I looked away, sickened.

The trumpets sounded and the gladiators strutted into the arena. Every man, woman, and child in the Roman world knows what they look like even if they have never seen them fight: the
retiarius,
armed with trident and net, his left shoulder covered with armor; the
murmillo,
a fish-like crest upon his helmet; the
thraex,
carrying a scimitar and small square shield. Small boys squat in the street and, within a circle drawn in the dirt, enact fights with figures made of sticks, the net a scrap of muslin. Alypius stirred from his torpor and leapt to his feet, and when the clank of weapons echoed around the stadium he screamed out encouragement to the fighter he had put gold on that day.

I rose and pushed along the seats, out of the box and up the steps to the back of the stadium, the highest tier, fighting my way through, pushing at the crush of bodies, deafened by the screams. Behind me I heard Augustine call my name, but his next words were drowned out by the roar of the crowd.

The fight to the death horrified me, but the bloodlust of the crowd who moments before had been ordinary citizens horrified me even more. I saw the girl with the cat's eyes from the stall at the harbor, the one who had lent us the water jar. Leaning out across the barrier she was screaming, “
Iugula! Iugula!
Kill him! Kill him!” lips peeled back, teeth glistening, her painted eyes crazed with a kind of murderous joy. I bumped into her as I tried to force my way past, and she greeted me gaily although she did not recognize me, all trace of her monstrous passion slunk back below the depths. I shuddered to think of what hidden horror crouched in
other people's breasts waiting to be let out, like the trapdoors in the arena of the Colosseum in Rome where lions, crocodiles, hyenas, and all manner of fearsome beasts would suddenly appear at the feet of those destined to die. It frightened me to think that beneath the surface of ordinary life nightmares lurked. I wondered what evil lay coiled within my own breast.

Augustine was right: the world was a place of evil. Only love could transform it and make it beautiful and good.

Appearing beside me, Augustine took me in his arms and held me to him, holding my head tight against his chest as I have seen mothers of newborns do.

“Forgive me,” he whispered. “This is a terrible place. I should never have let you come. Nebridius says he will stay with Alypius while I take you home.”

As we left the amphitheater, I looked down into the arena despite myself. A slave in the guise of the god Mercury was touching one of the gladiators, now crumpled in the sand, with a red-hot cauterizing iron to see if he was dead. He did not move. Slaves dressed as Pluto, god of the underworld, dragged the corpse away by the heels. The sweepers began to rake the sand level like a scribe scraping his wax tablet clean so he can mark it again, like Alypius erasing all memory of his losses and placing another bet, like my father sickened with drink only to raise the wineskin to his lips yet again.

I wondered then at the compulsions men lay upon themselves—violence and the lust for power—while women bore the burden. My life, I vowed, would be different.

CHAPTER 9

T
here was no more shadow cast on our happiness that autumn except for Augustine's increasing frustration at what he regarded as the pointlessness of his studies. He railed against the method of learning passages from rhetoric and literature by rote and the lack of critical discussion about content in the classroom. Nebridius's city house increasingly became a meeting place for the more serious students, an ad hoc university, where discussions of literature, philosophy, and theology raged long into the night. The brotherly affection with which Nebridius treated me rubbed off on the others and I became a kind of sister to the group: Nebridius first and last amongst our friends; Possidius, at fourteen the youngest of the group; gentle Antonius, who every time I looked at him blushed to the roots of his hair; stubborn Marcellus, who would not be budged from his argument by reason yet would suddenly abandon it on a whim and laugh uproariously about it after; Zosimus, who was to become a serious and revered bishop though I knew him as a great teller of jokes. All those future lives held in that courtyard long ago and at the center, Augustine. He was the sun around which we lesser planets danced, the great light
of his intelligence, his wit, his humor, and his unfailing generosity, the radiance he shed effortlessly.

In this way I was thrown more into male company than female, a rarity for our time when men and women spent much of their lives separate converging only at table or in bed. The talk about philosophy and literature, astronomy and religion was intoxicating although my untrained mind was frequently bewildered.

During this time I mastered letters and began to read and write Latin and Punic with fluency. All those soft late summer and fall evenings we spent seated at his desk forming words or I reading them aloud, hesitantly at first and with many errors, my finger moving slowly along the page and then faster with more confidence. I would be perched at the foot of the bed, Augustine stretched out on his belly, his chin propped on his arms, murmuring a correction here and there but mostly quiet, listening. And when I looked up his eyes were fixed on me and filled with light, the same look he gave me before I knew he loved me.