The Confessions of X (9 page)

“Don't stop,” he would say. “Don't stop.”

My father had talked of beauty in a way that was not abstract but made incarnate by his art. He spoke of colors and lines and how shapes should complement one another, how proportion was all important, and as he spoke his fingers showed me what he meant, sketching figures in the dirt beside the campfire or arranging bits of tile.

When I first met Augustine, he spoke of beauty as if it had no material form but was something invisible but necessary, like air. But his actions told a different tale. I remembered the way he had stooped and touched my father's mosaic in the church as if by touch he could feel the beauty of what was made and so come to know my father's
spirit. He loved to take down my hair and run his hands through it, and holding its weight back from my face he would kiss my forehead, my nose, my neck and throat, and then slowly undress me, planting kisses on each part he uncovered, my falling hair a cover for us both as he knelt before me, a veiled place, a tabernacle in which we found each other. He worshipped the beauty of my body with his body but talked about it with his mind. And he was never so lost in speculation that his eyes did not seek me out, his look saying: “I am a fool to talk thus. I know it.” And he would give that ironic quirk of the mouth I loved so much, a look so boyish, so self-mocking, that it was all I could do not to throw my arms around him.

One morning we left the city and, passing though the western gate, walked out into the countryside beyond the walls. It was late autumn now and the evenings were often chilly so I took along the cloak Augustine had given me on my birthday two weeks before. It was of emerald wool—to go with my eyes, he said—and lined with fur. He also gave me a silver ring to wear upon the fourth finger of my left hand and on the inside it was inscribed: “My heart rests in thee.” I learned later he had paid for the cloak and ring by selling some rare scrolls he possessed to a dealer in the forum. When I found out I wept for I knew how much he loved them.

His own birthday was approaching—November 13—and I already had a special gift to give him.

It had cost me nothing; it was to cost me all.

A road ran from the gate straight as an arrow toward the west where first the Phoenicians, those seafaring ancestors of my mother's Punic race, landed. Wide enough to let two carts pass side by side, the road was busy with vehicles of all sorts: lumbering carts piled high with stacked amphorae of olive oil from olive groves that grooved the lowlands and lower slopes for miles; other carts laden with bushel upon bushel of apples, plums, pears, and grapes, the mountains to the south and the sea to the north kind to crops and fruits of every kind. Once we were passed by a messenger on a galloping horse, its hooves sending up a roiling dust storm that made us cough and covered us with grit; a person of wealth was carried by in a litter but whether man or woman we could not tell, for the curtains at the windows were drawn shut.

We walked hand in hand, my cloak over my arm, a basket of food over Augustine's, but soon I tired and we left the road just as it descended into a shallow valley no more than two miles from the city where a tiny stream meandered busily to and fro like a little dog nosing for a scent.

I spread my cloak beneath an apple tree near the stream and we lay down on our backs and, shielding our eyes, looked up at the sky.

“An elephant,” I said, “about to raise its trunk.”

“Where?”

“There,” I said, pointing to the north where serried banks of clouds were rolling in from the sea.

It was a game we sometimes played leaning on our window in
our room, a game my father and I had played to pass the time when we walked from site to site. He called it making “cloud mosaics.”

“That's a rhinoceros,” Augustine said, squinting. “See. It has a horn not a trunk.”

“You took so long to find it, the cloud changed shape,” I protested.

He laughed. “An elephant, then, who got his trunk caught in a door.”

I thumped him on the shoulder and he laughed again.

Perhaps it was the sound of his laugh that made me ask what I had puzzled over for months. Shifting closer to him, I laid my head in the crook of his arm. Immediately he pulled me closer and taking up the edges of the cloak covered me for he had felt me shiver. We lay there for a while, cocooned together, the only sound the trilling of the stream, the distant cry of a hawk.

“Augustine?”

“Mmm?”

“Why are you a Manichee? Mani teaches that this world is evil, yet you love it so.”

During our walk I had watched how his eyes took in the late flowers growing in the ditch, the bare branches of the trees swaying in the wind, their shadows checkering the stones beneath our feet. I recalled how he had watched the furling of the ocean on the shore, rubbed silk between his fingers in the market, held lemons to his nose to smell their scent. Never have I known a man so attentive to beauty nor so tender to all living things. Once when I was looking out the window into the courtyard watching for his return, I saw him pick up a baby bird where it had fallen to the ground and, climbing the wall that ringed the courtyard, place it gently in its nest.

He was silent for a while and I knew he was thinking. Never did he dismiss the questions I asked as stupid or banal as I had heard some men do to their wives but always considered them with utmost seriousness. So much so that I sometimes smiled to myself when I saw two little frown lines appear between his brows, his eyes taking on an inward gaze as if he looked at pictures in his mind.

“I look at the world and as well as beauty, I see sadness and evil. My mother's God is supposed to be all knowing, all loving, but how could such a God allow us to suffer? It seems to me that only an evil God could delight in our pain. Ergo: To posit one good and one bad deity perpetually at war is the only rational explanation.

“My mother says that we have free will and that God allows us to do evil but then brings good out of that evil. I cannot understand how that can be so. Good and evil are opposites and one cannot lead to the other. They can only coexist separately.”

“What about the Christian God, who is said to be all good, all knowing?” I asked. “My aunt says it is we who have transgressed, bringing evil into the world. There's a story the Christians tell about it in the book the Jews have.”

“Adam and Eve?” He laughed derisively. “That's just a folktale dreamed up by an illiterate tribe.

“Plato is interesting,” Augustine went on. “He tells a story, too, but it is much more sophisticated and free of contradictions. He said the world is like a cave and outside the cave is a great fire. The gods—not people, you understand, but great ideals like Truth and Justice and Goodness—pass back and forth across the fire, and within the cave we only see the shadows on the walls and that is how we know that they exist. This metaphor makes much sense to me as well.”

I thought about this a while. “It seems to me the world is like a giant mosaic formed from my father's art—his masterpiece. But from the moment the plaster dries and we walk upon it, it begins to turn to dust. It is the ruin of the world and all its beauty that you hate, not the world itself.”

In one swift motion, Augustine rolled over so he was looking down into my face, my head still pillowed in the crook of his arm. “You are a marvel,” he said.

He saw I thought he teased me. “No,” he said. “I am quite serious. Not all the students I have ever known or am likely to know could have understood my philosophy so well. Before you put it into words I didn't know myself.”

“It is because I love you that I see you truly,” I said. “My love is a kind of knowing.”

He stared at me.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Remember that bird in a cage at Nebridius's?”

“It is a sun lark.”

“The first time you made it sing I thought: This beautiful girl is that little bird whose song escapes the bars of its cage. I have never in my life heard music clearer, more melodious, than your song.”

“My father called me Little Bird,” I told him, “in the Punic tongue.” Never had I told a living soul of this before.

After that day, he sometimes called me Little Bird when we were alone, and I could swear I heard the cadence of my father's voice beneath his own as once I had seen his tunic showing through my veil.

On the morning of November 13, Augustine's birthday, I woke when it was still dark and lay listening to his breathing. The day before I had gone to the baths and washed myself with care, oiling my body, brushing my hair until it shone. After that I went to the market and bought a tiny cake of almond paste and honey and a bunch of dried lavender tied with a bow of grasses. I also bought a little flask of wine. When I got home Augustine had not yet returned from his lessons so I hid them underneath the upturned bucket by our bed. He thought the scent of lavender was in my hair, the almonds from the oil on my body.

I knew at once when he awakened. I always did. There was a difference in the air, a tremor, as if the world had shifted minutely on its axis when his soul grew conscious. Later I would feel the same vibration when his soul was ready to leave this world. But on that day, when he turned eighteen, he and I were as gods immortal.

“Happy birthday,” I said.

“Thank you.”

A dim gray light was creeping through the shutters. I could just make out his face.

“I have a gift to give you.”

“You are my gift,” he said.

“I have another.” And taking his hand, I placed it on my belly. “Here it is.”

For a moment he was still and then comprehension flooded him. “Is it true?” Swiftly, he sat up and took my face between his hands.

I nodded.

“You are with child?”

“I am.” I had known now for a month, waiting to be certain, waiting for this day to tell him. But like the man he was, Augustine had had no clue not even when I tired more quickly, had bouts of sickness in the morning and could not look at food, or burst into tears when the strap of my sandal broke. I smiled at his stunned expression.

Reaching down, I drew out the cake and lavender and wine. I gave him the cake and flowers, poured the wine into the single cup we shared, and, handing it to him, said: “To our son.”

He drank and passed the cup back to me.

“To our daughter,” he said.

I drank.

Augustine took a sprig of lavender and threaded it in my hair and then broke the cake in two and passed me half. We ate cross-legged on the bed, our simple meal a solemn, holy Eucharist.

CHAPTER 10

I
n the spring a letter came from Monica that Augustine's father, Patricius, lay dying and he must come at once to Thagaste. He gave excuses and delayed for he hated his father, a drinker and a bed-swerver, an insult to his mother Augustine considered mortal and would not pardon, hoping meantime he would die. Then came a letter from his older brother, Navigius, sending money for the journey and beseeching him, in Christ's name, to come at once. So at sunrise one morning in a mule-drawn gig he hired, for I was seven months gone with child and wearied easily, we set out along the coastal road southwest into Numidia and then turned inland due south toward the mountain range and forests, a place I had never gone before.