The Confessions of X (16 page)

“He'll be walking soon,” Neith told me one day after she had seen Adeodatus pull himself up and take two steps. “Then watch out.”

Aside from frequent trips to the market to buy food and twice weekly visits to the women's baths, once when Neith and I went alone, once when we took all the children to bathe them in the children's pool, it was almost the first time I had left the insula all winter and the spring sun felt heavenly on my face and shoulders, the colors of the street so bright they almost hurt.

“The goddess does not look kindly on the ways of men,” Neith said as we were walking, “for they swim on the surface and know nothing of the deeps.”

I thought of Augustine and all his ardent talk of things far above the life we women live and knew that Neith spoke true, that somehow the wisdom of which he so often spoke lay not above in realms of light but in the deepest things of blood and flesh and bone.

And in that instant and for the first time since I loved him, he appeared to me lost or, rather, seeking something he could not find. I thought of the quarrel I had overheard between him and Monica when they spoke of his father, Patricius, that man of appetite, and the contempt for him I heard in Augustine's voice. It came to me then as I walked with Neith that Augustine was searching for a father he could respect and love. I wondered if perhaps that had been one of the things that had drawn him to me—except that I had known a father's love before I lost it whereas Augustine had
never known it. I wondered if one could lose something one never had or perhaps find something one didn't know was lost.

The temple of Astarte stood in an area of the city unknown to me. Not built in the Roman style with portico and columns, all hard lines and masculine symmetry, it seemed to emerge out of the very earth itself, an ancient rounded cairn with a dark opening in the center through which we passed by bending low. The air smelled sulfurous, decaying, and I could hear the faraway sound of water as if a river gushed beneath our feet. Hosts of black flies circled in the noisome air, crawling horribly on Adeodatus's face until I covered his head with my veil to keep him from breathing them in.

Neith bowed low with palms pressed together and, edging forward in the gloom, placed a tiny clay pot of honey upon the rough stone altar and then backed away, chanting in a low and guttural tongue, one I did not recognize. The statue on the altar was of a woman in a pleated dress with the crescent moon upturned upon her head like the horns of a great bull. Her lips were smiling but her eyes, wolflike, regarded us with feral and pitiless intent. Eggs lay broken on the altar, some fresh, some rotting, and heaped upon the floor a coil of glistening offal, a woman's afterbirth. More dreadful still the tiny corpses of stillborn children like dolls discarded carelessly after play, their blackened faces cauled as if they peered through membranous windows to another world.

I watched as Neith touched her forehead to the altar then backed away. Outside in the blinding sunlight, she put a hand on my shoulder. “Now you will quicken with child again,” she said.

I thanked her but found that despite the warmth of the sun
I could not suppress a shudder. The temple seemed more to me a place of death than of life—of flesh but not of soul. Breathing
in
the clean air again, I understood why Augustine preferred the airy realms of spirit.

CHAPTER 16

T
hose years we lived at the insula were some of the happiest of my life, marred only by one incident that broke my heart.

It was in September almost two years to the day since we had moved in. It had been a hot day and I had been looking after Neith's children for she was in her ninth month of pregnancy, big as a whale, hugely swollen about the legs and ankles, and finding it hard to catch her breath. I had moved my wicker chair outside for her and she was sitting in the shade of the fig tree in the courtyard fanning herself with a palm leaf, her feet up on a footstool. She reminded me of myself that summer so long ago now it seemed. Adeodatus was just over two and had changed from a sweet little baby into a rampaging toddler. I had a task just keeping him under my eye, let alone Neith and Tazin's little tribe.

Five-year-old Mena was sitting at her mother's feet, tickling them with a chicken feather she had found and laughing when Neith wiggled her toes, an odd sound like the creaking of a gate.

“You look like the Queen of Sheba sitting there,” I said, handing Neith a cup of water I had just drawn from the well so it was icy cold. I dipped a cloth in the bucket and laid it on her breast to cool her.

“A fat sow is more like,” she said with a tired smile.

I stroked her sweat-soaked hair back from her face. “It won't be long now,” I said. “You'll soon be sylphlike again.”

“Hah!” she snorted. “I was never sylphlike to begin with, as well you know. But,” she added, touching my hand, “it's nice of you to lie. I don't know what I'd have done without you.”

“Coped,” I replied, squeezing out the cloth and dabbing her forehead. “As you always have. As we women always do.”

“Isn't that the truth.”

At that moment a crash came from my apartment followed by a howl and running in I found Adeodatus lying on the floor, a stool upturned beside him, his father's oak gall inkpot overturned and a black lake already spreading over his papers and the desk.

“Oh, Hades!” Picking up my son, I checked for damage but he wasn't so much hurt as shocked by his tumble and his wails were those of fear of being punished.

I stuck my head through the door of our sleeping chamber. Neith's youngest children were sitting on my bed playing with the clay animal figures I had given them earlier. Sitting cross-legged on the floor beside the bed was Gil, their nine-year-old brother, a reluctant watchdog.

I smiled at him guiltily. So concerned was I for their mother, I had quite forgotten them. “I know you're bored, Gil,” I said, “but watch them just a little while longer. I promise you can go out to play soon.”

He folded his arms and stared stonily at me but did not move from his spot. Despite his surly expression he was a good boy who would grow up to be a good man just like his father, Tazin.

“Thank you,” I said. “I will buy you something nice tomorrow.”

Holding Adeodatus on my hip so he wouldn't paddle his fingers in the ink, I was mopping up Augustine's desk when I heard another crash followed by a piercing scream. This time it came from outside.

Running out I saw that Neith had tried to stand and crumpled forward, tipping over a little table with her cup on it. Mena, who had her back to her mother, played on regardless. This picture of Neith in agony and Mena innocently unaware has stayed with me all my life. I see it as a frozen tableau, perhaps entitled: “The Mother.”

At the scream, the other women of the insula had appeared in the courtyard. They clustered there in a group, looking at Neith, none of them seeming to know what to do. I handed the still wailing Adeodatus to Lena and went to Neith.

“What is it?” I said, taking her by the shoulders and supporting her.

“It is time,” Neith said, then doubled over again, gasping. “Ye gods!”

It was then I saw the water at her feet and mixed with it, blood.

“Take the children away,” I told Lena, “and send someone to fetch the
medica
.” To Maris I said: “Send Gil to fetch Tazin.”

Both Lena and Maris were staring at Neith, their faces fearful and bewildered.

“Go!”
I said and they ran to do as I had bid.

Mena played on.

When Augustine returned at sunset he found our apartment a different place. Many lamps from the neighboring apartments had been brought in and all were lit—the inside of the bedchamber was bright as day and stifling. There had been no question of getting Neith up all those stairs to the fourth floor to her own apartment, so I had helped her into mine and laid her on our bed.

I was seated on the edge of the bed holding Neith's arm; Tazin was seated on the opposite side, holding the other. When she reared forward in agony, we braced her and held her up. She had been laboring like this for hours. And for hours, her blood had flowed from her body, a deadly little stream, the merest trickle but dark as heart-blood, dark as artery blood is dark.

Her face was waxen and bloated, unrecognizable, her eyes rolling back, her mouth set in a rictus of torment. I do not think she knew who we were nor what was happening to her. I pray that she did not. We had sent Mena away, but later I spied her crouching in the corner, eyes fixed on her mother's face, a high-pitched keening issuing from her throat such I have heard a leveret make when it is taken by a fox.

Tazin's face across the bed was as expressionless as a carven idol in a temple; from between lips that never seemed to move he chanted invocations to the ancient Punic gods in a guttural dialect I did not recognize, a deeper counterpart to his daughter's lament as if they prayed in tandem, a sound that stood the hair up on the back of my neck. Sometimes he spoke his wife's name. That, too, was an invocation.

Augustine came to me and touched my shoulder. Then he
moved me gently away and took my place for he could see I was exhausted.

I moved to the foot of the bed where the midwife, sleeves rolled up and bloody to the elbows, was wiping her hands. She had just examined Neith, feeling for the child inside her. She looked at me and with a tiny gesture shook her head then she drew me to the door.

“The baby is dead,” she whispered. “I must cut it out.”

I shuddered when she explained what she must do but I nodded and straightway began to gather what she required—hot water, clean cloths, a needle, and sheep gut for thread. From her basket she withdrew a linen cloth, which she laid on the foot of the bed; on it she placed the dreadful instruments of her art—a long bronze needle with a blunted end, a length of garroting wire attached to the eye, one end running down the needle's shaft and wound around a wooden toggle; a long-handled bronze spoon and knife, its blade serrated and razor sharp. She was as calm, as practiced, as if she laid a table for a meal.

When all was ready, I lifted Mena in my arms. “Come, little one,” I said though I knew she did not hear me. “This is something you should not see.” I carried her, unresisting, to Lena's apartment three floors up. Entering, I passed her to Lena then checked on Adeodatus; mercifully, he was sleeping. I stood a moment looking down at him, then briefly touched his head. He shifted and put two fingers in his mouth but did not wake.

“Will my mother die?” a voice asked from the darkness.

In the light from a single oil lamp I saw Gil. He was hunched on the floor by the side of the bed, his back against the wall, his knees drawn up against his chest, minding his siblings still as if
I had forgotten my promise earlier to let him go out and play. I went to him and, kneeling, touched his shoulder. I do not know why I did not gather him in my arms and crush him to my breast as any mother would who seeks to comfort a child who is frightened, lonely, and bereft. Perhaps it was his faithfulness, the dogged patience of his vigil, the way he spoke so calmly, but it conferred on him a kind of dignity. In that moment, he seemed to me full-grown and not a child at all. And so I told him the truth.

“The baby is dead,” I said. “We are trying to save your mother now.”

He nodded once then turned away, dismissing me.

The sight of him, alone and watchful, came near to breaking me.

When I returned to the bedchamber, the midwife had already begun.

“You must help me,” she said. She handed me a cloth and pointed to a bowl of water. “You must wipe away the blood so I can see.”

And so I did, closing my mind to what she withdrew piece by piece from Neith's body though my eyes remained wide open.

Neith was quiet now, sunk almost in a coma, her breathing shallow, her eyes flickering behind swollen lids, her only movement now the pull and tug inside her belly as the midwife went about her bloody business.