The Confessions of X (26 page)

I smiled, even at that moment I marvel I could smile. “No,” I said, “I've never thought that. But you know as well as I that you will rise no higher than orator if you do not marry. And marry
well.
” Unconsciously I echoed the words he had said in the church all those years ago.

“And Adeodatus? What of him?”

At our son's name, I flinched. It was as if he had struck me in the face with his clenched fist. “Do you think I do not know?” I cried, releasing him and stepping back. “I would rather be torn to pieces in the arena than to leave my child.” I groaned aloud as if, even now, I were in labor. “Do you think I do not know that to him my love will look like hatred?”

Augustine laid his hand on my arm but I shook him off. Like a butterfly alighting on an open wound, his touch—so sweet, so necessary, so finite to me now—was unbearable. I fled the room.

Augustine let me go.

I had thought the hardest part was over but I was wrong. The hardest was yet to come, to tell our son—a task so arduous, so killing to us both, we shrank from it. Yet we could delay no further for when he and Monica and Nebridius returned from their visit to Nebridius's kinsman that night, Adeodatus knew something was terribly wrong. His father was silent and withdrawn, shut up in his study. I kept to my room and let Monica see him to bed. I only went in to kiss him good night.

“Who has died, Mama?” he asked, his eyes wide with fear.

“No one,” I said, tucking him in. “Everything will be all right. Now go to sleep.” I kissed him then bent to blow out the lamp.

“Can you leave it burning?”

“All right.”

Adeodatus had not feared the dark in years.

The morning after Augustine and I spoke together, Nebridius was quiet and Monica's eyes were red with weeping. It was as if we were a house of mourning, which indeed we were.

The day dawned bright and warm as if to mock our sorrow.

“Let's go for a walk,” I said to Adeodatus at breakfast. “You, me, and Papa. It is such a beautiful day.”

When Adeodatus ran off to fetch his cloak, Monica laid a brief hand on my arm. Nebridius got up abruptly and left the room.

“Are we going to the market?” Adeodatus asked as we walked hand in hand down the street, my son on one side, Augustine on the other.

“I thought we would go to the wood,” I said, “to see if the bluebells are out.”

That seemed to satisfy him and he let go of my hand and raced ahead, doubling back when we lagged too far behind. I watched him run, his strength now fully returned after his illness though he was still too thin, and marveled at how much he had grown over the winter. Soon he would be eleven and his limbs were already beginning to lengthen out, a prelude to an adolescent's awkward lankiness. The next time I see him, I thought, he will be a child no longer.

“I must be the one to tell him,” I told Augustine.

He said nothing but squeezed my hand tightly.

We passed out of the city and came to the wood, an ancient growth of oaks once worshipped by barbarian tribes come down into the plains from the distant Alps before the time of Caesar.

“Look, Mama,” Adeodatus called. “You were right.”

In a small grassy dell shadowed by a vast canopy of leaves, the ground was blue with flowers, so many it seemed the very air absorbed their hue. Against the roots of a tree, Augustine spread his cloak and we sat down.

Adeodatus began to gather flowers and link them in a chain by splitting the juicy stems with his thumbnail the way I had showed him many years before and threading them through the stalks. He had a look of complete absorption on his face, the way children do at play, and I saw the care with which he strung the flowers making
sure not to tear or bruise them, the deftness of his busy hands, the sideways glance when he felt my eyes upon him, his grin.

“I'm making you a crown,” he said, thinking me impatient for my gift.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I'll make one for Avia after.”

“What about me?” Augustine asked, smiling. But when he glanced at me I saw his eyes glittering with unshed tears.

Adeodatus sent him a pitying look. “You're not a queen,” he said.

“True.”

Watching my son, I wished with all my heart that time would stop and not move on, that forevermore he would be like this, a child making chains of flowers with which to crown me and his grandmother, the two women who loved him best in all the world.

“There,” Adeodatus said. “All done.” He put the circlet on my head, adjusting it so it was straight. Then he touched my cheek with his finger. “Why are you so sad, Mama? Don't you like it?”

I grabbed him into my arms then and held him fiercely. “I love it,” I said. “I love you
.”

I let him go and sat him down beside us. “We must tell you something,” I began. “Something very important. And you must try to understand. Promise?”

He nodded solemnly looking first at me and then at his father.

Even then I knew I could leave my words unspoken, that we could go home and that somehow we would find a way. But once I spoke to my son, there was no going back, no turning from the fork in the road, as once I had known there was no going back when Augustine asked me in the church to be his and I said yes. A
terrible temptation came to me to keep silent. His face so trusting, so full of love, was looking at me and I told myself that for me to speak the words I had brought him here to speak would be no less than murder.

Without thinking, I put my hand up to touch the flowers but Adeodatus stopped me. “It is best not to,” he said. “They are already wilting.”

A bird began to sing in the branches above our heads, a blackbird's song so sweet and singular it was like a shaft of light.

“I must go away,” I said. “Back to Africa.”

At first he cried and then he grew angry, hitting out at me with his fists and pushing me away when I would hold him. Then he grew quiet. That was the worst.

“So you see,” I said, “it is not because I do not love you that I must go away.” Even to my own ears, this sounded like a cruel riddle with which to confuse a child, the kind adults make when they rationalize their actions yet know them to be wrong.

I tilted up his chin. “Do you understand?”

He raised his eyes to mine. They were his father's eyes.

“I am your father's concubine not his wife. Under the law I have no rights. Even as a wife I would have no legal right to take you with me.”

“It is not fair,” he said, tearing up great fistfuls of grass and letting them blow through his fingers.

“No,” I said. “It is not.”

He turned to his father. “It is your fault,” he said. “I hate you.”

Suddenly he tore himself away from me and got up. “I am going home,” he said and walked away. Never had he done such a thing before. Hastily, we gathered up the cloak, shaking the bluebells from it, and silently followed.

He looked back from time to time to see if we were behind him but he did not walk beside us. By the time we entered the house, he had shut himself in his room.

CHAPTER 26

I
t was high summer when I took a ship for Africa but my heart lay deep in winter. The preparations for my departure took but a few days so little did I own in my own right—clothes and remembrances of Adeodatus chiefly, a broken wax tablet upon which he had traced his first letters; the sandals Tazin had made him, the leather dry and cracked with age, one strap broken; the earrings my father had given me long ago. And all the books and clothes—the green cloak that was my first birthday gift—and jewelry Augustine had given me, the tokens of his love over the years, as well as Neith's little figurine, which since her death had always rested by my bed. The shell Augustine had given me that day at my aunt's house—his first gift to me—I could not find.

Neither Augustine nor Adeodatus could bear to see me pack. Only Monica helped, moving silently about the room folding clothes and handing them to me.

We were almost done when Nebridius knocked and came in.

“I would speak to you alone,” he said.

Monica nodded and left the room.

“Naiad,” Nebridius said crossing the room and taking both my
hands. “I have not involved myself in what you and Augustine have decided to do because I felt it was not my place.”

I opened my mouth to tell him that he was my brother, my family, and had every right, but he squeezed my hands hard in his and I remained silent. I knew he needed to get out what he had resolved to say, that he was in great anguish of heart and I would not prolong his suffering for the world. A vision of him waving to me at the gate, when my father and I left his father's country estate all those years ago, flashed into my mind.

“I will return,” I had shouted.

He did not reply but watched, a small still figure standing in the road, until I passed out of sight. His face was, as now, stricken.

“I have deeded you the farm outside Carthage with slaves to run it and a yearly pension plus whatever profit you can make on it,” he told me. “Since my father's death, it is my right to dispose of all properties the way I see fit as I am now the
paterfamilias
.”

The legal terms seemed out of place coming from his mouth. For the first time, I realized Nebridius was a landowner of considerable wealth, that he had many responsibilities and burdens. Always I had thought of him as the boy who had spilled water on me, who was my companion as a child, my friend as a young woman in Carthage. Now I saw that threads of gray had appeared in his hair, that his face was prematurely lined and careworn as if some inner fire had eaten up his youth.

“I have the papers here.” He took a rolled piece of parchment from his belt and handed it to me. I recognized the imprint of his seal on the outside—a water nymph with long wavy hair. We had laughed at that, Augustine and I, when we first glimpsed it on his
ring finger in Carthage many years ago, Augustine asking him if it was his girlfriend, but he had closed his fist to hide it and refused to answer. Abashed and obscurely aware that we had offended him, we quickly held our peace. Since then I have never seen Nebridius without the ring.