The Confessions of X (3 page)

The dog I had heard stuck a shaggy head out of the doorway and growled, his lips curling above yellow teeth, brindled fur erect along his back. I stopped dead in my tracks and looked down, knowing not to challenge him but keeping a wary eye on the door. A face appeared, saw me, and spoke sharply to the dog. He shook his head as if puzzled and then lay down with a great sigh, his chin resting on his paws, his eyes still fixed on me as if to say: I am not allowed to eat you . . . yet.

A bucket rested beside the well and in it floated a gourd for drinking. As I dipped and raised it to my lips, a boy darted from the kitchen and clipped my shoulder, sending icy water down my tunic. Furious, I picked up the bucket and dashed its contents in his face. He stood blinking through tendrils of hair that clung to his face like the seaweed my father fashioned in his pictures.

“I was going to the river,” he said, “but it seems it's come to me.” Then he spun on his heels and took off running. “Come, Naiad,” he called over his shoulder. I followed, my thirst forgotten.

I found the boy wading in a stream, which to our childish eyes seemed as wide as a river. A small bird suddenly rose squawking
and flapping from a hollow under the bank and the boy jumped. We looked at each other and laughed. In that moment we were friends.

“Look,” he said, pointing to silver slivers flashing along the current wriggling around his toes like pondweed. “Minnows.”

The water was cool, the mud at the bottom clouding our toes until we stood motionless, holding hands, to let it settle. I felt a tickling like when my father stroked a blade of grass over my feet when I was drowsing and did not want to wake. I wiggled my toes and the fish darted away.

“My name is Nebridius,” he said, when we were sitting on the bank warming our numbed feet in the sun. “I will call you Naiad.”

Naiad. Spirit of the river, the fountain, the stream. My first word in Greek, a language other than the Punic my father spoke or the Latin of the Roman landowners, my first word in that literature of bards and philosophers I would grow to love and would give me solace in the years to come. I repeated it carefully as if I held an unknown food in my mouth. It was Nebridius's first gift to me.

How could we know, he and I, in that faraway of our innocence, that water and the crossing of it would become an emblem of our devotion to another, the one who would take our love and then discard it when he found a greater? But that was far in the future, and those days of high summer passed as if each were a year, each moment an hour, so wholly did we live inside our bodies whose only pain was thirst or hunger or weariness and those soon mended. Like rocks in a riverbed we stood in time, heedless of its flow, and did not dream that one day we would be swept into a current and carried to the shores of an unknown place.

For the first time I was invited as playfellow into the home of a rich landowner, Nebridius's father. At first his mother looked askance at my tunic with the braid coming loose around the hem, my tangled hair and dirty face and feet, until she discovered that she and her maids could spend endless hours cleaning me up and dressing me in the softest and most brightly hued clothes I had ever worn. Nebridius would lie on his stomach on the rugs at his mother's feet in her boudoir, his chin cupped in his hands, and watch this transformation with a mock adoring face that made me giggle until I was bade hold still.

I think his mother longed to have a daughter and I was her substitute for a time, a doll to dress and bathe and adorn with trinkets from her jewel box. I gave myself up to her ministrations with a tiny inward swoon, for her hands were gentle, her voice soft, and I had never before been mothered.

The luxury of that house dazzled me and made my senses quiver: couches piled with cushions so that to lie on them was to drown, the softness of the rugs beneath my feet, which before had trod only earth and stone. She kept perfumes in tiny glass vials, which she let me smell one by one—spikenard, myrrh, balsam, sandalwood, cinnamon, oil of crocus—if I was careful and replaced the stoppers tightly, for each cost more than an Arabian stallion, she told me, saddled with Spanish leather tooled in gold. All my life since, a fugitive waft from the perfume-maker's stall in the market or the drifting veils of senators' wives carried in their litters by ebony slaves would transport me back to that room where I first learned what beauty was and why sculptors give it female form.

Best of all, there was a burnished silver mirror that showed
me for the first time what I looked like. I stared transfixed at the bleary image of a girl whom I had only glimpsed before in water that scattered into a thousand shimmers when I bent to see more closely. Now I saw that my nose was small, my eyes large, and my hair a dark cloud about my head.

In the mornings Nebridius was closeted with a tutor, an elderly Greek with mild, watery eyes and a wispy beard, who made him memorize and recite aloud endless reams of what Nebridius later told me were Greek authors—Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides—and the Roman lawyer and rhetorician, Cicero. Later in life I would read all these authors for myself, but then the names sounded strange and exotic except for Cicero's name, which made me giggle. It meant “chickpea,” a nickname he had been given because of the shape of his nose, Nebridius told me with much hilarity. In honor of our first meeting, he dubbed himself “Nereus” meaning “wet one”—Greek for god of the sea. For the rest of our lives, when we wrote to one another or talked in private, I would call him “Nereus” and he would call me “Naiad.”

Despite our friendship, forged by our loneliness and an innocence that did not make distinctions of rank or sex, I could not help but notice, for the first time in my short life, how much distance there was between Nebridius's life and mine. As a male child and heir to a rich father, he was taught his letters and numerals, had never known hunger or cold or uncertainty, and consequently possessed an air of confidence that derived from knowing his future place in the world. As an unlettered girl, the daughter of a craftsman, who lived hand to mouth when work was available, I was beginning to realize that I would have a very different path in life.
I sometimes overheard Nebridius's mother speaking to her maids about how, as I was poor and not a Roman citizen, I would have to rely on my looks to get a husband as I would, sadly, have no dowry. Whenever she made these comments she would be especially solicitous of me and give me sweetmeats and lengths of embroidered ribbon. When I asked Nebridius what a dowry was, he told me that it was gold or land the betrothed girl brought to her husband. How good a husband depended on how much gold and land.

“You mean he buys a wife?” I said.

Nebridius frowned. “I suppose so,” he said.

“And your father will buy you a wife?”

He shrugged. We were lying side by side on the riverbank chewing on grass stalks. A breeze stirred the leaves in the trees over our heads, but it was still and hot and airless where we lay. He sat up and put his chin on his knees.

“Not for a long time yet,” he said. “I'm not interested in girls. They're silly.”

“I'm a girl.”

“You are different.”

When the days grew shorter and cold clenched tight around the campfire, my father and I turned our faces back to Carthage, I weeping to be parted from my friend.

“In the spring,” I called as he stood waving at the gate. “I will come back in the spring.”

But five years were to pass until I saw him again and by then we were no longer children.

CHAPTER 4

E
ach time we returned, my father's sister in the city, a potter's wife, bitter from the barrenness of her womb though she was a Christian, clicked her tongue with horror at my state.

“She's wild,” she said and set to taming me, each winter's task, with ungentle hands that yanked the comb through the knots in my hair until I howled. My hair was washed and braided tight against my neck, my feet were shod; I learned the woman's arts and went to church although my father was a pagan and raised me to honor the gods. My father, meantime, would be gone for days, returning shuffling, heavy-limbed, my aunt's scolding the unheeded accompaniment to my joy.

“Take me where you go,” I begged.

And when the air blew balmy and kind across the sea, the rains ceased falling and all the world lay greening, I forgot my coffined life and grew brown again under the sun. We did not return to the estate where I first met Nebridius despite my entreaties, for my father drank away his earnings and we had to go wherever there was work. We walked now, our mule and cart sold against my father's debts, for he would gamble when he was in his cups, trying vainly to make amends for our increasing poverty.

In the winter of my twelfth year, two years after meeting Nebridius, I began to bleed, a thing neither my father nor my aunt had told me of. In my childishness I thought that I was dying and with the wisdom of innocence I was not wrong, for my childhood died that day. Hiding the rags I stuffed between my thighs, I sensed betrayal, my nipples flowering buds, my belly curving, a changing I could not stop, the marketplace and street a strange and awful disrobing before the beast-like eyes of men. One night, my aunt confronted her brother.

“She's child no more,” she said. “Come spring, she stays.”

Between us lay a lamp, the flame twinned in my father's eyes. Closing them, he put out the light as if a door had closed, and surrendered me without a fight to the world of women. The next day after the evening meal when we were sitting around the kitchen table, my aunt announced to my father that if I were to become a proper lady and not a savage I would have to have my ears pierced. She took a bone needle and a piece of cork from her pocket and rose from her stool.

I scrambled to my feet, placing both hands over my ears. “Papa,” I implored.

I expected him to forbid it, to tell my aunt that I was not like other girls who cared only for ornaments and finery, that I was his help and his companion and what use were earrings when we were traveling the countryside looking for work, that the ears of infant girls were pierced when they were too young to know or to remember but that I would suffer cruelly. But he remained silent, his eyes fixed on his beaker, which he turned and turned again in his hands. My aunt signaled my uncle to take hold of my head
between his hands and hold it still. I screamed as the needle passed through each ear and copper wire was threaded through the holes to keep them open, but the pain of it did not burn more hotly than the silence of my father. When it was over I fled the room and flung myself on my bed. I did not weep but clenched my eyes shut to block out the sight of my father's face. Even the throbbing of my ears, the blood that ran down my neck onto the pillow, was as nothing compared to the pain in my heart. Presently, I heard my father come to the foot of my bed.

“Little Bird,” he said.

I did not look at him nor give any sign I knew he was there. Instead I murmured names I had heard my aunt call him—“Drunkard,” “Fool,” “Unbeliever”—over and over, each word a stab more cruel than those that had punctured my flesh. After a while he went away and I gave myself up to weeping. The next day I found a pair of silver earrings lying on my pillow, each a cluster of tiny silver stars suspended from a crescent moon, and knew they were from my father.

I never wore them for him and when I did it was too late. Forgive me, oh, my father, as my son forgave me when I abandoned him in a foreign land and sailed away. Like you, I surrendered my child into another's hands and reasoned I did it only for his good.

My arms grew pale, my sandaled feet soft. Each spring I wept to see my father leave, humping his baskets down the street, a lonely shambling form swallowed up at last by a curve in the street. When he returned he looked older, more lined, his back more stooped, the blades of his cheekbones yoking his face, his soul in harness to the flesh. One day he took me with him to a house above a
shop, a silversmith with wares that cast a moon-glow in the street, the same that had fashioned my earrings. The couple watched, the woman weeping, while he made a memorial for their child, tiny stones set for the smallest life, to place above her tomb.

“Say this,” the husband said: “ ‘Two years, four months, fifteen days, and nine hours she lived, Beloved One.' ”

“And border it with birds,” the mother said, “for we kept one in a cage and she loved to hear it sing.”

He took a cough that winter and in the spring it had not abated. His eyes were sunken, fever-bright, his breathing labored as if he drew in water.

That autumn he did not return though a traveling tinker said he saw him at Hippo Regius when the pears were ripening on the trees. In the agora, the street, at the baths and temples and churches, I looked for him but no one gave me news. He was my first great disappearing and I mourned him, inconsolable, growing thin and listless until my aunt thought I would join him in the grave.