The Confessions of X (4 page)

At fourteen my aunt began to talk of husbands, craftsmen's sons apprenticed to a trade, a strapping youth to give me babies, long aware of how my uncle's eyes tracked me when I moved, lingered on my breasts and thighs, a lazy, predatory look such as panthers give wild sows in the amphitheater. He had never paid me much heed before except to shove me if underfoot, shout to bring him wine, and complain I was a mouth he could ill afford to feed. I was frightened by this change.

From that time on I slept against a wall, a knife beneath my pillow; in daylight I lingered at the fountain with the women or walked the streets, a virgin seeking sanctuary in the churches of the One said to favor them. My aunt seldom complained that I was always gone. From the coldness with which she treated me, I knew she blamed me for her husband's lust. Only later when I was older and she was dead did I realize it was not I from which she recoiled but the shame of our mutual helplessness. Illiterate, unskilled, without even a child to prove her worth, my aunt must submit or else be cast off and starve. Unbeknownst to me, that very day she entered into marriage negotiations for my hand with a widower almost twice my age.

One day my aunt had gone to a birthing, leaving me alone with my uncle, and I wandered in the Christian quarter at daybreak and entered the church. Within it was cool and silent, the roof a firmament of stone. Windows high up threw spears of gold and where they touched the floor vermillion, green, and azure sprang up like flowers. At the four corners of the great floor the winged creatures of the evangelists kept watch—the angel of Matthew, Mark's lion, Luke's patient ox, the lordly eagle of John. It was these I came to see, the work of my father's hands, his astonishing, teeming imagination. More than any other place in Carthage, the church was my father's house, his monument, his memorial. It was where, once more, I was that small child who squatted at his side and marveled at his handiwork.

My only companion was an old woman standing near the altar, her veil a smoky gauze about her face, her knotted hands cupped before her breast as if to catch water from the heavens. I crouched beside a column to watch the play of light so that if I squinted just so, John's great eagle seemed to lift and hover, its wings beating dust motes in the air like chaff at threshing time. The church was quiet, the city's roar an animal kept at bay, the space around me hushed as if the place were dreaming, the muttered prayers of the old woman a kind of song. Then I heard voices. Two men talking.

“The light is pure essence,” one voice said. A young man, serious.

“It's full of dust,” another replied, laughing. Deep, a man's voice, but the way he spoke . . . I peered around the pillar, but they were backlit by light streaming through the doorway and I could not make out their faces.

“You're an Epicurean,” the serious voice said.

“And you're a hopeless Platonist,” replied the other. They scuffled briefly and then grew solemn when the old woman hissed, “Ssssh!”

I sat very still as they walked into the center of the church and faced the altar, their backs to me. Then the one whose voice I thought I knew turned slowly in a circle to look up at the roof and when he stopped and lowered his eyes he was looking straight at me.

“Nereus!” Jumping to my feet in a tangle of skirts, I ran to him and threw my arms around him, his body hard and strange, a man's body. But the scent of him, clean like pine or balsam, the scent of the woods in which we played, the scent of our childhood, was the same.

“Naiad? Is it you?” He held me at arm's length so he could see my face. “You have . . . changed.” A frown appeared as he took in my woman's dress, my braided hair, and tinkling earrings. The last
time he had seen me I had been wearing a short tunic with a frayed hem, my hair loose and hanging around my face, my body scrawny and flat-chested, whippy as a pealed switch.

“I have missed you,” was all I could think to say. Since my father died I felt I had been in exile many years, had wandered the city streets alone in search of something precious. Now here before me stood the living bridge that joined the farther bank upon which my father stood with the nearer of my womanhood. I felt only joy at our reunion but my cheeks were wet with tears.

“I have missed you too.”

He told me he was staying in his father's city house while he pursued his studies.

“More Chickpea?” I said, wiping my eyes.

And suddenly the shyness of two strangers meeting dissolved and we were laughing at the joke about Cicero, embracing, asking a thousand questions, interrupting each other as we used to do as children, finally managing to communicate in garbled form what we were both doing in Carthage.

His friend stood watching us. I think it was his silence that I noticed first, the way he held back and gave us space. I stole a glance at him: brown hair, brown eyes, light brown skin, and shadows about his chin and lip, all angles and planes like Nebridius's face, bone thickened into manhood beneath the flesh, the roundness of childhood utterly departed.

“Are you a student too?” I asked, although I knew the answer, for his hands were smooth, his fingernails trimmed, unlike my father's or my uncle's, whose hands were engrained with stone dust and clay that no amount of washing could erase.

“I am.” He said it with a serious face but there was something of self-mockery in his tone as if he ridiculed himself. It was as incongruous as the expensive scroll stuck casually through his belt like a workman's tool.

“This is my friend, Augustine,” Nebridius said. “We, too, have known each other since childhood.”

Augustine gave a small ironic bow. “Are you here to pray?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I come to look at the mosaics.”

Nebridius explained my father was a craftsman. “You remember the mosaics in our bathhouse in the country? He made them. My father says they are the best he ever saw.”

I told him of my father's disappearance and how he must be dead.

“I'm sorry,” Nebridius said and touched my hand.

“He used to bring me here when we were in the city and tell me that beauty is the gods' gift and without it we would die.”

“Do you believe that?” Augustine asked.

“You ask a lot of questions.”

He suddenly looked stricken. “Forgive me,” he said. “It is a failing of mine.”

But I thought of my father and how his hands created oceans and forests and all the creatures that lived therein and how living eyes still beheld his work though his were closed forever.

“Yes,” I said. “I do believe it.”

He looked at me a moment and then did something strange. He crouched and placed his hand palm-down on the mosaic floor. It was a kind of blessing.

“Come.” Nebridius linked one arm through mine and the other through Augustine's and steered us both toward the door. We used to be the same height; now the top of my head came only to his shoulder.

As Nebridius's house lay on the hill overlooking the harbor, in the wealthy part of the city, we decided to go along the waterfront and then climb the steps up the hill.

The harbor was a huge half-circle, fronted with wharves and storehouses, storied monsters whose gaping mouths consumed the cargoes of endless ships: amphorae of Tuscan wine, Thracian silver, and pigments from the northern climes, all unloaded here, the holds regorging wine and wheat and olives bound for Rome.

Fugitive odors washed the air—spices, a hot waft of garlic and frying meat, crocus oil and animal fat, a costly unguent the highborn Roman ladies craved and paid for in gold.

“Over there is Rome,” Augustine said, pointing north. He had not spoken since we left the church.

I looked where his finger pointed. The ocean stretched away into the distance, a plain of endlessness unto the farthest place I could imagine.

“I will go to Rome one day,” Augustine said. “My mother prophesied I will be a famous teacher.”

“An
august
teacher,” Nebridius corrected.

Augustine grinned. “Her ambition for me
is
a bit obvious, I admit.”

“What are you studying?” I asked.

“Nothing that interests me.”

“Why do it then?”

“It's what my mother wants.”

“But what do
you
want?” I asked.

“You ask a lot of questions,” he said.

He had been standing in profile looking out at the ocean, now he turned to face me.

“But since you ask,” he said, “I care for nothing but to love and be loved.”

Then he threw back his head and laughed as if he knew he spoke the words of a cheap seducer. Nebridius joined in. But I did not laugh, for, deep down, that was what I wanted too.

CHAPTER 5

I
n the weeks that followed, we spent all our free time together walking in the city or sitting in the atrium of Nebridius's house under the shade of potted palms, whose wide-fingered leaves shielded us from the pitiless sun. In this green oasis at the heart of a city of stone, I listened to talk about the world, talk about books and poets and philosophers, talk about things of which I had no knowledge. For the first time, I understood that my ignorance of letters barred me from a world beautiful in a way that was different from the beauty my five senses could apprehend, that if books were word mosaics set down in sequence, I had been tasked with sorting tiles with my eyes closed.

When Nebridius had been closeted with his tutor as a boy, I had pitied him. It seemed a kind of imprisonment stuck inside while outside the sun shone bright and butterflies danced in the lilac. Now the strange words he had chanted as a boy, that he and Augustine spoke so easily as men, words like
essence, the soul's eye, light unchangeable,
were like notes of a melody half heard beneath the din of daily life, a snatch of song I first heard at my father's knee though in a different key, for my father was an artist who
did not think of beauty with his mind so much as grasp it in his hands.

A kind of longing would grip me then and jumping up I would drift among the vines entwined about the pillars of the atrium, red hibiscus, orange roses, a clematis with great purple waxy flowers. There was a little yellow bird in a copper cage, and when I put my lips against the bars and made a soft clicking sound with my tongue against the roof of my mouth, it would make a sweet spider-silk of sound that floated and wavered on the air. The men's talk would cease then and when I turned I could swear the darkness in Augustine's eyes had fled and all was brilliance.

Mornings when Nebridius and Augustine were at their studies near the forum, I helped my aunt about the house. Then, snatching up a basket and a few coins, I would go to the market to buy food. As long as I returned well before sunset so she could prepare the evening meal, my aunt didn't care where I had been all afternoon. I welcomed her indifference, for, unlike other girls my age who daily carried heavy water jars on their heads or swept the steps or sat in doorways watching fractious siblings tussling in the street, I was relatively free.

One day I reached the forum at midday, a little later than usual. That morning my aunt had set me to scrubbing the kitchen floor and I had filled many buckets at the local fountain to sluice it down. By the time I was done, I was hot, dirty, and out of sorts.

The market stalls were much depleted when I arrived, the freshest produce snapped up long before, and so I was left to pick through baskets of too-soft figs, wizened grapes, stale bread, and wilting bunches of herbs. Only the fish were fresh for they were
kept alive in buckets of sea water on the open bed of the fish-seller's cart and replenished by his sons whom he kept trotting up and down the hill to and from the harbor all day long. One of them, who looked about eighteen, thick in the chest and with heavily muscled arms from hauling fish all day, leered at me as I looked into each bucket vainly trying to remember what kind of fish my aunt had told me to buy. He stood too close and the smell of sweat and fish was overpowering. At last I pointed at a large silver fish with red gills.

“That one,” I said.

The man scooped it up, grinning, and then suddenly swung it head first against the side of the cart with a sharp crack.

“Want me to gut it for you?” he asked, shoving the dead fish in my face.

“Want me to gut him for you?” a voice said.

I glanced round. Augustine was leaning against the cart cleaning his fingernails with the tip of his knife.

The young man stepped back, the fish still hanging from his hand, blood dripping from its mouth. “This your sister, then?” he asked, keeping his eyes on Augustine's knife as if I had suddenly become invisible.

Augustine just looked at him.

“How much?” I asked.

“It's on the house.”

I held out my basket and the man laid the fish inside on a bed of herbs. I covered it with a cloth to keep off the flies.

Augustine and I left the market and wandered down the hill toward the harbor, drawn by the coolness blowing off the sea. The
streets had emptied out, people gone home for the midday meal and to wait out the worst of the heat, and so it seemed the city was all our own, a kind of private kingdom and we its rulers. Augustine carried my basket and we walked side by side, close but not touching, the space between us not so much a void than a drawing in of breath before words are spoken. He told me Nebridius had been called away to deal with a land dispute on one of his family's farms a day's ride outside Carthage and would not be back until the next day. I glanced at him, surprised, for I knew Augustine had many other friends, patricians' sons like himself, who spent the afternoons drinking in the local wine bars near the forum.