The Confessions of X (28 page)
During the worst of my illness, a woman tended me and often, when I opened my eyes, she was sitting by my bed. She smiled and called me Domina, but I turned my head away confused, not knowing to whom she spoke. She lifted me, bathed me, fed me, and sometimes I thought I was a child again, that she was my aunt, and all that I remembered as the past but a dream of things to come.
One morning when I was strong enough to sit up and eat, the woman who was tending me put a rolled piece of parchment in my hand.
“This came by messenger when you were sick,” she said. “It has been waiting for you to read.”
She smiled at me as she picked up the tray lying on the bed. “My name is Tanit, Domina,” she said. “I am the housekeeper.”
I stared at her, not fully comprehending. For a moment, I did not understand, then comprehension slowly dawned. The voices I had heard beyond my door were the people of my household. I was their mistress. And it came to me that the time had come when I could no longer be a child, that I could no longer hide in my room while the life of the household, the farm, continued without me. I must rise from my bed and be a woman, a true domina like
Monica, not a pampered, enervated thing like Nebridius's mother, waited on by servants.
“Thank you, Tanit,” I said. “I think I will get up today.”
She was a tall, strongly built woman of about my own age and of my own race with hair that shone like polished onyx. Named after the consort of Ba'al Hammon, the Punic sky god, she reminded me of Neith.
She looked surprised. “Are you sure, mistress?” she asked. “Are you strong enough?”
I drew back the covers and swung my legs to the side of the bed. They looked pale and sticklike. I drew down my shift to cover them.
“I am quite sure,” I said, although now that I was standing I was not. I felt as weak as a newborn kitten.
Tanit put down the tray and quickly came to me, throwing a warm robe about my shoulders. With an arm around my waist, the way Augustine had held me when I was recovering from childbirth, she helped me to a wicker chair under the window. When I was safely seated, she drew up a footstool, placed my bare feet on it, and covered me with heavy sheepskin rugs.
“There,” she said, putting her hands on her hips and looking down at me. “That should do.” She placed a beaker of honey water on a table beside me and a small bronze bell. “Ring if you need anything,” she said.
“Thank you.”
She smiled at me again. “It is good to see you up,” she said shyly. “There were times we thought we would lose you.”
“I am well now,” I said.
“Yes,” she replied. “I can see that you are.”
“And Tanit?”
She stopped in the doorway.
“Thank you for nursing me through my sickness.”
A look of surprise briefly flickered over her face and then she nodded quickly and left the room.
When she had gone I sat looking at the parchment in my hand. Then with fingers that shook, I unfurled it and read:
Dearest Love,
What can I say? I have no words. This great Orator of Milan, this eloquent wordsmith, has no words. For you left so I would rise in my profession, to make possible what my restlessness craved, yet now I am struck dumb. All that I wanted beforeâposition, fame, the praise of influential menâis so much chaff in the wind. A marriage to advance my career? The very thought appalls.
Yes, my love; it was my ambition that drove you away.
Forgive me: I should have done more to persuade you to stay; I should have prevented you from leaving.
I know now that my mother was right when she said I seduced you on a path that would bring your ruin. For I made you leave your child and so your heart also bleeds from a wound that may never heal. Your courage overwhelms me, humbles me, shames and rebukes me. Compared to you, I am nothing. Less than nothing.
You told me I never lied to you but that is not true: I lied to myself and so I lied to you. In my pride, I thought I could have whatever I desired. The first moment I saw you in the church with the light enveloping you like a gorgeous mantle, I knew you were
the one. And I determined to have you. Like the pears, I stretched out my hand and you, in your innocence and trust, took it. But not content with having you, I despoiled the tree, the source of life itself. My restless heart has destroyed all that is good and true and beautiful. It was not Eve that plucked the fruit, but Adam.
My heart is cut and wounded, a trail of blood stretching between us from Italy to Africa.
I can write no more. Forgive me if you can.
Always,
Augustine.
I traced his name with my fingers. The same extravagant flourish of the
A
and
g
compared to the neatness of the other letters, the thousand times I had seen him make this mark, as familiar to me as the color of his eyes, the feel of his body against mine. And I could hear his voice in his words as clearly as if he were standing there.
Smoothing out the parchment I saw a postscript at the bottom. Instantly, I recognized the hand:
p.s. Papa is sad. I am too. We miss you. I am sorry I did not hug you when you left. I was angry then but am not angry now. Just sad. I love you.
Your son,
Adeodatus
p.p.s. Papa says I can come and visit soon.
I
n early March I was strong enough to sit outside and turn my face toward the soft African sun, and as the earth revived so did my body but my spirit remained stricken. I longed for the sight of Augustine and my son more than I longed for the warmth and light of summer, more than for life itself. During the winter, the shipping lanes were closed and I received no more letters. The one I had was so worn with reading and rereading that I feared it would disintegrate in my hands.
As my health returned so did an interest in the farm. Despite my travels with my father, I had been a city child and knew little of country ways. The house itself was of moderate size and comprised a single story set around a courtyard in the Roman fashion: a small entrance hall led into a modest-sized atrium with a rectangular pool and fountain open to the sky; to the right under a pillared walkway lay three bedroom cubicles with only the master bedroom large enough for windows set in two adjoining walls at the corner of the house. My bed was beside one window and a wicker basket-chair and footstool stood before the other, a table and chest the only other furniture. A reception room was situated to the left of
the atrium opposite the bedrooms with a kitchen and small vegetable garden at the back of the house.
Compared to the cramped apartments in which I had lived most of my life until we moved to Milan, this house was more spacious than I could have hoped. Best of all, set a little way from the main house but joined to it by a trellised walkway was a tiny bathhouse. During my long convalescence I spent many hours sitting in the steam room as if the sweat that ran from my body could purge me of the poison in my soul.
With the house came slaves who I learned, when I was strong enough to go to Carthage to consult Nebridius's lawyer, were now transferred to my ownership. This was the first time in my life I had owned property, and I recalled the estates my father and I had visited, the slaves we saw there, some happy and well-fed, many starved and beaten, and the strange feeling, almost of guilt, that I was freeborn. I wondered then, as I wonder now, what makes the gods decide who shall be free and who a slave, who will conquer and who will be overthrown. It seemed a cruelty beyond all cruelties that when I was poor I was free and now I had means I was a nothing. Gradually, my shame of ownership grew to love, especially when I recalled my servants had saved my life when I lay sick, performing all those intimate tasks while I lay helpless as a newborn.
More than anything else, it was the life of the farm that revived me, the life of its people. Tanit I began to know during my illness, the other members of my household during my convalescence: Anaxis, the steward who had fetched me from the ship and brought me here; Anzar, the foreman of the farm, a man most skilled with his hands who could fashion a new pump for the well
just by looking at the broken one. Often I would see him crouching down before something he had disassembled and spread out on the ground before him, turning over this piece or that in his hands and then squinting at the sky for long moments.
“He tells me he is thinking when he does that,” Tanit said when she caught me watching him. “He says Ba'al Hammon inspires him. Me? I just think he's puzzled.” And she laughed and when she saw me smile she nodded to herself as if she had accomplished what she set out to do.
Anzar and Tanit, I soon saw, loved each other although they thought I did not notice. I would see them looking at one another across the kitchen table, hot, hungry looks, and once, when I had gone for a walk along the road at sunset, I saw them outlined against the red of the sky holding hands, their heads bent close as if they talked. As I walked back to the house, I felt a kind of happiness, the first since leaving Italy, and I determined to do all in my power to help them. From that moment a plan began to form in my mind.
A few weeks later I summoned them to me. I had had my bed moved to the far wall and a table and a straight-backed chair placed under the window. It was the exact placement of Augustine's desk in our apartment in the street of the silversmiths, and sitting at it with the afternoon sun falling on my books, I felt close to him, would often sit gazing out of the window, unseeing, wondering what he did, what he felt, if he had forgiven himself. Seeing my son. It was here at the desk that I wrote to him and Adeodatus every week, saving up the letters until the trade routes opened in the spring.
Tanit arrived wiping her hands on her apron, Anzar with a streak of dirt across his forehead from repairing a wall in the lower
pasture. They stood a little apart, and aside from the briefest glance at one another, there was no indication they were a couple. I smiled a little to myself at that and thought that Augustine and I must have been just as transparent.
“Tanit, Anzar,” I said. “Do you love each other?” I had decided the direct approach was the best.
Then they did look at each other and their glance was so full of longing that the brisk demeanor I had decided to adopt almost failed me.
“We do, mistress,” Tanit said.
Anzar nodded.
“Is it your intention to marry?”
Again they looked at each other. Again, Tanit spoke for them both. “We cannot,” she said.
“If you were free, would you marry?”
“Yes,” they said together. They moved a little closer to each other.
From the desk, I picked up the two pieces of paper I had prepared. Handing one to each, I said: “These are your manumission papers. If you make your mark beside my signature they will be legal.” I dipped a pen in ink and gave it to each of them in turn. As if in a dream, glancing repeatedly up at me as if they thought I was playing a cruel trick or making a strange out of season Saturnalian joke, they each put a cross next to my name.
“Good.” I blew on the ink to dry it and then rolled up the papers. “I will keep these safe and when I go into Carthage I will deposit them in my strongbox at the bank.”
I went to Tanit and took her hands in mine, those strong brown work-hands that had ministered to me in my illness.
“Congratulations,” I said, kissing her formally on each cheek. I turned to Anzar and shook his hand.
“We don't understand, mistress,” Anzar said. “We are free to marry? We are no longer slaves?”
I smiled at their bewilderment, their dawning hope. “That is so. You are free to stay or go as you see fit. If you stay, I will employ you in your current positions. What I can pay will depend on the annual profits from the farm but I can put a roof over your head and food in your belly. This will always be your home.”
“What of the others?” Tanit asked.
“I intend to free them as well.”
After that I called the others into my study one by one. Anaxis, the oldest of my household and the most experienced, calm and kind and a confirmed bachelor, Tanit told me.
“I would like to stay, Domina,” he said. “If that is pleasing to you. I have lived here since I was a young man and know no other home.”
“I was hoping you would,” I replied. “And you need not call me Domina.”
He smiled at me, not a servant's smile but as one adult to another, the sort of smile one gives a friend when they are being unusually dense.
“You will always be the Domina,” he said.
Likewise I freed Rusticus, Anzar's right-hand man responsible for all livestock; Maia, the housemaid and Tanit's kitchen helper, who was little more than a child; Marcellinus, a half-grown youth,
supposedly Anzar and Rusticus's apprentice though they told me he was bone idle and spent all his time chatting up Maia in the kitchen when he should be working.