The Confessions of X (11 page)

After the burial the tranquil waters of the household closed soft and seamless over the dead man's memory, its surface placid and untrammeled. Augustine's married sister and her husband
returned to their nearby farm, and Navigius became paterfamilias in his father's stead, his wife the domina, though she ceded authority to Monica in all things.

One evening Navigius's wife, Perpetua, knocked on the door and came in before I could ask who it was. She stood by the door watching as I arranged my hair in preparation for dinner.

“It is shameful to wear it thus,” she said. “You should wear it loose like an unmarried woman, for you are no true wife to Augustine.” Then she was gone.

My eyes filled with angry tears. Since coming here I had known only kindness from Monica, Navigius, Cybele, and the servants but I had noticed that Perpetua often looked at me coldly. She was older than I by five or six years and already the mother of a four-year-old son and eighteen-month-old daughter. Brown of hair and skin like a nut, she was as tall as her husband and strong and shapely of limb although her waist had thickened with childbearing and there were dark shadows under her eyes. The daughter of the landowner who farmed the property adjacent to Navigius's land—for with the death of his father ownership had passed to him—Perpetua was my social superior, as was Monica, but I had never been made to feel it until now.

My fingers fumbled and my hair unraveled and fell down.

“Hades!” I exclaimed and threw the brush across the room just as Augustine came in. Then I was angry at myself because I couldn't bend to pick it up so big my belly had grown. Defeated and a little ashamed at being so childish, I flopped down on the bed. Never had I felt so ugly and useless as at that moment.

“What troubles you, Little Bird?” Augustine asked, stooping to pick up the brush. He came and sat beside me and took my hand.

I told him what Perpetua had said.

“Come,” he said, kissing my fingers one by one. “Let's pin it up magnificently and we will watch her turn puce when she sees you at dinner.”

I smiled a little at that.

“For that is what it is, you know. Envy. And she is frightened of the responsibility of being the mistress of this farm. You must not mind her unkind words.”

Later, after dinner when I was getting ready for bed, there was a knock on the door.

“Enter.”

It was Perpetua, her face blotched as if she had been crying and I wondered if Augustine or Monica had spoken to her.

“I'm sorry for my words,” she said. “They were unforgivable and rude. Here.” Clumsily she pressed an ebony comb and several silver-headed ivory pins into my hands. “To put up your hair.”

“Thank you,” I said, taken aback and touched, more by her courage than by the value of the gift. “They are exquisite.”

At that she blushed with pleasure. “You forgive me?” she asked, and the way her voice rose uncertainly at the end made my heart twist. “Truly?”

I smiled at her. “Of course I do.”

“Oh, I'm so glad.” Impulsively she put her arms around me and kissed me on each cheek. “Sisters ought not to quarrel.”

“Would you like to stay?” I asked as she turned to go.

She looked at me surprised—I was surprised myself—then smiled, the first I had seen and it lit up her face. In that moment she looked very young and very pretty. “But you must sit in the chair
and put your feet up,” she said, pushing me down and stuffing a cushion behind my back. She lifted my feet onto the footstool.

I groaned at the relief. My back was a misery to me whenever I was on my feet and even when I lay flat on my bed. I was also very tired for the baby chose the nighttime hours to move about and it was difficult to sleep and I tossed and turned all night. To give me room, Augustine had insisted from the first on sleeping on a pallet on the floor. Monica had not approved of us sharing a room under her roof but relented when Augustine told her flatly we would move into an inn in Thagaste if she insisted we keep separate rooms. I could have wept with relief. We had hardly been apart and being now so advanced with child I felt vulnerable and fearful in a strange house.

“As you wish,” Monica said to her son, patting my cheek. “It is just as well for the baby most likely will choose to come in the night.”

As I came to know her, I realized this was ever Monica's way, to make her charity appear a thing of necessity or merely common sense so the gift of it could be accepted more easily.

“Better?” Perpetua asked.

I realized my mind had wandered, something it was prone to do now I was pregnant.

“Very much,” I said. “Thank you.”

“My back felt like it was breaking when I was carrying Cecilia.” She poured some water into a cup and passed it to me. “Here, drink this. You must let me know if there is anything you crave and I will try and get it for you. I wanted calf's liver. Couldn't get enough of it. Can you imagine?” She wrinkled her nose. “Can't stand the sight of it now.”

I told her I longed for pomegranate juice and she said she would see what she could do, that she knew a neighbor who grew them and would walk over the next day and beg some fruit.

And so we sat on for an hour or more and talked of pregnancy, its joys and ailments, childbirth and how the first labor could take hours, of how to breastfeed infants and care for them. She was astonished at my ignorance until I told her I was motherless.

“Sisters?”

I shook my head.

“Ask me whatever you want to know,” she said.

And so I did and as I saw her devotion to Navigius and her children, her love and respect for Monica and Augustine, how kind she was, how eager to be helpful, I came to love her. She was the first friend I ever had who was a woman; more than that, she was a sister to me.

The next day, good as her word, Perpetua brought me a cup of pomegranate juice she had squeezed herself. She watched, smiling, as I drank it down greedily, declaring it the most delicious thing I ever tasted. Perpetua told me the neighbor, an old man named Silvanus, said I could have as many as I wanted and he sent a blessing on myself and the child.

Except for that one instance with Perpetua, no cruel words were ever spoken in that house about my status or my swelling womb, though as I lay awake at night sleepless with the movements of the child, I heard Augustine's voice across the house vehement, intent, the way he spoke when he was laying out his reasoning to a skeptic and in response the low murmur of a woman's voice. When he came to bed later, moving quietly so as not to disturb me
although I was awake, I felt his sadness, a burden heavier and more bulky than the one I carried in my womb.

As my belly grew and the days got hotter, my ankles swelled and my breath seemed harder to get so I was forced to sit long hours in a wicker chair with my feet up. As I watched the daily business of the house go on around me—servants crossing the courtyard on errands, the sound of shutters opening, water sluicing the tiles, the flap of a cloth out of a window, voices calling, the sound of little Cecilia crying or Julius playing—I felt heavy as a boulder in the middle of a chattering stream. At first it irked me to be so useless, but as the days and weeks passed I found a kind of quiet contentment gradually descend on me.

Cybele often sat with me during the mornings when Augustine was out on the property with Navigius and Cyrus, the foreman, discussing the farm and ways in which the land could be made to yield more, for Patricius had let it go badly in recent years. Perpetua and Monica were busy running the household, a thing they did together in remarkable harmony considering it was Perpetua, not Monica, who was now the domina of the estate. Even so, Perpetua would come out to visit with me from time to time and ask me if I needed anything. I see her still, perched on my footstool in the shade, leaning forward, gesticulating with her hands, her eyes gleaming with fun, or seated with her little daughter on her lap, who stared at me solemnly, thumb in mouth, a little slick of drool glistening on her chin. In those talks, Perpetua confided to me
how much she loved her mother-in-law yet felt overawed by her, too, how she despaired of ever measuring up.

Monica had instructed the serving girls—Livia and Marta—to make sure I received everything I needed, but, typical of her, she often came to check on me herself. I learned from Monica how a domina should care for her household. She was a far different mistress from Nebridius's mother, who had lain all day on an opulent divan attended by her maids, her only exertion to give orders to the steward and the cook. By contrast Monica worked side by side with her servants in the kitchen, the distillery, the spinning room, and storeroom. I never knew a more diligent or more competent housewife; I never knew a more harmonious household despite Monica's unhappiness with Augustine for his Manichaean beliefs, which, as a devout Christian, she regarded as heretical.

The company of women was, for me, a revelation, my childhood having been spent largely in the company of men. Shyly, I had kept to myself at the women's baths in Carthage, content to watch and listen silently as I bathed myself or rubbed oil onto my skin. Compared to the talk of men in Nebridius's house in Carthage, I found women's talk mysterious, largely taken up with childcare and how to treat sickness. In my foolishness and pride, I thought that only talk about intellectual things like the soul and mind and ideals was interesting or of value. It was like admiring an apple tree for its lovely blossoms and never guessing one could also eat its fruit. Cybele sat spinning wool, the spindle madly twirling in her expert claws, plucking at the lyre of her web like Arachne, a marvel to see so straight and fine a thread emerge from such crookedness. For household tasks I was useless except to wind the
thread she spun and place it, rolled in balls, in a basket at my feet, a heaping mound of goose-eggs to be kept for dyeing in the winter when their drabness would be changed to robin's egg, leaf, and crocus as if spring came premature but welcome. Or birthing peas from pods to rattle in a bowl set in my lap, a bowl I couldn't see except through touch so great had I become, while within the baby danced and nudged my belly's shiny dome like kittens wriggling in a sack, my outer self inert and supine, gasping in the heat of summer as I awaited my baby's birth.

At noon, after the midday meal, the house and fields fell silent, stupefied by the heat. That was the time Augustine would return from working on the estate and we could be alone. He would come and sit with me in the courtyard where sometimes there was a breeze. Sometimes we lay together on the bed in our room his body against my back, his arms around me, for my belly was too big for us to lie face to face. Smoothing the damp tendrils from my forehead, he would blow gently on my neck or waft a fan to cool me. The tiny life inside me was like a winter-lit brazier and I suffered cruelly from the heat. He loved to rest his hand on my belly and feel our child moving within.

“Augustine?” I said one afternoon when we were lying thus on our bed.

“What, my love?”

“I have heard you arguing with your mother late at night.”

He sighed. “It is not you we talk about,” he said. “It is me. My mother is worried about my soul. She says the Manichees have no true understanding of God and the world. It is nothing to be worried about.”

“It's because she loves you.”

“Yes,” he said. “She does.”

We lay there quietly for a time but I could feel Augustine was not at peace from the feel of his body against mine though he kept quite still and I knew what troubled him.

“Augustine?”

“Mmm?”

“You mustn't worry. I am not going to die in childbirth.”

“Hush,” he said, his arms tightening around me so strongly it hurt. “Do not speak of dying. I could not bear to lose you.”

“You will never lose me,” I said.

“Nor you, me.”

In the evenings, the whole family gathered in the courtyard where it was coolest and after dinner, Augustine and I read stories aloud, my tongue halting over words still new to me. Monica would listen, her fingers busy with sewing or sorting herbs for drying. Like most women of our time she could not read or write but made her accounting of the household goods by cutting notches on a stick, which the steward transcribed into the estate records. At first I was proud of my ability to read while she could not—without patrician birth or Roman citizenship, it seemed the only mark of distinction I possessed—but she listened so intently, with such humble attention, sometimes asking me to repeat a sentence or two so beautiful it was, she said, that my pride was overborne by her pleasure.