The Confessions of X (34 page)

The pain of my son's death had dulled with the passing of
time, lodged now like the broken tip of a knife in a wound encased by scar tissue, a foreign object I would carry to my grave.

As I grew older, sleep became elusive and so I would arise and light the lamps and sit in my chair and look deep into my memories and see again Adeodatus and Augustine and it was as if I was young again and we were together.

One event stands out in my memory during those long, quiet years when season followed season in an unvarying round and religious unrest died down. Half a day's journey from Carthage, we would often receive news of the world outside our tiny sphere of life. One morning, I heard the sound of wheels and saw a neighbor, a farmer called Linus, draw his mule-drawn rig up before the house.

“Have you heard?” he said. “Rome has been sacked by Alaric and his army.”

It seemed a thing incredible that Rome, the ancient center of the world, should fall. It was as if the earth had shaken, the seas had risen to overwhelm the land, all nature turned upside down. I remembered the streets of Rome, dirty, teeming with people from all the corners of the earth, its temples rising huge and white against an azure sky, the amphitheater that Vespasian built, the largest in the world, beside the ancient forum of the Caesars.

Though born on a different continent, a child of a conquered race, I had lived my whole life in the shadow of the Romans, their culture my culture, their ways my ways, like the water that flowed from their aqueducts to the city fountains from which we drank and thought little of it except that our thirst was sated. Linus, a devout Christian, weeping told me of the sacrilege committed by the Goths, how they raped holy nuns, slaughtered priests, pulled
down statues, and stabled their beasts in churches fouling the beautiful mosaic floors with ordure. We felt, Linus and I, citizens of Africa Province and all the Roman world, as if the whole world perished in that one city.

One day, during my seventy-fourth year, news came that the Vandals had landed on the African shore east of the city of Hippo Regius and had begun to lay waste the countryside, burning farms and villages, killing and enslaving the inhabitants.

I had also heard some months previously that Augustine was ill, had left Hippo in the winter for his health but had returned still ailing. It was rumored the barbarians had their eyes on Hippo Regius, a rich and ancient coastal city, that if it would not surrender they intended to sack it and put it to the torch.

The next morning I awoke before dawn, knotted a few belongings inside a cloak, including Neith's statue, placed the scroll containing my will leaving everything to Ifru on my bed, and left the house. I saddled the old mule, Hannibal, in the barn, a hard task to lift the heavy saddle and buckle it around his fat girth, then led him out into the orchard and tied him to a tree to graze. A faint light was showing in the sky, a pearlescent sheen above a stilled landscape, the only sound the sleepy sounds of birds as they awoke. The dogs came and nosed my hand, whining and looking up at me with their great innocent eyes as if they knew what I intended. I murmured their names—Torch, Orion, Tecla, Nimrod, and Sisyphus—the great-great-great-grandchildren of the dogs that
bared their teeth at me when I first came to the farm, a stranger to their sires. Torch butted his great head under my hand, his feathery tail sweeping back and forth in placid greeting. I stroked his wiry muzzle, grizzled now, remembering how, when he was born the runt of the litter, I had had to guide him to his mother's teat and protect him from his stronger brothers and sisters. He had outlived them all.

I knew I must leave before the rooster crowed and woke the farm but I lingered, walking the paths about the house, seeing it as I did a lifetime ago when I was a woman bruised almost to death.

A figure appeared in the doorway, no longer lithe and girlish but thickened now with the bearing of her five children. In her hand she held the scroll I had left her. Long ago I had taught Ifru to read, so she knew very well what it meant.

“Mina,” Ifru said, the infant name she first used when she had been unable to pronounce
Domina
now as familiar to me as
Mama
. “Where are you going?”

I came toward her and took her by the shoulders so I could see her face and look into her eyes, the eyes of her mother, Tanit.

“It is time,” I said, “for me to make one final journey. I go to Hippo Regius.”

“No,” she wailed, tears starting in her eyes. “It is too dangerous; you are too old.”

I smiled at this and patted her cheek as I used to when she was a child and needed comfort.

“That is why I will be safe,” I said. “Who is going to notice an old woman like me?”

“They will rob and murder you,” she said.

“I have nothing that they want. All I have is yours, Little Bird. Take what you can and flee, for the Vandals will not be content with Hippo Regius but will sweep west consuming all before them until they reach Carthage. If you love me you will go.”

I embraced her then, astonished to feel her woman's bulk when it seemed to me she was still a girl.

She helped me on my mule, weeping, and that is how I saw her for the last time, standing in the lane, her hand uplifted in farewell like my son all those years ago, except it was I who was leaving and she, like me, was left behind to grieve. I clicked my tongue at Hannibal and he set off.

At the rise of the hill I drew up and looked back over the coastal plain where my farm sat, miniature as a picture in my father's mosaics, a thin tendril of smoke now rising from the oven as Ifru baked the day's bread as if this day were like any other.

To see it down below, knowing how the morning light was slanting into the atrium, a band of gold illuminating the mosaics I had put down in memory of my father, the clash of pots from the kitchen, the distant call of voices as the household awoke to the smell of baking bread. All this was as familiar to me as the sound of my own breathing, yet it was removed from me, too, as if I gazed upon a living picture of my life long distant from my present. It came to me then that all my life had been a journey from one place to another, each time thinking, this, surely, is the last.

I did not have a premonition of my death except to know this body that had carried me faithfully through life, even as Hannibal plodded placidly on with me upon his back, would soon be no more.

“I am coming,” I said aloud. Hannibal's ears twitched at the sound of my voice.

“Not you,” I said, patting him. “Another. Though equally mule-like.”

I took the inland route reasoning that the coastal road would be swarming with the Vandal army, for they never liked to be far from the sea. It was high summer and the fields were filled with laborers, the lanes with farmers taking their produce to market, their oxen slow and ponderous, snatching mouthfuls from the hedgerows as they went, the farmers' children running behind the cart, their bare feet caked in dust, their tunics dirty from their play, staring to see one so ancient as me until their parents bade them sharply to mind their manners.

Many a stranger stopped to ask me how I did, if I was lost, and could they point the way, addressing me as Mother and Grandmother.

“No, thank you,” I told them. “But if you have news of Hippo Regius I would be glad.”

None had news but some said they had seen black smoke rising in the east, too early in the year for it to be the burning of the harvest stubble. As I drew closer to my journey's end, the farmers and the travelers were replaced by refugees fleeing the environs of Hippo, an endless train of carts piled with belongings deemed too precious to be left behind: a feather bolster, a crate of squabbling chickens, a baby's cradle filled with pots, an oven, chairs, tables. Small children sitting on the laps of grandparents or ancient slaves,
those too young, too old, to walk, stunned by their misfortune. It seemed the whole world was on the move.

At night I camped in the fields beside a stream if I could find one now the heat of summer had shrunk the watercourses to a trickle, its cheerful music an accompaniment as I lay and watched the stars wheel in living arcs above my head.

Each morning I rose and filled the water-skin I carried and was on my way before the sun had risen. This journey, my last, contained all my journeys, a contraction of time, a pressing of my life till it ran pure and clear, ready for storage in time's vast vessel.

These same roads I traveled now, Augustine had surely trod, for he was known throughout the diocese for his frequent visits to villages and towns, determined to know the people of his parish, that recalcitrant flock of adulterers, drunkards, heretics, thieves, and graspers after wealth, all whom he cajoled, harangued, rebuked, and comforted with his tongue and pen until it wore him out.

Now he was dying while a barbarian horde massed at the city gates, their only desire to destroy what he had built up these forty years or more. Our lives were joined in some mysterious way, as if we were as identical twins who, when one dies, the other dies not long after.

He was the last remaining witness of my life, the only one who knew me from my youth, and when his eyes beheld me once again it would be as if a stamp were placed upon a document to verify its legality, that it had the force of law. My life was that document, drawn up over time, each clause, each paragraph painstakingly inscribed so there would be no loopholes, no way to wriggle out. I had come to present him with the bill of my life and demand payment, even to the smallest coin, each jot and tittle.

My journey was also a last tribute to my father whom I had accompanied on these same roads in my childhood, whose body lay unburied and long since turned to dust in some ditch, some distant field beside a stream, his last sight the same stars that filled my nights and made me weep to behold their splendor, their vast indifference.

Did he think of me as he lay dying, my face the last thing he saw and reached out to, as the darkness came upon him? Or did he die in his sleep, his dreams the mosaics he would make tomorrow, the swirls and patterns, trees and flowers, birds and beasts, slowly resolving into depth, a living color, until he knew he was in Elysium, no dream of art but art itself. I spoke his name out loud—Kothar, “the skilled”—my eyes dimming with tears, and asked him, if afterlife there was, to wait for me with my son, the grandson he never knew, for I would see him soon.

CHAPTER 36

A
s I drew closer to Hippo it became too dangerous to travel by day and so I traveled by night, the distant beacon of a thousand campfires guiding me. In a wood behind the city facing the eastern gate, I unsaddled Hannibal and placed my hand on his soft muzzle, his lustrous eyes regarding me with intelligence, even love.

“Good-bye, old friend,” I told him. “I thank you for your faithfulness.” And slapping his rump I drove him off amongst the trees, for I was anxious lest he be taken by the enemy and butchered. Once he turned back, bewildered by that strange place, until I drove him off with stones. He gave me a last reproachful look and then trotted off, and I sat down and wept the tears I had not shed when I parted from Ifru and my home.

Wiping my face and clutching my bundle to my chest, a stout stick in my right hand, I set off for the city before me, its buildings standing white and tall against the great openness of the western sky where the land gave way to the ocean, around its walls a desolation of filth, animal bones, the stinking corpses of the dead blackened by flies that rose in swarming clouds as I passed by. It was as if the City of Man in all its squalor had sought admittance
to the City of God and been denied, forever to remain encamped outside its shining walls.

Mumbling to myself as if I were senile, I made my way toward the gate, passing soldiers squatting by their campfires gambling with dice or sharpening weapons, some calling out to me in their strange tongue as if I reminded them of their own great-grandmothers across the sea, some making a sign with their hands as if they feared I was a witch, but none molested me.