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Acclaim for The Confessions of X

A Novel

Thomas Nelson

There is a well in the courtyard where I sit that is not yet dry and at daybreak a young man in a dark tunic comes to draw water. One by one he fills earthen pots with the bucket he hauls again and again and again until the ground blooms dark beneath the well and water runs along the gullies between the stones where thirsty dogs lap it up. When he stoops his neck shows white below the hairline, tender like the milky stems of new grass in spring, his eyes brown and liquid like a doe's. He sets the smallest vessel brimful beside me with a piece of flatbread he takes from a sack.

"Here, Mother," he says. "May your prayers be heard."

I do not speak to him with my tongue but my eyes speak. They say: "I thank you, you who could be the son of my son's son. As for my prayers, there is no one left to hear."

Long ago in Rome I saw a woman so ancient of flesh that she was kneaded and furrowed like God making the world. She was earth, root, and stone, and the shadows of the buildings of men fell across the square in silent homage. I have become that woman, and the people in the courtyard do not jostle me, although it is crowded, but leave a circle around me as if I were charmed or cursed. They think I am wise because I am old past counting and all those who knew me are dead or dying. I would tell them that if it is wise to have lived so long, to have borne so much desolation and not to have died of it, then I am wise indeed.

When the people in the courtyard ask me what they must do in such times, I am silent; when they ask where God has gone, I am silent; when they show me the bloated bellies of their children, I look away. They think endurance is wisdom and perhaps that is so, but it is not the wisdom of men but of women, for though we live longer, history does not remember us and so we are a mystery to each generation.

Now that the city of Hippo Regius is besieged, the people whisper that the world is ending, that the clouds will part, and the Christos will descend to scourge the city of men and lead the blessed to the city of God. But first the barbarians from across the sea, the Vandal hordes, a plague of locusts swarming the land, consume our orchards, our crops, our vines, our livestock, all growing things under the sun until there is nothing but the barren husk rattling in the wind and the emptiness of children's eyes. They smote our bishop and he will die and his flock will be scattered. His death will be the beginning of the end of all things.

On the long journey of my life I have seen many beginnings and many endings. I have seen many deaths, and sometimes the living die and sometimes the dead live on and it is difficult to tell the difference. My son died young and I died with him, yet I breathe. His father lives, yet he also died forty years ago on that day in spring when the air was filled with blood and the world tilting forever beneath my feet.

I have come to this place to sit beneath the pear tree he planted to remind him who he is. My garments against the trunk are blackness upon blackness and perhaps, if he looked, he would see the shadow of his heart and would know, irrevocably and for all time, he is that same man though more than sixty years have passed. And so I have come, to rest here against this tree, the tree he planted against the day of his judgment, to see if what he said was true when he wrote, "It was not the pears my unhappy soul desired. For no sooner had I picked them than I threw them down and tasted nothing in them but my own sin."

Each day we gather in the courtyard of the church outside his window. Many come and the sound of their prayers is sometimes like the thrumming of bees deep within the hive in winter and sometimes like the cry of an animal in the dark. Its ebb and flow sets the leaves shaking and the shadows dancing until it is hard to know what is sorrow and what is joy, what is greeting, what is farewell. Such has been the sound of my life as it has passed along the wide corridors of time to this moment, here in this place, where I will once more look upon his face.

Now the church bell is ringing and soon the chanting of the faithful will rise like smoke from the campfires of the enemy outside the city walls and hope and fear will again contend in the souls of men. Their prayers for him and for their own deliverance are spoken in the same breath and none can tell which is which, save God. Thus the desires of our hearts knot and twist until we cannot discern the one from the other, neither seek to know, and so we weave the tapestry of our lives and wonder at the pictures we make.

An old dog makes his home in the courtyard and lies beside me when the shadows shrink to knives against the walls. He is the only one who does not fear me, his breath ragged, intermittent, his ribs fretted with want, abandoned by his master in the exodus as I myself was abandoned. My hand rests on his head like a blessing as I feed him bread, piece by piece, for he has few teeth and those carious; the crusts he mumbles wetly in my palm. He reminds me of Torch, too old now to be much use on the farm except to lie in the sun and dream.

Once I had my fill of touch, skin smooth and languid against my flesh, my body falling, falling, the smash of it, then darkness and a slow returning. Later, my arms drawing him down once more, the rush of our meeting a vortex and a roar.

Then the sweetness of my son's limbs, brown, creased, firm as figs ripe for eating, his body slippery as I bathed him, then sheeny with oil as he lay kicking before the fire, his hands clutching the air as if to catch up the stars. Never have I loved with such rapture, that tiny body bequeathed me out of blood, a long laboring through the night and then the day coming and with it, you, my son.

Memory for the old is not solace but a terror and those with clouded minds are God's favorites. I remember your hair springing strong and silky as young wheat between my fingers as I kissed your forehead on the day I left. My little son whose hands I still feel fisting my skirts in the marketplace, shy of the skitter of mules, the bully of legs crowding the stalls, the shouts of sellers, hands now blunted and veined as your grandfather's, my father's, a laborer's hands wearing an iron citizen's ring as you lead me through the street, I your child, you the parent. I have it still, this ring that once encircled your finger, that once was warmed by your flesh, and have worn it on a chain against my heart these forty years.

And afterwards, after the parting, your letters so brave, your pain ducking and peering behind the lists of days, books, hymns, lessons like a child playing hide-and-go-seek, until the sudden finding, the wail, "Oh, Mama, I miss you!" Then that last perfect summer we spent together as if the world and you in it would be forever golden and ripe with promise even as the vines and orchards grew heavy, the grain swelled on its stalk, all things living delighting in plenitude.

Then the news that you were gone. I never saw you dead but the picture of you upon your bier plays ceaselessly before my eyes.

Oh, my son.

Once he said that memory is a longing, that the pictures we make in our minds are the soul's remembrance of the place where God dwells in immutable light. I have found that place and it is a lonely house, a place for kites and jackals, a fit dwelling for the God who stayed the knife of Abraham but would not spare my son.

Many and many are the times I have watched you sleep, my son, and never was sleep so still, so absolute, as this your long last dreaming. The goneness of you is an ache in my bones on a winter's night with the wind blowing cold and desolate off the mountains, my heart a hovel fallen in upon itself, the sky a mocking eye.

Gift we named you, so blindly bestowed. Adeodatus. Given by God. Iatanbaal in my mother's Punic tongue. And I a month short of my seventeenth year. My body was a woman's, my heart a girl's, and my womb was stunned by its swelling, its stirring a burden that would not let me rest. When, after all that anguish, I reached down and touched the rounded orb of you, a new world crowning and crowned, it was another birth entire, my own, this strange anointing above the lintel of my soul.

Long ago he said that when something is lost to us, its image is retained within us until we find it again. Crippled by the loss of it, the memory demands that the missing part should be restored. This I believe.

We are, he and I, as if never parted yet we have been as distant as the stars that roll in darkness and never meet.

My mother died birthing me and when the wise-woman showed me to my father saying, "A girl-child" — eyes averted, voice ashamed — he took me in his arms and held me tight to still my wailing, for he loved my mother and I was her remnant. She was Punic, from the tribe of the Imazighen, the free people, ancestors of the Phoenicians who crossed the seas to Africa and settled on these northern shores, and from her I got my light skin and green eyes. He was a poor man, my father, an itinerant mosaic-layer, often drunk but never violent or unkind, his love for me a lame and faithful dog that followed upon the roads we trod from job to job and curled beside me when I slept, the heavens a spangled canopy, the ground, oftentimes, our bed.

I was wet-nursed and weaned in Carthage at my father's sister's house. My father began to take me with him on his travels when I turned four, curled like a mouse in a nest of cloaks he made for me in the cart when I was weary, skipping at his feet or, best of all, riding on his shoulders, for he was a young man then, his back not yet bowed from bending to his craft.

I first remember colors though I could not name them. The clip and clink of tiles gritting my fingers, these my first playthings tumbled in gaudy heaps in the marketplace of Carthage or piled on the ground at work sites. Slate, basalt, marble, veined with blue and red and green as if lapidary spiders had spun fantastic webs within — these I sorted when I got older and laid in baskets my father heaved onto the cart pulled by our patient mule, tramping the countryside, a shabby legion of three.

I was his apprentice, he often boasted, as good if not better than any lad. He would wink at me when he said this and the other craftsmen would laugh. Many of them had daughters at home, and I could tell by the way they would look at me that they missed them sorely. Some had sons with them, learning the craft, much older than I, gangly youths who teased but tolerated me, for one of my tasks was to fetch water from the well when they were thirsty or needed it to mix mortar. Sometimes they gave me things, a necklace plaited out of flowers, a bird crudely carved from wood, to carry to a kitchen-girl or one of the lady's maids. I soon learned that if the girl accepted, I would receive pieces of honeycomb or perhaps an apple for my mule, but if the girl rejected the gift, the boy would be sullen and bad-tempered for the rest of the day and I knew to keep away.

They were given the heavy work, carrying baskets of fine rubble to be laid as the base of the mosaic, mixing mortar and then shoveling it over the stones as the second layer, the men smoothing it down with long trowels until it was even, checking constantly with a lead plumb line suspended from the apex of a triangular wooden frame laid flat. This was followed by another layer of mortar mixed with terra-cotta. Above this, the final layer of pure mortar was applied only by the craftsmen themselves when it came time to lay the tiles, and only in small areas, for the mortar had to be wet, the tiles laid swiftly and precisely before it dried. Each son would stand near his father, ready to supply him with fresh mortar, and tempers grew short if the mortar dried too fast and the next batch was not yet ready. I would scurry about with my bucket and dipper so that setting mortar could be dampened and made pliable again. My father had no boy to do this for him and did it himself. It made him slower than the rest but he was an artist of figures rather than of geometrical designs used in bordering — a much rarer skill — and the client never complained.

He called me Little Bird because my eyes were always bright and watchful, he said, my head cocked to one side as I squatted next to him. When he placed the first tile I would hold my breath, for this, to me, was the beginning of the magic.

"What is it going to be, Papa?" I would ask.

"Wait and see," he would say.

He would lay another tile beside the first and then another and another until, suddenly, as if sprung from the very earth itself, there appeared the delicate curve of a stem bending under the weight of its bell-like flower or the jagged points of a tiger's teeth or the rounded scales of a golden carp barely glimpsed beneath a gauzy, azure pool. I see him still, stooped, intent, laying whorls and lines until an image grew — bird, fish, tracery of frond or vine, worlds flowering piece by piece before my eyes, a miracle of making, the motion of his fingers deft, continuous.

"How do you do that?" I would ask.

"Ah, Little Bird," he would say. "It is the art of broken things."

I thought, then, that he was remembering my mother, and perhaps he was. But now that I have lived more than twice his lifespan, have picked through the shards of a broken life, fitting them to a pattern that, once set in time, I cannot change, I know that he was speaking of himself. Most rarely blessed by the gods with an eye for beauty and the gift of making, he had taken to drink in grief over my mother's death, and slowly, inexorably, his gift began to fail. Once held to be one of the finest mosaic makers in all of Africa Province, sought after by senators and noblemen to adorn their villas or the churches and temples they endowed, his fame dwindled, and before he died his hands trembled so he could barely lay a tile and the only work he found was in adorning the tombs of farmers and freed slaves. I know now that he kept me by him not only because he loved me but also because he knew he would not live to see me grown.

As I grew older, I was given more important tasks than fetching water. I would sit cross-legged before heaps of tiles and sort them into piles of similar colors, terra-cotta at first as these were cheaper than stone and it did not matter if I broke a few. Next I was entrusted with stone, slave-quarried from living rock and brought in ships from distant parts of the empire or in mule-trains from the southern mines. Sometimes, using a tiny hammer and chisel, I was allowed to chip little squares of tile from rods of terra-cotta, for it seemed that however big the heaps of tesserae awaiting the day's work, by noon each was gone and the workmen were shouting for more, the tic, tic, tic of the chisel's edge the sound of summer and my childhood passing.

When I was ten, my biggest and most important job was when the mosaic was finished and had been allowed to dry, only a few hours in the fierce, dry heat of our African summer. Under the direction of my father who worked by my side, we scrubbed the tesserae with brushes dipped in sand and oil and then rubbed them with leather cloths, smoothing and burnishing until the whole floor shone, my father explaining that any roughness in the surface would catch on sandals, dislodge the tiles, and destroy the mosaic over time. Such polishing we do to our memories so they will not snag on our souls and cause us to stumble.

Thus in spring and summer my childhood was spent outdoors going from place to place, my father kneeling in bathhouses, churches, the atria of Romans to make pictures they would tread upon. And after the day's long labor, a settling round the fire, bats stitching the moon's white cloth above my head, the chuck-chuck of sleepy birds, the uplifted wineskin against the firelight, my father's swallow my lullaby.

"Sleep, Little Bird," he would say. "Sleep."

At the large estates of the wealthy we would turn from the road, toiling with weary hope up paths sentineled with poplars. Slaves in belted tunics bent in the fields, their children crouched doglike in the ruts, a shy wave or greeting called and we would know the master kind. Mute stares told us otherwise, the overseer's brute vigilance, his whip coiled snakelike at his belt. I'd take my father's hand and watch my feet lift up, set down, until we passed that grove of human shapes, my liberty a pain that made me gasp, the wings of a trapped bird beating in my chest.

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Excerpted from Acclaim for The Confessions of X by Suzanne M. Wolfe. Copyright © 2016 Suzanne M. Wolfe. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson.
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