The Confessions of X Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    â€œThe light is pure essence,” one voice said. A young man, serious.
    â€œIt’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.
    â€œYou’re an Epicurean,” the serious voice said.
    â€œAnd 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.
    â€œNereus!” 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.
    â€œNaiad? 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œI have missed you too.”
    He told me he was staying in his father’s city house while he pursued his studies.
    â€œMore 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.
    â€œAre you a student too?” I asked, although I knew the answer, for his hands were smooth, his fingernails trimmed, unlike my father’s