The Confessions of X Read Online Free PDF

or my uncle’s, whose hands were engrained with stone dust and clay that no amount of washing could erase.
    â€œI am.” He said it with a serious face but there was something of self-mockery in his tone as if he ridiculed himself. It was as incongruous as the expensive scroll stuck casually through his belt like a workman’s tool.
    â€œThis is my friend, Augustine,” Nebridius said. “We, too, have known each other since childhood.”
    Augustine gave a small ironic bow. “Are you here to pray?” he asked.
    â€œNo,” I said. “I come to look at the mosaics.”
    Nebridius explained my father was a craftsman. “You remember the mosaics in our bathhouse in the country? He made them. My father says they are the best he ever saw.”
    I told him of my father’s disappearance and how he must be dead.
    â€œI’m sorry,” Nebridius said and touched my hand.
    â€œHe used to bring me here when we were in the city and tell me that beauty is the gods’ gift and without it we would die.”
    â€œDo you believe that?” Augustine asked.
    â€œYou ask a lot of questions.”
    He suddenly looked stricken. “Forgive me,” he said. “It is a failing of mine.”
    But I thought of my father and how his hands created oceans and forests and all the creatures that lived therein and how living eyes still beheld his work though his were closed forever.
    â€œYes,” I said. “I do believe it.”
    He looked at me a moment and then did something strange. He crouched and placed his hand palm-down on the mosaic floor. It was a kind of blessing.
    â€œCome.” Nebridius linked one arm through mine and the other through Augustine’s and steered us both toward the door. We used to be the same height; now the top of my head came only to his shoulder.
    As Nebridius’s house lay on the hill overlooking the harbor, in the wealthy part of the city, we decided to go along the waterfront and then climb the steps up the hill.
    The harbor was a huge half-circle, fronted with wharves and storehouses, storied monsters whose gaping mouths consumed the cargoes of endless ships: amphorae of Tuscan wine, Thracian silver, and pigments from the northern climes, all unloaded here, the holds regorging wine and wheat and olives bound for Rome.
    Fugitive odors washed the air—spices, a hot waft of garlic and frying meat, crocus oil and animal fat, a costly unguent the highborn Roman ladies craved and paid for in gold.
    â€œOver there is Rome,” Augustine said, pointing north. He had not spoken since we left the church.
    I looked where his finger pointed. The ocean stretched away into the distance, a plain of endlessness unto the farthest place I could imagine.
    â€œI will go to Rome one day,” Augustine said. “My mother prophesied I will be a famous teacher.”
    â€œAn august teacher,” Nebridius corrected.
    Augustine grinned. “Her ambition for me is a bit obvious, I admit.”
    â€œWhat are you studying?” I asked.
    â€œNothing that interests me.”
    â€œWhy do it then?”
    â€œIt’s what my mother wants.”
    â€œBut what do you want?” I asked.
    â€œYou ask a lot of questions,” he said.
    He had been standing in profile looking out at the ocean, now he turned to face me.
    â€œBut since you ask,” he said, “I care for nothing but to love and be loved.”
    Then he threw back his head and laughed as if he knew he spoke the words of a cheap seducer. Nebridius joined in. But I did not laugh, for, deep down, that was what I wanted too.

CHAPTER 5
    I n the weeks that followed, we spent all our free time together walking in the city or sitting in the atrium of Nebridius’s house under the shade of potted palms, whose wide-fingered leaves shielded us from the pitiless sun. In this green oasis at the heart of a city of stone, I listened to talk about the world, talk about books