The Saint's Mistress (21 page)

Aurelius sat on our bed again and put his face in his hands. “I don’t know if I can do it, get on

a ship and trust my life to the sea. It’s one thing to look on it, to splash around in it a little, but to

set sail and see nothing but blue waves for days…I’m afraid that I will be unmanly and lose my

mind.”

My heart, too, was heavy with terror. Slowly, I lowered myself to the bed beside him.

“It’s a way out, though,” he continued, “and I don’t see any other way. You’re wrong in

saying that I’m tired of you. I don’t know how you can think that. The thought of you in bed with

someone that my mother chose for you…that’s torture to me. That’s so awful to me that I would

face the sea instead.” He turned his head to look at me, and I saw the pain in his eyes and knew

that he was telling the truth.

“But, there’s the issue of the fee for passage,” he said.

Now I smiled. “I have over 100 denarii saved with Piso the money changer.”

Aurelius’ mouth fell open. He knew that I had money of my own saved, but I had never told

him how much. I smiled wider at his astonishment and said, “I’ll brave the sea if you will.”

Aurelius was Romanized, and seldom allowed himself tears as a Berber would have, but now

I saw water rise in his eyes. “We’re agreed then?”

I nodded, terror and joy rising in my heart in equal columns.

He started ticking off plans on his fingers. “I’ll respond to the letter by tomorrow’s mail ship,

then, and go down to the docks to arrange our passage. My mother and Urbanus will be staying

for another week. We’ll have to keep this from them. I must tell my students, though, to give

their parents time to enroll them elsewhere. I can leave the impression that I’m going back to

Thagaste.” He stood now and smiled for the first time. “This might turn out to be the best thing

that ever happened to us.”

We left most of our possessions behind for the family that took our apartment. Two weeks

later, we sailed, taking only our son, our clothing, Aurelius’ books and what was left of my

savings after paying for our passage.

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Adeo squirmed as I tied the white scarf around his mouth and nose.

“Do I have to wear this mother?” he protested. “Please! None of the other boys wear one.”

“None of the other boys are my son. I don’t care if any of the other boys die. I care if you

die.” I tied the scarf at the back of his head, and lifted a garlic necklace over his head.

“Mother! No! Please! I won’t go to school if I have to smell like garlic. Everybody laughs at

me already.”

I squatted to his level and shook my finger in his face. “You listen to me. Do not come home

without the mask on your face and the garlic around your neck. I don’t care what the other boys

do, and I don’t care if they laugh. I will keep you from getting sick or I will die trying.”

“You, too,” I said to Aurelius as he approached the door on his way to walk with Adeo to

school. “And make sure he keeps his on,” I added to their retreating backs. I glared out the

window at them as they reached the street, to make sure that they didn’t rip off the masks the

minute they were outside. Aurelius looked up at the window, saw me, pointed to his face mask

and saluted me. He gestured to Adeo to do the same, and I had to smile then at their dark heads

and square shoulders, our son the smaller version of his father, even to the matching ocher tunics

that I had bought them in Carthage.

Our time in Italy had not started well. The voyage across the Middle Sea was stormy.

Aurelius was uncharacteristically quiet, and his mouth and eyes were tight with the effort to hid

his fear from Adeo. As we tossed and pitched, I once again found myself fingering Miriam’s

cross and promising devotion to her God if only he would deliver us safely to dry land.

Deliver us He did, and Aurelius started his new job at the university. The Manichees at least

paid on time, but they didn’t pay well and we lived no better than we had in Carthage, taking an

apartment in Rome’s Subura district, a hive of windowless tenement buildings and poor

immigrants from every corner of the Empire. The Imperial government had abandoned Rome for

the relative safety of Milan, and the old capital had grown tattered. The students in Rome were

every bit as unruly as those in Carthage, and Aurelius once again despaired at turning any of

them into philosophers or orators. Worse, his principles chafed at teaching Mani’s tenets when

his eyes had been opened to the emptiness of the Manichean claims. In private, he read Plato and

had joined a Platonic discussion club.

Then he was finally the recipient of some good luck. In Carthage, he had once been

introduced by Nebridius to a visiting Roman senator named Symmachus. Symmachus was a

lover of classic literature and he and Aurelius had become passionate friends during the senator’s

short stay in Carthage. At the time, Aurelius had hoped that this friendship might become a

patronage relationship and advance his career, but Symmachus returned to Milan and it seemed

that he forgot Aurelius. It was I who reminded Aurelius of Symmachus after we had been in

Rome for six months, and Aurelius wrote to him in Milan. Within weeks, he had an enthusiastic

response, and not long after that was offered the position of professor of rhetoric in the new

capital.

In Milan, we had a small house of our own with a courtyard and apple and cherry trees and

two servants. Aurelius was so busy that I could no longer keep up with all of his writing and

correspondence, and he hired an additional scribe. Adeo attended lessons with a famous

grammarian. Had I been able to convince Aurelius to marry me, my happiness would have been

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complete, but he took up Urbanus’ argument that his career advancement depended on his

marital availability.

We had been in Milan for two years when plague seeped into the city, first only a few

rumored cases in the slums outside the city walls, and then steadily increasing as winter

advanced. Aurelius had always been opposed to charms and amulets, but as the plague worsened

he didn’t protest when I hung a string of garlic and a fish-eye amulet on our front door. Nobody

knew what caused plague. The pagans accused the Christians of bringing a curse on the city by

offending the old gods. The Christian priests attributed the sickness to the wrath of their own god

on those who refused to accept him. But, it looked to me like the wracking cough and black

swellings and vomited blood were no respecter of any religion.

I tried every preventive strategy that I heard of at the baths, the taverns and the markets: the

garlic, the fish-eye, the face scarf. I kept in the house no leftover food that might attract flies. So

far, my measures had worked. All three of us were healthy. I wasn’t satisfied, though, and sought

additional insurance. That was when I remembered my many broken promises to Miriam’s god

and started praying in the Christian church.

I stepped carefully around the beggars who littered the steps in front of San Lorenzo, waiting

for the daily alms distributed by the priests, and the occasional penny that might be put in their

hand by worshippers. I felt special compassion for the staring, hollow-eyed mothers with

children draped across their laps and leaning on their shoulders, and sometimes brought with me

a penny or a piece of flat bread to give.

I arrived early, to get a place towards the front of the courtyard that led into the western apse

of the basilica. Only baptized Christians could enter the basilica itself during worship.

Catechumens and casual worshippers like me were restricted to the courtyard, lined by the same

rough gray stone columns that marched through the nave of the basilica.

Only a few other worshippers drifted around the courtyard when I arrived, chatting quietly

with each other and selecting spots close enough to the three plain wooden doors that we would

be able to hear the service, but soon the court swarmed with activity. Women and children

gathered around the central fountain to wash hands, face and feet before entering the church. The

small children squirmed and twisted, trying to escape their mothers’ scrubbing hands. Slaves in

their short tunics slid into spots towards the back of the courtyard, and a few noble men in bright

cloaks and embroidered tunics strode through the entrance columns and claimed places in the

courtyard or continued through the doors. The men congregated on the right side of the courtyard

and the women on the left, just as the baptized worshippers inside sat on separate sides of the

church. Many worshippers wore face masks similar to the ones that I had improvised for my

family. Pale sunlight swam on the water of the fountain on this late winter day. Even in the press

of warm bodies, I felt chilled and longed for the hard, bright sun of our African home.

A child jostled me and his mother apologized as I stretched my neck, looking for my friend

Cornelia. At last, I spotted her entering the courtyard and waved her towards the spot I’d saved

for us.

She shouldered her way through the growing crowd to join me, and folded me into an

embrace. “Everyone wants to hear Ambrose,” she remarked, nodding at the crowd. “How is

everyone at your house?”

“Still well. And yours?”

“Well, thanks be to God,” she said, her response muffled behind her face mask. “I heard a

rumor.”

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“About the plague?” I was almost afraid to know.

“Yes, but it’s good. I heard that Bishop Ambrose will announce today that one of the churches

will be designated as a plague hospital. Any baptized Christian, rich or poor, can come and get

care. And those who die will be buried on consecrated ground. He’s asking for volunteers to staff

the hospital.”

“You’re not thinking of signing up?”

“No, of course not, I have my family to think of, but, Leona, think of it. They’ll be doing just

as Christ instructed: I was sick and in prison and you comforted me.”

No church I knew of had ever done such a thing. I’d felt pulled towards the Christians in

Milan for this reason. The Church in North Africa, riven by the Donatist schism and subject to

both ecstatic frenzies and rigid legalism, had never held any appeal to me. But, Milan’s

Christians, under the leadership of Bishop Ambrose, exerted a pull by living the command of

their Christ to feed the poor, visit the sick and imprisoned, comfort the afflicted.

From our place in front of the door, we could see the bishop under his canopy in the far apse:

small and pale, with a halo of thinning hair, and a forehead so large and prominent that he looked

as if he might at any moment tip over from the weight of his thoughts. His dark eyes were as

large and as round as plums, and when he preached he leaned forward and swiveled his head

slowly to fix those eyes on every person in the crowd, great or low, seeking out their sin, inviting

them to redemption. Yet he was so small that he looked more like a prematurely-aged child than

the man who had discovered the remains of Saints Gervasius and Protasius, was rumored to be

able to reach into a beehive bare-armed without being stung, and packed the baptized and the

non-baptized alike into any Christian church in Milan where he spoke in a voice so full and

commanding that it seemed impossible that it could come from his frail chest.

He had introduced singing into western churches, chants of such hypnotic beauty that I often

felt tears as I hummed along. I longed to believe, but I had never received instruction and

Aurelius had planted in me too much skepticism. I listened to Ambrose’s golden words, more

beautiful by far than his embroidered robes or the ornate gold cross behind him, but, still, they

were only words to me.

The humming and jostling of the crowd stilled as he spoke for half an hour on the subject of

everyone’s worries: the plague. He quoted the Hebrew scripture which the Christians had

adopted into their own sacred book: “You shall worship the Lord your God and I will…take

sickness away from among you.” The crowd sighed at these words and leaned forward in a wave.

A few women began to weep. The bishop went on to explain that these words were meant not

literally, for our own world, but referred instead to the life that baptized believers would know in

Christ after death, a life without hunger or sickness or sin. “What is the body, after all,” he went

on, “but a tattered garment that we wear? It is that which we cannot touch or see that is most real

about us and about which our Lord is most concerned. It is the soul that is the real man. The

body, maimed or ugly or starving, poor or ill-clad, wracked by disease or by sinful desire, will be

cast off, leaving naked and visible our true essence, that which is already known to God.”