Free The Confessions of X by Suzanne M. Wolfe

Rome where lions, crocodiles, hyenas, and all manner of fearsome beasts would suddenly appear at the feet of those destined to die. It frightened me to think that beneath the surface of ordinary life nightmares lurked. I wondered what evil lay coiled within my own breast.
    Augustine was right: the world was a place of evil. Only love could transform it and make it beautiful and good.
    Appearing beside me, Augustine took me in his arms and held me to him, holding my head tight against his chest as I have seen mothers of newborns do.
    â€œForgive me,” he whispered. “This is a terrible place. I should never have let you come. Nebridius says he will stay with Alypius while I take you home.”
    As we left the amphitheater, I looked down into the arena despite myself. A slave in the guise of the god Mercury was touching one of the gladiators, now crumpled in the sand, with a red-hot cauterizing iron to see if he was dead. He did not move. Slaves dressed as Pluto, god of the underworld, dragged the corpse away by the heels. The sweepers began to rake the sand level like a scribe scraping his wax tablet clean so he can mark it again, like Alypius erasing all memory of his losses and placing another bet, like my father sickened with drink only to raise the wineskin to his lips yet again.
    I wondered then at the compulsions men lay upon themselves—violence and the lust for power—while women bore the burden. My life, I vowed, would be different.

CHAPTER 9
    T here was no more shadow cast on our happiness that autumn except for Augustine’s increasing frustration at what he regarded as the pointlessness of his studies. He railed against the method of learning passages from rhetoric and literature by rote and the lack of critical discussion about content in the classroom. Nebridius’s city house increasingly became a meeting place for the more serious students, an ad hoc university, where discussions of literature, philosophy, and theology raged long into the night. The brotherly affection with which Nebridius treated me rubbed off on the others and I became a kind of sister to the group: Nebridius first and last amongst our friends; Possidius, at fourteen the youngest of the group; gentle Antonius, who every time I looked at him blushed to the roots of his hair; stubborn Marcellus, who would not be budged from his argument by reason yet would suddenly abandon it on a whim and laugh uproariously about it after; Zosimus, who was to become a serious and revered bishop though I knew him as a great teller of jokes. All those future lives held in that courtyard long ago and at the center, Augustine. He was the sun around which we lesser planets danced, the great light of his intelligence, his wit, his humor, and his unfailing generosity, the radiance he shed effortlessly.
    In this way I was thrown more into male company than female, a rarity for our time when men and women spent much of their lives separate converging only at table or in bed. The talk about philosophy and literature, astronomy and religion was intoxicating although my untrained mind was frequently bewildered.
    During this time I mastered letters and began to read and write Latin and Punic with fluency. All those soft late summer and fall evenings we spent seated at his desk forming words or I reading them aloud, hesitantly at first and with many errors, my finger moving slowly along the page and then faster with more confidence. I would be perched at the foot of the bed, Augustine stretched out on his belly, his chin propped on his arms, murmuring a correction here and there but mostly quiet, listening. And when I looked up his eyes were fixed on me and filled with light, the same look he gave me before I knew he loved me.
    â€œDon’t stop,” he would say. “Don’t stop.”
    My father had talked of beauty in a way that was not abstract but made incarnate by his art. He spoke of colors and lines and how shapes should