Free The Confessions of X by Suzanne M. Wolfe Page B

got his trunk caught in a door.”
    I thumped him on the shoulder and he laughed again.
    Perhaps it was the sound of his laugh that made me ask what I had puzzled over for months. Shifting closer to him, I laid my head in the crook of his arm. Immediately he pulled me closer and taking up the edges of the cloak covered me for he had felt me shiver. We lay there for a while, cocooned together, the only sound the trilling of the stream, the distant cry of a hawk.
    â€œAugustine?”
    â€œMmm?”
    â€œWhy are you a Manichee? Mani teaches that this world is evil, yet you love it so.”
    During our walk I had watched how his eyes took in the late flowers growing in the ditch, the bare branches of the trees swaying in the wind, their shadows checkering the stones beneath our feet. I recalled how he had watched the furling of the ocean on the shore, rubbed silk between his fingers in the market, held lemons to his nose to smell their scent. Never have I known a man so attentive to beauty nor so tender to all living things. Once when I was looking out the window into the courtyard watching for his return, I saw him pick up a baby bird where it had fallen to the ground and, climbing the wall that ringed the courtyard, place it gently in its nest.
    He was silent for a while and I knew he was thinking. Never did he dismiss the questions I asked as stupid or banal as I had heard some men do to their wives but always considered them with utmost seriousness. So much so that I sometimes smiled to myself when I saw two little frown lines appear between his brows, his eyes taking on an inward gaze as if he looked at pictures in his mind.
    â€œI look at the world and as well as beauty, I see sadness and evil. My mother’s God is supposed to be all knowing, all loving, but how could such a God allow us to suffer? It seems to me that only an evil God could delight in our pain. Ergo: To posit one good and one bad deity perpetually at war is the only rational explanation.
    â€œMy mother says that we have free will and that God allows us to do evil but then brings good out of that evil. I cannot understand how that can be so. Good and evil are opposites and one cannot lead to the other. They can only coexist separately.”
    â€œWhat about the Christian God, who is said to be all good, all knowing?” I asked. “My aunt says it is we who have transgressed, bringing evil into the world. There’s a story the Christians tell about it in the book the Jews have.”
    â€œAdam and Eve?” He laughed derisively. “That’s just a folktale dreamed up by an illiterate tribe.
    â€œPlato is interesting,” Augustine went on. “He tells a story, too, but it is much more sophisticated and free of contradictions. He said the world is like a cave and outside the cave is a great fire. The gods—not people, you understand, but great ideals like Truth and Justice and Goodness—pass back and forth across the fire, and within the cave we only see the shadows on the walls and that is how we know that they exist. This metaphor makes much sense to me as well.”
    I thought about this a while. “It seems to me the world is like a giant mosaic formed from my father’s art—his masterpiece. But from the moment the plaster dries and we walk upon it, it begins to turn to dust. It is the ruin of the world and all its beauty that you hate, not the world itself.”
    In one swift motion, Augustine rolled over so he was looking down into my face, my head still pillowed in the crook of his arm. “You are a marvel,” he said.
    He saw I thought he teased me. “No,” he said. “I am quite serious. Not all the students I have ever known or am likely to know could have understood my philosophy so well. Before you put it into words I didn’t know myself.”
    â€œIt is because I love you that I see you truly,” I said. “My love is a kind of knowing.”
    He