The Saint's Mistress (30 page)

Christian Bible that didn’t stand up to reason. But that was only because I was reading it

literally! Ambrose taught me to read it as a story that God tells us in terms that we can

understand. He didn’t create the earth and the heavens in six days. You and I understand that

that’s nonsense on its face. It’s an allegory that simple people can understand. Once I understood

that, I was prepared. And then one day I went out into the country to read and contemplate. I sat

under a tree half asleep, with my Bible in my lap – because, by that time, I had a Bible with me

always. I was ready, standing in front of the door to faith, ready to place my hand on the latch.

And I heard the words
tolle, lege
- take up and read - as if God were calling me. I took this to

mean that I should pick up the Bible and read whatever my eyes first rested on. My eyes fell on

Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans, Chapter 13: ‘Arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ; spend

no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites.’ I read this and I was like a blind man seeing

for the first time, or like someone struck by lightning. Finally, I
knew.
I broke off the ridiculous

engagement, and decided to found a community of chastity, poverty and study at a country estate

that one of my friends offered to us. But when I returned to Milan for my baptism, Ambrose had

other plans for me. He sent us back to Africa. It was the time of the war between Theodosius and

Magnus Maximus and the seas were unsafe then. We had to wait some months at Ostia. It was

there that my mother took a fever and died.” His voice broke. “Leona, my mother was a saint

and I caused her grief and now she’s gone. I’m never free of sorrow.”

“Of course. If it’s any comfort to you, your mother died knowing that your soul was saved.” I

stood to embrace him. It felt so natural, even after our years apart.

He wrapped his arms around me and I felt the muscles of his chest and even the coarse,

springy hairs there, between the thin wool of our tunics. I inhaled his scent, clean and musky at

once, as familiar to me as if we had never been apart. My skin suddenly felt warm and I felt the

spasm of desire in the pit of my stomach. Without thinking I ran my hands down his back and

moved against him, rubbing against the hardness of his thighs.

He sprung away from me as if I were on fire. “I can’t trust myself around women yet,” he

said, “and you least of all. I still burn with lust, the same as always.”

I flushed, still burning myself with feelings that I had thought long tamed: warm skin, racing

heart, moist swelling between my legs. Well past thirty now, an age when my own brother was

already an old man, Aurelius still glowed with muscular virility. I was stunned by how quickly

my lust had returned, the second our bodies touched. I turned my head away from the sight of

him pacing away from me.

He walked back towards me, but stopped short. “Will I ever be free of these temptations? I

pray for it every day, and yet memories of our time together dance in my head like devils.”

I still couldn’t look at him. “I don’t know. I thought I was free of these feelings forever and

now…”

His eyes were wild and tortured, and his voice raspy. “I’ll leave you now, before my devils

get the better of me.”

He crossed the courtyard, his powerful body filling the space with its vigor. I knelt at the

bench and prayer the Pater Noster over and over until repetition and exhaustion tamed my own

renewed desires

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Adeo was not well when he woke the next day. I had been allowed to stay the night in the

servant’s quarters of the bishop’s house and in the morning Quintus’ new slave came to me and

let me know that my son was asking for me.

I arrived at his bedside to find him more feverish than the night before. The paleness of the

previous night had given way to a splash of livid red across his face. When I felt his forehead, it

was more than warm; it was almost too hot to touch.

“I’m sorry, mother,” he whispered. “I hoped to have some time with you today.”

“We can still have time together. I’ll sit with you. I’ll read to you or just watch you sleep. It

will be enough.”

I sent the slave away with orders for theriac and I held Adeo’s head up to sip it hourly for the

rest of the day. He wanted nothing to eat, his head thudding back to his pillow in exhaustion after

the effort of lifting to sip the medicine.

I read to him from the Beatitudes in the Book of Matthew, those plain and comforting

admonitions to simple goodness. He seemed not to hear, except once when he corrected some

phrasing in the Latin translation from Greek. I smiled to find how much his father’s son he was.

Aurelius looked in on him late in the afternoon, when his business with the bishop was

finished. He entered the room silently, nodded at me, felt Adeo’s head and frowned. “What

medicine did you order for him?”

“Just theriac.”

Aurelius nodded. Still scowling, he examined Adeo more closely. “It’s not the same fever that

took my mother,” he said, “or, if it is, it is manifesting itself differently in him. I’m concerned,

though. I’ll ask the bishop to recommend a physician.”

I had kept fear at bay all day, concentrating on reading to Adeo, and the joy of just soaking in

his presence. Now worry began to tickle the back of my mind. “What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know, Leona. That’s why I want a doctor.”

Adeo was no better the next day, nor the next. Quintus’ physician speculated a brain fever of

some kind and asked if Adeo had ever had a head injury. Aurelius and I looked at each other for

a moment, remembering the long-ago day at the Circus, and finally Aurelius said, yes, he had a

bad fall and hit his head when he was very small.

The doctor nodded and had Adeo bled. The morning after the bleeding, he was whiter and

weaker, but still just as hot. His skin had a clammy feel to it that I didn’t like at all. I had not left

his side for days, sleeping on a pallet on the floor of his room, rising every few hours to coax

some liquid between his lips. My bones ached, my eyes burned and my head felt stuffed with

wool.

“You’ll be sick yourself if you don’t rest,” Aurelius scolded. “Let me sit with him a while.”

I nodded, too weary even to speak, and pulled the weight of my body out the chair. But,

instead of going to my own room, I dragged myself to Quintus’ chapel, where I collapsed onto

my knees, dropped my head onto my folded hands and began an exhausted, incoherent silent

prayer.
Just let him get well even if I never see him again after this, just let him get well, just let

him get well, just let him get well, just let him get well, I’ll never ask for anything else again, just

let him get well…

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I must have fallen asleep there. I was jarred awake by Aurelius shaking my shoulder. “Leona!

Leona, come quickly!”

I was afraid to ask why. Shaking off my sleep, I followed him back to Adeo’s room. Quintus

was standing over him, performing last rites.

“No!” I screamed. I dashed to Adeo’s bed and threw my body over his, as if to protect him

from death’s hand.

Aurelius sat on the bed beside me and covered both of us with his large body. In Adeo’s last

moments, the three of us were once again a little family.

I lay over my boy, weeping wildly, until he drew his last breath. And when I knew that he was

gone, I heard a wail, as from someone being torn limb-from-limb, and was only remotely aware

that it was coming from me.

I spoke not at all for the next three days. I sat in silence through my son’s burial, and through

every meal, at which I took only water and bread. Aurelius was quiet, too, his handsome face

painted with gray shadows that I’d never seen before, his muscles so tense that he looked carved

of wood. He tried once to talk to me about God’s inscrutable but reliably loving will, and about

joining Adeo again at the Second Coming, but his arguments were muted and my eyes on his

were a wall. Aurelius, always so sure of himself, even in heresy and error, seemed diminished by

our son’s death, in both body and mind.

I never cried. I knelt in the chapel and willed myself to pray, but no prayer would come. I

knelt perfectly straight and rigid, as if to soften or bend would be to melt into a puddle of nothing

but yielding sorrow.

Why was Adeo taken from us? When I left Milan, I accepted that I might never again see his

face, but I learned to be happy as long as I knew that he lived somewhere in the world. Aurelius

and I had both renounced our old sinfulness and devoted ourselves to chastity and poverty. And

still God took our only son. A little voice kept trying to remind me that this was the same God

who had sacrificed his own only Son for the world, but I hated that voice.

The day after the interment, Aurelius and I sat silently in the graveyard. The family

mausoleum was modest, rising from the ground only about five feet, of mortared red brick, with

a diamond pattern of red-and-black bricks laid on end over the entrance. Nearby, were larger,

more ostentatious buildings with pillared marble fronts, and a few individual marble sarcophagi,

but most of the graves were simple mounds of brick, stretching over several acres now among

the live oaks and pines. In the Christian era, as burial had overtaken burning as the treatment of

the body after death, this graveyard, not far from where I had first laid eyes on Aurelius, had

grown rapidly.

Aurelius quoted Cicero: “‘Of all people you are the only one I would wish to surpass me in

everything.’ He would have, too.”

Grief filled me, black and cold. I didn’t think that I would ever feel anything else again, and

was not sure that I would be able to speak, but after a short while I answered, “It was our fault.”

Aurelius didn’t reply.

“It was our fault,” I repeated. “The doctor said brain fever from his fall. We should have been

watching him that day at the Circus in Carthage.”

“He
guessed
brain fever,
perhaps
from a fall. There’s no way of knowing for sure.” Aurelius

picked up a pine cone from the ground and turned it over and over in his hand.

“God took him from us to punish us.”

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“God doesn’t work that way, Leona.”

“God is punishing me for wanting too much. My desire for you was rekindled the minute I

was alone with you. And I wanted your mother’s land. And I wanted to see Adeo again, when I

should have been content to just know that he lived. I wanted, I wanted, I wanted. I wasn’t

content to just do His will. And so I am punished.”

Aurelius had no reply. The breeze that hissed through the oaks felt cool to me, and I shivered.

“I don’t want the acres,” I said.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re right. You’ll make better use of the land than Quintus would.

And it was Adeo’s last wish that you should have it.”

“I don’t want it. I don’t want anything in this world. I only want to spend the rest of my life in

prayer and hope to die soon and be reunited with my son.”

“Well, it’s probably good not to be focused on things of this world, but I’ll still see to it that

you get the land.” He was quiet for a minute and then said, “How I will miss him.”

“At least you got to watch him grow into a man. You and your mother saw to it that I was

deprived of that privilege.”

“You’re not being fair.”

“Fair? You’re a good one to talk about that. I missed the second half of my child’s short life.”

I stood and walked away from him.

“I’m sorry,” he called after me. Is that what you want to hear? All right, then, I’m sorry that

was how it went. Did I have foreknowledge that this would happen? Am I God?”

I turned to face him. “You and your mother acted like you were, arranging everybody else’s

life without consulting them.”

“Leona, you are a woman of God. These childish emotions are unworthy of you.”

My grief and rage were like molten iron, rising in my throat. “Childish emotions? My son just

died, and I had only hours with him before he took ill.”

“My son just died, too!” Aurelius roared. His cloak swirled around his legs as he sprang up

and loomed over me. He jabbed his chest with his finger. “I grieve, too, and yet you feel the need

to torture me further with these accusations about things that happened long ago. I’d give

anything to have him back, do you understand me? Anything. I would endure the fires of hell for

all eternity for one more minute with him.”

I noticed that tears ran down his cheeks and that his brown eyes seemed sunk in their sockets,

but I was locked in my own grief and was unmoved by his. I stared at him coldly.

“I’ll leave you to enjoy your bitter memories,” he said, and walked away.

Quintus was furious about the disposition of Monnica’s acres.

“I won’t lie to you,” he said. “I did everything I could to talk him out of this, but he was