Read Online The Confessions of X by Suzanne M. Wolfe - Free Book Online

the weeks we had been apart our happiness had battened on his, diminishing him as we thrived. His mother, I knew, had died.
    â€œNaiad,” he said, kissing me on top of my head. “I am happy for you both.”
    When I would have embraced him again, so overjoyed was I to see him, he gently held me away. This new constraint between us at first confused and then grieved me for I remembered how, in childhood, we had swum in the river or sprawled on the bank to dry, wholly unconcerned about our nakedness. But in the time it took for Nebridius’s mother to take sick and die and be put in the earth, the girl he once knew had forever vanished, replaced by a woman marked by the intimate touch of his best friend, forever untouchable and set apart to all other men.
    As for Augustine, never did he show jealousy of the love between Nebridius and me but accepted that, like twins, we were two trees grown so close their branches appear as one. Nebridius was the link between the time before and the time after, between my childhood and adulthood, and so he became the guardian of my past, the only one who had known my father and his craft and the savior of a future I did not yet know.
    As we strolled with linked arms through the streets, I in the middle, Augustine on one side, Nebridius on the other, it came to me that all my aimless wandering about this city, my restless searching for something I could not name, had led me here, precisely to this moment. I knew then that forever I would be held in balance between these two men, that somehow all my happiness and well-being would depend on them, one my dearest love, one my dearest friend. Later, there would be another—my son, Adeodatus. To this beloved trinity, I gave myself body, heart, and soul.

    Augustine and Nebridius had another friend called Alypius, who loved the games beyond all measure and often begged us to go with him to watch men die for sport in the arena. My own age and from a wealthy family in Thagaste, Augustine’s place of birth, he loved to wager on the gladiators, who would win and who would die. Later, when I witnessed it for myself, I could not understand his love for carnage nor his delight when the man he had bet against lay defeated in the dirt, the crowd booing and jeering, his life hanging on their whim, the roar of “ Mitte! ” “Let him go!” or “ Iugula! ” “Kill him!” his own man strutting round the ring in triumph, sword held high.
    Augustine, too, had no love of the games and I often heard him remonstrate with Alypius, trying to get him to see that to profit off the blood of a man was unclean, sinful even. But Alypius would not heed him. By temperament he was quiet, his manner toward me reserved, and apart from gambling, his interests seemed wholly intellectual. At Nebridius’s house—we never invited anyone to our room now—Alypius would talk for hours in the evenings about his compulsion. I would become sleepy and long for Alypius to leave, but he talked on and on until Augustine told him flatly he had to go.
    â€œYou should see Alypius when he’s at the games,” Augustine told me when I was complaining that Alypius was so withdrawn that it cast a damper on the time we spent with Nebridius when he was present. “He’s a completely different person, laughing when his horse or gladiator wins and then sunk in deepest gloom when they lose. It’s bizarre. He is like a man possessed.”
    Later, thinking over what he had said about his friend, I concluded he was right. I had never seen Alypius in the grip of this strange obsession but I knew how much my uncle had frightened me when he was drinking, the sudden rages, the way he clenched and unclenched his fists.
    â€œLet’s call him Janus,” I said.
    â€œMmm?” Augustine was almost asleep.
    â€œJanus,” I replied. “Because he has two faces.”

    The next day Alypius turned up at our door at