Problems by John Updike

Author:John Updike [Updike, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-679-64578-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

Augustine’s Concubine

TO CARTHAGE I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. I loved not yet, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated want, I hated myself for wanting not. I sought that I might love, in love with loving, and safety I hated, and a way without snares.

She was, in that cauldron of the dark and slim, fair enough to mock, with a Scythian roundness to her face, and in her curious stiff stolidity vulnerable, as the deaf and blind are vulnerable, standing expectant in an agitated room. “Why do you hate me, Aurelius?” she asked him at a party preceding a circus.

“I don’t,” he answered, through the smoke, through the noise, through the numbness that her presence even then worked upon his heart. “Rather the contrary, as a matter of fact.” He was certain she heard this last; she frowned, but it may have been an elbow in her side, a guffaw too close to her ear. She was dressed compactly, in black, intensifying her husband’s suit of dark gray, suiting her female smallness, which was not yet slimness, her waist and arms and throat being, though not heavy, rounded, of substance, firm, pale, frontal. She had, he felt, no profile; she seemed always to face him, or to have her back turned, both positions expressive not of hostility (he felt) but of a resolution priorly taken, either to ignore him, or to confront him, he was undecided which. She was, he sensed, new, new, that is, to life, in a way not true of himself, youth though he was (aet. eighteen), or true of the Carthaginians boiling about them.

“Love your dress,” he said, seeing she would make no reply to his confession of the contrary of hatred.

“It’s just a dress,” she said, with that strange dismissive manner she had, yet staring at him as if a commitment, a dangerous declaration, had been made. They were to proceed by contradiction. Her eyes were of a blue pale to the whiteness of marble, compared with the dark Mediterranean glances that upheld them like the net of a conspiracy, beneath the smoke and laughter and giddying expectation of a murderous circus.

“Absolute black,” he said. “Very austere.” Again meeting silence from her, he asked, a touch bored and ergo reckless, “Are you austere?”

She appeared to give the question unnecessarily hard thought, the hand accustomed to holding the cigarette (she had recently given up smoking) jerking impatiently. Her manner, contravening her calm body, was all stabs, discontinuous. “Not austere,” she said. “Selective.”

“Like me,” he said, instantly, with too little thought, automatically teasing his precocious reputation as a rake, her manner having somehow saddened him, sharpened within him his hollow of famine, his hunger for God.

“No,” she replied, seeming for the first time pleased to be talking with him, as pleased as an infant who has seized, out of the blur of the world, a solid toy, “not like you. The opposite, in fact.

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