feels sorry for Valentina. Being appreciated as a woman in the medical world is tough, but in the Carabinieri it must be close to impossible. ‘What will happen to them?’
He lets out a small laugh. ‘You care?’
‘Yes!’ Louisa looks down at her hands. Her thumb’s bleeding where she’s chewed the nail. ‘They were only doing their jobs.’
Now he’s angry. ‘Oh, please! No bleeding hearts. Be a bit more professional.’
He loves the fact that she’s feeling guilty, feeling so bad about things that she can’t help but let off steam.
‘What’s done is done. You’ve got your personal victory and beaten the bad lady captain and her army, so enjoy it. Then forget it and get your job done.’
In a sense, Louisa has already forgotten it.
Her mind is back on her patient. ‘She damaged herself again last night.’
‘What?’
‘Anna. She tore at the stitches again.’ She makes a motion towards her forearm. ‘Drove the corner of a bible into her wounds until she’d opened them all up.’
77
Tom and Valentina finish the mountain of breakfast.
They stack used crockery on the tray and slide it outside their hotel room before attacking Anna’s journals.
Tom spreads photocopies on a largish desk in the corner near the
Valentina sprawls across the gold-quilted bed with the two other sets of documents. It doesn’t take long for her to see the big picture. ‘These diaries stretch back at least fifteen years. It looks like even pre-puberty, Anna was troubled by multiple personalities.’
‘And the stories and history are all jumbled up,’ says Tom.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Look.’ He shows her the first page, marked The Ancient Diary of Cassandra. ‘Here she calls herself Cassandra; that’s a Greek name. She refers to the Greek god Zeus, but the Etruscan goddess Minerva.’
‘So what?’
‘Then she says that she’s a descendant of the house of Savyna; that was Renaissance period.’ Tom traces a finger over the appropriate text. ‘Next she describes “the people of Cosmedin” – I think that’s from the medieval period, but her husband is called Lucius, and that’s an old Roman name.’ He turns the page. ‘And this story about the Bocca, the Mouth of Truth, it’s completely anachronistic: church and legend are from totally different time periods.’
Valentina smiles at him. ‘Boy logic. Why is it men are obsessed with seeing things in a set order? You’re looking at the writings of a highly disturbed woman suffering from multiple personalities, not a graduate entering a history paper. What are you reading into it?’
‘I’m not sure. I just noticed that all the timelines crossed.’ He tries to better articulate what’s really troubling him. ‘It’s as though her suffering stretches back through time, through the entire history of Rome.’
‘You’re reading too much into it. These are fantasies, to mentally protect herself from whatever abuse she’s endured. She’s grabbing at visual fragments of every legendary story she’s ever heard.’ Valentina fans out some of the papers she’s been reading. ‘Come and see this. In here, she pretends to be normal. She adopts totally different alters with common names like Maria, Melissa or Francesca. Thankfully, nothing awful appears to have happened to them.’
Tom leans over the bed to look. ‘What are they?’
Valentina’s mood goes melancholic. ‘They’re almost what every teenage girl thinks about. More daydreams than anything. She writes about seeing a nice boy in a park, kissing him by some fountains, spending time in the sunshine at her grandmother’s house, picking flowers from the garden.’
Tom touches Valentina’s hair. ‘Maybe she had some good times after all.’
‘I hope so.’
They drift back to their separate piles and read in silence, only speaking to call out the name of any new alters they discover.
After an hour, they’ve counted more than a hundred.
‘I’m out of my depth here,’ confesses Tom, laying down the papers and rubbing his tired eyes. ‘I understand demonic possession, but not this dissociative identity disorder business. It’s like Anna has an out-of-control personality machine inside her that can’t stop manufacturing new identities.’
Valentina gives it some thought. ‘That might not be a bad comparison.’
‘What?’
‘Anna’s brain being like a broken machine. I mean, we all adjust our personality to cope with whatever life throws at us, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So maybe life threw too much at Anna and her personality machine broke down trying to cope.’
‘You still believe it was something in her childhood?’
‘Has to be. After everything she said yesterday about her sisters and her mother, I would put all my money on Louisa’s childhood abuse theory.’ Valentina shuffles through some of the photocopies of the diary in front of her. ‘I think the answer lies in the original alters, Cassandra in particular.’
‘I’ve got a lot of stuff from her.’ Tom holds up a stack of sheets. ‘Listen to this; this is after Cassandra’s death in Cosmedin. They gather my bones and ashes. Loyal fingers seek out every part of me – what I was, what I am, what I will be… They poke among the embers of a pyre that was soaked in cups of oil and bouquets of perfume. My husband is not among the grubbers. He is long gone. Vanished after the feasting… No doubt he is now in our matrimonial bed, slaking his thirst for wine and boys.’
Tom lowers the paper. ‘Don’t you think it’s weird that this alter – the Cassandra alter – continues to exist after she’s been killed?’
Valentina isn’t as shocked. ‘Why not? I guess if you’re a DID sufferer, it’s up to you to decide whether you want to let your alter live on after it’s died.’
Tom reads another section. ‘ Arria is here, of course. Sweetest Arria. She will be among the first to remember me at Parentalia. Was not Dies Parentales made for women with faces as sad as Arria’s? ’
Valentina is puzzled. ‘What on earth are Parentalia and Dies Parentales?’
‘They’re one and the same. Basically, a remembrance celebration for the dead. It ran from the thirteenth to the twenty-first of February.’
She searches her pile of papers. ‘Is there a date on her diary entry?’
‘No date, but I found this between several other entries that were in the personalities of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls.’
‘So Anna was probably a young teenager when she was already dissociating, or whatever the medical term is.’
‘Probably.’ Tom is keen to finish the passage. ‘The urn they have fashioned for me is a cheap one. From its lack of elegance I know already that they will not carry me to my husband’s tomb. I am pleased
… I shall not wait for him beyond the three canine heads of Cerberus.’
‘What’s Cerberus?’ Valentina asks. ‘Didn’t Anna mention that yesterday when she became agitated and started arguing in several voices?’
‘Yes, she did. Cerberus is a Latinised version of the Greek Kerberos, and according to mythology, it’s a three-headed hellhound owned by Hades that guards the gates of the underworld.’
‘I guess that makes sense,’ Valentina says flippantly. ‘A multi-headed dog to kill off multiple
