The Rome Prophecy

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 personalities.’

Tom explains a little more. ‘Cerberus had one head to watch over the past, one to guard the present and the third to look into the future.’

‘Quite a pooch.’

‘And a hungry one. All of the jaws hungered solely for live human meat. Cerberus was the perfect monster to ensure that no living soul entered the afterlife. It was also said to have a mane and tail made out of serpents, much like Medusa’s hair.’

‘Not exactly Fluffy.’

‘Fluffy?’

‘The three-headed dog in Harry Potter. One of the advantages of having a young niece who needs taking to the movies.’

Tom puts the paper down. ‘Mythology is everywhere these days. McDonald’s will be selling Zeus burgers soon.’

‘Are you willing to bet their Greek franchises don’t already do them?’

‘No. Joking aside, the mythology might also be some kind of clue.’

‘How so?’

‘Well, when Anna first started talking about Mother, I thought she meant the Holy Mother.’

Valentina nods. ‘Me too. So?’

‘Well, yesterday she also used the term Mater.’

‘That means Mother.’

‘Yes, I know that. But she said something odd, like: “Mater, who is all, is within us”, and that made me realise we weren’t in the realms of Roman Catholicism any more.’

‘We weren’t?’

‘No.’ He picks up Anna’s diary again. ‘And this confirms it. In here she talks about other women. She says: ‘ Before me I see my sisters. The others of the spirit world. Those who have for ever been and will for ever be. They are the keepers of the secret. The prophetesses.’

Tom looks pleased with himself.

Valentina still doesn’t get it. ‘ Sisters? Some feminist movement? Nuns?’

He shakes his head. ‘No, not nuns. I didn’t want to speculate until I’d thought it through.’

‘What, Tom?’ She presses him. ‘Come on, you need to give me something.’

He waggles the papers in his hand. ‘Cybele.’

The name means nothing to Valentina.

‘ Cybele! ’ he repeats with extra stress. ’I should have got it much earlier. I had coffee a few days ago with Alfie, and we found the name Cybele linked to the Field of Mars and to several temples in Rome.’

‘Tom, I really don’t follow. Cybele who?’

He blows out a sigh. Explaining this could be difficult. ‘She’s as old as time itself. Known to the Greeks as Meter, to the Phrygrians as Matar Kubileya and to the Romans as Magna Mater – the Great Mother.’

‘We’re talking about Mother Nature?’

‘Not quite. Not as simply and benignly and abstractly as we refer to Mother Nature these days. It’s more complex than that. People began worshipping Cybele centuries before Christ. She was the ultimate matriarchal icon, and some even say she was responsible for the birth of feminism.’

‘And all this is bad how?’ Valentina jokes.

‘Bad for men. She had a lover called Attis. He was unfaithful to her, and in revenge she drove him insane and made him castrate himself. Male followers in the sect of Attis were eunuchs, just as they were in the sect of Cybele.’

Valentina starts to see connections to her case. ‘We’re back to those… what were they called… galleys?’

‘Galli.’ He makes a scissor action with his fingers. ‘Only after they’d experienced the snip were they allowed to become priests. These were the only males permitted to be close to any of the sect’s priestesses.’

She climbs off the bed and moves to the desk. ‘Let me look at that section.’

He passes it to her.

She scans it a little, then reads aloud: ‘… the mortals take my burned remains to their dank resting place in the Colum barium. Here among the shelved peasantry is my place in the potted history of poorest Rome. My niche in society.’

She looks up from the photocopy. ‘Columbarium? As in Columbia?’

‘No. A columbarium is a public resting place for the ashes of the dead; it’s where poor people stored their loved ones when they couldn’t afford tombs. Urns were kept on numbered shelves, so relatives could come and find them and pay their respects.’

‘During Parentalia?’

‘Exactly.’

She carries on reading. ‘ No ornately engraved plaque marks my spot. No statue or portrait. Nor any message of love. Just a number. My sisters and I wonder if beyond the grave they can hear us laughing. The number is X.’

She hands the paper back to Tom. ‘Why would the number ten be amusing for Cassandra and her sisters?’

Now it’s Tom’s turn to look lost. ‘The number ten means nothing significant to me. You’ll find myths and legends that talk not only about Cybele, but also about various sibyls.’ He spells it out for her. ‘These are often the same prophetess, but I can’t recall the number playing any symbolic part.’

‘Maybe we shouldn’t get too excited about all this. It’s probably just some crazy nonsense that went off in Anna’s head when she was imagining being dead Cassandra and living beyond the grave.’

She puts her arms around his neck. She’s had enough of the case for now. Enough of ancient Greeks and Roman myths. Enough of her suspension and her uncertain future. In fact, enough of everything except Tom. ‘Thanks for staying. For being with me throughout this madness. All this madness.’

He puts his hand on hers. ‘Think nothing of it; there’s nowhere I’d rather be. Besides, Paris was far too cold for an LA boy. I had to go somewhere.’

She gives him a friendly slap on the side of his head.

‘Hey!’

Mischief flickers in her eyes. ‘Hey what?’

She dances away from him like a boxer, hands up in pretend fists. ‘What are you going to do about it, eh?’ She feigns a slap with her left and then clips him with an open-handed right. ‘Woo-hoo! Come on, Mr Beeg Man, let’s see you fight for your place in the Roman sun.’

‘Right.’ Tom springs up with a smile as broad as Canada. ‘You are now so going to get it.’

Valentina jumps up on to the bed and bounces some more. ‘I hope so. I really hope so.’