The Sleeping Nymph, page 38
After nearly forty years conducting searches, Teresa believed that every potential crime scene fell into one of two categories. There were those that told stories more powerfully than words ever could, stories made of bricks and of human lives left stranded, and held together by the mortar of emotions and hopes.
Then there were those that kept her awake at night because they appeared to be sentient, and seemed to peer and probe into her soul.
Matriona’s house fell in the latter category. Everything inside it seemed to have come straight from the past, as if she’d acquired it over the course of a lifetime that stretched far back into the centuries. Painted porcelain, copper basins, bronze cauldrons and heavy marquetry furnishings, spread few and far between. The scent of the herbs she picked and grew issued from various baskets and cotton sacks.
It all looked so harmless. And yet . . .
Inside that home, the semblance of normality was punctuated by a low thrum that quickly enveloped Teresa. The house seemed alive—and unhappy with their trespass.
Think clearly.
But instead, some mysterious force was urging her to abandon all the trappings of reason and go deeper. When she followed its lead, the hostility she’d sensed in her surroundings faded away like the last gusts of a tired wind.
It was her subconscious, clamoring to lead the way.
Teresa broke off from the rest of the team, seeking silence and solitude. Sounds became indistinct and soon she lost sight of her colleagues methodically working their way through every room.
At the back of the house was a room that looked like an old apothecary shop, lined with majolica jars full of dried herbs and powders. One of those could have contained the seeds of Datura stramonium, but Teresa didn’t linger for long. There was something else she was looking for, something that she knew, deep inside, she was bound to find.
She had heard it in the ancient hymn Matriona had sung while the heart nailed to the entrance of the valley was still dripping with fresh blood. It had felt like a ritual, with Matriona the priestess.
She had seen it in the urns filled with the ashes of the Babaz kept in Matriona’s inn: the remains of bonfires in which the past was exorcised and male effigies were burned.
She kept hearing it from old Emmanuel, the ghost that haunted her thoughts, with that hole in his chest and the face of a man burdened with a secret.
Behind a work surface bearing a few severed stems of unknown plants, and a pestle and mortar, a door beckoned to Teresa. She pushed it open, into darkness.
Inside, the air was saturated with indecipherable smells. Teresa’s heart began to beat like the drums they’d overheard earlier, coming from the birthing ceremony.
She saw a sliver of blue light behind her. Marini had caught up.
“Close the door. Let no one else in for the time being,” she told him.
There was no light switch, but all along the walls, which were coated with dark paint, there were niches carved in the rough plaster, each holding a bowl of wax.
As if she had been there before, Teresa brought out a match and lit each wick, and soon a trembling glow spread through the room like a red dawn.
The walls and the ceiling had been painted with red ochre. There were no windows, save for some air vents on one side of the room, which reminded Teresa of the kind she had seen in ancient cave houses and early Christian mountain churches.
“A little claustrophobic,” muttered Marini.
To Teresa, it brought to mind a womb, red, dark and warm.
She saw the drums, resting silently on mats laid out over the floor. She crouched down to examine one.
“Drumbeats and chanting,” she murmured, a theory now beginning to take shape in her mind as she uttered the words. “They were methods used in antiquity to trigger trance-like states during ritual ceremonies.”
“How eerie.”
“Research has shown that they can stimulate the brain to enter into what is known as a theta rhythm, which occurs during the early stages of REM sleep. Electrical activity in the neural tissue of the brain becomes ‘synchronized’ and stimulates a state of deepened consciousness. We know, for example, that the ancient priestesses of Denderah would beat on their drums when pregnant women went into labor.”
“What does this deepened consciousness do?”
“It connects us to the spirit world. Theta waves can even induce hypnagogic episodes—religious ecstasies, in other words.”
“You don’t believe any of this, do you?”
“The Church feared their possible effects so much that they banned them.”
Marini spun on his heels.
“What the hell is this room?” he asked.
Teresa was quite certain now.
“The holiest of places—that is, before the great monotheistic religions came along and handed power over to men, snuffing out the sacred feminine,” she replied in a low murmur, getting back to her feet. “It’s an ancient birth chamber.”
“So you’re saying this is a war of the sexes now?”
“Idiot. You’ll understand when you have a daughter.”
“Understand what?”
“The need to protect her.”
She pointed out a series of drawings on a wall. They were stylized human figures, lightly sketched with superabundant buttocks and swollen breasts. A series of white dots lined their spines all the way to their heads.
“Matriona sure takes her shamanism seriously,” Marini remarked. “These look like ancient cave paintings.”
Teresa put on her glasses and shined her flashlight on the images.
“They’re speaking to us,” she murmured.
“All right, surprise me: What are they saying?”
“See those white dots? They’re found in countless examples of prehistoric art across different cultures, even far apart in time and space. They represent phosphenes.”
“What’s a phosphene?”
“I’ll show you.”
Teresa pressed her thumb into one of his eyes.
“Are you crazy?”
“Did you see any flashes of white?”
“Yes.”
“There you go. Those are phosphenes: a visual phenomenon involving the perception of sparks or luminous dots even in the absence of light.”
He rubbed his eye.
“I can’t see.”
“They can be caused by pressure on the eye, hyperventilation, physical strain and deep meditation. Or by the ingestion of entheogens. Get it, Inspector?”
“So you’re saying that Matriona and the women who follow her practice shamanic rituals that involve the use of hallucinogenic plants?”
“Well done.”
“But you said just now that this is a birth chamber.”
“And is there any act more shamanistic than that of a woman giving birth to a child? She, more than anyone else, lies suspended between life and death. Through that most feral of natural processes, she becomes a portal through which a soul passes from an unknown realm into ours. She puts her own body and her own life at the service of the species.”
Teresa sensed the turbulence coursing through the young man, who was preparing to become a father. She could tell that his thoughts had gone straight to his partner and to the life she was about to give him through her own.
Teresa began to study the numerous other objects that had been laid out over the mats and the wooden shelves in the chamber. Others were hanging from the walls. She saw a small terracotta statue depicting a young woman weaving a thread with one hand and holding a warrior’s shield in the other.
“She’s weaving the thread of life, but she’s also protecting it,” Teresa noted, surprised. “It’s the symbol of the midwife. Midwives were often herbalists or bonesetters, too.”
Marini was inspecting the other end of the room.
“These aren’t the sort of objects you can just find in a shop,” he said.
Once more, Teresa felt that strange energy that had coursed through her when she’d first walked into the house: her subconscious again, clamoring to speak in her stead.
“These are no ordinary objects,” she said.
She needed a moment to regroup. Inside that room, the air itself seemed to have hands and carried the scent of a world that had long been presumed vanished but had instead survived in there.
The swirls and spirals painted on the terracotta sculptures weren’t the abstract decorations she’d initially assumed they were, but instead symbolized the sacred waters so intimately linked to a woman’s womb and the life it generated. She understood, now, what the distorted statues really were: steatopygian Venuses, female deities, in this case roughly carved or perhaps just eroded by the passage of time. There were dozens, perhaps hundreds of them.
Old Europe.
Teresa didn’t realize she’d spoken the words aloud until she heard Marini ask her what she was talking about.
“Old Europe is a term that’s been used by anthropologists in recent years to refer to a civilization that’s deemed to have prospered in the Balkans, along the shores of the Danube, throughout Anatolia and all the way to the Caspian Sea. A matriarchal society in which women were at the center of the community’s spiritual, social, political and artistic life, whose settlements were devoid of fortifications and weapons, and from whom we’ve inherited thousands of intact Neolithic-era figurines of the Great Mother.”
“Like these replicas here?”
Teresa didn’t think they were replicas.
Carefully, almost tenderly, she took from his hands a long, ancient-looking staff, rounded at either end. She could hardly believe what she was seeing.
“Thirteen notches,” she said, running a finger over the marks carved into its surface. “Thirteen, like the yearly menstrual cycles experienced by women of reproductive age.”
“What does it mean?”
“That contrary to what we’ve always been taught, in primitive tribes it wasn’t the men, the hunters, who wielded the staff of authority, but the midwives,” she explained, putting the object back into the cabinet in which Marini had found it. “And what’s more, the staff wasn’t really about power, either, as we’ve always thought. What you’re looking at here, Inspector, is a lunar calendar, designed to predict births and keep track of ceremonial occasions.”
Marini’s expression slowly shifted.
“You think these are original artifacts?” he asked, amazed.
She looked around the whole room. The candles burned in their niches, shadow and light flickering across the faces of the female deities and on their protuberant bellies decorated with spirals.
“Can you not smell it—the smell of centuries, of millennia of history?” she asked him. “The motive for Emmanuel’s murder is right here, all around us: a sense of belonging so powerful and so absolute that someone was willing to kill in order to preserve it.”
They fell silent, both feeling a little overwhelmed.
“So we’ve found the killer,” said Marini. “Now, we need to figure out the connection between Matriona and the death of the Sleeping Nymph. I bet they’ve already found some devil’s snare in the next room.”
“It’s one thing to find some seeds in a jar; it’s quite another to prove they’re from the same batch as those that cropped up in Krisnja’s system,” Teresa replied distractedly.
A sound from her mobile phone had just alerted her to the arrival of a new message: an update on the results of the inquiry she’d ordered on the estate of the violin-playing partisan, Carlo Alberto Morandini.
After she’d read through the report, she couldn’t help but close her eyes for a moment.
“Everything okay, Superintendent?”
Everything was definitely not okay.
“The tables have turned on us, Inspector.”
94
Some lives are tainted from the start. They carry inside a seed that will grow and grow until it will eclipse the soul of its host, generate dreams and fears that are another’s dreams and fears.
Slowly, inexorably, the seed will take hold, like a degenerative disease, a quiet calamity.
Some lives aren’t lives at all: merely the blurred, distorted mirror images of other lives altogether.
Alessandro loved the mountains so much that he’d chosen to spend his whole life around them, to study them, to train as a forest ranger so that he could devote his life to their conservation.
Alessandro loved the mountains—or maybe he didn’t. Maybe even he wasn’t sure.
When she had first met him, on that day Francesco had told her about all the mysterious ways the forest was connected, Teresa had thought how refreshing it had been to come across such a gentle, timid young man who was willing to clamber up and down endless sun-baked mountain slopes purely to measure the circumference of hundreds of tree trunks. It had almost seemed a fairy tale, a story of genuine passion.
What she hadn’t known then was that the young man she had just met was Carlo Alberto Morandini’s grandson. Krisnja’s boyfriend was a direct descendant of Cam, the violin-playing partisan who had somehow either witnessed, or indeed carried out—it still wasn’t clear which—the murder of Krisnja’s great-aunt.
Alessandro had severed any connection he’d had with his mother and given himself over, body and soul, to his grandfather’s mission, whatever that may be.
“He’s been here all along,” said Marini, staring in amazement at Alessandro’s house at the entrance to the valley, the place he’d inherited upon his grandfather’s passing.
“He couldn’t leave,” Teresa replied. “His sense of duty and loyalty would never have allowed it.”
“I just don’t understand that.”
“That’s because you’ve never been conditioned like he was. A child’s mind is putty, and an adult can easily mold it in his or her own image, or in accordance with his or her own needs.
“Day after day, Cam shaped Alessandro, constantly undermining his mother’s influence on him; perhaps by this point he saw her as an obstacle to his plans, a threat, even. It makes little difference that Alessandro is an intelligent, well-educated young man: it won’t be an easy task to break down the cage his grandfather has erected around his mind. I would go so far as to say we’re dealing with a case of brainwashing.”
The house was a typical mountain dwelling and, like the clearing around it, it showed signs of neglect. The shutters needed a fresh coat of paint, and the gutters were clogged with dead leaves, which must have been there since the winter. Weeds had begun to grow over what had probably once been flower beds but had since deteriorated into the odd rock sticking out of a clump of bushes.
This is not a place he loves, yet he keeps trying. It’s a daily struggle.
They walked up the steps to the patio.
“He’s not home,” Parisi informed them, “though his car’s in the back.”
Teresa pictured him trudging down some forest path, searching, perhaps, for a little bit of peace.
“So we’ll wait,” she replied. “In the meantime, we can take a look at what’s outside.”
“There’s a pair of boots over there,” Marini pointed out.
They walked up to the woodshed, where he put on his gloves and picked up the boots. He turned the soles toward Teresa.
“Size 43, like the prints we found at my place.”
She nodded silently. Assuming Alessandro was indeed the person responsible for the intimidating message left at Marini’s home, his actions seemed to Teresa a desperate, irrational and clumsy attempt at protecting himself and the memory of his grandfather.
But to carve a man’s heart out—that’s something else.
In the profile she had sketched of the killer, paint and blood simply couldn’t co-exist. It would be like comparing the actions of a misbehaving child to the clinical violence of Jack the Ripper.
At this point, her theory, which she had yet to share with the rest of the team, was that the person who’d splattered paint over Marini’s front door wasn’t the same person who’d broken into her home and stolen her diary—and not the person who’d murdered Emmanuel Turan, either. The killer was hiding in other people’s shadows—unless she’d made a mistake and underestimated the extent to which Alessandro’s will had been erased and rewired.
“We’ll need to confiscate clothes and shoes and compare the patterns on the soles with any footprints we’ve found so far,” she said. “If we’re lucky, we might even find traces of paint.”
And if I’m wrong, we’ll find my diary, too.
She let them get on with their work while she walked toward the house. It was as if spring had halted its course a few feet from the door, giving way to a persistent winter that manifested itself in gloomy colors and in the putrefying remains of dead vegetation that had yet to be absorbed into the earth. The way the house was positioned, in a north-facing clearing that backed into a rock wall, ensured the sun rarely shined on it.
The shutters had been left open, and Teresa took the chance to sneak a look, her hands shielding her eyes so that she could see better. What she saw inside confirmed her suspicions.
The living room was covered in moss-green wallpaper and hunting trophies, and among these were photographs of the valley interspersed with close-ups of Krisnja. It didn’t look like she had posed for any of them; rather, they seemed to be candid shots.
He’s always been with her, Teresa thought. Not Alessandro: his grandfather, Cam.
Inside a glass cabinet next to the blackened fireplace were a violin and its bow, proudly on display like a relic in a monstrance. Teresa was sure it was the same instrument that had played the “Devil’s Trill” as Aniza lay dying in Alessio’s arms.
