In Rome, I encountered no difficulties. Here too they barely look at you. I’d worried all the way over about filling in a tourist card, but none was required. I showed my passport to the customs official, but he was talking to one of his colleagues in the next booth and never directly looked at me at all when he stamped my passport. And then I just disappeared.
I will not tell you where I went from there, nor how I did it. There were people who helped me out of sheer kindness, and I would not wish their generosity blunted by learning they helped a murderer. All I will say is that it is surprisingly easy, and requires very modest sums of money, to effectively vanish.
As I think I told you earlier, I have a little money, not much, but enough to live relatively well in a place where poverty is the norm, and where relatively small amounts of money have the potential to greatly ease the misery of those around me. I have pledged myself to do that, at least, to make up in some small way for what I have done.
It will be a novel experience for me, living without the perpetual advice and counsel of either my father or my husband, but I believe I will grow a little more confident every day. The Worryman you gave me that day in the shop is with me still, and I think of you when I rub my troubles on his back.
You will be surprised, no doubt, when I say that while I do not regret that last fateful act of my relationship with Martin, would even do it again, if the circumstances were the same, that I miss him so very much. I dream about him vividly, and wake with a feeling of his presence so real that I reach out to touch him. If I could bring him back, if I had godlike powers to make that happen, I think perhaps I would. But we, the two of us, would have to work out a new relationship, one where my newfound independence could be accommodated, where my opinions were held to be of some consequence.
I gather from the newspapers that the authorities believe that I may be dead, killed by whoever killed my husband. I would wish to remain so, yet I feel compelled to write to you. You were very kind to me on those few occasions we met. You seemed interested in what I had to say and respected my feelings. Now my fate rests with you. If you choose to tell the authorities of this letter— this confession—then so be it. I do not know if they can find me, but I know they will surely try. That decision I leave, perhaps unfairly, to you.
With best regards—and love, Marilyn Galea.
I sat for a very long time that evening, very still, watching the flames in the fireplace flicker in front of me, thinking about what I had read. I thought about all the truly dreadful things that had happened in the past weeks, the ache of the loss of friends, the anger that still was in me. Where was the Goddess now?
I am at the beginning as I am at the end. I am the sacred circle, spinner of the web of space and time. I am the cosmic “And”: life and death, order and chaos, eternal and finite.
How is it that you wrenched apart that which is inseparable? Why did you create the Either/Or? Because when you did, when you replaced Me with your despotic sky gods who rule from Without, you made Me something to be mastered, something to be conquered…
Neglected, devalued, insulted, and profaned I may be, but I remain. I wait in my sacred places, I live in your dreams. Nammu, Isis, Aphrodite. Inanna, Astarte, Anath. Call me whichever of my manifestations you will. I am the Great Goddess, and I will be avenged.
I took the letters, both of them, and page by page, consigned them to the flames.