Episode 28
Multiple personality disorder.
Some say it’s haunted, others say it’s the devil’s trick.
It is when a person’s personality changes, as if they have the same appearance but become a completely different person.
Enrique Sullivan confessed that he was exactly that. Monica was confused.
She, too, had wished she were someone else as a child. Every night, lying in her hard, worn-out bed at the orphanage, she imagined that she might actually be a lost princess from a neighboring kingdom.
The content of the imagination was roughly as follows. One day, a very magnificent carriage suddenly stops in front of the orphanage, and a middle-aged man wearing a crown gets out. And as soon as he sees me, he glares and shouts.
‘Charlotte Cordelia! My daughter!’
… … Charlotte Cordelia is a combination of the names of princesses Monica read about in fairy tales at that time. The book was named as Lucy Maud Montgomery
Anyway, that’s what happened. That kind of imagination went too far, so sometimes I would practice acting like a princess. Even more so after I found out that the name the orphanage director gave me was actually taken from the name of a princess who had been lost in a neighboring kingdom.
But imagination is just imagination.
No matter how wonderful her imagination was, Monica could not forget that in the end, she was just another orphan in an orphanage.
But it wasn’t the same for Enrique Sullivan.
“Luis Berfeil, Garcia. I know all the names but I don’t remember them. Sometimes I have memory lapses. I wake up and a day has passed, sometimes three days. And there are things in the room that I don’t remember.”
It was after the war ended and he returned to the Sollivan household that the man became aware of his symptoms.
Mrs. Sullivan forced him to return from the war, which was natural since he was the only son left after her eldest son died.
Unfortunately, there was a massive shelling just before his return, and the man lost all memory of the time before and after his return.
However, Mrs. Sullivan found it difficult to take care of such a son because of the huge war reparation bill issued by the crown prince.
When Mrs. Sullivan saw the bill, she fainted for a moment, then woke up. Then, as everyone knows, she started selling off everything in the house. Even her son, who had lost his memory and was left in the care of a doctor, was quickly sold off.
“Go to the society of La Spezia. All the girls with big dowries will be there.”
Mrs. Sullivan braced herself for her son’s cynicism as she spoke. Unlike her eldest son, who was always affectionate towards his mother, her second son, Enrique, was strict and principled.
It was natural for high society women to ask for dowries and conditions for marriage, but Enrique was the kind of man who gladly laughed at such things.
Mrs. Sullivan knew Enrique’s personality even better because she had raised him as her own son.
Moreover, his appearance was too bad. As soon as Mrs Sullivan received information that the war was going to be lost, she quickly brought back her remaining second son. Usually, she would have wasted her remaining time crying over her already deceased husband and her first son who was the cause of their defeat.
But to others, it might have seemed like she had acted faster than anyone else to sell her son away.
What about the son himself? Enrique had not yet fully recovered from the wounds of war. He was even criticizing Madame Sullivan for her cowardly actions in leaving him alone in the battlefield, and the relationship between the two had deteriorated.
But when Enrique Sulivan heard that he was to go to La Spezia, he smiled faintly. It was definitely not to mock Mrs. Sullivan.
“I will do so, Mother.”
He didn’t stop there, he put his arm around her shoulders and gently comforted her.
“You must be very hurt because of Pablo. I understand. I have always hurt you, but this time I will not make you suffer as well.”
Mrs. Sullivan was horrified.
“Are you hurt somewhere?”
Enrique Sullivan tilted his head, then smiled brightly.
“I hope you just think of it as a coming of age moment.”
Mrs. Sullivan was now in tears. Her proud son, according to the doctor, had lost only the memory of the month before and after his return.
But looking at his current actions, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that he had completely lost his memory.
She touched his forehead with her hand, but Enrique was fine. However, he muttered quietly in a dissatisfied tone,
“Isn’t this it… …”
Mrs. Sullivan spent two days eating and talking deeply with her second son, and soon realized that her son loved her quite deeply, if not as much as the dead Pablo.
Now it is certain.
The son was deeply wounded by what he experienced in the war, but his love for his family also grew deeper because of it.
Then a letter from that cheap arms dealer arrived. (Basically its Mr Mollet)
It was a letter asking her to marry him, in return for offering a huge dowry. If it had been before, Mrs. Sullivan would have seriously considered the offer.
But how could I send such a smart and loyal son to that lowly household as a son-in-law?
There was no need to think twice. Mrs. Sullivan immediately picked up her pen and declined the offer.
On the day when her son, who had grown old, left for La Spezia, she held his hand and spoke with emotion.
“Nevertheless, son, I will never force you into marriage if you don’t want to.”
Her proud son, Enrique Sullivan, furrowed his brow and replied:
“Of course, old lady.”
Mrs. Sullivan fainted.
The servants of the Sollivan family, who were watching from afar, did not hear the details of the conversation and simply thought that Mrs. Sullivan was sad to see her second son, who had barely survived the war, sent to the far south again.
But around that time, Andrei, a young man who had been hired as Enrique’s secretary, listened carefully to what his master had said.
Andrei was an exemplary, ordinary, semi-aristocratic youth with ambitions to become a colonel of noble birth and to rise in the ranks. So Andrei thought.
‘I guess I ended up serving an unfilial superior. But if you look back at history, it’s the unfilial sons who are more likely to get close to power.’
It was a truly splendid and shameless thought.
Enrique Sullivan woke up in a first-class cabin on the train to La Spezia with a terrible hangover.
Enrique was confused, because he had no memory of getting on the train.
In the first place, he didn’t like drinking alcohol beyond a certain level. At that time, his new secretary Andrei was sleeping next to him, and Enrique woke Andrei up.
Andrei went on to describe his boss’s behavior, as he ordered all sorts of expensive drinks and drank them all as soon as he got on the train.
‘Boss must have been drinking too much like an unfilial son and not remembering it’ Andrei thought, but then realized something was strange. Enrique’s face had turned very pale.
“I don’t remember.”
Andrei’s face also turned pale. He knew full well that his boss had lost his memory for a month before and after his return. That was the reason why Madame Sullivan had placed him next to Enrique.
But if the boss was simply suffering from dementia at a young age, not because of the scars of war, then his ambitions were doomed from the start.
The two matched up what they knew.
Enrique Sullivan noticed that immediately after returning from the war, he had been thinking that he had slept too long and had not taken it seriously, and that this overlapped with the days that Andrei remembered, ‘when he thought the master was a bit strange, but had passed it by thinking that he was just a weirdo.’
“I thought that after being in the war zone for two years, you might get a little rough, or maybe you might become more attached to your family… ,” Andrei said, covering his face.
The conclusion was the same: Enrique was clearly suffering from madness.
There was no other way to explain this situation. His personality changed drastically, and he lost his memories in the process?
Andrei insisted that he should get off the train and go back immediately. What was he thinking about his mad boss, with his bright and beautiful future ahead of him?
Now his boss should be getting treatment, not meeting girls in La Spezia and trying to get married.
However, Enrique, after hearing what had happened while he had lost his memory, said he would go to La Spezia.
The secretary was furious that Enrique was clearly crazy, but Enrique shook his head.
“I can’t worry my mother.”
“I think you have already caused all worries to Mrs. Sullivan the day you called her an old lady… … .”
Enrique’s face turned even paler as he heard Andrei’s gloomy words, but his thoughts were firm.
Mrs. Sullivan was in a situation where she had to sell even the chamber pot in the house, just as everyone said.
How would she feel if her only remaining son suffered from madness? Enrique patted Andrei on the shoulder.
“Let’s find a good doctor in La Spezia.”
But if you think about it, marrying a girl from a good family meant that he too had to be a flawless groom.
At least he wouldn’t be embarrassed if he had called the doctors indiscriminately and they found out that he was suffering from madness.
Andrei was often away from La Spezia, seeking good doctors in other places.
Meanwhile, Enrique calmly sorted out his symptoms. It started with a small note.
<Hey, buddy. I think you owe me an explanation for calling my mother ‘Old lady.’>
The man wrote the note and stuck it on the nightstand before going to bed. When Enrique Sullivan woke up two days later, he could see the writing added to the note.
<It’s not me.>
Enrique put the note back on the table. About a week later, another note was added.
<She’s not my mother, so what do I call her?>
It was a very rude and rough handwriting. Enrique Sullivan calmly wrote a long message on a large piece of letter paper this time.
The letter was long, very formal and cool, but its summary was simple.
‘Get away from me.’
The answer came back quickly. Enrique woke up from his nap and saw a simple, vulgar, and childish reply underneath the letter.
… … I can now understand why my mother fainted.
Enrique Sulivan thought about it and was about to tear up the letter, but then he got annoyed and just left the letter there.
Because the moment I tore it apart, I felt like I was admitting that I was suffering from madness.
It was the most dizzying moment since he had almost lost an eye in that long war. For the first time in his life, Enrique Sullivan drank heavily of his own free will.
And then I lost consciousness and when I woke up I was in the house of a woman I didn’t know.
She, who was clearly the bar owner, laughed at Enrique, who was flustered and said he couldn’t remember anything.
“It’s been a while since I’ve seen noble young men make excuses like that.”
Then she immediately kicked Enrique out.
Enrique was really angry at that moment. The first doctor Andrei rescued spoke stammeringly.
“It could be the ghost of a historic family.”
As soon as Enrique heard those words, he kicked the doctor out and growled at his secretary.
“You said he was a doctor.”
“All the good doctors died because of the war.”
It sounded brazen, but it was true. Andrei sighed, chased the doctor away, silenced him, and left the city again to find a new doctor.
Enrique Sullivan was left alone.
But I didn’t plan on giving up and lying around alone, losing and regaining my memories until the doctor came.
He was the second son of the Sullivan family. This meant that unlike his older brother Pablo, who was always surrounded by people, Enrique was used to solving things on his own.
There were still a couple of months left before spring returned to La Spezia’s social circle, so there was plenty of time.
All the servants were fired from the townhouse that the Sullivan family temporarily rented.
He fought his insomnia by drinking alcohol until Andrei returned from his empty townhouse, and communicated with the parasitic entities living between his lost memories through notes.
Thus Enrique learned that their names were Luis and Garcia.
It was a strangely familiar name. Of course, I didn’t intend to leave it as it is.
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