11. “The Clandestina,” a fantasy novel by Jasmina Tesanovic, Part Eleven
21. Zombie Meredith in San Salvario
Winter conquering Turin, the shortest days of the year, overcast skies, endless gloom, the suffocating pressure of clouds trying and mostly failing to snow… In the cold sunless fog and half-shadows, Meredith could feel herself barely clinging to life. Restless dreams of deep shame, despair… The abyss… humiliation, self-destruction…
Enough is enough! Better to hide among people than hide from oneself, and Christmas, the notorious part of the year when everyone drinks, feasts, kisses, celebrates, except for the lonely and the abandoned, those who do themselves in for Christmas… Better to leave her narrow, borrowed, illicit room, littered with occult books and maps, abandoned school texts, candelabra, grimy albums of true-crime newspaper clippings, Italian catalogs of New Age knick-knacks… Better to throw her herself into the Christmas crowds of the city, just to hear voices, to get recognized, stared at, arrested, jailed, killed….
Meredith threw on her second-hand winter trenchcoat, which was not a fashionable Milanese or Burberry garment, but a literal antique coat from a battle trench, that some small-sized Italian officer had died in… She also put on her shoulders the big military second hand bag, full of her magic junk. With a fixed smile on her face, her feet freezing because she hadn’t bothered with socks, being Californian, she stumbled the streets , looking for good cheer from faces, for warmth from happy people with reasons to live…
Rita was thirteen years old, and walking the streets of Turin alone was the best feeling she had ever had from life, or from half a life. She was almost as tall as a grown up, and no one treated her as a child. People let her be herself, and didn’t look twice at the half of her, if she said or did something awkward. On the contrary, they helped her out without scolding, as if she was a pet cat.
A pet cat isn’t a grown up person, either, but who cares what a cat gets up to, in the streets? So Rita loved being thirteen: she realized that something special was happening to her body, fast and like a sunrise. Every day, every hour was full. of surprises and decisions. Cutting her pigtails, dying her hair, wearing a bra, high heels, looking back at boys she liked…
And music, films, they were talking to her in a grown-up way. Everything had more risk, more power, more life, and bright, raw colors. Even her parents, who had been gods of her life, towering over her, they were just her parents. She noticed her mom’s goofy hairstyle, her dad’s crude language. She realized that they didn’t understand her — they just waited for her lips to stop moving and then acted like they thought parents should act.
God knows what they themselves were thinking when they said useless things to her new, budding inner self. They didn’t notice the huge changes transforming her, that every seven days she conquered a new world. They didn’t see her mentally struggling to stay one step ahead of her body, which was harassing her with new demands.
They didn’t see her, or else took her for granted because, honestly, who sees or cares about a thirteen-year old city girl, with her gray leggings and her parka? Even her parents had to look twice to pick her out of the crowd. Any girl with her age and hair color could step into the back seat of their Fiat and they wouldn’t think twice.
She liked her anonymity, anyway, her girlfriends enjoyed exchanging their clothes, buying the same items in the same shops…They despised unique brands that older girls wore, look-at-me clothes, because they felt that the differences among them were becoming too big to bridge…. They were ashamed of their differences, afraid of the loneliness it would bring them, to be all grown-up. They saw the older girls, separated forever, by life choices, style choices, jobs or schools, men, money, good and bad luck. Even, separated by death!
It happens, one in the classroom always dies young! And another lives to be a hundred, the last of her generation, and wants to tell everyone about those wonderful days, weeks, months, ages ago, when she felt so alive. All the weird stories of a long lifetime, how she won the Nobel prize for chemistry when all she really wanted to do was make good jam…
No one understands her, though, no one sees her or loves her any more, this former thirteen year old girl, turned world-famous scientist, the Italian beauty who never married, who wore high heels and smoked and drank until the age of 103…
Rita had a twin sister, Mara, who vanished. It took a while for the police to find out that she was abducted and murdered. Because she had her sister, she needed no mirror. They were breathing together, laughing together, and fighting each other with the same flailing hands. God forbid if anybody tried to split them, or even making them sit in different rows in the classroom. They had to feel each other’s warmth in order to thrive.
In San Salvario, a grown woman stopped Rita on the sidewalk. She wore a trench coat, and had a big, awkward-looking canvas bag, and she opened its yawning mouth.
- “You there — would you like to have a free kitten? She’s white.”
“She’s cute,” said Rita, entranced. “But I don’t think my parents would let me keep her.”
“You can call her ‘Mara,’ then they’ll let you do it. Don’t die of grief, you don’t have to. Because once you are a twin, you are always a twin, even if your sister disappears, into another being… You are still there, the same life is going on and on…. You could study life, the life in lab animals, like cats. The beasts share life.”
Meredith said:
“ Nikola Tesla, the famous Serbian American scientist, used to say: death does not exist, we living beings are all light and energy transforming from one shape to another.”
Rita held the mewling white kitten in her hand. It was still tender, but in a less innocent way.
“She has a brain, a soul, cells, genes… she lives, you live, and your sister lives… all the twists and turns and patches of darkness and light, there’s an inner oneness, all of us are happy, all of us are murdered… Everyone is a twin, and you have had a twin even if your sister had never died.”
Foggy Christmas lights over the streets, the famous “Artist Lights” of Turin, big glowing fancy constructions, with birds, kissing couples, poetry, all in light… Light on the bridges, buildings drenched in colourful glow…
The snowy clouds parted and the Po was shiny with moonlight, and the bare, wintry bushes and trees were bathed with phantoms of green…. Like a promise of redemption at the pit of the abyss, dark, dirty, beautiful, magic and true, every form of life, people, beasts, birds, grass, the fish in the river, every living thing made perfect sense, asking no other meaning but to be, and to be there….
Meredith let the crumbling trenchcoat fall from her shoulders and the nasty cold did not bite her, she was already cold to the bone, she was one with the city’s night… The cold could not bother the bricks, the cement, or the asphalt, and she was one with Turin, fully and totally, her flesh was of the city, for she was who she was, naked in body and mind.
Clothed only in the city, wearing pretty Turin like a pretty dress, it was as if she was the debutante who met herself forthe first time, in this charming, necromantic metropolis, where she had come by chance but stayed by choice. Just drifting past the other people strolling the streets, naked and cold, not breathing, no heartbeat, Meredith - La Clandestina, with no need to hide from anyone or anything…
Not quite entirely nude, for in the fashion of a naked-dream, she had the skimpy shirt, her torn stained shirt, the shroud.
More a shameful rag than a nightgown, because it was a dishrag she would claw around her naked body in the shame of self-awareness. But in a woman’s dreams of public nakedness, no one broke the spell to look, point, laugh, stare at the naked dreamer. They were like flying dreams, where people just flew… Nobody looked twice at Meredith, and besides, it was Torino. People were too discreet and polite to scream about a naked woman walking among them, or about some madman throwing open his trenchcoat in a park and exposing himself… People could go mad in the streets of Turin raving, embracing black cats or dying horses, screaming about the abyss, and the Turinese would discreetly overlook their insanity, until medical officials arrived, with Doctor Lombroso, to explain it away.
In the rest of Italy, the Turinese were called “the false and courteous Turinese,” but the politeness of a city’s politics makes it possible to be mad and free, and still dignified, and also to explain everything in thick books that make women criminal.
Meredith, her nudity radiating through the streets, more naked than any strip-tease dancer, in the bare nakedness of her bare life, wanted to be clothed in dignity until the very end. But what end could that be? What ends at the end of the year? In Christmas a child of redemption is born, stark naked, like all of us…
Christmas, that fat, ugly holiday in the cold and the darkness, where everybody nervously overstuffs themselves because there is no fresh food in the frozen fields, and the children are greedy and weepier, and the lonely get lonelier, and long for death…
And yet in San Salvario they had set some tables on the sidewalks, many were just peddlers but others were not, they were local people sincerely concerned for their city, handing out pamphlets, badges, manifestos, playing music from local bands…. Some of them had cups of hot red wine, “burned wine” as they called it, the wine that Piedmontese people drank on the icy ski slopes, and the grissini breadsticks….
Grissini breadsticks were so fantastically tasty and nourishing that they were famously eaten by ghosts…
A famous dead Duke of Savoy carried his long thin grissini breadstick, lit up on one end and burning like a midnight candle, and he was dead, but his grissini snack was so crunchy and tasty he couldn’t help but munch the bread of life with unfeigned ghostly glee…
And there was a table with some sad old derelict somehow peddling wildflowers. It was amazing that in the depth of winter he’d gotten a wicker basket of humble blooms from somewhere or other…
This miserable florist, almost in rags, as poorly dressed as any lowly shepherd at the stable of Bethlehem, beat-up old hat, long white hair, stubble on his cheeks…. He was beckoning her over, he wanted her to check out his humble wildflowers.
So she did, she looked in his battered, handwoven wicker basket, and he had periwinkles, buttercups, water-lilies, gentian, aster, cornflowers, little meadow wildflowers good for some little girl’s flower-wreath, and all miraculously out-of-season. He was the White Gentleman. He noticed her. She was naked, but he wasn’t upset about that. He was calm, observant, appreciative, in the way that an old artist-teacher would be calm when the classroom model stumbled on the dais.
Then, with a nod, the White Gentleman offered her a wild rose. He didn’t ask anything , he just offered the red bloom, one among many, to one woman among many.
Meredith looked at the brilliant red petals of the rose, and sniffed it, and was instantly overwhelmed by memories of her mother. Attar of roses was her mother’s favorite scent,her mother had worn that scent in Meredith’s girlhood, and often had roses in the house.
She felt a sudden tremendous gratitude to the woman who had given her life, to her Mom who had brought her into the world, in pain, in blood, who had cradled her, nursed her, who had calmed her childish fears, who had protected her from every possible threat that any anxious mother could imagine for a daughter, murder, chaos, ignorance, violence, massacre, war…
She felt a pang of loneliness about her absent Mom, so far away in another country, and she held the frail rose more tightly, in her cold, unbreathing, stony hand.
The rose began bleeding, the red petals fluttered and moved, they were oozing a warm heart’s blood. The rose grewn slippery with a woman’s blood, and then, pang, one wicked thorn pierced through the living skin of Meredith’s finger.
Then she was wide awake in bed, naked, freezing cold, with all her bedclothes kicked off. One finger on her right hand, scratched, beading up and bleeding, and she quickly sucked the wound and tasted her own salty blood, and she would never, ever kill herself.
She wanted to exist as long at Turin existed, centuries did not matter, anyone who was bones now had been just as alive as she was ever was, with blood, tears, sweat, a mouth watering with hunger.
Meredith turned on the bedside lamp, a melancholy sight, with empty beer bottles, teary tissues, tampon wrappers, and little empty golden foil containers, lingotto chocolates, that she’d been eating in her wintry depression and gloom.
She unwrapped one golden candy and placed it into her hot, living mouth, and the chocolate-with-hazelnut exploded with richness and flavor, like being hit in the head with a thawing and flooding Piedmontese Alp, a chocolate so good that Anna Karenina would crawl off Tolstoy’s train tracks to eat one. As long as there was a Turin, and roses in the world, and chocolate, she would never forsake life and embrace nothing, she would never kill herself, never, ever, ever.
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