12. “The Clandestina,” a fantasy novel by Jasmina Tesanovic, Part Twelve
22. Lodoletta
Meredith had a rough patch during the winter cold, when she spent weeks hunched over her books and the Internet, and it seemed that the mysterious killer of Meredith might well be Meredith.
Then the fog lifted, the days grew longer, spring arrived in Turin and she rallied. Her encounter with black depression had bruised her soul, but she had grown stronger by it. It was not that she was light-hearted and happy, but she felt more self-mastery, more self-respect.
After all, she was not the only clandestina in all city. She looked it up on the Internet — seventeen percent of the city’s population was of foreign birth. And in emigre districts like San Salvario, it was almost half foreigners.
Many of them were clandestini, in fear of arrest, without any real jobs or property, barely scraping by, but the rest were legal emigrants.
So even if she wasn’t a citizen of Turin, there had to be some way to live as a woman of the city. If she could struggle to understand the occult, she could struggle to understand the Italian legal system.
If other emigres could live in Italy, so could she. She was American, from a NATO country, had all kinds of privileges and advantages that were denied to other emigrants in San Salvario, the Bangladeshis, the Salvadorians, theVenezuelans, the Libyans, the Albanians, the Bosnians, the Ukrainians.
It embarrassed her to look at these other migrants, diligently working hard jobs, in their ethnic groceries and restaurants, driving their Italian cars, taking their small children to Italian schools…. Meredith could see the schoolchildren of Turin, out on their little class jaunts with their sober, gray-clad, lady teachers, and half these future Turinese kids, maybe even more of them, were the kids of foreigners.
Also, San Salvario, even though it was haunted, was not the sad part of town. The saddest part were the many, big abandoned buildings, empty factories, empty monasteries, empty arsenals and repair yards, weedy, crumbly places that nobody knew what to do with. Places were so chillingly empty that even ghosts gave up. San Salvario, had “Movida” , where the young people went who wanted a change.
It was impossible to be a zombie , full of aloofness and introspective sadness in San Salvario. There was just too much going on.
So Meredith stopped haunting her lonely room, and went out to haunt San Salvario, again. When she had the need to drink a beer, she made herself go drink a beer in a cafe or a disco.
And what were they doing, all these foreigners in San Salvario? Mostly they were importing and exporting, because that’s what foreigners knew how to do. They had imported and exported themselves. Even if the city of Turin had a lot of ghosts in it, and it did, it was not a vast urban coffin.
It had armies of tourists coming in. Turin exported cars, and planes, and furniture, and wine and food, and clothes. It wasn’t just a place of spiderwebs. It was a place of the web, too.
The Italians said of Turin that you could have a Turin without Italy, but you could never have an Italy without Turin. It meant that you could have a Turin without the world, but the world, somehow, needed a Turin. Maybe the world needed Turin even more than it needed the other Turin-like cities on Earth, which were Prague, the City of Alchemists, Lyon, the City of Necromancers, London, the City of the Golden Dawn, and San Francisco, the Cool Gray City of Love. Maybe Turin, because it was both Black and White, was the locus of all those other places. Maybe Turin was the center of Revival and Risorgimento, the dead place that could live again when survival was least expected.
Maybe Turin was a secret capital of the world. Occultists outside Turin were very interested in Turinese magic. They did not want to just buy toys, the way they might buy some toy at Disneyland. They were Internet occultists who wanted to interact in the most occult way possible.
They were magic people, voodoo people, lost, crazy, desperate, delusionary people, people who were self-martyring saints or slaves of dark forces, people who were advocates of human sacrifice, beginning with themselves. People who made up their own lives by looking at the lines in their own hands, or the hexagrams of the I Ching, or the patterns in their eyeballs.
Meredith’s new customers did not even want the things in Turin that actually had magic power. Meredith now knew where genuinely magical things were kept. The truly powerful artifacts were carefully catalogued and treasured inside the Royal Madame’s Palace, the Valentine Palace, the Antonelli Tower, the National Library, in Lombroso’s crime museum. There were also some magical things in the Egyptian Museum, mostly the long-mummified bodies of Egyptian god-kings and their servants, but these mummies were so amazingly old that they didn’t do much, except to attract hordes of tourists, who paid handsomely to look.
The occultists from the world wanted mementos of the Shroud of Turin. Nobody in Turin cared very much about the Shroud, they were so used to it, but the Shroud of Turin was a long piece of bloody cloth that had been wrapped around the body of the murdered Saviour of Mankind, and the Shroud had His face on it. You could see Him. You could love Him. The dead Redeemer was visible on that Shroud of His.
So when Meredith, a young woman from California who was studying the Turinese occult, hinted that she might make some things available to other seekers on the Internet, in the open-source way that one might give away a living kitten, they wanted the Shroud. They wanted tokens, mementos, of the blood-caked, tortured, murdered, entombed and Resurrected graveyard Shroud, and they desired the Shroud ten times more, a hundred times more, maybe a thousand times more, than they ever wanted anything else. And she had that shroud, original or not, scientist said that it there was no such thing as the original shroud, they were all fakes and yet they were all originals too.
Eventually, Meredith found out what to do with her legacy shroud, to stay as a player, respected if not legal. She decided to found a company somewhere else that employed her in Italy. This company just had to put a lot of money in an Italian bank, and tell the immigration authorities that it was hiring her in Italy to buy and sell Italian goods. And, if the Italians believed in this ghost company as in the ghost shroud, then they would believe in her, too.
Meredith had to find some ghost money, which meant Bitcoin or other Internet crypto coins. Mostly those were in ghost markets, which were Internet black markets that sold all kinds of fishy stuff. She would still be the Clandestina, because she was esoteric, but not that clandestina that the police could arrest on a random bus-check for no reason. She had the holy shroud.
Meredith went into her fledgling Turinese jewelry-peddling business. She found on the Internet every street store in town that was doing this. There were about thirty of them. Some of them had wizards and witches behind the counter, but most of them were owned by foreigners. They sold Chinese-made Shroud mementos, mostly to other foreigners, believers and healers, who were coming in hordes, buses, planes….in wheelchairs, on crutches, from all over the world.
Meredith was not a business woman, but she was a medium, and she knew what had magic power. Those mysterious magic stores never opened before noon. So Meredith, who didn’t have to go to class any more, adopted those late-night hours, too.
That was how she met Lodoletta. “Lodoletta” was not her real name but her stage name, because Lodoletta was a San Salvario girl who wanted to sing.
Lodoletta was just getting started as a singer, and she wasn’t going to go far, because even though, she could sing really well, she was not a professional but preferred to improvise always, with music just as with her life. She had a pretty face, but was too short, busty and hippy to look good in music videos.
She was basically a loud show-off who liked to hop on stage and yell in a miniskirt and a sequinned top. She wasn’t ambitious or mysterious. Meredith had never met any local girl so easy to understand. Lodoletta was all out on the surface, naughty and giggly, with an infectious glee about her.
San Salvario had a lot of small music clubs that were engaged in a weird fight with their neighborhoud. All of the pop music and dance music in Turin once was next to the river, the Murazzi, with a bunch of derelict import-export warehouses turned into nightclubs. These clubs were dug into the brick riverbank, so they were practically underground.
But due to some occult political struggle, this whole party-area had been barricaded with sawhorses and tape, and sometimes flooded by the River Po. So the disappointed musicians had to crawl off to San Salvario, where the clubs were tiny coffee-houses instead of big underground warehouses, and the dancers had only munchkin-sized dance floors.
There wasn’t even room for a proper band to set up, so the tiny clubs would commonly play techno music. Turinese techno was very weird-sounding, and not even popular.
Lodoletta and Meredith found a little dance-bar, just a cafe, but after dark it had a Goth vibe and played a lot of “vaporwave” and “witch house” tracks. The whole place was lined in cork, because the angry neighbours would sue about the noise, while the owner was a harmless, geeky electronics engineer who had made money in aerospace business.
Only Italian girls would dance to techno in high heels. Also, their poor little nightclub had hardly any room to dance, so they danced in such a stiff, peculiar, yet graceful way. They preferred talking to dancing.
To go out at night, Meredith would load up with thirty or forty amulets, bracelets, belts, earrings, and just tell people: “I’m Meredith, I’m from Los Angeles, these are magic amulets,” and she sold them.
The young people were also respectful to her, because, although, physically, she was just a few years older than them, spiritually, she felt centuries older, with explosive emanations of raw spiritual power.
Lodoletta wanted to be the diva of this little club. Lodoletta was innocently eager to be heard. Her fans would respectfully talk to her after her forty-minute turn on stage. If one weird little club in San Salvario was the only world that you had, and you were the biggest star in that world, then Lodoletta was the biggest star in the world.
Meredith found herself going to see Lodoletta every week. The techno music didn’t do much for her, but she had become a genuine Lodoletta fan. There was something charming in her generosity of spirit, her willingness to drop the barriers of shame and reticence, let her hair down and give — she was even vulgar and embarrassing, but in a good way, la pasta di mamma style.
Lodoletta was like a force of nature, the natural ease of some Piedmontese mountain spring that was heading straight for a dirty swamp in a cow pasture.
One Thursday night, a photographer showed up for Lodoletta’s performance. It was Stefano.
Stefano was startled to see Meredith at the little club crowd. But he did see her — he knew her at once — and so did his new girlfriend.
Stefano was cordial, normal and adult about this chance encounter — “this is Meredit, an American friend,” he said — but of course New Girlfriend caught on at once. New Girlfriend was old-school Turinese, she looked like a young chemistry professor, and she gave Meredith, and her dancing clothes and her occult jewelry, the up and down stare. Visibly thinking — Oh my God! if I can’t fix him completely, at least I can save him from this!
Meredith did not give the snob girlfriend a smack across the face, because she was above and beyond that impulse. She did think of warning the girlfriend about her destiny and her youthful widowhood — but then she caught the blue gleam of Stefano’s lovely grandmother in New Girlfriend’s eyes.
Meredith realized — I’m trifling with the widowed heiress of the chocolate shop here… If that place stays in business for the next century, it won’t be that feeble guy with his arty moodiness, it will be the steely resolve of the likes of her… So instead Meredith offered the New Girlfriend a big American smile, the toothy grin that always made Italian girls think that American girls were idiots.
Then Meredith left early, but she was back for Lodoletta’s next event. Lodoletta had bought herself more musical hardware. It looked like junk that a bankrupt DJ had thrown off the back of a truck, and Lodoletta had next to no idea how to use it.
She plugged it in all haphazardly, and it was shrieky, feedbacky and loud. It was a monster pile of technology next to the neighborhood chanteuse girl. She was doing her best with it, but this was going to be a flop performance night, and Lodoletta, angry and frustrated, got sweaty-handed on her microphone stand.
Suddenly there was a speaker-busting short-out noise, all the lights went out in the club and Lodoletta fell down dead.
Electrocuted on the spot, struck dead by lightning, and while everyone else — Lodoletta’s fans, the club owner, were still mildly bemused — “where’s the fuse,” they were saying, “oh che schifo, oh che vergogna,” Meredith knew instantly that Lodoletta had been killed.
Just as instantly, in furious reaction, she hopped on stage to pound two-handed on Lodoletta’s heart. She tilted her head back and blew hot breath into Lodoletta’s dead, open mouth.
“Get an ambulance,” she paused to yell, and went back at heaving and pounding and puffing. It was CPR, Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation, which her dad the cop had taught to her.
Bringing back someone whose heart had stopped, that was more a superstition than real medicine, but sometimes CPR did work, as if it was magic.
Lodoletta was semi-conscious when the ambulance arrived. She was even trying to sit up and talk. Two medical guys in their orange jumpsuits hauled her off on a stretcher.
Lodoletta was back at her club next Thursday. She wasn’t well enough to perform yet, but she was so happy to see Meredith. “You are a miracle! You are my best friend ever!”
The undead Lodoletta was the first undead woman in Turin who was an intimate friend of Meredith’s — always generous and accepting.
“You’re an American witch, with magic powers over life and death? Good for you!”
Lodoletta was superstitiously respectful and reverent about escaping her death for maybe two weeks, but then she just got over it.
Her death seemed to have released an even wilder and more carefree Lodoletta. “I got killed once, so the worst that can happen to me, has already happened!”
They were both undead and free!
The new Lodoletta gave up on electronica, and started singing actual songs, with an old hippie guitarist. She sang songs with emotional depth, world music songs, such as fado music and mournful Irish ballads and balkan sevdalinkas.
She couldn’t pronounce them right, but that didn’t stop her at all. Even Lodoletta’s Italian wasn’t very good. Her techno fans mostly deserted her, but foreign men started showing up to admire her.
A lot of these men were lonely guest-worker types, their lives were sad because their families were so far away, and they had discovered this Lodoletta singing sadly the nostalgic songs.
Lodoletta was more than just approachable, she was promiscuous. She was thrilled to lavish a living woman’s attentions on an admirer — for one night and one night only.
Her beaus didn’t get anxious and jealous about her. On the contrary, they were impressed and honored by the glamorous singer’s kindness. Lodoletta didn’t even ask her admirers for money, although she accepted jewelry and stage gowns.
The Turinese didn’t raise a scandal about it. Somehow, Lodoletta had crossed some invisible boundary, emigrating into the demimonde of a star-and-diva, where a woman’s promiscuity was perfectly okay. Gay make-up experts appeared out of nowhere for Lodoletta, and hairdressers offered to do her hair for free, and once she even appeared on a favorite local TV game show, where she didn’t understand any of the riddles and jokes.
The rising star clung to Meredith.
And Meredith stayed with her friend, because she cared.
#
A terrace in a big rented house on the eastern bank of river Po. A house once built for aristocrats, but the Great and the Good fell on hard times a long time ago — now it’s a playhouse for the new rich, the Great and the Bad.
A pleasant night with stars and a full moon. A party of a hundred people is roaring on, with catered drinks and great steaming platters of pork, beef, ham. Lodoletta has done a star turn, just one song, “Felicity, felicity, felicity,” but it’s her best song, and people know about it. They sense they’re in the presence of an artist on her way up, seen by many, loved by many.
This private party doesn’t lack for pretty girls in fancy clothes. These are not invisible, clandestine girls, they are young women of class, with permission to adorn the social events of the well-to-do. They laugh loudly and mingle through the other guests as if controlling and herding the sheep.
A swimming pool glimmers in the moonlight, adorned with floating bouquets of flowers, torches, safe plastic bottles of pricey liquor. Nobody swims. The red firelight touches the water with accents of blood.
Their free-spending host is an import-export fixer, he’s in the car business, like a lot of Turin’s wealthy. He is said to have something to do with car factories in Eastern Europe, where the labor costs are much cheaper. A rough and ready guy, they say, but he knows a lot about global supply chains outside the borders of Europe, and that’s a great way to make millions.
He is cruising his own party, swaggering but dressed as a gentleman, accepting congratulations, and Lodoletta suddenly grips Meredith’s hand.
“Oh, Meredit, I really believe he’s the One.”
“Oh come on, you always say that.”
“Well, I’m not going to marry him, he’s already married with a wife and two kids in Belgrade, but when I sang him ‘Tamo Daleko,’ that sad Serbian song that you taught me, he wept in my lap like a child.”
Some of the shiny set are retiring to discreetly snort cocaine. Cocaine is fashionable in Italy, because it makes people more sociable, more talkative, more Italian. Blue lights wink on in the plane trees. Electronica is playing, and it’s Serbian, and it’s good. Tamo daleko an old Serbian song.
Lodoletta starts disrobing at the edge of the pool, ready to swim. She’s not strip-teasing, but she’s dressed for her performance, with microphone wires, earrings, hair toys,high heeled shoes, hose, garters, putting them on a round pool-side table, with teasing, deliberate care. The other girls clap and look excited.
The bald, suit-clad host comes over to leer at her, and he is terrifying. He’s ex-military, and a boxer to boot, or maybe a karate expert, because someone has beaten his rugged face, not just once, but repeatedly. He is embarrassed by his girlfriend’s exhibitionism, but also excited.
Meredith stands aside watching him, and he notices her, even though she is just the clandestine pal and sidekick, rather than the star. That’s not a good moment, because Lodoletta’s new boyfriend is with the Black Magic. Meredith has seen one like him before, the tough sailor named Jack from San Francisco, the guy who was an anarchist, or a communist, or whatever name he used, and even though her fellow American did not actually stab Meredith with a jack-knife, he wouldn’t have minded doing that at all.
This new Black Magic guy is like that except worse, and not only that: Meredith herself is worse. Meredith is strong enough to do something potent and dreadful to this evil general pursuing her friend, and she doesn’t yet know his name, but a name comes to her: “Holofernes.” A Biblical name, because during her dark winter, Meredith was reading the Bible, in Italian. A strange, holy book, the Bible. Every single verse full of bibliomancy.
Lodoletta feels herself overlooked, and pulls her top off.
Then the smart set lifts their smartphones to commemorate the moment, and although it’s a vulgar and awful moment, it’s a moment of triumph for her. She dances a little in her underwear to fix the attention of Holofernes, and her movements are not sexy or graceful, they are weird and somewhat like a hooked fish, and finally Lodoletta jumps into the red-tinted pool. She stays under water for a long time.
When she comes up she yells, and other girls jump into the pool, too, not bothering to strip-tease for the host, they just put their fancy iPhones aside and splash in fully dressed, gleeful about their big party hijinks.
Balding Holofernes tilts his powerful head on his bull-like neck and speaks to Meredith in Serbian: “What is this all about? You’re not jumping, you don’t like my pool? A little fun with my new girlfriend, you think it is indecent?”
Meredith gives him a shiny Hollywood smile, speaks in English: “Lodoletta takes me to a lot of parties!”
Holofernes says in Serbian: “Girl, don’t make a nuisance of yourself. These are my business partners, I teach them what to expect from a woman, from her, and from you too, if you think I don’t see you. I know exactly what a Clandestina looks like. Who brings girls like you to Europe, in boats, in trucks? Me, I do it.”
Meredith, speaking Italian: “Oh yes?”
More in Serbian: “So who brought you here, girl, who is your sponsor? You are not a rich party girl, or a model, or a hooker. You are not even Italian, and I know you understand my language. I see it in your greedy eyes, you don’t fool me.”
Meredith: “Is Lodoletta a hooker?”
Holofernes: “She’s not a wife. She’s my mistress in Turin. I always need a girl, and she’s not the first. I’m not a poor man who buys hookers, I’m a rich man who can make hookers for other men!” He laughed. “Good hookers, too, because wherever there is a war, the quality of the prostitutes goes way up!”
Meredith: “What do you want from me, spit it out?”
Holofernes, smiling: “I don’t know yet. Shall we find out?”
Meredith speaking in Serbian boldly: Maybe I am your wicked sister.
#
Lodoletta was pleased about her new patron, Holofernes. She had never had so much generous, focussed attention from a foreign guy who was potent and rich.
As a kept woman, Lodoletta moved into a new, big apartment. It had belonged to the former mistress of Holofernes, a Ukrainian refugee girl who had fled Turin in stark terror when she realized what her boyfriend was really about.
Meredith knew and felt this instantly as soon as she stepped inside the penthouse apartment. Lodoletta was hopeless at house-keeping. She was pretty good at singing, Lodoletta could cook up a storm, but when it came to simple adult tasks such as laundry, folding and sorting clothes, grocery shopping, washing dishes, picking up litter, keeping rats and mice at bay, stocking shampoo and soap, changing damp towels, Lodoletta was was a menace to public health.
The panicked Ukrainian girl, who had packed a bag and escaped, was obviously an intelligent and decent person, a woman of foresight and refinement. She had run from a country torn by civil war, a landscape beset with cannon, tanks, mines, missiles, barbed wire… drones, homemade armored cars, machine guns, grenades… She had done her best to please her patron and protector, Holofernes. She had a stocked pantry with vodka, whiskey, plum brandy, odd cheeses, yogurts and pepper sauces, enormous sausages. Her bedroom was like a little theater, it had mirrors and stage lights, and she had a stereo system with Balkan CDs of turbofolk.
The Ukrainian was a clandestina mistress who knew how a mistress should conduct herself, but she had also run away as if her tail was on fire, and Meredith had to admire her good sense. This globe-wandering survivor from a cruel, obscure war, she knew what was what. She would not get killed, this missing Ukrainian. She was underworld, but not by choice.
Meredith also knew something of what was what, so she left her dorm in San Salvario and she moved into the penthouse of the kept- woman mistress, as Lodoletta’s roommate. In this quieter neighborhood of Campidoglio, she was just as clandestine, but more discreet.
This old, fascist-era apartment building, with the renovated top floor that Holofernes owned, he hadn’t bought it just to hide a pretty girl. He had also bought it for all the padlocked “cantinas” down in the cellar, dark, silent, very private places underground, behind two tall, locked iron grates.
Even though she was Lodoletta’s roommate — Meredith could not penetrate the locked cellars. But she didn’t have to knock down the grates, because one night she was just standing there in the cellar, naked. And the fancy electronics stacked inside the cantina, those expensive things were not even weapons. They killed, but they weren’t guns, knives, bombs, any of the rest of that.
They were Italian-made components of electronic weapons systems, drones, missiles, airplane radars, pieces of military computers wrapped up in dry bubble-pack. They didn’t look like death and terror, they looked just like the electronic music gear that had killed Lodoletta.
Holofernes was an international arms dealer and human trafficker, and though girls often died because of him, he didn’t kill any girls in Turin. Turin was his safe haven for pretty girls — the clandestinas. Sometimes he imported new clandestinas, to add to the hoard. Mostly girls from Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Libya.
Meredith had to think about this plight, while re-arranging Lodoletta’s apartment, while playing beautiful Maria Callas opera CDs on the fantastic sound system. A big Greek star with a tragic life story, her ability to sing like an angel did not remove a woman from the Greek tragedy of women. La Castadiva was an eternal woman’s song that made La Callas the Casta Diva par excellence.
For a while, Meredith fantasized about going to the police about Holofernes. She doubted it would make any difference, but she was from a police family, after all.
So — in a dream — Meredith might say to the Italian police: my best friend is the mistress of an international arms smuggler, so if you break into our building, in a small obscure street named after some martyrs of fascism, you will find… obscure components of machines that, put together, can kill innocent people who are like your mothers, wives and daughters…
An interesting dream, but if she was Italian, and in Los Angeles, and went to her own dead father, a man who had seen everything dreadful in Los Angeles, and said, in halting English: Sir, there is something black and magical happening here that kills women far away, he would just shrug and say: Is there a body, is there a smoking gun? Because if there isn’t, I have plenty of bodies and smoking guns somewhere else.
That was why Turin could be the world capital of Black and White Magic. It was not that you woke up, after your dream-trip to the underground basement, and you said, with your right hand and your left hand: this is the white thing and this is black thing.
But Lodoletta would sing. Even in bed. She would yell her raw passion fit to blow the roof off the building. She would yell louder than a tiny, repressed bar in San Salvario. Embarrassments two hundred years old would appear. She would scream testaments.
Lodoletta: Something snapped inside me, I have an energy in me which I cannot restrain. I feel anger, I feel pain, I feel myself free of any need except to be myself. I want to kill him, and feed myself on his flesh. My body will punish his body with more pain than he could ever give to me. The bonds of love will pass, but the bonds of anger, hatred and the need for justice will never pass until he understands, and he will never understand. He will desert me with my burden of unhappiness, that burden that was the ruin of my life, the only life I had. I freely gave him everything I was, everything I had, but how can I be free, free of him, and my unhappiness? Let him be cursed!
Holofernes did not hear Lodoletta singing in her club, though. Then, once, outside the club, where people were smoking cigarettes, Holofernes stalked and approached Meredith.
Signorina, he confessed in Italian, it’s bad. Your friend has bewitched me.
Is there a problem? said Meredith, borrowing a cigarette.
That silly creature, I put a roof over her head, I bought her pretty clothes. She never knew how I arranged it, but I let her sing and I made them pay. Those men who run these clubs, they all wanted to cheat her, for her tiny sums of money, and I told them they had to pay for her songs, or I would have their legs broken.
Meredith agreed, blowing smoke. That’s a difficult matter for a man, a broken leg.
Who did this to me? Who afflicted me, and stole my virility? Was it her? Did she bewitch me? Go inside, look at her, she’s just a local girl. I never failed with any other women, Syrians, Ukrainians, Iraqi girls, so is she honest? How can a woman be so full or dirty and secret knowledge, an innocent girl like her?
#
Lodoletta was in grief. Meredit, she said, why did Holofernes abandon me?
Every woman knows that men are beasts, said Meredith, but maybe they are different kinds of beasts in different times and spaces, maybe men are bulls, bears, apes, old goats, swans and eagles, brothers, fathers, sons, grandfathers, they never understand us and they always hurt us, and that is all we know, and all we need to know.
Lodoletta looked at her.
Why not say bats? Us bats can sing even if no one hears us, the ‘pipistrelli’ of Turin, in every dead factory and empty church steeple, little mice with wings. The bats are coming to our rescue, they always do sooner or later. This is their city, they’ve been here since forever, long before us modern girls troubled them with our boy problems.
Lodoletta, said Meredith, I care about you like you will never understand, but I am much older than you.
No, Meredit, he left me and I’m unhappy, and you know why he left me and you are not unhappy. Love is older than death, and love will forever outlast death, so I am older than you.
No, Lodoletta, you just sing, and I read, and a book will last longer than a song.
And the oldest books in the world, Meredit, where the wheel of written history first turns, where girls turn into bats, or else stars, or trees, or ants, or mushrooms, or back and forth from stone statues, are those not songs? Thrown onto the wheel of black and white magic, the sweet sorrow of loss and the true love so lasting and painful. The ache of conscience and the source of power. Gathering one by one, a flock of bats, dark, weird, light, fast, passing quickly, but each one screaming at deaf ears, and becoming an army, avenging an underground history of darkness.
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