A novel by Nicole Maria Pezza
Tallulah Has Nothing
Sickened by loss and consumed by a longing with nowhere left to go, Tallulah drifts through a world of ruin, slipping through the lives of men as saint, weapon, courtesan, myth, and witness in equal measure.
Tallulah Has Nothing is a literary novel about worship, cruelty, and the terrible desire to surrender oneself to something absolute.
Saint, weapon, courtesan, myth, witness
Saint
Tallulah was the hero, Tallulah was the saint, her hands white as doves.
Weapon
Forgetting that I am, and always shall be, the hand that brings down the axe.
Courtesan
She smiled at all those whom her flesh would take on a long journey.
Myth
The village burns and the old woman combs her hair.
Witness
The Veiled One observed all things and overlooked evil, bore witness to good.
Read the first pages
Chapter One
“Where you make a wasteland, you call it love. You dominated and held dominion over me and my body, and called it union. You bound me to you with all your favorite wiles and called it a bond. You are a plague, Tallulah, or perhaps a drought; you burn everything around you and leave nothing. You left nothing to me.”
He had spoken like a prophet, and three times he had reviled her: three times he had cast her wrongs in her face, and on the third he had sealed her fate, and she had wept.
All of it was true.
Once she had anointed her naked body in scented oils so that he might feel desire for her flesh but be unable to seize it, and Tallulah had gone on laughing each time she slipped through his fingers, because she had told him it was a bedroom game and not a game of power, and he had believed her.
In the evening hours she would lay his head in her lap and tell him fairy tales by moonlight, so that between her curls he might glimpse the moonspun threads and believe, for as long as it took the hero to triumph over darkness, that his mother was there, that she had lived into old age, alive, to dote on him and read him stories beneath the curtain of her white hair.
Tallulah interrupted the weeping brought on by the three offences, told him she loved him, and seven times tied knots in his hair to remind him that a pact is forever, all the more so since they had shared sperm and blood and tears and grains of moon: if he left, she would become the elegant cynic she had been before, back when her heart was thorned over and coated in honey, and he had made her fall in love by licking it clean to the last drop.
With that ruinous pronouncement, her love had named her a maker of solitudes, and to his phlegmatic dryness she replied with a ballad, shedding fresh bitter tears, enough to fill his eyes with pity but not his chest with rain, enough to prove her affection but not her fear. She placed his hands on her hips and murmured to him things loving and vicious, as though he were a beast to be placated, until he was moved to sing slow songs in his beautiful voice and call her whore, whore.
“You’re a vampire, you’re a vampire.”
About the Author
Nicole Maria Pezza is an Italian writer who lives out of a suitcase and writes about the things that follow you regardless, like devotion, violence, and longing.
Her work is influenced by the fevered worlds of South American magical realism, particularly García Márquez and Isabel Allende, and by the ineluctability of the great Russian novels.
She wrote Tallulah Has Nothing out of a fascination with fractured selfhood, estrangement, and the feeling of moving through the world as though one were made for somewhere else entirely.
