I furiously plunged my hands into the sudsy red water. I pulled them back out: perfectly dry. Filth was a form of empathy that the world was no longer willing to offer me. Matter didn’t understand me. I looked down at my bare feet: no, I couldn’t feel the chill of the tiles at all. But why the hell should that surprise me? Without a body to act as interpreter, it was impossible to establish relationships with atoms and molecules.
“Now what am I supposed to do?” I asked myself.
No one answered.
I put the razor in the medicine chest, between the shampoo for brittle hair and the moisturizing cream. Outside the half-open window were the walls of apartment buildings, with laundry hung out to dry and lights turned on. It was 7:45 by now, and still my mother hadn’t found me.
A moth fluttered in, zigzagged from side to side until it reached the fogged-up mirror, then flew back out. I picked up my black panties and bra from the floor, and my sleeveless red cotton dress. It was rumpled, shapeless. The blood had stained the neckline. I placed it on the sink and started scrubbing it hard with the tangerine-scented soap, the kind my mother always bought at the Body Shop. The stain was still there.
I tried using water, but it did no good. I kept scrubbing, making use of the terry-cloth towel. Down in the courtyard, only silence. The water kept running. I went on rubbing for half an hour, until the dress became wrinkled and hard. I continued until suddenly the fabric ripped. The stain was still there.
I kneeled at the foot of the bathtub that held my body, dipped the towel in the water, and delicately dabbed at my wrists.
It was harder to rub away the red clots on my right wrist: they were solid and substantial. They formed a pattern: when I was alive I would have instinctively identified them with some familiar shape. Living people don’t do anything all day but find matches: they match clouds with animals, birthmarks with types of fruit, constellations with various figures, faces to other faces. Being just themselves causes such a great loneliness that people feel the need to seek not only their own kindred spirits but a kindred spirit for everything in the world. They look for doubles of everything. They even demand consolation for their own individuality from inanimate objects: not a cloud in the sky has the right to be just a cloud.
I left the bathroom and my apartment.
Out on the street I thought about how my mother was finishing counting to a hundred while Lidia was drowning herself in the river. I thought about my heart as it stopped beating. First one beat then another then silence. Having opened my wrists, I finally had eyes enough to see, but by then it was too late. Too late. Greta was walking barefoot on the rocks but Lidia was hidden forever. Too late. Greta was me and I was the river with Lidia drowning in it. I was my mother who didn’t yet realize. There was no noise. My mother starts to understand. Then in the midst of the understanding come the pain and the grief, but it’s still just an object, not the crowded piazza that it will eventually become. She doesn’t know yet how it’s going to work from now on. She doesn’t know that grief will always be a stranger. She doesn’t yet know the scalpel that will come every day to cut everything open, that nothing will ever be the same again, she doesn’t yet know that she’s already become an operating room.
On the banks of the Cassibile River, only cold rocks and dark trees in the distance, a beetle walking. Nothing has yet been revealed; life still keeps its secret. Every color plays its own color, and every shape plays its shape. The colors and shapes haven’t spoken yet. They haven’t yet changed places, like in a game of musical chairs. There will be plenty of time for that; there will be lots of chairs, lots and lots of empty chairs.
It will start soon, and once it starts it will never stop. But now it’s still the before. It’s still clouds and flowing water and beetle on the rock, distant barking and translucent fish. An observer and the things being observed, like in a museum.
“Greta, Lidia! Where are you?”
The reality that was ending was a strange hide-and-seek, and everyone inside me had lost the game.
I wept the whole way to Piazza Galatea.
I was dead, and I felt the need to talk to someone about it. I’d selected the person who’d made me suffer most over the past few years: Lorenzo. I pressed the buzzer by his name over and over again. He didn’t answer.
A crowd of young girls went past me, chattering loudly and dressed in loud colors.
“Hey, excuse me . . .”
It was a “testing, testing.”
No one answered.
I should have felt devastated. Most important, I should have felt something. The 545 bus went by, and on the back there was a toothpaste ad, I remember it clearly: “Do you see blood when you brush your teeth? Try Sepsodent!”
Lorenzo wasn’t answering on the intercom.
I went in anyway. I went upstairs to his apartment. He wasn’t home.
But his new girlfriend was: her pictures and one of her scarves, in light-blue silk, hanging on the coatrack. A Tweety Bird mug with coffee residue inside it stood on the white wooden counter that separated the living room from the kitchen. A calendar of the two of them embracing in Taormina, set inside a pixelated heart. Every square announced an undertaking to be completed: never had a visit to Ikea struck me as so heartbreaking.
I picked up a pair of scissors: I wanted to throw the pictures at the wall and cut the scarf to pieces. I put the scissors down: I’m not that kind of a ghost. I’m more the kind who suffers and does nothing. The kind who keeps it all in. Like a shower drain.
In Lorenzo’s office I found his new canvases (he’s a painter in his spare time). They were all portraits, women’s faces, all of them smiling, filled with a vulgar illusion. They were all the same woman, and the woman was the same as in the photographs. How could this be? Had he really fallen in love with someone else? I couldn’t accept that. Being dead was depressing enough already.
The way he used to say: “I would never be able to make a serious commitment.” It really is true that what does not kill you only makes you stronger. What does kill you, on the other hand, makes itself stronger, and suddenly Lorenzo seemed to have become a titan.
In the second drawer of his desk I found a letter written to him in a woman’s hand, and that was when I realized death’s worst collateral effect: I no longer knew how to read. Here I was, so worried about my unrequited love, suddenly caught in a tragedy of unrequited language. How could I survive without being able to read? Ah, right: I’d quit surviving. I thought about the other words with the prefixes “sur” and “over” and “super” and I realized that they were all over me, all above me. Overestimate, surmount, supernatural . . .
I no longer overestimate, now that I’ve seen the worst. I no longer surmount, because I’m always absent. I no longer imagine the supernatural, because nothing could be more supernatural than me. Those prefixes mean going past a certain limit, and I haven’t crossed any limit: I’m the living proof that death is not a limit. I don’t survive: I subvive.
In the bedroom I pulled the dresser drawers open.
That woman’s clothes were in there too. Low-cut tops, tight-fitting jeans, the playful T-shirts of an overgrown teenager, other T-shirts that were his but that she without a doubt wore to work out in. It was obvious that this was a serious relationship; it wasn’t just sex.
It was obvious that they were going to get married and they’d go to Morocco for their Christmas vacation and he would take a picture of her with a monkey climbing on her shoulder and in the photo you’d be able to see all the self-esteem of a person in a fulfilling relationship who was taking part in a bourgeois holiday ritual to be hung up on the virtual wall of a married couple’s memories. They’d have two children, a boy and a girl, good students and nicely dressed, raised with all the indulgence and resources required to make them into the kind of human beings who confess their crushes and sign up for every kind of sport. The girl would celeb
rate graduating from high school with a trip to London with her best friends and in the streets of the city they’d laugh with the gratuitous laughter of tourists. As soon as the boy got his first girlfriend, Lorenzo would sit down with him to explain the importance of prophylactics without any idea that he’d learned this ridiculous ritual from American TV series.
I slumped down onto the gray leather armchair by the window.
“It’s only reality,” I told myself, “it can’t hurt you.”
Kids were coming home from nightclubs on their mopeds. Kids were strolling on the sidewalks chatting and laughing. The streetlights were all glowing brightly and so were the stars. I kept looking at the words of the letter the way you do with one of those colorful postcards that suddenly reveal a three-dimensional picture to you.
I walked from one end of the city to the other, for hours and hours.
I got home at three in the morning. My body was still in the tub full of blood. I opened the eyes of the me in the tub. The eyeballs had become more sunken and more glazed over. My lips were dry and chapped. I stretched out at the foot of the tub and went to sleep. When I woke up it was morning and I wasn’t there anymore: the tub was empty.
I went into the kitchen and found my mother and my aunt.
My mother was leaning against the stove, sobbing in a yellow knotted sarong. The light was off. Aunt Clara was washing two white demitasse cups, silently. The two of them matched, both with mascara smeared down to their cheeks, and their hair stuck to their heads with sweat. Clearly they’d found me.
Now my mother had both hands pressed to her face. Her skinny arms traced a line parallel to her long, pallid body. How I missed parallel lines: the five-bar staffs of my sheet music, the pedestrian crossings to get safely across the street, the slices on my wrists before they were suffused with blood. I had never realized, when I was alive, how fond I was of geometry.
I went over to my mother. I wanted to give her a hug, but I no longer knew how. The void between her and me was suddenly an awkward obstacle. How could that be?
I looked at her, then I looked at my arms, undecided as to how I could best help them to overcome the distance between her and me. I held them out; perhaps I resembled a sleepwalker. Actually, I didn’t resemble anything; you can’t resemble when you can’t be seen. I tried to move them, from my shoulders to my fingertips, but it was a movement with no destination, diffuse like darkness. Clara dried her hands and turned off the water. My mother dried her eyes but went on sobbing.
I gave up: I couldn’t hug her. I stood with my arms in midair; I wept with her while she wept without me.
You can call me Dorotea.
But don’t think that I’m one of those ghosts that come running when you utter their name. My name has already done its job. For twenty-five years it gathered me up completely: an unbreakable box, in which all the different parts of me were nestled in an orderly fashion, and they all snapped to attention every time I was pronounced, like an alarm being sounded. For twenty-five years, this box held me together, a single logo like on a package of cookies, a metronome for the cacophony of my identity.
No, you can’t call me, I’ll never come running. I was already a doormat in my relations antemortem, I certainly don’t intend to go on being one now. Not that it matters all that much to me: I’ve moved past that phase of existence—life—where you care about things like pride and dignity.
At seven in the evening, in the dining room, my aunt poured my mother a glass of Chinese plum wine, and my mother said:
“Dorotea would have liked this.”
In the soft tail of silence that followed, my name was against them. My name, two hours later, was the squeak of the bed as my mother tossed and turned, unable to sleep. My name was the silence in the hall when she got up to drink whiskey, and Clara appeared in the doorway in a pink nightgown and said to her: “That’s enough now, Greta, that’s enough.” My name soon vanished from everyone’s mouths, and when it did emerge, its breath smelled of alcohol and sleeplessness. My name is no longer in Lorenzo’s thoughts, but it vanished from there long ago; now, however, it has also vanished from his cell phone directory. When my name is uttered, I don’t respond: silence is my switchboard, it answers for me.
My name is an abandoned house.
The day after my death I got up at the usual time and went to work.
Via Vincenzo Giuffrida 63, stationery and gift shop. I crossed the street.
My boss, Mario Masi, a creaky seventy-year-old man with sunken eyes the color of dry ice, was sitting behind the cash register and looking at the computer. Suddenly there was something obscene and provocative about his elderliness. I walked in in a state of terror, of trepidation: would he be able to see me?
He turned around.
He smiled: he saw me. What a disappointment.
Sure, of course, that was what I’d been hoping for, but at the same time I found it disconcerting—now that my body lay rotting somewhere far away—to be mistaken for myself. It was a cruel affront for someone to attribute to me the very identity that I had annihilated with such an enormous act of willpower. It was an appalling show of disrespect.
It was also mere vulgar superstition: everyone knew I no longer existed. It was pure folklore. I was pure folklore. I was a relic of a popular lament. I was the cardboard protagonist of all the horror stories ever told in a dark campsite, in the glow of trembling flashlights. The vague shadow by the armoire that frightens the children at night. I was a misunderstanding, a horrible misunderstanding: where do you see the flesh and bones that were once called Dorotea Giglio, you idiot? Cut it out right now, you old lunatic, stop believing in me. I order you to stop. I don’t exist, I swear to you.
“What are you doing just standing there? Get moving, you have the Moleskine notebooks to put away.”
“Yes, I’m coming, Mr. Masi.”
What alternative did I have? At least this way I could keep my job. All I had to do was be myself. A painless and legal act of identity theft.
I shut the door behind me.
The stationery shop seemed the same as before.
Small, clean, tidy, the multicolored flora of Stabilo pens on the right, the white ashtray by the cash register, the WWF calendar: July was still a panda. The ceramic umbrella stand from Caltagirone by the front door, with red-eyed white-and-yellow painted fish. The six spherical spotlights on the ceiling, the photo on the wall of the proprietor with his granddaughter in the garden: he’s crouching down, sweaty and smiling, and she has a ring of chocolate around her mouth.
I put the Moleskines on the central shelf on the right, between the Paperblanks day planners and the Comix notebooks. My boss showed me a new line of notebooks made of recycled paper and then asked me to organize the Stabilo indelible-ink pens that had just come in, along with a box of Winx paintboxes. The electric lights were on: my boss’s eyesight was getting worse. In fact, I’d been the only one putting prices on the merchandise for some time now.
But that morning there was something different about the electric light. It was a liquid thing perfectly contained by the shop’s body, and the walls would never suddenly break open.
I did my work with my customary precision.
The newly dead, after all the thanatocentric advertising offered by religion and art, have enormous expectations concerning death, and I was no exception to the rule. That first day I anxiously awaited something extraordinary.
Two little elementary-school kids came in to buy a pencil sharpener and a graph-paper notebook. Then a stout lady asked for directions to the pharmacy. The phone rang: it was my boss’s wife. Then at eleven he went to the café and came back with two coffees. Mine was a caffè macchiato, as always. I went into the bathroom and poured it down the sink. I returned to the counter with the empty cup.
“Ah, Dorotea, did you know that Amy Winehouse died yesterday? She was a great singer. Y
ou know her?”
I bit my tongue to keep from confessing that I too had died yesterday.
“Yes, I know her, it’s true, she’s great.”
“Was great, you should say!”
Here’s the worst thing about death: the inherent racism of human language. While the living gorge themselves on the present indicative, all we can hope for are moldy leftovers of the past tense. If you want even the tiniest helping of a verb in the present tense, you must necessarily have the obscene badge of a beating heart pinned to your chest.
“Yes, of course, was. She was great. What a waste, to die so young.”
I stood up to discard my empty paper cup.
“Hold on, though, don’t you want to know how she died?”
“Yes, of course. How did she die?”
“They still don’t know for sure, it might have been an overdose. Or maybe it was suicide.”
“I don’t understand why someone would commit suicide, I mean someone who was so beloved.”
That last thing was something I really thought.
“You know, Dorotea, what I can’t understand is how anyone could commit suicide at all. Life is beautiful, and when you kill yourself you cause so much pain to the people who love you.”
I looked at him. He was old. I wasn’t interested in arguing about suicide.
After I got off work, I went to visit my violin teacher, hoping that he would see me the way my boss had, so that I could continue studying with him. I knew that he taught at the conservatory on Wednesdays, so I went to find him there.
I walked into his room without a word of greeting, because I was afraid I’d get no reply: I just picked up the violin and dove into a performance of Rossini’s O salutaris hostia for soprano, violin, and organ. My teacher got a strange look on his face; he looked around in alarm. He went running out of the room, bumping into me as he went. It was clear that he hadn’t seen me, but he had heard Rossini.
Hollow Heart Page 6