Hollow Heart

by Viola Di Grado

  I left the room too.

  I played my way down the corridor with its high, austere ceilings, past people who lifted their eyes to see where those sounds were coming from, as if in mystical ecstasy, and then continued down the hall. I’d walk into a room at random and start playing, hoping that someone would lock eyes with me and say something like: “Excuse me, but what do you think you’re doing?” and then, hopefully, kick me out. I’ve never yearned so deeply to be kicked out, scolded, misunderstood. But it didn’t happen, because no one saw me. Everyone took to their heels, some screaming, others simply with terrorized expressions on their faces, and sometimes they even turned the lights off on me. I wanted to finish my piece at least, and so I stayed in the last room.

  I went on playing and I realized that I no longer had any need or desire to play. They’d already locked the heavy black front door with its brass handle. I passed through it.

  It’s sad to have no need of doors. It’s sad to have no impediments whatsoever. Liberty is overrated.

  When I got home, I found Dorotea Giglio in the living room, in a transparent casket.

  Dorotea Giglio’s eyes were closed, her eyelids were puffy, her arms were crossed over her chest as if in a straitjacket. I looked at her white face, her freckles. The nose was more pronounced, the skin had lost its color, my face was swollen. Her face. Our face. I was confused.

  Relatives and friends, mixed together, noses dripping snot, leaned over the vitrine in which I was displayed. Some left filthy fingerprints. Aunt Clara was beautifully made up in pink tones. My mother was wandering around the room in a long dark-blue caftan and a pair of old sandals, not talking to anyone, drinking one glass of wine after another. Every so often she’d open the window and a blast of muggy heat steeped in yellow light would inundate everything, casting garish reflections on my casket. Then she’d shut it again. Every so often she’d ask someone if they wanted water, but then she’d fail to bring them a glass. Every so often she’d nod to herself. Every so often she’d even smile, but really it was more of a grimace. Every so often she’d go over to Gaia and Flavia or her cousin Emilia and stare hard at them. Every so often she’d wander close to me, but without knowing it.

  I holed up in the kitchen and got some cheap supermarket table wine out of the fridge. I drank it: sliding over me, through me, it landed on the white floor tiles. I watched the dark-red puddle as it expanded, pushing beyond one tile and then the next, and then the next after that. It moved slowly, becoming grainy at the corners. I watched and waited for a cockroach to reach it, but it didn’t happen. When everyone had left, my mother went around collecting the paper cups and Clara shut the curtains and the front door.

  I lay down next to Dorotea, on the floor.

  Behind the glass, I was beautiful. I’d never loved myself so much. I wished I could be me one last time, before it was the insects’ turn.

  I looked at the face, the freckles, the already dry lips curled in a sort of half smile: What the fuck do you have to smile about, you bitch? You think it’s funny to have gone along with me, stopping my heart and my brain, just to support the naïve cause of my pain and sorrow? What right did you have to kill me, just because I felt lonely and useless and abandoned?

  I looked at my face.

  Her face.

  No one’s face.

  All night long, hands clasped, I prayed to the oxygen to go on feeding my muscles for at least a little longer, to produce cellular energy and ward off rigor mortis. But the oxygen ignored me. At the funeral the next day, my body was stiff and cold, purplish. I had to leave the church without delay; I couldn’t stand to see myself in such terrible shape. Later I held my body’s hand as they lowered it deep into the ground. Relatives and friends left flowers on the headstone. I picked a little bunch of daisies from a bush and did the same. But I was the only one who had good intentions. The others didn’t want me near them, they’d never again invite me to their dinner tables, they’d never again ask me how I’m doing and whether I’m still hungry, whether I’d like to spend the night.

  It was dark. They locked the gates.

  I availed myself of a ride with Aunt Clara. My mother was sitting in front, silent, her fingers busy scratching away an old stain from her black viscose dress. I got out on Corso Italia.

  It was eight in the evening the way it is for the living: an hour followed by nine, not by a circus of eternity. It was possible to make plans for a Thursday at five thirty. It was possible to make an appointment for a manicure or make a stupid wisecrack or buy a pack of cigarettes. Two young men, one blond and one not, were transporting canvases: landscapes, women, hands. Two lovers held hands so they’d never lose each other. The windowed doors on the balconies were all open, the faces all looked out. At the Bar Europa a girl dressed in gray laughed into her phone, and a Moroccan held out roses to a couple who would not buy them. A glass was set down on a table, another was picked up and taken away. A young man with almond-shaped eyes looked at his appointment book while sipping a cappuccino. A cell phone rang, another was put away in a leather bag. The young man closes his appointment book. He’s beautiful, with those high cheekbones and a supple neck.

  He looks at me.

  Who are you looking at through me, asshole?

  My first visit to see myself was on Wednesday, July 27.

  Wednesday was my day off from the stationery shop. I went into the cemetery, intimidated, looking around as if to ask permission. I walked down a broad street lined with large modern structures made of old cement.

  I realized that I’d never been here before: the first time, I’d come in by another entrance. I didn’t know which way to go. Behind the glass panes of the structures’ facades there were dark rooms with drawers full of dead people. I came to a seven-story building. On the wall a modern sculpture depicted crowds of bronze faces with sad expressions, mingling together as they rose toward the ceiling, like fishing floats, the carved bodies lightened, like empty suits of clothing. I didn’t remember them. I stepped into the elevator. I pushed the button for the top floor. In the elevator there was a cart loaded with dried flowers and cleaning products: ammonia, grease cutter.

  From the seventh floor I looked down on the entire place and then went back downstairs. I retraced my steps and found the right entrance, the main entrance. There everything was different. Pine trees, palm trees, boulevards, traditional headstones. A bus came through and out of habit I stepped out of the way. It stopped amid the headstones. Two women got out, one young and one old, both brandishing opulent bouquets of chrysanthemums as if they were rifles.

  I walked past small family chapels decorated to look like houses; behind the glass windows there were old framed photographs of big-bellied people in black and white, sitting at the table with cigarettes in their mouths. Then gravestones covered completely with earth. Graves without names. Graves topped by mutilated statues. One was a beakless eagle and a girl sitting looking at it. One was an open grave.

  At last I came to my headstone.

  I descended into the darkness of the soil. I climbed inside the wood, into the closed coffin, stopping just half an inch short of my body’s outer wall. Here I am, here we are.

  I opened my secret diary, the purple one with bunnies that Aunt Clara had given to me when I was alive.

  I started writing on the first page.

  07/27/2011: My face is swollen, my eyes are bulging. The skin is just starting to flake off my face. The cuts on my wrists have vanished. Horrifying lines have appeared where my arms attach to my body. Wide red tubes like deflated balloons. At first I didn’t recognize them, then I understood. They’re my veins. Germs have caused them to swell. They’re full of disintegrating erythrocytes, red blood cells coming apart one by one, until finally they leave my veins as empty as the gutters of a house scheduled for demolition. I’m afraid.

  From that day forward I documented my decomposition in my dia
ry. Like a paleontologist, I documented what remained of my body from when I abandoned it. Its loneliness in the bowels of the earth and the worm invasions certainly didn’t do it any good, but I didn’t let appearances deceive me: I liked seeing my body open up, revealed little by little behind the flesh, like a confession. It was full of organs: that is the true meaning of inner beauty.

  I went back up to the surface.

  It was almost dark.

  I went past dozens and dozens and dozens of graves. I walked down the boulevard, under tall gray motionless pines. Pines think themselves superior. Their branches look down on my brain stem.

  When I got home I knocked on my mother’s bedroom door. Silence. I went in anyway. It was dark except for the lamp on the nightstand. She was stretched out on her back, wearing red cotton pajamas. Her feet were covered with dust, her eyes were swollen, and she was staring into the void. I sat down on the edge of the bed, next to her.

  “Mama?”

  Silence.

  I placed my hand on her left hip, where the cotton crept back, leaving a little bare skin. My mother didn’t move: her skin couldn’t feel my hand. I tried again: nothing. My touch was no longer requited.

  “Mama, I’m afraid.”

  Silence.

  “Mama, listen to me, I’m dead and I don’t know what to do.”

  Silence.

  “Mama, did you know that I can walk through walls?”

  Silence.

  “Mama, help me, my face is swollen and my arms are red and my skin is peeling off.”

  More silence. A curtain of silence pulled open shamelessly on a stage of silence.

  Now a strange distance united us: a one-way mirror that on her side was absence and on mine intimacy. She remained motionless. For a long time. At a certain point she shut her eyes. I put my ear to her chest the way you might put your eye to the peephole in a door: “Did you come to me? Are you dead?”

  Her heart replied: no, she’s alive, beat it.

  I went back to my bedroom. Outside it was raining. Lying on the faded yellow blanket showing Donald Duck and Goofy having a picnic in the countryside, I burst into tears. How odd: crying was so different now. Before there had been self-pity. There was also an emergency exit. Now instead crying was a bunker without so much as a window. I sobbed curled up in a fetal position, both hands covering my eyes. I cried loudly and then softly and then silently. Mostly I cried because no one was ever going to hear me cry again. I cried with my eyes squeezed shut, my arms wrapped tight around my knees. I kept saying: “I want my mommy,” like an abandoned child, but I was the one who had abandoned my mother. I kept saying: “I want to go home,” but I already was home.

  On July 28 I left a message in lipstick in my mother’s bathroom: “I’m still here.”

  I gave no credence to the rhetoric of an unbridgeable gap between the living and the dead. I didn’t entirely believe in invisibility either. It struck me as a cinematic gimmick, perfect for Demi Moore moping around her apartment in overalls while her dead husband watches over her, unseen. What I needed was a solution, a translation, a way to go on being there. When my mother saw my message, she screamed.

  07/29/2011: The network of swollen red veins that at first was limited to where my arms met my body has now reached my torso.

  On July 30, just seven days after my death, the scene of my crime became a bathroom again. The blood was scraped off the white floor tiles and the tub was drained. A dark tangle of my hair was rooted out of the drain and tossed into the trash. The window was opened. Sunlight and fresh air and wind were allowed to enter. It was Aunt Clara who took care of these things.

  On her knees on the floor, a scrub sponge in her hand, she tracked down and eliminated all traces of dried blood in the grooves between one tile and the next. In the meantime, my mother received her girlfriends in the living room, nicely made up in gray tones and wearing a blue silk dress. She showed them all a picture of me on the day of my First Communion: standing in the church courtyard, gloved hands clasped in prayer, a white lace dress a size too large, a palm tree behind me. Her friends passed the photo around in silence. My mother said: “That’s Dorotea in her youth.”

  That bathroom was never used again.

  I met Anna in the fruit aisle of the supermarket in Largo Pascoli, where I was walking and watching with envy and astonishment as hands reached out for peaches and apricots, feeling them, deciding which were ripe, and placing them in their carts.

  She was sitting in a shopping cart. She had wrinkled cheeks, broad teeth, and salt-and-pepper hair. She was dressed in gray and she was slowly caressing a white-and-orange box of Kinder chocolate-covered granola bars.

  Anna had died of a heart attack at age sixty-six. She ran a dry-cleaning establishment and she hadn’t given up her business after her death. She’d put up a sheet of paper behind the counter that said AWAKE AND SING, YE THAT DWELL IN DUST: FOR THY DEW IS AS THE DEW OF HERBS, AND THE EARTH SHALL CAST OUT THE DEAD. ISAIAH 26:19.

  “What’s that?”

  “Resurrection of the bodies. The Bible is very clear on this point. We shall rise again, Dorotea, we shall rise again.”

  I went home. My mother was on the couch, talking on the phone and laughing.

  07/31/2011: The red network has spread even further downward. Red patches on my arms, my torso, my chest, my knees. Floats from the carnival in Rio, floats made of swollen and decaying superficial veins, spreading further and further downward, tinting my whole body red. It’s not true that red is a lucky color.

  08/01/2011: The network has continued to descend. Now it’s denser than before and has turned black. I’m in prison.

  08/01/2011: My brain has turned soft and yellowish. So long, memory, emotions, obsessions.

  I went home and sat in a chair at the dining room table waiting for my mother. Two hours went by. A butterfly landed on my wrist, went through my wrist, all the way down to the wooden armrest.

  I stayed there until she came home, got undressed, and went to sleep. I got up to make sure the door was shut correctly. I closed the window too. I turned the light off in the hall. I lay down next to her.

  Every day when I came home from work I’d wait for my mother in the chair in the dining room, always the same chair, the one with the faint scratches on the wood in the right corner. When I was alive it always gave me a sensation of stickiness because of a peach juice spill that was never scrubbed off; now it no longer gave me anything.

  Until the moment that she appeared in the dining room to get the wine, I remained there, motionless. “Remain” is the key word, if words could still open doors. “Remain” is the only word capable of describing me: the others are still on the side of the living. I write “remain” in italics. Italics have the angle of something stirred by the cold. Italics are an alarm. They say: Be careful, you’re in a zone of alienation, this is a word that’s not like other words. Italics see the dead.

  While I was waiting on the first of August I wrote a letter to Gaia. The next day, before work, I left the letter on the reception desk at the real estate agency where she worked, but it was quickly buried under a pile of fliers and Post-its with the phone numbers of clients.

  None of my postmortem letters ever reached their intended recipients, at least not in the common understanding of the phrase, which implies that someone realizes that the letter has arrived. That’s because I myself am a letter that never reached its destination: the message of my body—with all its experiences and the things that it learned—remained buried underground, abandoned. It was lowered just a notch, from aboveground to underground. It was fired. Now it’s unemployed, though it’s certainly being employed by the bacteria. What a strange turnabout: before, my body had to eat in order to keep moving forward, now it’s being eaten by insects in order to go backward, to retreat into nothingness.

  Today is March 1, 2015, and I’m watching thi
s slow last supper like a movie. A last supper without betrayal: everything is going just as it ought to; the universe is reappropriating its lost atoms. There are no unexpected turns or plot twists in the departure of these bones. The flesh is dismantled, the tissues come unstitched, and no bacterium ever withdraws from my body out of respect. Respect for whom, after all?

  By now my inner life consists only of organs, and those are disintegrating. To say nothing of my skeleton. My skeleton is the building that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima: before it was a magnificent concert hall, now it’s a monster of broken foundations. My eyes too are on the brink of extinction, surrounded by larvae: if I asked you what color they are now, you’d get it wrong. And what can we say about my tongue, which itself can no longer say anything? By now it’s a dead tongue, just like Latin. My words are as halting as in a high school oral exam . . . Rosa, rosae, rosae? No thanks, not now that the roses crush me underfoot. You want me to recite the first declension? Not now that I too am in decline.

  Aboveground, I watch my decomposition as if it were a film I don’t like, in the background. I am the background, and I watch myself like a film. The film is one of those hyperrealist ones, without a plot, without beauty, full of silence and long takes along dirt roads. The film will come to an end, at a certain point: nature always meets its deadlines.

  Soon Dorotea Giglio will be over, but don’t touch that dial, stay on this channel: it won’t be long before her atoms are recycled into a new human being!

  You have no idea how cynical the universe can be.

  In the meantime, as I watch myself decompose, I go on living more or less the same life as before. No, this is not a case of split personality: to have a split personality you must have a self. But I’m no longer myself: when you reach your posthumous years you lose certain limitations. I myself, or the world, go on as before. And to think that I expected so much from death. At the very least, a conclusion. I believed in an end. Deep down I was an idealist, and I had no idea.