Hollow Heart

by Viola Di Grado

  Sometimes we’d go for walks at night, when there wasn’t a living soul around. Anna would follow me, dragging her feet. She’d say: “I’m tired.”

  She’d say: “The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish. The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left. Isaiah 24:4-6.”

  We walked along Viale Ionio, night after night. Geremia would drag along in the dust like a dead dog, but other times I’d carry him in my arms. Anna would say: “I’m tired.”

  Walking through those dark streets at night, I hoped that one day I’d see my father and that he’d be dead. Without a body to abandon me with, perhaps this time he’d stay with me.

  04/19/2013, noon: The aerobic germs have excavated a monstrous place for themselves deep inside my body. They’ve taken up residence in cabins made of disintegrating tissues.

  5 A.M.: My bones are ramshackle windows that look out on nothing; my skin is so many tattered curtains.

  5:09 A.M.: With no more barriers between the world and my soul, thousands of germs and beetles enter and exit my body. Thousands of germs and beetles have become Dorotea Giglio. Now, in the tumbledown castle of flesh I once called “me,” I’m a complete stranger.

  I’m Dorotea Giglio (1986–2011), your niece. I don’t know your cell number, so I’m speaking to you from the banks of the river where you drowned. I just wanted to ask you something: where are you?

  I’d really like to get to know you. I’d like for us to become friends. When I was little I dreamed about you all the time. Actually I dreamed about a jar in which I felt I was suffocating. Was that how you felt too, while you were drowning? I know which bed was yours in the house in Trecastagni and I know what chair you sat in at the dinner table. I know which glass was yours, and which cup. But you don’t sit in that chair anymore. I’ve seen plenty of people stay seated in their chairs, you know. Everyone has a chair of their own, a building of their own, a stretch of roadside of their own, right before where the car hit them. I have a bathtub, but now it’s full of insects. Where are you?

  The man never came back, and Aunt Clara started coming over every day again, the way she had right after I died. They resumed that silence of theirs too, that way they had of dining together with pat phrases until they locked eyes by accident, and then they’d fall silent. It was May 12, 2013, and it was raining out. My mother was talking about an Iranian film she’d seen in the theater; she reached for the pepper without looking up. Aunt Clara talked about the latest titles from her publishing house: “Do you want me to bring you that French grammar textbook with the updated 2013 edition of the dictionary?”

  She hadn’t looked up.

  “No, no, thanks, forget about it.”

  My mother didn’t look at her either.

  It was more than I could stand.

  I stood up.

  They no longer had reason to avoid each other’s gaze for fear of seeing Lidia’s eyes. Now those were my eyes, not theirs, the certified copies of Lidia’s eyes. Underground those eyes had filled up with blasphemous larvae, ready to suck my entire soul out through my scleras. The irises had lost their color, the sockets had become imprints of forgotten dry riverbeds. Now, with my retinas caved in, without the blankets of my eyelids, I was naked as never before. Now Lidia and I—her body buried who knows where—certainly resembled each other. Identical and similarly alone in the uniform of our bones, we had twin eyes. Four empty holes, like the nail holes in the wall of the villa in Trecastagni. Like the four chipped pale-pink bowls that you used for breakfast, Greta-Clara-Lidia-mother, withered little family, and now in that house, on the highest kitchen shelf, they’re stitched together by a spiderweb.

  My mother gradually resumed the life she led before I died.

  In the summer she’d go stay with Aunt Clara in Costa Saracena and she’d water plants on the balcony dressed in white. In the winter she’d turn on the radiators. All year round she’d wash her undergarments and remember not to leave the milk out of the fridge. She started to use insecticide, so the house emptied of insects, but I stayed, I continued to stand by her, to eat lunch and dinner with her, but without sleeping in her bed, so as not to frighten her.

  08/28/2013: The ligaments are broken. The cartilage is breaking.

  08/29/2013: My mouth is nothing more than a crack in the wall. Silence.

  2014

  Time passed.

  I went on dining with my mother and my aunt, I went on giving my mother goodnight kisses. In the morning I’d lie on the bed while she made it, letting cotton and air pass through me. At night I’d come home from work before she did, I’d wait for her at the door, and when she walked in and dropped her jacket on the floor I’d hang it up on the coatrack. I’d sit on the sofa with her and Clara while they watched TV at night, and when they went to bed I’d put the remote control back on the coffee table and straighten the cushions, turn out the halogen lamp and the light in the hall.

  On June 29, deep in the earth, my connective tissues had all crumbled to pieces. That evening Aunt Clara called my mother from her office.

  She was pregnant.

  “How can you not know who the father is?”

  My mother talked with her, stretched out on her bed. I sat next to her, and I laughed and laughed and laughed.

  2015

  Time passed.

  Now it was my mother who cooked for Clara, who was more and more pregnant all the time, swollen and awkward, but with the expression of a generous mammal. She even seemed happy.

  I’d never be happy.

  In your posthumous years, at a certain point, you arrive at what at first might be taken for pessimism, but it’s really the malady of objectivity. Objectivity is the malady of things as they are. Objectivity has a sudden onset, a collateral effect of the suspension of one’s encephalic functions. It shows up uncooked and intact, with neither an instruction booklet nor a definite article.

  Objectivity is a rough timber, and it’s up to you to light the fire, with your senses. I lost my senses along with my body. My senses have become elucubrations. Objectivity begins with my death. It begins in my body, where there are now more worms than there is identity, it begins and it increases, slowly, as the flesh vanishes and the bones corrode.

  Objectivity is a fine object, multifunctional. It looks lovely in the middle of a room, so wide open and brightly lit. Its straight lines attract attention, its glow enchants. It’s very useful, if combined with a working sensory apparatus. It can produce the lacerating sound of truth or the syncopated songs of science. But without a sensory apparatus, it’s like a stereo without speakers.

  Result: continual, incurable incomprehension, a long stay in the white hospital of eternity, without any hope of recovery. All around us life is teeming, but it reaches us only as a blocked idea, a congress of actions that will never bear fruit, unpaid rent on an apartment overlooking the past. It arrives as a glitter of scalpels without risks, and what meaning does it have?

  Objectivity is the alphabet that doesn’t come to us as bricks of phrases but as the naked debris of buildings, stones by the roadside. Let those who have truly loved life cast the first “a.”

  Time passed.

  My tendons were all destroyed and my bones lost their protein component. The wrinkles closed around my mother’s lips and the damp ate away at the living room ceiling. It rained all March and the stain on the ceiling turned darker and darker; underground my ligaments came loose from the bones; two diagonal creases extended under my mother’s eyes. She had more and more white hair; my hair continued falling out. From her hands emerged the road maps of her veins and the hardness of he
r knuckles.

  Time passed, my body rotted, but I grew no older. In the opaque mirror in the living room I saw a twenty-five-year-old girl, smooth-skinned, with freckles and clean, glistening hair. In the opaque mirror in the living room, for hours, I would dream of myself covered with lines, the way I never would be.

  At night, with my eyes closed and my hands clasped, I’d pray: Dear God, give me varicose veins and missing teeth. Thinning intervertebral discs. Shrinking bones. I want to feel my cerebral mass recede and my spinal column shrink.

  I dreamed of the old age I’d never have. I wanted to grow old with my mother, but obviously that would never happen. Time, the same time that was passionately dismantling my body underground, had seduced me and abandoned me. And I, like a voyeur, continued to spy on the passing hours. I stalked the days. Every morning in the mirror I’d search my skin: never a mark. I measured my hair with a ruler: always the same length.

  This is why the calendar is a precious object. The months are postcards from some distant place, a sumptuous Middle Eastern city. Sitting on my bed, certain nights, I’d leaf through it like a forbidden book, lingering over the empty squares like pictures of gilded mosques. Then I’d put it back where it belonged, on its nail, opened to the month of July.

  On January 5 something horrible happened.

  I fell in love for the second time, the first time since I died.

  His name was Alberto, but I’m not sure that matters much. Alberto was the new salesclerk in the stationery store where I work. Alberto like Albert, the officer loved by Victor Hugo’s daughter, the one she followed to the ends of the earth while he continued to avoid her, all the way to Barbados, by which point she had lost her mind, and walked through the streets dressed in rags, past barefoot boys who threw stones at her, and when she finally saw him again she failed to recognize him. Alberto like my Lupo Alberto agenda from middle school. Alberto like all the times that I encounter something lovely and incomprehensible.

  He came to work for us on January 5. That day Sinéad O’Connor attempted suicide.

  They kept running clips of the video of “Nothing Compares 2 U” on the BBC: the close-up of her tear-streaked face, her walking in a black tunic past statues and through gardens. I’ve always loved Sinéad O’Connor in all her manifestations. When she tore up the picture of the pope. When she became a nun without taking a vow of chastity. When she wore a tank top and army boots with a shaved head and sang about phoenixes rising from the flames and dragons to be killed, and husbands lost on far shores and tears scattered on the beach. When she screamed about eternal music in Gaelic, and women lying on their lovers’ graves. And then when silence fell on the dragons and phoenixes: she no longer sang then, she said that she was going to devote herself to her family and nothing else. She appeared on TV only rarely, twenty pounds heavier and with a weakened voice, she supported lawsuits against child molesters in the Irish church and hit sour notes while singing some of her best songs live. Then she’d tweeted about her sexual frustrations and placed a personal ad in the Irish Independent to find a boyfriend. She’d found an analyst and married him only to file for divorce after just eighteen days. Then this. She’d called the newsroom of The Sun to tell them that she’d tried to commit suicide by overdosing in London after the failure of this fourth marriage of hers. Why tell the press? If I’d survived I wouldn’t have told anyone. But she’d even gone so far as to ask on Twitter whether anyone knew a method of suicide that would keep her children from figuring out that she’d done it on purpose. I was flabbergasted. I kept watching a YouTube video of that concert of hers in which she, still so skinny, slowly took off her clothes, from a black coat to a high-necked dress to a cat burglar’s black leotard, singing: “I feel so different.” It was the unveiled meaning of the striptease, performed to spite all the ridiculous Jennifer Lopezes on MTV. It was a free fall toward truth that came to a stop just short of her skeleton. “I feel so different.” How beautiful her voice was, with that saturated, imploring rage of hers, how beautiful she was, so skinny, so close to the bone, wrapped in that leotard as if she were asking her bones: what next?

  She’d told the press: “God obviously wants me around—though I can’t think why.” She’d announced a new CD, and had posed in a low-cut dress with a tattoo on her chest of Jesus in the middle of a cloud, wearing the crown of thorns, a huge bleeding heart in His hands. Sinéad had tried to kill herself but hadn’t succeeded. I had. Between her and me, who had won, and who had lost?

  Just then Alberto came in.

  I looked up from the computer. He was so handsome: he had blue eyes and black hair and he was alive. Alberto was a very sad answer to my question.

  Horoscope for the sign of Leo (for those who died between July 23 and August 22): The quadrature of Uranus no longer concerns you. Neptune returns to his house, but you aren’t invited.

  That same evening I hurried over to see my body and tell it that I had a crush on someone.

  01/5/2015, 10:03 A.M.: Now my body is populated by fungi. They’ve colonized my decomposing brown fat. Fungi are one of the few things I know about my body’s current life. I know that it has Aspergillus candidus.

  11:59 A.M.: So depressing. There are times when I can’t wait for it to turn into ashes, to put an end to this excruciating wait. There are times when I wish I could give my body a posthumous euthanasia, and spare it all the worms still to come.

  Every morning at work I’d talk to Alberto.

  I told him about my father, about my mother, about my problems, about Lorenzo, about Aunt Clara, about Lidia whom I’d never met, about our house in Trecastagni and about Clara’s house in Costa Saracena, about the locked drawers containing the forbidden pictures of Lidia. I showed him a picture of me and Lorenzo on my cell phone and the cuts on my wrists.

  “Yes, there are two extra cuts on the right wrist because I didn’t do them right. It’s hard to hit the center of the vein.”

  After I’d told him everything, I felt so good.

  “Speak from the heart”: when we were alive we used to say that, it meant to fill your words with feeling. To speak from the heart: we were first-rate ventriloquists, but now our puppet is rotting underground. To speak from the heart: now it’s a dialogue, and the rotting heart doesn’t reply.

  At the cemetery I’ve seen plenty of dead people exhume their hearts. Their fingers reemerge filthy with mud, and they pin their rotten, lurid hearts to their flesh like a brooch. But it’s only a masquerade. They’ll be found out. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day emotion will burst out all over them like a popping zit: obscene, liquid, a mass of dense filaments that will pour out of the decomposing heart and down their bodies.

  The dead person will try to put all the parts back together, to clean things up, but the heart will be everywhere, ejaculating a disorderly meshwork of pus and blood, ramified veins and empty tubes, pustules swollen like closed eyes, lesions like open mouths, excrescences as porous as tongues. In the explosion, his feelings will have left a single motionless fragment on his chest. That point, immobile and solid as a nail, is the nail of objectivity. It’s the only truth available. You can hang all the emotions on it that you want, they’ll just flake off like scabs from a wound.

  You can hate it all you like, the nail of objectivity, but it’s our nail, our lurid personal baggage, like the shopping carts that the homeless push around. It’s our fake ID, the way we remain among the living without meeting any of the requirements. And because it’s ours, we must respect it and take good care of it.

  It was wonderful to talk with Alberto. We had the same tastes: Michel Gondry, Naomi Watts, frozen yogurt. We ate some together a couple of times, after work, at the cart in Piazza Stesicoro. He liked horror movies okay too: The Evil Dead, The Thing, The Others, Poltergeist. I wish that I could still enjoy them for the adrenaline rush, and not just for the clumsiness of the plot.

  The Thursday after that
, our boss asked Alberto to lock up, but I stayed behind to keep him company. Then at eight o’clock the phone rang: “Yes, sweetheart, right away. I’ll be at your place at nine. Love you.”

  He left; it was dark out the way it ought to be. The wind blew. Alberto had a girlfriend and he was going to swing by and pick her up at nine. He got into his blue Fiat Panda. I stayed there for a while, motionless, trying to remember what it feels like when someone’s coming to pick you up at nine. I sat motionless for half an hour, five inches above the sidewalk. I stared at the empty rectangle with the blue outlines where just a short time before Alberto’s car had been parked. A kid went by with earbuds and yellow highlights in his hair; he wasn’t much to look at. No doubt he too had a date later that evening at a specific time. For an instant, just as he walked past me, I was tempted to throw myself at his feet and beg him to make a trade: please, please, all my eternity in exchange for your 9 P.M.

  The period of my crush on Alberto coincided with my ammoniacal phase.

  Inside me, along with love, ammonia developed, and a vast swarm of larvae took up residence in my interior. Among them were plenty of flies but also beetles of the species Nicrophorus humator. While I was busy trying to make Alberto fall in love with me, they were busy scrubbing me clean of the black ooze that drenched me.

  At night, in bed, while my mother watched documentaries on the La7 network, I thought about Alberto: about the white gown I’d wear for our wedding, and about my body, even whiter, once it had emerged entirely from the filth of the tissues. Purified, geometric, honest, a jewel of precious bones. And my eyes: emptied of cornea and of gaze, naked sockets like stone windows in a castle, so that the soul, instead of being reflected in them, would finally reveal itself whole, all its love looking out, no longer inverted, finally true.