Hollow Heart

by Viola Di Grado

  Lorenzo knew how to be just human enough.

  His boilerplate affections at the movies left me with deep hickeys, his long fingers never wasted any time. An apartment-dwelling Homo sapiens, tame on the sofa but aggressive in the darkness of the flesh. At night, his sperm marked territory like a dog’s pee. I’d open my eyes and he would no longer be on the bed. He was already in the shower; I’d hear water splashing, he would be singing songs I didn’t know. Lorenzo was a friend to all and everyone was his friend.

  The first time I saw him was on July 11, 2001, and I was at the Gloria Beach Club, attending my colleague Elisabetta’s university graduation party. Everyone was in the water, splashing each other and laughing. Everyone had wet hair. There was a rock band from Misterbianco playing out-of-tune Radiohead covers. I was stretched out on the sand next to Gaia, who was telling me about a bartender she liked. I was watching Lorenzo, his dark eyes and his pointy, intelligent nose. I was watching Lorenzo talk and smile and wave his hands in the distance, surrounded by people I knew but who had never become my friends. I got up and asked Elisabetta, who was wearing a leopard-print bikini and was vomiting up whiskey behind a hedge, to introduce us. The band was doing an off-key rendition of “Karma Police.”

  That night we fucked twice in his apartment on Piazza Galatea with the air conditioning set at seventy-two degrees. Then I fell asleep. I woke up with a start, in the middle of the night, to the sensation of tiny irritating spheres under my body. I had sand in the fold between my breasts, and all down my chest like a staircase of bread crumbs, and inside my panties like insects. Sand filled the bed, tracing a yellowish line from my sweaty back to his as he slept beside me. I turned to look at Lorenzo.

  A streak of light from the streetlamps, filtering in through a crack in the ramshackle blinds, illuminated the wet grains along his neck and back and his folded arms, as tidy as a text message. I got out of bed. The parquet was covered with sand too.

  When I got home I went to my mother’s room, but the door was locked. I put my ear to the door: she was fucking someone. I went to sleep.

  On April 23, 2009, two years and three months before my death, Lorenzo took me to the Isola delle Correnti, down the coast past Syracuse, the southernmost tip of Europe. A narrow strip of manmade rock, destroyed repeatedly by the waves, it marks the meeting point of the Ionian and Mediterranean seas. To our left were dark towering waves, to our right a sheet of water still and transparent as a crystal casket. And we were in the middle.

  “I’ve done some research. There are a bunch of ghosts on this island because a bunch of ships full of illegal immigrants went down here.”

  “And you call that doing research?”

  He laughed.

  “No, but that’s the most interesting thing about this place, don’t you think?”

  He laughed.

  “Let’s go, dummy.”

  A hole fifty feet deep gaped in the middle of the long manmade strip on which our bodies were standing motionless. We were there for Lorenzo’s doctoral thesis: he was studying an insect that reproduces only on that island. We walked the length of that strip of rock, with the violent waves crashing one after another. Lorenzo went first, his shoulders as square and inviting as a chalkboard, his legs muscular. The water was icy, the wind was blowing hard; it was hard to keep your balance.

  “Lorenzo?”

  “Yeah? Need some help?”

  “Lorenzo. Listen. You think I’m disgusting because I piss in my pants, don’t you? I didn’t want to tell you, I shouldn’t have told you, I don’t know why I did. Do you think that I’m a poor deranged girl? It only happens when I think about certain things. I mean, when I have certain nightmares. Do I disgust you?”

  “You’ll be better when you get some medicine.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Careful, the waves will pull you under.”

  He went on, and I trailed after him.

  A very strong wind was blowing on the island. There were abandoned houses, with broken windows and grayish masses of dry vegetation surrounding them. At the center of the island stood the empty, weathered residence where, until ten years before, the lighthouse keeper had lived with his family. Lorenzo stopped in front of the place: a long white building in the process of falling apart. The saltwater had slobbered dark rust spots onto the building’s metal sections. A sign warned us that we were in danger and forbade us to enter.

  “Lorenzo, I have to tell you something. I love you.”

  He turned around.

  Boxing up all your feelings in a single phrase is very convenient: it’s an insurance policy against the mysteries of the subconscious. I relied upon that phrase where everyone takes shelter, that well-heated room where one can sit rapt in prayer. I relied upon my desire and upon my cloistered state within my desire. I trusted the self-abnegation that you could build inside, already thoroughly tested over the millennia by human animals on themselves: I thought I’d found safety.

  “Aren’t you going to say anything?”

  “You know, this island is constantly being pounded by the waves, and they’re always every bit as rough as they are right now. There are practically no plants, but look at this one, it’s a wild leek. But the fauna is in better shape than the flora, there are wild rabbits and albatross. And then in the migration season, aquatic birds from North Africa pass through. If we came here then, just think, we could hide behind the dunes and watch them.”

  He entered the building. I followed him.

  Inside it was dark, even though it was the middle of the day.

  The light filtered in only through tiny chinks between the weakened rafters. The walls were flaking away; red stone appeared underneath here and there, like infected flesh. The floor was covered with broken white-and-blue tiles, dust, and dead spiders. We turned into the first room on the right. It had no door. With his back turned to me he squatted down to get a better look at a withered little plant that had sprouted between two muddy tiles. He remained motionless for a few seconds, the little plant plucked and held between his fingers. There was a syringe in the corner to our right, and on the wall YOU ARE MY LIFE was scrawled in red, half eaten away by briny encrustations. The place reeked of damp. There was a dead mouse buried under a heap of white plaster. I left that room and went into the one on the left. This one had a door: it was ajar, and over it was another scrawled YOU ARE MY LIFE. In that room nearly all the rafters had given way, and a dense rotten-egg-colored light poured in along with the wind. Two chipped seashells next to the dust-laden doorjamb, which was covered with beads of mold. To the right was a spiral staircase. We didn’t climb it.

  On January 30, 2010, my second-to-last birthday alive, I woke up, took my morning pills, and went back to sleep. I powered down my cell phone to make sure no one could call to wish me happy birthday. I shut my eyes. At noon the door buzzer woke me up. Aunt Clara had come by with a cake and a present. She handed me the red package. I felt a chaotic warmth struggling to take shape inside me.

  The gift was a secret diary bound in purple leather dotted with tiny white bunnies. It even had a lock. My mother arrived. She’d bought a beautiful yellow lemon cake with two little sugar figurines on top. It had birthday candles, one for each year, though it was two candles short.

  I remember flying to Bologna to visit my mother’s cousins for Christmas in 1990.

  My mother wept silently with a book in her hand; the cover was orange and white. The clouds outside the airplane window looked like a motionless sea. A slab of dark waves, caught by surprise in the middle of a storm. Breakers suspended in that enchanted instant right before they crash down on the shore. You could see the entire arch of their bodies, the hook-shaped curve, soon thrust into the earth. A huge hand lifted to grab, as if full of yearning.

  Yearning is what I miss most about being alive. But I can’t say that I yearn for it: I lack the body to yearn with, the ski
n, and the mystery of warmth-bringing blood. All I have is a barren gaze, freed from my skull like a canary from its cage.

  We were seated in one of the last rows in the plane and it was ten minutes to five in the afternoon. All around us people were moving: they gesticulated as they talked, they stood up to get something out of their suitcase or to use the restroom. Even the people sitting quietly reading were in movement: at a certain point, no matter what, they turned the page. Nothing could have persuaded them to sit motionless with their forefinger on the left page. I looked out at the sea of motionless clouds and the sun setting in the distance, a solid line that almost seemed to mark an end, a boundary. When they’re alive, people are so free that they need boundaries. Both instinctually and culturally they identify boundaries with death. That’s how it’s always been, it’s been that way for everyone, and it still is. People think that when you stop living, there’s a bright line. Whether they envision it as a direct transfer to paradise or the simple cessation of all vital functions, they’ve always imagined this dividing line. They need that wall. They need to know that there’s no knocking it down. No one has the courage to imagine it doesn’t exist. Literature and religion have covered that wall with pious inscriptions.

  The rip-off comes when you find out the truth. There’s no wall, no dividing line, no boundary, no end.

  The darker the clouds became the clearer the border became: a violent red against the false hesitation of black waves. Motionless waves equal desert. Desert equals thirst. Now that I am the desert, I no longer feel thirst, and I’m equal to everything else, as is the case with those who are no longer anything. I’m a free association, an empty figure, an untouched coloring book.

  But even if I’m a gaze fluttering around freely outside of my skeleton, I can return inside my rib cage whenever I like. I can clutch the metacarpus and phalanges just as I did when holding hands was a comfort. I can do all these things because my skeleton and I love each other: we’re in a kind of open relationship, and I’m jealous of all the insects, the wind and the rain, the anaerobic bacteria.

  On February 23, 2010, two months before breaking up with me and fifteen months before my death, Lorenzo took me up Mount Etna. We were walking through the birch trees, taking the dirt road up to the Bocche di Fuoco, the “mouths of fire.” Then we stopped in front of the Pozzo del Buio, the “well of darkness.” It was a very deep pit in the earth. You could sense there were masses of dry leaves and other detritus at the bottom.

  “I don’t remember. Is this the cave where the ceramic vases were found? The one that was a place of worship in the Neolithic?”

  “Shhh. If you stay quiet we’ll see the tawny owl leave its lair.”

  We waited.

  “You know, its best trait is its highly developed sense of hearing. It can hear even the quietest animals. And the tawny owl itself is extremely quiet. So the instant it hears its prey, it attacks, catching its victim unawares.”

  We waited.

  Nothing emerged.

  “That’s hardly surprising. Daylight affects their nervous system, so in the morning they’re lazy and slow.”

  Lorenzo descended into the cave. For a moment he vanished and I heard the sound of leaves crunching underfoot. He reemerged with a handful of black goop. His palm outstretched and his eyes glittering with excitement.

  “Look at this, it’s the skeleton and fur and teeth of a little mouse. The tawny owl is able to spit out all this and ingest just the organs, muscles, and flesh. Isn’t that magnificent?”

  Then we went to see his grandparents, who lived nearby, in Nicolosi Nord. They were very old. They lived in an orange farmhouse, faded by the sun, half concealed by a mass of struggling vegetation. The living room window wasn’t closing right, and Lorenzo offered to fix it. Then he wound up the pendulum clock in the dining room. He reset all the television channels. He oiled the lock on the back door. Sitting on the terrace on a wicker chair, I waited.

  2011

  You see the dead. Or at least, you read them. You’ve become necroliterate. This is a letter that came to you by sea. And this is my death: there are still jellyfish, weeks, religions, city buses and post offices, concert tickets, clothes hangers, powdered chocolate, love letters, coffee umbrellas monkeys onionskin paper, sunglasses, elevators and weddings and hail, forks, store-window mannequins and real people, people and clothing, wool socks, dogs and hospitals, doors, door handles, boots and pillows, glass, leather, plastic, blood, cartilage, gums.

  This is my death: the commercials on TV still last longer than the movies, people still go to work and at night they come home to their families. The streets are still congested but for me the streetlights are always green. Please, go right ahead, this is the apex of freedom, its narrow tip, as painful as a spearhead: you’re invisible.

  This is my death: my headstone is there too, a slab of rock surrounded by an assortment of flowers that I myself regularly see to replacing. I’m not actually sure it’s my headstone: since I died I’ve forgotten how to read. I study my name up close and I can’t say whether those marks say my identity.

  But I still know how to write.

  I know, it’s odd that the two things don’t go together. It’s odd that this page I just wrote, now that I look at it, is a square of random shapes that I can interpret however I please, like those jagged inkblots in psychological tests. It’s very sad: you write down your thoughts and before you know it they’re no longer yours.

  Focusing my eyes on my name carved into the marble, I can concentrate as hard as I like, but it’s like looking out the window in the bedroom in Trecastagni, looking down at the olive tree in the courtyard, and trying to squeeze meaning out of every branch. I believe that branches, unlike letters, don’t form words. I believe that the fact that the branches all derive from the same root does not imply that they have a semantic relationship. I believe that the leaves they cover themselves with in springtime mean nothing more than that: leaves.

  I believe it, but I’m not positive.

  This is my death: it set out from Catania, it’s a universal geological phenomenon, but it’s invisible. This is my death: on Mount Etna in winter there’s snow, and on the sea below in the summer there are the dirty white wakes of motorboats. On Via Crispi there’s a gray concrete apartment building that was built in the seventies, and on the fourth floor there’s an apartment full of dust. Inside the apartment there’s a mother crying over the kitchen sink, a bowl covered with meat sauce in her hands, soapsuds on her fingers. The water is running. There’s an empty bedroom at the end of the hallway. There’s a yellow bed, perfectly made, and biology textbooks piled high on the shelves. That mother is my mother: we live together, but I don’t know how to reach her. That empty bedroom is where I live, but there’s no proof of that fact.

  My death began on the afternoon of July 23, 2011.

  My name was deleted from the cell phone directories and Facebook contacts of a great many people. There was sorrow and tears, but outside of a certain geographic area only indifference. There was a funeral, two days later, and a body lowered deep into the earth. There was a thunderstorm, but only in the center of town: out at the Scogliera the sun was shining, and people went on jogging along the waterfront, music playing in their ears.

  It’s well known that the dead are obsessed with the regrets and resentments they accumulated during their lifetimes. And in fact the first thing I wanted to do as soon as I died was to go to Lorenzo’s place. Even though a full year had passed since we broke up, he was my first thought as a dead person. The second was: I’m dead.

  But what was I supposed to do with that death? Was it really such an important thing for me? That thing that art as a whole had been yammering on about, from time out of mind, I was now experiencing personally. I felt an enormous and uncomfortable responsibility. Having a body had given me the privilege of a restricted point of view, the opportunity to be irresponsible t
oward the vastness and mystical significance of the universe. But now, suddenly, I found myself a citizen of the Absolute, with all the seriousness attendant upon that role. Now the Tao and Nirvana were matters of day-to-day administration. Now the Zoroastrian bridge to the afterlife was every bit as relevant to me as the bridge over the Strait of Messina.

  I woke up from life in the bathtub.

  I got out of the bathtub: my dress was on the floor, and my body was in the tub. I looked at the clock on the wall: it was 7:21 P.M., and my mother still hadn’t found me. I looked at myself: seen from outside, I looked nothing like myself.

  I touched my puffy eyelids. My fine, thin dark hair, underwater from the earlobes down. My uptilted nose, with the scar on the right nostril from the time I took a spill off my mountain bike on Mount Etna when I was fifteen. A zit on my wet cheek. My small lips: the purple lipstick was still on. My wrist, abandoned forever over the rim of the tub, had left a round bloodstain on the marble.

  I brought my ghostly forefinger near the stain. I established a contact. I reached the point where there was no longer any visible space between the pad of my fingertip and the stain. I pressed lightly. All this in life is called “touching,” and it had a purpose and a result. I lifted my finger and looked at it: there was no blood on it. I repeated the whole operation: nothing. The stain lacked the generosity to give me a part of itself. The stain was not my friend.