Hollow Heart

by Viola Di Grado

  You must be wondering: if I’m no longer myself, who am I? Well, I can tell you who I’m not anymore: my body. You can call me a soul, or a spirit, or a phantom. I don’t know which term would be most accurate: science doesn’t deal with these matters. Now it’s all a religious question. You who are still alive can choose to believe or not to believe in me, just as I can choose to believe or not to believe in you.

  I have a calendar.

  It’s ugly, orange and white, from the pharmacy on the corner downstairs from my apartment. January is the month of the tango, there’s a drawing of a couple dressed in red, dancing against a vague light-blue background.

  At night, lying next to my body, I flip through the months. I rip them from the spiral binding the way we once popped open cans of beer at parties, as if I were still invited to take part in the passage of time.

  I mark crosses on the days, as if to take them down with me into the grave. I really need some company. But ever since I died, time has stretched out limply like a sweater in the washer. Time has become eternity, which is many sizes too big for me, and it just doesn’t fit anymore.

  On today’s date, March 1, 2015, I write that the writer Violet Trefusis died this day in 1972. She died of malnutrition in a large villa outside Florence, overlooking a garden designed by her mother, surrounded by stone statues and poisonous dark-green boxwood hedges.

  She wrote: “Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be an anarchist, be a religious fanatic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity’s sake be it to the top of your bent.”

  She wrote: “Live fully, live passionately, live disastrously.”

  I wait for her at the cemetery with a lemon cake, to celebrate the anniversary of her demise. We could talk about death, as would be appropriate in these circumstances. We could talk about putrefaction: it’s the opposite of the old conversations about clothing, now that the body is becoming more denuded with every passing day.

  The first few days back at work were really hard.

  I had to come up with a bunch of excuses, saying that sudden bouts of panic kept me from talking to the customers, since the customers actually couldn’t see me. Luckily Mr. Masi was a good-hearted old man who liked me, so he didn’t fire me but instead agreed to limit my role to tending to the shelves. It was also good luck that he led a very solitary life and that he had a reputation for having an evil eye, and so he hadn’t talked to anyone and he still hadn’t heard about my death.

  Whenever anyone came into the shop, I immediately hurried into the back, inventing some urgent task to attend to. The living hide when they don’t want to be seen; I hide because no one can see me.

  On August 2 at 5:00 P.M. a young brunette woman walked in and I instantly ducked under the counter. My boss saw me and when she left, he said: “What’s wrong with you lately? You’re out of your head!”

  It was true.

  It was such a relief, to finally be out of my head: when I was alive, I’d spent far too much time in my head, secluded in the chilly studio apartment of my brain, with all the broken windows and the locks that needed oiling. I suffocated in the stale air of my childhood, an unwilling roommate of all my past selves: I didn’t have the keys to the front door. All the selves that were still alive and those that were on their way out and those that were already dead, trading clothes and skin with them, hanging their worms from my earlobes. Introspection is necrophilia.

  When I got home from work, I found my mother and my aunt in their places. Sitting motionless on two identical chairs, with an empty one between them.

  08/02/2011: The flesh fly has laid one hundred and seven eggs.

  08/03/2011: The brain has become a gray-green mass. So long, reflection, ideas, logic.

  Sitting next to my body, deep in the earth, I opened the calendar.

  My favorite part was the “notes” section on the bottom right corner of each month. Where when I was still alive notations would pile up concerning shoes I wanted and movies to watch, must-see concerts and interesting exhibitions, because back then time was in short supply, and so it was exciting to shoehorn into that time various worthwhile commitments. Where notes flowed into each other about friends I absolutely needed to see again or even teeth that needed care, because back then things could go back to being healthy and nice. As I was leafing through it, a gust of wind tossed the pages: I immediately shut the calendar; I’d been found out.

  My mother stopped cooking and worked less and less.

  Aunt Clara came over for lunch and dinner every day: she cooked, mopped the floors, and then went back to work. She planted geraniums on the balcony and hung a small Victorian painting over the bed of girls serenely strolling. She would ask my mother about the few photography jobs she did and remind her to water the geraniums. My mother would respond with a false smile. I never stopped having lunch and dinner with them.

  As soon as they were done setting the table, I’d add my plate and silverware. The Winnie the Pooh glass from when I was small. The napkin. Each of them assumed it was the other who obstinately insisted on performing this daily ritual, and neither ever said a word for fear of offending the other. How sweet. Too bad that the cause of this newfound harmony had to be my death. I even said a prayer, a very new habit for me: I did it to give a phantom meaning to the silence. Or perhaps Anna had influenced me to some slight degree. Hands clasped, eyes shut, words that whether in my mind or in my mouth produced the same muted effect.

  “Our father, who art in heaven . . .”

  On August 4, my mother looked up from her plate of grilled chicken.

  “At the park this morning, I dropped a lens; luckily it wasn’t damaged. But the client—it was for a wedding—looked at me like I was an unfortunate lunatic. It wasn’t my fault, you know, and nothing really happened. I just . . .”

  She put her head in her hands and a tear rolled down her cheek. Aunt Clara patted her hand and poured a little more Nero d’Avola into her glass.

  On August 6 at 2:08 in the afternoon, my mother accidentally knocked the blender off the shelf while reaching for the cheese grater. The blender hit the floor and came apart, its pieces scattering in all directions under the table. My mother got on her knees to pick them up and stayed there, bent over, staring at the pieces of plastic with a bewildered look on her face.

  “It’s broken.”

  Aunt Clara bent over to help her. She retrieved the base of the blender from under a chair.

  “No, stop, Clara, don’t you see? I told you, it’s broken.”

  “We’ll fix it, calm down.”

  “No, it can’t be fixed, stop it, just look.”

  She pointed to a fragment under another chair: it was the corner of the lid. Clara picked up the chipped cover and tried to fit it onto the jar.

  “You see? What did I tell you? Without that piece, there’s no seal, it won’t close, it’s impossible.”

  “That doesn’t matter, Greta, come on, we’ll buy another one.”

  “I don’t want another one. I want this one.”

  My mother took the two pieces out of Clara’s hands and started fiddling with them, trying to force them closed with her fingers.

  “You see? You see? It’s no good!”

  “Cut it out, Greta.”

  “It’s no good! It’s broken, can’t you see, it’s broken!”

  “I said cut it out, Greta, put it down.”

  My mother wouldn’t stop. Aunt Clara grabbed the cover out of her hands. My mother broke down crying.

  08/07/2011, 7:42 A.M.: The one hundred and seven eggs of the flesh fly have hatched; obscene larvae have emerged. I refer to them as “107 Infestations,” but it doesn’t make me laugh.

  9:42 A.M.: The larvae have gathered all around my dry lips. Never again kisses or insults, never again words.

  10:00 A.M.: Silence.

&
nbsp; Every Saturday I went to lie on the beach with Anna. All around us an expanse of dead strangers, inert, feet in the water, draped with seaweed, sometimes with gaping fish on their bellies, on their faces.

  There was one crazy old man who dreamed up horoscopes for the dead. He would look at me, flat on his back, and say:

  “Horoscope for Leos (those who died between July 23 and August 22): This year your death will be filled with discoveries, especially if you passed on between July 23 and August 2. If you died in an accident, look out for work-related accidents. If you died of disease, the virus of love might explode in your heart. If you died of old age, old friends will get in touch. But if you committed suicide, your death will always be a turbulent one, à la Night of the Living Dead: too bad for you.”

  I didn’t believe in horoscopes. By then I was so unsuperstitious that I no longer even believed in feelings. I’d invented a more literal form of love. During kisses, we exchange hearts with our tongues. It takes the composure of a mummy and the exacting perfectionism of an Egyptian embalmer. It takes saliva as dense as the natron that the Egyptians gathered from dried lakebeds and then scattered over bodies gutted of their viscera. Literal love begins with removing the hearts from the collapsed caverns of our chests, deep underground, and swallowing them. Then the tap of the tongue, the sharp click. I tried it with Anna and she said: “Never do that again, it’s a sin.”

  08/11/2011, 11:21 A.M.: All’s quiet.

  1:29 A.M.: Liquids of assorted colors.

  5:01 A.M.: Flies, flies, flies.

  At night, Anna and I would go to my place.

  We’d sit on the sofa while my mother watched TV with Aunt Clara, and we’d chat. We’d play with my mother’s hair. We’d count the strands, we’d braid them all over ourselves. We’d caress Clara’s long red nails.

  “Do you ever see your father?”

  “I don’t have a father.”

  “What about your mother, does she ever see you?”

  “My mother doesn’t have a daughter.”

  08/12/2011: Down there my body feels no regrets: the regrets have stayed with me, and I have to fight them off on my own. My regrets shrill, they whine, they throw tantrums, they keep me from sleeping. They disobey me. They grow. My body has enzymes instead of regrets. They emerged from the lacerated lysosomes and set about destroying their own tissues. And so every one of my cells crumbled itself from within, alone, in silence.

  I initiated my own destruction, me and no one else.

  The sporophytic microorganisms, the flesh flies, the cockroaches, all the wretched frequenters of my flesh, open to the public, arrived from the outside world only later, to carry on the process of disintegration that I first began.

  Hi, I’m Dorotea Giglio (1986–2011). We did theater together in middle school. I was the one who was three years older than you, I had dark hair and freckles, you remember? I’m the one who, that time we went to Milan to see the show about Pirandello, on the bus, told you about when my cousin’s duckling almost drowned after it got tangled up in a piece of twine and the other duckling saved it by peeping really loud. You said it was a crazy story. Do you remember that? I know we didn’t talk much for the rest of the trip. And I know that we haven’t been in touch in the fourteen years since. But I heard that you died of leukemia, and since I was in your neighborhood, having died myself just last year, I thought that maybe we could get together . . .

  I got your number from a girl who died of an overdose and used to do aerobics with you. I stopped by the hospital room where you stopped living, but you weren’t there. I thought you might be in the morgue, hanging ribbons and necklaces on your frozen body, but you weren’t there either. Nor at the cemetery; that’s where I spend a lot of my time these days. Would you call me at this number? I really hope to hear from you. Ciao, kisses.

  There was a gray concrete seventies-style apartment building. There was an apartment on the fourth floor full of dust. There was a mother crying over the kitchen sink, a plate covered with oil in her hands, soapsuds on her fingers. There was the water running from the tap. There was an empty bedroom at the end of the hallway. There was a yellow bed, perfectly made, and biology textbooks piled high on a shelf and a window that revealed the outside world. That mother was my mother: we lived together, but I didn’t know how to reach her. That empty bedroom was the room where I once lived, but there was no proof of that fact.

  The sheets were never sweaty, the mattress never curved under my weight. There was never a crease on the pillow. My fingers left no smudges on the windows. On the evening of August 14, looking out that window, I saw Gaia stop just short of the crosswalk in the street below and look up in my direction. I saw her look up and see no one.

  I looked for myself in the bathtub less and less as time went on. Now I looked for myself in the streets, in the cafés, in the bookstores. Then in the Villa Bellini, the park where I spent so much time when I was alive. I’d sit on the edge of the basin and wait and wait and wait. I’d search the water with my fingers. Instead of myself I found one of the murdered swans. I think it must have been the last one; it was weeping in the center of the basin.

  08/15/2011: It’s rush hour on me. I’m not jealous of the bacteria. I remember clearly that all my life my body rejected their advances. But now it’s different. Now it’s better for my body not to be alone. And after all, my body and bacteria have lots in common: to be exact, 6.4 percent of their genetic material.

  On August 18 Aunt Clara brought a jar of Bronte pistachio pesto for lunch. I opened the door for her, she assumed it was a gust of wind. She put her hat on the chair, I hung it up for her, she thanked my mother. When they were eating and she complained about the heat and reached for the bottle of mineral water, I blew on her neck. Not out of any particular altruism but out of frustration: I wanted to be responsible for things too, the way I had been when I was alive. But now my actions no longer belonged to me.

  Everything I did the others always attributed to something else. Everything I did was split instantly in two: to me the cause, to expiate in my state of invisibility, and to the world the effect, an orphaned act that emerged out of nothingness. It was so unfair. Aunt Clara, after I blew on her neck, closed both eyes, the way you do when you know how to reopen them, and said with a smile: “I just felt the loveliest breeze.”

  09/11/2011: My cellular structures have definitively collapsed. All of the lysosomes have been razed to the ground like tumbledown shacks. All the cells have killed themselves, one after another, releasing horrible acid proteases.

  Where is my self, amid all these disintegrating nucleoli? Where is it, poor earthquake victim? Where is it? Suffocated by the swelling of the mitochondrial structure? I look for it among the germs, all of them identical. I weep for it; I can just imagine it, a wet naked thing surrounded by mayhem. I so wish I could rescue it. I wish I could protect it from nature and carry it with me again, like a joey in a kangaroo’s pouch.

  09/15/2011: Outside it’s still summer. Inside I don’t recognize myself anymore.

  On the evening of September 16, as usual, I went with Anna to go moonbathing on the beach.

  There was a little dead boy with a nose like a potato and a gray T-shirt with blue stripes. He told me he’d been run over by a truck.

  He was going for an outing in the countryside with his parents, but that wasn’t actually true: they were just planning to abandon Dragonball, a Dalmatian-lab mix, which had no idea of what was in store and rode along with its white head out the window, eyes half closed. The little boy had no idea either. He knew his parents beat the dog whenever it crapped on the rug and were constantly complaining about how dirty it was. Then they stopped the car and let the dog out. The boy started shouting and sobbing. Parked in the emergency lane with the blinkers on, they put on their parent faces and explained that there was no alternative; he jumped out of the car and went running after the dog, which in i
ts turn had made a bolt for freedom. The parents both leapt out of the car. They called the boy. The boy called the dog. Neither answered. Dragonball veered into the roadway. A truck went by. The boy was killed. Not the dog: it crossed safe and sound. The parents took the dog home.

  “I waited there on the ground for months and months, but Dragonball never came back to me. He just stayed with my parents at home. I have a bad dog, he abandoned me by the side of the highway.”

  “What should I call you, by the way?”

  “No, you shouldn’t call me at all, jeez, don’t you understand? Because the truck already ran over me. Tell my mother too, okay? Tell her not to call me anymore when she’s sleeping.”

  Now the parents give the dog double rations of treats, and they take it out for a walk every two hours. Every time it craps on the carpet they burst into tears, surrounded by the pictures of the boy that hang on the walls: boy in the mountains, boy blowing out birthday candles, boy with parents on either side of him and green grass below him and smile on his face.

  09/17/2011: The anaerobic germs, born inside me, have grown by now.

  09/18/2011: My body, especially my swollen, taut belly, is covered with blisters.

  09/24/2011: Some of the blisters have burst, releasing methane and hydrogen sulfide.

  09/28/2011: More blisters have burst. Out comes hydrogen. Then nitrogen.

  10/12/2011: My stomach has split open.

  10/13/2011: The anaerobic germs have come to the surface. They break down the tissues.

  10/16/2011: I can see my muscles.