Hollow Heart

by Viola Di Grado

  In just three months’ time my bathroom filled up with long cockroaches with quivering antennae and enormous weltering labyrinths of dust. A patch of green lime scale with dark-brown undertones spread out on the bottom of the tub, and an unknown spider constructed a web on the hot-water handle, and no one evicted him.

  The ants too emerged from their holes and immediately attacked whatever food my mother left out of the fridge. There were cockroaches everywhere, lots and lots and lots of them. They moved over the walls like black lace curtains.

  I picked up a handful of ants from the dining room table and a couple of cockroaches from the pasta drawer. I set the ants down on my sleeping mother’s wrists, and the two cockroaches on her throat.

  “Those look great on you. Now we’re twinsies.”

  She woke up screaming.

  Hi, I’m Dorotea Giglio (1986–2011). Three years ago you entered a coma due to a case of the flu. I don’t know if you’re still there, in your coma, midway between the two places, but if you’ve made it here I’d like to take you out for a pizza sometime. I tried to find you at your place, but you weren’t in your bedroom. Your bedroom wasn’t there anymore either. Instead there was a storeroom full of objects nobody uses anymore. A tennis racket, a pair of hiking shoes, a child’s typewriter, an old television set, a bunch of discount bestsellers, and a Portuguese dictionary. Anyway, I think you’re really cute. I’ll be waiting for you at my apartment, on my bed. Ciao.

  I saw Euridice for the first time on October 19, at the morgue.

  She never told me her real name, but I didn’t see why I would need it.

  The morgue is a delivery room: Anna and I have loads of fun looking after the gestating bodies, sweetly awaiting eternity. They’re so afraid, and they have no idea what’s happening. We see them come in like hard, cold white dolls. Like Pinocchios who have turned back into puppets because they suffered too much as humans.

  You can always glimpse a state of apnea in their eyes. Under the neon lights there’s a fragile soul pushing to emerge from every cold body. It’s difficult for all of them to find their way out, and the actual process of leaving the body is difficult too. And that’s why we’re there, to help them out. The medical examiner interrupts us: “The location and nature of the lesions demonstrates that . . .”

  Or else it’s a mother or a father who interrupts with their sobbing.

  Ladies and gentlemen, silence, please, this death has just begun!

  We explain to the dead how to manage eternity. We tell them that they have to go on sleeping and eating, in spite of everything. Watching TV, going for walks, pursuing hobbies, going out with friends. Life is neither good nor bad, but without the prospect of death on the horizon it’s hard to muster much interest in keeping it going. Life goes on, as people say, and death too goes on and on and on. We watch as people come away from the world. It’s an obscene doubling, not unlike birth itself, but less messy, without blood.

  Congratulations, it was a boy!

  We clap our hands, we scatter sky-blue confetti.

  “What shall we call him?” asks Anna.

  “But I already have a name, I’m called Fabio!”

  We comfort the gestating souls, whispering in their ears: “It’s all over, you’ll be out any second now.”

  Sometimes we bring them presents: fake orchids, history books. Now they’re empty and they’re put away in their drawers, frozen: food in the freezer, ready for the worms’ dinner.

  That morning the body lying on its back belonged to a girl who had cut her wrists just like I did, and so I stayed very close to her, but no one emerged.

  Euridice was sitting on the ground in her orange fake-silk dress, a visibly aging piece of apparel, with pilling and fine runs in the fabric, a ripped hem and patches of dry dirt. Her legs were covered with freckles, with intermittent patches of regrown hair, her feet were dirty and bare, and she was laughing at me. It was impossible to guess her age. She had long unkempt red hair and a notebook bound in purple leather in her hand. The medical examiner was bald and thickset, and he said: “A series of parallel wounds can be observed on the wrists.”

  And I said: “Silence!”

  I looked at Euridice: she was writing, her dark eyes open wide.

  The medical examiner: “This was a case of suicide.”

  “Silence!”

  The morgue is an orphanage: you no longer belong to anyone, even your body has abandoned you. You need to accept that you’re alone and abandoned to yourself, abandoned by your self. That you’re no longer anything and that you no longer understand fuck-all because life no longer needs to be understood by you. That you’ve been rejected, that you’re a discard, a discharge of rational thought. Because all we are is brains under glass: the glass is our body, but even more transparent. You no longer understand: you invent. Without senses, reality is no longer on offer. Understanding is an auction: you raise the bid with an interpretation, hoping that it’s accurate. Understanding is like tossing a pebble into the water. Mine always sink to the bottom.

  The good thing is that now that rational thought is no longer a train traveling toward the truth, it’s no longer frightening. So we no longer take refuge in the irrational. We no longer feel the need to believe in God and love. At Easter we play the game of nailing our hands and feet to the wall, laughing and laughing at how little it hurts. We tell each other our sins in order to appreciate just how pointless guilt is, and how much more pointless forgiveness is. On Valentine’s Day some feed their hearts to the dogs, since by now they’ve gone bad anyway.

  That night, at the morgue, I leaned over to read the tag that dangled from the foot of the newly dead girl, but of course I couldn’t decipher it. I left the room.

  Later I saw Euridice again in Piazza Teatro Massimo: she was drinking an orange vodka that collapsed through her onto the asphalt. She was talking with Anna.

  “This is Euridice.”

  “Yes, I saw her this morning at the morgue.”

  And Euridice said: “You look prettier tonight.”

  I learned that in spite of her childish appearance she was more or less the same age as me. She asked me a few questions about how I’d killed myself, the number of razor blades and the water temperature in the tub, but she wouldn’t tell me anything about her death. Then we moved on to the subject of shoes.

  Euridice wasn’t her real name, that was her pen name as a deceased novelist. I decided immediately that I liked her a lot, that she was a sensitive soul. We would have been best friends for life, if we weren’t already dead.

  Everyone called her Euridice la scrittrice, Euridice the Writer, because that’s what she wanted to be called. The rhyme was intentional: now that our words no longer communicated anything to the living, we took great enjoyment in making our words communicate with each other. A rhyme was a perfect coming-together for them, their version of love at first sight, of incest on a desert island. It was the only available form of dialogue, specially packaged just for us. It was a cover that fit perfectly with its box, and that was especially important, now that the box was empty.

  Euridice remembered the names of her classmates from high school and a list of her favorite books. This filled me with astonishment and admiration. Memory among the dead generates the same reverential respect that prophecy does among the living, because it’s a way of processing time that is extraneous to us: certainly, we still remember the events of our past, but not the minor details.

  Euridice was writing a science fiction novel. The main character was called Euridice, and she was a human being living on a hostile planet called Earth. “Her mission is to go on living without killing herself, and she will succeed because she’s a superhero.”

  That told me that she too had committed suicide, but I decided not to ask any more questions, since she clearly didn’t want to talk about it.

  Since meeting Euridice I f
elt less lonely. As if I’d expected her. Certain mornings I felt the way I did before I putrefied. I felt my heart inside and the world outside, as if there were nothing missing, not even the future.

  November 2 was the Day of the Dead, and the cemetery was absolutely packed. Leaning over the coffin, squeezed in among the crowd of conventionally prostrate relatives, I rooted for my corpse: “Rise and walk.”

  Genuflecting old women and bored kids, spouses carrying flowers wrapped in vulgar aluminum foil. How uninteresting, the ritual of visiting the dead. With my gaze focused on my body, I kept saying to it, over and over: “Get moving!” I was rooting for it as if at a horse race. It wanted to be Lazarus, the same way it wanted to be Sailor Moon when I was small. Its eyes were closed as it wished for its transformation, but now it could no longer open them.

  I needed to resign myself. It wouldn’t be coming home even for Christmas, nor for my birthday. I’d have to celebrate without the cheeks to blow out candles or the hips to dance. Without a stomach to digest the cake or the lips to say thank you. Other people’s kisses wouldn’t smack. I’ll have to celebrate without my body: it’s no longer invited. Without it, I won’t be able to turn a year older: it was my body that always kept count. It was my body that proved that time went on and on and on, and it was also the reason that it did.

  I’ll be stuck with my age of twenty-five, as well as with the same old dirty dress. Like a panhandler in an American movie who jealously pockets the only quarter he’s made all day, I’d eke out the rest of eternity with my quarter century of life.

  I went home. My mother was sleeping naked with the light on and a romance novel open on her belly. I tucked her in.

  On November 7, like every Monday, there were plenty of customers. High school students making tiny Xeroxes of their art history textbooks to hide during their in-class writing assignments, little kids from middle school who needed official paper for bureaucratic requests, but also professionals who needed Xeroxes, envelopes—in other words, objects that would only temporarily be in their possession, and so there was never any emotion in their voices when they asked me for them. Which is why I wasn’t very interested in this type of customer. The ones I cared about were the elementary school children who asked for notebooks. When my boss would point them to a shelf, they’d spend a long time picking one out, with considerable trepidation, reviewing all the covers available, as if they were choosing something they’d use for the rest of their lives. That morning a dark-haired little girl was unsure whether to pick a graph-paper notebook covered with teddy bears and little hearts or a more masculine one with a picture of a guy surfing. I hid behind the shelf and watched with a smile.

  When I got home my mother was already asleep. I gave her a goodnight kiss.

  Now that there were finally insects at my place, I got into the habit of leaving a trail of sugar on the dining room table every evening. Then I’d come home late at night and turn on the light. I’d watch the cockroaches scatter across the table like inkblots, I’d watch them take refuge in the corners: they knew I was there and it didn’t strike them as absurd. They believed in me, and in return I believed in them.

  11/10/2011: Life is hard up here without my body. Down there time is running out and there’s nothing I can do about it. If I’d known that my vanity would be transformed into a pathetic unrequited love, perhaps I’d never have killed myself.

  On November 12, Anna met Filippo.

  She won his heart in the pub on Piazza Teatro Massimo: she went up to him and said: “Ciao, I believe in love and friendship, and above all in respect.” To believe in something is one of the sweetest things that can happen to a dead person, and it’s an excellent weapon of seduction. And so that same night they went to a hotel on Viale Regina Margherita and had sex.

  Anna isn’t pretty, but she had a beautiful death that left no marks. She died in her sleep: heart attacks, like idealism, are also a tool of seduction here. My slashed veins aren’t much to flaunt, on a Saturday night, while I drink my usual whiskey at the pub on Piazza Teatro Massimo. In fact, people here dislike suicides. We’re the pariahs of the deceased community, and they avoid us like the plague. We are the ones who discarded the only thing they desire. Just try and make them understand, understand that when I was alive I loved life much more than they ever did, that they’re a bunch of hypocrites for changing their preferences only afterward, like children after you take their ball away. Try and make them understand that while artists can recycle their suffering in their art, I didn’t know what to do with mine. The things that you don’t know how to use don’t belong to you.

  I want another whiskey. Euridice steals a bottle for me from behind the bar. I raise the bottle: I drink with her to all the goals we can no longer achieve. As soon as I raise my wrist and it comes close to the candle, the cuts are illuminated: it’s my empty pentagram, I’m fond of it, all my silence is written in it.

  That night I went to the hotel on Viale Regina Margherita with Anna and Filippo. It was a small room that overlooked the empty street. It was very quiet.

  While they were getting undressed I went in the bathroom and unwrapped the little soap bars, arranged on a little dish next to the packets of shampoo and bodywash, and I held the bars in my hand for a while, caressing them. I could feel the impression of what had once been deep emotion. Its empty, gaping form, without anything left inside.

  In the hotel room I sat on a chair and watched them fuck.

  She lay on her back and he climbed on top of her.

  They started slowly. Right hand on right breast. Fingers clutching. They mimed gestures that were miles and galaxies away. Gestures that they remembered mathematically but not emotionally. Not the electric discharge of nerves, not the marathon of blood. Then the parts fit together: that still worked. Back and forth, without sweat. Back and forth, without expecting anything more. They shut their eyes tight. Her fingers followed a familiar route over his back. Their mouths knew the equation of tongue and lips but there was no saliva available. They held on to each other desperately as if on a sinking ship, she clamped her skinny thighs around him but their solitude didn’t change temperature. There was no sweat to secrete, no sperm to spill. I looked out at that desert, with concentration and a bit of pity. There were even moans at the end, like the ones they’d seen themselves emit when they were still alive.

  They were reproducing a counterfeit desire. They dressed in silence.

  Now instead of desire there’s a desire for desire. Now inside the bodies there are no ovaries to be deceived, no lungs to make us pant. Now sex is the body’s own empty room inside the empty room of a hotel. There, that’s what death is: a matryoshka doll of empty rooms. Too bad, now that love really would be eternal.

  Then Christmas came.

  Aunt Clara put up the tree and strung it with Christmas lights. On Christmas Eve she made lasagna and my mother put on some easy-listening music. They didn’t say a word during dinner. They each wondered who had bought the napkins and the red forks. They each wondered who had put a silvery star of Bethlehem on the tree. They each wondered who’d lit the incense and who’d cleaned the jam and crumbs off the table. They each wondered why the floor was gleaming and the windows were sparkling.

  After dinner I went to visit myself at the cemetery.

  I dragged my body out of the coffin. I decked it with red and green Christmas ornaments and little wooden angels. There was a red toy train dangling from one rib, a Santa Claus lodged in the eye, a Baby Jesus nestled cozily in the jawbone. Spook lights were our crackling hearth.

  At a certain point the rats arrived, even though no one had invited them. I was tempted to chase them away, but it would have been an act of selfishness. Unjustifiable arrogance. Now that I was incorporeal, my body had much more in common with the rats than it did with me: to be exact, they shared 94.9 percent of their genetic material.

  Euridice showed up.

 
“What are you doing here?”

  “But you invited me yourself!”

  “Yes, but I never thought you’d come, you said that you were going to write all night.”

  “I’ve already written everything I wanted to write. It’s a true story. I can read it to you from memory.”

  “Okay.”

  “At Sungir, near Moscow, a young woman, a man, and a little girl were buried thirty thousand years ago. Their bones were shuffled together like a pack of cards. Like that game where everyone’s an animal: who’s the calf, who’s the carotid artery? The foot pretends to be a hand, a rib claims to be a sternum. Skull against skull, the bones were arranged in lovely rings like oversized necklaces. Between a leg and a sternum, between an eye socket and an orphaned hand, precious jewelry and little sculptures of horses were placed, alongside little ivory outfits and straightened mammoth tusks. The girl’s skull was adorned with lots of tiny beads. The mammoth tusks were like the sides of a toy chest. Inside the chest, the bones played at being playthings themselves. ‘To be or not to be,’ asks the skull, but everyone knows the answer. Unfortunately, thirty thousand years later, those happy bones were placed in a museum. And so they discovered that they weren’t a toy chest at all, but a historic artifact. They never would have wanted to be anything so serious. ‘We are a relic of the human race dating back to the Paleolithic,’ says the rib cage sadly, ‘and there’s nothing fun about that.’ In that museum the bones were very depressed.”

  “Is that how the story ends?”

  “What else were you expecting? Now let’s have a smoke.”

  She pulled out of her pocket a cigarette for herself and another for me.

  I lit mine and imagined that puzzle of bones. I lit a second cigarette and imagined the bones after they’d been arranged for display in the museum. I lit a third and imagined that I was at the museum and then I went out and did lots of things because I was still alive.