Hollow Heart

by Viola Di Grado

  On February 11, 2012, Whitney Houston died, apparently from a mix of alcohol and antidepressants, and my boss yammered on about it all day.

  Suddenly in his eyes she’d become an extraordinary artist. Facebook was full of her videos, accompanied by the commentary of weeping emoticons. The undying love that she proclaimed at the top of her lungs in her most famous song had spread like a virus through the entire online community. Everyone will always love her, even those who had never listened to her. Even new fathers and new mothers, obsessed with the canine grimaces of their children in pictures, had moved on from those photos to pictures of Whitney.

  I tried to distract myself by arranging the new silver Bic pens on the shelf, but it was impossible: my boss kept commenting on videos and reading his comments aloud: “Another great talent destroyed by drugs. RIP Whitney.”

  It was unacceptable that death should perform this kind of facelift on the reputations of artists. It was equally unacceptable that, in contrast, death should have failed to perform any cosmetic surgery whatsoever on my identity: I was still the same behind-on-her-exams university student, and as if that weren’t enough—now that eternity had entered the picture—being behind had taken on an insurmountable cosmic dimension.

  I thought these things while lying in bed that night. And suddenly, in the hollow depths of myself, I found a tattered scrap of hope: a malingerer. A still-alive fish on the beach. A technological object that had once been useful but which was now overly complex and obsolete. I didn’t know what to do with it, with hope. Suddenly, I sensed that something could change. But what?

  I got up as if I were suffering from insomnia.

  Right in front of my window was my dark wooden desk, with a black metal reading lamp and a pile of university textbooks. There were creased pamphlets from museum shows I’d never attended and discount coupons from perfume shops on Via Etnea. There were bus tickets I didn’t need anymore. And Post-its with phone numbers written on them, samples of revitalizing conditioner and moisturizing creams, a hair band. A silver-plated frame with a picture of Lorenzo and me; what was that still doing there?

  We were in the elevator, on our way up to the apartment we would live in together. Smiling. We had the strange proportions you always get in a selfie: my arm, holding the camera, was enormous and his head, behind mine, was too small. We looked like two snakes of different species put in the same glass cage by accident at the zoo. Happy in different ways, unaware of all the skin we’d have to shed. How could I have ever fallen in love with a guy like that, with a gym membership and a subscription to the “Star Wars” forum? Did I have to abandon my body underground in order to understand that this was all we had in common, that we belonged to the only human species to have survived for evolutionary reasons?

  I flung the photo to the floor. I didn’t bother picking up the shards because, after all, they can’t hurt me anymore.

  The sun was almost up. I rushed out as fast as I could go.

  When I got to the end of Corso Italia I went down to the water. There was practically no one around, living or dead.

  And I . . . will always . . . love youuu!

  Whitney Houston’s best-known song, which I’d never liked and which I now liked even less, bombarded my head. What a tasteless joke, to have a voice in my head telling me that it loves me.

  Especially because that song, like all other songs, isn’t for me anymore.

  I knelt before the sea. Where the edge of the waves, never cold, never damp, began. I knelt there as if facing a horizontal wall. A wall that runs from one blue to another, but each blue is more argumentative than the one before, it never lets me drown, it doesn’t give me even a hint of goose bumps, a single miserable drop on my calves. And I will always love you.

  I pulled out my leather diary. I decided that it was a letter for someone who would rescue me. And that someone is you.

  The next Friday, when I got home from work, my mother wasn’t there. I couldn’t find her in her bedroom or any other room. I sat in my usual chair at the dining room table, waiting for her, until dawn. I waited for her until sunset. Then night again. Then dawn again. Then the afternoon. Then she came home.

  She was with the man.

  She threw her coat on the floor, her keys on the table by the door. She went into the bathroom and called: “Will you make the pasta? The pot’s in the bottom right cabinet.”

  I opened the cabinet door and bent down; he reached through my fingers and grabbed the pot out of my hands. He filled it with water. My mother came back and said: “I have to go out and get some tomato sauce, I forgot that we don’t have any.” And she left.

  I watched the water as it heated up. I watched my hands slide into it. I didn’t have nerves anymore to tell me the excessive heat, nor did I have muscles to jerk my fingers out of the water. I didn’t have anything but my monstrous freedom.

  I was like the bacteria that were eating away at my body: invisible to the human eye, devoid of a nervous system to take care of me, but still perfectly capable of destruction. The man came over to check on the water. Little bubbles were stirring on the surface. I lifted the pot and dumped the water onto his face.

  He screamed and threw himself to the floor.

  My mother came back: “Oh my God, what happened? Carlo?”

  “Help me! Help me! It burns! It burns!”

  He was sobbing. He was shaking. The pot was on the floor. I went back to the front door and carefully hung up my mother’s coat.

  At the hospital they said that Man had second-degree burns.

  Flat on his back in a white bed, he was grimacing, twisting the naked pulp of his face: he kept swearing that someone had thrown the water onto him. My mother smiled: “You’re a little mixed up, try to get some sleep, you’ve been working so hard lately, and then you’re having all those problems with your wife . . .”

  Next to him in the bed were two people. There was an old man whose eyes were closed and whose arm was bandaged with a thousand tubes hanging off of his flesh, his chest rising and falling. Next to him, an old woman sobbed and sobbed; her chest was motionless and her arms were hooked to his chest.

  She asked me: “What’s your name?”

  “You can see me?”

  “Of course I can. I’m dead. Let’s talk a little, please.”

  I left the room and wandered through the corridors of the burn unit. They were packed. Live moving bodies hobbling along, opening up manhole-smiles in the direction of passing white doctors, begging for good news. Tumbledown moving bodies, bodies with arms and legs bandaged like papier-mâché. Lumbering heavy bodies, damp, full of fluids and blotches and questions. Bodies jammed in among other bodies, lighter bodies: dead bodies.

  Lots and lots of dead people, motionless, sitting or lying on the floor. They weren’t bandaged, their flesh was disrupted, oozing rivers of pus, their faces and arms covered with flimsy white membranes, like jellyfish melting in the sun. There was a boy missing an arm who said to me: “Sit down by me for a moment. Please.”

  There was a little girl with no lips: “I’m afraid.”

  There was another girl in the corner: “Tell me a story with a happy ending.”

  There was a mother with her arms wrapped around her child and neither had a face, nothing but a bow of naked muscles. There were two blond twins, their chests riddled with holes; both boys were staring at me but I refused to see them. They looked at me and I closed my eyes. Cut it out, I’m not like you! At last my mother came out and we went home.

  Hi, I’m Dorotea Giglio (1986–2011). You don’t know me, but I remember your face. I saw it in the paper when you were killed. It was an accident: you happened to be crossing the street during a Mafia shootout. In the grainy photograph that appeared in the crime section, your face looked as untroubled as if you expected to live forever.

  I’d like to get together and chat with you, find o
ut how you’re spending your eternal life, what new hobbies you’ve come up with for yourself, that kind of thing. Do you still go by the street where you died? Or does that stir unpleasant emotions for you? I died in the bathroom at home, and I wish going back there freaked me out and scared me. But every morning I still brush my teeth and shower in there. I use a cleansing cream for sensitive skin, I spend five minutes inspecting for blackheads, but I’ve stopped getting them. I still keep my makeup arranged on the shelf, first the dark lipsticks then the light ones then the mascara, and finally the makeup-removing wipes. As soon as I’m done with something I put it back where it belongs. I so wish that the fact that I’m dead would stir something in me: sadness, disgust, the desire to be elsewhere.

  Man never came back to our apartment. I ran into him a couple of times at the supermarket, with a bandaged face. I saw him at his home, where I’d gone to get the striped tie my mother had given him and the photo of the two of them embracing with big smiles on the rocks of San Giovanni Li Cuti. I threw both the tie and the photo away.

  2013

  03/12/2013: My fibrous tissues have been reduced to shreds.

  03/13/2013: My body is a threadbare overcoat.

  03/14/2013, 6:00 A.M.: I’m happy, in spite of everything, to still be able to be close to my body. It’s not something everyone could do. It takes affection, understanding, and plenty of amour propre, alias necrophilia. There are times when I’d like to steal all its bones. Wear them myself, as I did when that was still my right. Do it while there’s still time, before they disappear. They’re still as white and luminous as pearls. When I was alive, I preferred pearls, but they never did anything for me. My bones, on the other hand, supported me as long as they could.

  That night I went with Anna and Euridice to lie on the beach and look at the sky. There were also a couple of little kids who had died recently. When Anna was alive, she’d been a dreamer. Now that she could only be dreamed, she was having a very hard time of things.

  She said: “I was religious, not a dreamer. It’s different.”

  She said: “Just a few more months. We’ll rise again before the end of the year.”

  We believed her. Our days were one long stag party: “Aren’t you excited that soon we’ll be back together?” I kept asking my body.

  We waited.

  We waited on Via Etnea, in front of the evergreen traffic lights: when will the red light finally bloom? We waited outside the little beach houses at the Scogliera, outside the doors that opened onto lawns cared for by those who no longer cared about us. We waited outside the gates of the Villa Bellini, including the ones that were always open, but only to those of us who had moved past the body phase. Looking down at our own bodies, abandoned one after another underground as soon as their expiration dates passed. Looking down at our eyes, closed for mourning. Looking down at our brains: broken-down machines, soon to be junked. Looking down at our hearts: now fallen silent. Looking out at the sea, especially. One was a cross-eyed little girl with black hair and a sky-blue dress. She had died of brain cancer.

  “Last night I dreamed about my Barbies again, the one with the camper and the one who’s getting married. They were on my bed and they were chewing off each other’s arms and legs. I don’t want to be eaten, go tell the worms, please.”

  She was holding another little child in her arms, small and translucent like a rubber doll: it was only a fetus. No bigger than a raspberry, it had tiny fingers joined together and a vestigial tail. It had neither eyelids nor defined genitalia. The little girl had dressed it in the pink-and-white dress of her favorite doll, the blonde one with the closed mouth.

  The sun started to set.

  “Hush, children. That’s the sun, it won’t hurt you.”

  The little girl held the fetus up so it could get a better view of the amazing drop.

  With death you forget so much, and you only learn a few new things, and all they do is befoul the wait. Now all we know how to do is wait. That’s our only talent. We wait and we talk, we talk and we wait to talk. We do it lying down on the sea, most of all, but I also spend time at the cemetery: I’m a girl who likes to keep both feet on the ground. Waiting is one long meal, a cannibalism. We consume time just as time consumes our bodies underground. I like waiting; what else could I do, after all, now that no one waits for me anymore.

  We prick up our ears, but there’s nothing to be heard. We stretch our muscles, but there’s nowhere they can take us. We hold out our fingers, but nothing ever allows itself to be grasped. The girl, squatting down on the ground, made a bridge with her chubby little finger for a ladybug to climb across, but the ladybug just walked right through it.

  The little girl had a book, but we don’t know how to read. So we started talking about the fetus: Was it born dead or did it die born? Is it on our team or on the team of the living?

  Anna and a junkie riddled with track marks started playing catch with the fetus: as night fell, the little creature was an iridescent mist that flew from one pair of hands to the other. Euridice grabbed it and clutched it to her chest. She knotted the umbilical cord around her neck like a necklace.

  I said, “Stop playing with him! He’s better than us!”

  “But it’s fun! What a pill you are.”

  Anna opened her Bible. Euridice sat cross-legged and wrote. Her long, low-cut orange cotton dress, open wide to the clear blue sea, was like the sun bursting into a lens. Anna chose the passage. She doesn’t know how to read either, but of all of us she has the most powerful memory.

  “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.”

  “But when? When will we rise again? When will I be able to go wake up my body underground? It’s already mid-March!” says the little girl.

  “Sooner or later,” I reply. “You just have to wait.”

  “But does it know when to wake up?” asks the little girl.

  “The body knows everything, don’t you remember? Hot and cold, sleepiness . . .”

  “No, I don’t remember.”

  She grips my hand. The fetus is curled up on the ground on a seashell: Botticelli’s aborted Venus. The darkness is complete. The lights of the traffic and the bars are behind us: we can’t see them, and they can’t see us. The living are behind us: we can’t see them, and they can’t see us. Will the world really begin again? People keep coming over to our side, and so far we haven’t seen anyone make the journey in the opposite direction. We wait. And we wait. And we wait. A one-way journey is for dreamers, lovers, lunatics.

  Not for people like us. We wait for the return journey, the counterclockwise direction. We believe in Lazarus and Frankenstein, in Romero’s zombies. We believe in Poe’s Ligeia, who comes back more beautiful than before. Faith is important: faith in God, faith in Stephen King, faith in Ghost Whisperer. Our faith has been cleansed of terror and of guilt. We’re not frightened of Christ’s cross nor of Buffy’s. Faith is the imaginary ring on Carrie’s fingers as they reach out of the grave.

  I wait. I wait as if inside a defused bomb. I wait to have weight. I wait stretched out underneath the grass of the cemetery, holding my hand, as if to tell my body that the worst is over. Or else on the lawn, my head on the wet grass, my eyes wide open. For thy dew is as the dew of herbs, and the earth shall cast out the dead. I wait, but deep in my chest my heart no longer keeps count. One, two, three . . . Green light? No, the light is still red. I wait. On my wrist, instead of a watch, I have an oracle: the cuts on my veins are motionless minute and hour hands. This is the memento mori of my eternity: time is broken, don’t cry, it’s stopped bleeding.

  I never saw that little girl again: as we say in Italian, if you don’t die, we’ll see you another time. If you do die, on the other hand, we’ll almost never see you again, and certainly no one will miss you.

  The fetus, on the other hand,
I took home with me.

  First I hung him up by its arms on the coatrack, next to the leather jacket. Then I gave him a name, Geremia, after the prophet Jeremiah, and I put him on my bed with my stuffed animals: he was the sweetest one, after the blue elephant that my mother gave me for my fourth birthday.

  Then I started taking him out on a leash up and down Corso Italia. Every now and then the deceased would stop and pet him, asking me how many months he’d been dead and that sort of thing.

  On Saturday, October 8, outside the Geox store, a guy around thirty with intelligent green eyes told me I looked like Lily Collins, and that Geremia looked like the floating fetus attached to Frida Kahlo’s womb in her famous painting.

  I really liked Kahlo but I hoped that Geremia wasn’t one of her aborted children, for his sake; that way he wouldn’t have to suffer the regret of painterly qualities lost even before he’d had a chance to inherit them. Lily Collins, however, was new to me: I had to ask my boss, who knows how to read, to look her up. She’s the daughter of the singer Phil Collins, she played Snow White in the movie Mirror Mirror a year after my death.

  That night on YouTube I watched her flail around for hours, a smile on her face and a crown on her head, wearing a yellow-and-blue dress made by Eiko Ishioka: she was singing “I Believe in Love” and she repeated it over and over again, ad infinitum. Eiko Ishioka died of pancreatic cancer not long after the movie came out.

  The next day I waited outside Geox, hoping to see him again. The young man didn’t come back. Same thing the next day.

  At two in the morning I clicked PLAY again, to fall asleep: luckily Lily Collins, surrounded by gilded walls, under a camera rising straight up to God, still believed in love.

  I never saw the young man with intelligent green eyes again.

  I continued to take Geremia on long walks, after work. Since he never spoke or moved, I didn’t know if he liked me, but I knew he was better than I was, because he’d never been human.