Hollow Heart

by Viola Di Grado

  Horoscope for the sign of Leo (for those who died between July 23 and August 22): Saturn continues to reside in Libra, but don’t go visit him, he’s not expecting you.

  Now that Sinéad O’Connor had attempted suicide, I looked at her poster over my bed with new eyes: like an expensive dress in a shop window, with guilty yearning. I wanted her all for myself, in my network of friends, in my death: I called to her, as if out of malice, but I was just incurably dead. It had never occurred to me that I might wish for someone else’s death. Before, it would have been wickedness, not loneliness.

  Geremia was stretched out on the ground, in the dust, like a Muslim prayer rug.

  Since he died in utero, his body underwent maceration, meaning that the decomposition of his flesh, protected from extrinsic factors and microbes, took place solely through internal agents. No worm had ever touched his body. It’s truly fascinating. It’s the highest degree of self-sufficiency. His entire annihilation is a personal matter, pure introspection. I admired his independence: when he grew up he would have been a strong man, sufficient unto himself; he would have dispensed unconditional love without any selfish desire to receive love in exchange.

  On January 12, I went with Alberto to the wine store near the stationery shop to buy a bottle of Nero d’Avola, my favorite. His girlfriend came with us. We went to get a pistachio gelato on Corso Italia. I liked him so much that when I was near him I lacked air. I felt the lack of the six liters of oxygen that I took into my lungs every minute when I was alive.

  On January 15 he gave me a scarf. It used to belong to his girlfriend. I stroked it all day long. I hurried to pay myself a visit.

  Having a scarf around my neck unleashed all sorts of absurd thoughts in me. Like for instance: being cold, being hot, the feeling of the wool. The whole way to the cemetery I played at putting it on and taking it off, imagining that it made me feel warmer or colder. I got to the headstone. I wrapped the scarf around my body’s neck.

  01/15/2015, 10:00 A.M.: I love Alberto in a way that’s different from how I loved Lorenzo. It’s strictly a physical thing. The beat of my heart is no longer the twofold closure of the two atrioventricular valves followed by the closure of the aortic and pulmonary valves. My skin no longer encloses my body and my sternum no longer encloses my heart. Now I’m wide open, around the clock. Open to worms, open to bacteria. Now I’m wide open like a house with broken windows. The vessels of my arteries, underground, are now flowerpots for all creation. My heart is thrown open to external agents, under the soil trodden by one and all. From Lorenzo’s doormat I’ve graduated to being the doormat of the whole universe, and it’s much nicer and much fairer. It’s unconditional love.

  When I got home I was in an excellent mood. I caught up with my mother in the kitchen and I broke the truth to her: “Your apartment is infested, I’m sorry.”

  01/16/2015: Beetles defecate on every tendon.

  01/17/2015: Horrible little butterflies attack my flesh. A lurid dust starts from my skull: yes, that really was once my hair.

  On January 18—it was a Sunday—I went up Mount Etna with Alberto, Sara, Anna, and Euridice. We walked on the snow-covered dirt path, surrounded by black birches. The footsteps of the two living people made noise. We reached the lavastone cave of the Bocche di Fuoco. Sara sat down in the cave and got out the sandwiches. She said that it was too cold, she complained, she rubbed her arms against her chest. Anna and Euridice remained standing, amid the dark shadows, crossing their arms over their chests the way Sara had done.

  Anna trembled and said slowly: “I’m cold.”

  Euridice trembled and said slowly: “I’m hungry, I’m thirsty, I’m sleepy.”

  Alberto emerged from the cave and went to get water from the cistern at one of the huts. I followed him, walked with him, behind him.

  At Canova Park, in Australia, in 1979, Mary D. Leakey found a set of footprints. They belonged to a man and a woman, two Australopithecines, who were running away from a fire in search of safety in a clearing. I don’t remember where I read it, but I do remember that it’s the oldest documented escape.

  01/18/2015: Nicrophorus humator, I don’t hold it against you, I know that you need my flesh, but do you need it as much as I do?

  On January 19 it was drizzling out. It was almost closing time. Alberto was organizing the discounted 2015 agendas.

  “I realize we haven’t known each other long, but I have this urge to tell you everything, you know.”

  He put on his overcoat.

  “And I mean everything. I hope that’s okay with you.”

  He said goodnight to our boss. He went out. He opened his umbrella. I followed him to his car. We had ten minutes at our disposal: that’s how long it usually took him to get home. He fastened his seat belt and checked his rearview mirror. He started the engine.

  “When I was nine years old my mother started spending too much time in the bathtub. This is something I’ve never told anyone else. Before taking her bath she’d set the dinner table with our Christmas tablecloth and light a white candle at the center of the table. I don’t know why. She’d lay out the red porcelain dishes that my grandmother had bought her in Holland. Those dishes are gone now, because my mother smashed them all against the wall when I was, like, eleven, one night when she was completely drunk. Anyway, whenever I saw the table set, I knew that she was in the bath and that she’d be in there a long time. I’d sit down at the table, in my designated chair, and watch the candle burn down. I’d clutch Lidia’s broken teddy bear to my chest. I was terrified, my heart was racing furiously.”

  Alberto braked at the stop sign. He rolled down the window.

  “If by the time the candle had burned down and gone out my mother still hadn’t emerged from the bathroom, I would run in terror to check on her.”

  Alberto lit a cigarette.

  “At first I’d call out or knock hard on the door, but she never answered. I’d put my ear to the door and concentrate.”

  Alberto put the car back in gear and pulled out.

  “As soon as I heard anything, even the slightest movement, I’d heave a sigh of relief. She’s still alive, I’d tell myself. She’s still alive.”

  Alberto turned on the radio.

  By January 21 my hair had all fallen out, scattered around my skull. On January 21 I touched Alberto’s hair.

  It was raining, he got to work late, as he came in he said: “I’m drenched.” I took advantage of the opportunity to reach out and touch his hair. I said: “It’s true, I’ll run and get you the hair dryer, I have a portable one that I keep in the back.”

  His hair was as soft and sweet-smelling as gold.

  I wasn’t certain that gold was soft and sweet-smelling. Plus, his hair was black. It was black because it was the same color as the panthers in the documentary that my mother was watching the day before, and that same night Euridice told me that panthers are black. She is an archeologist of the senses: even though she no longer has them, she’s memorized them better than the rest of us. She remembers one hundred percent. She can look inside herself without crashing into her organs. She smiles and her smiles speak the interior instead of imitating the exterior the way ours do.

  I left Euridice sitting on the saltwater with her notebook and went to the zoo to touch a panther. At first I was too scared to go into the cage: useless inhibitions from when I was alive. The panther was sleeping. I extended a trembling hand toward it.

  I pulled the hand back.

  I couldn’t touch it. But there was no doubt about it: the panther was black in the same way that Alberto’s hair was. I left with the same sense of satisfaction I felt in middle school when I solved an equation. The panther was black and beautiful; Alberto’s hair was black and beautiful.

  But why was the panther black while Alberto had black hair? Did the fact that the panther identified with its black while Alberto didn’t ide
ntify with his make the black of one different from that of the other?

  I came to a halt, discouraged, in the deserted street.

  I was no longer sure that anything about the panther’s appearance could help me understand Alberto’s hair. I wasn’t sure that there was anything in the world capable of bringing me any closer to understanding him, and without understanding him, I had no chance of being loved in return.

  Because after all colors don’t exist. They are simply our way of codifying the intensity of light, and they came about strictly for evolutionary reasons: our ancestors needed to distinguish between one fruit and another in the forest. Now that I no longer needed to evolve, now that I had been dismissed from civilization, the falsehood of colors revealed itself to me in all its ignominy. How could I ever hope to conquer Alberto, if we weren’t victims of the same lies?

  I passed through the street door of my apartment building.

  My mother was still up and was watching a documentary about the Second World War with Clara. If I had sat down beside them, neither one would have had to move over. I wasn’t even capable of reducing the amount of space available.

  I withdrew into my room. Not my room from when I was alive, the room of my death. The room of my death is the entire universe, and I occupy no more than a little corner of it at the cemetery, out of shyness. When I reached the dark cemetery, I followed the path that led to my remains: by now I knew the way by heart, I no longer needed any light. Two dogs could be heard conversing in melancholy tones on distant balconies, along with the siren of an ambulance, quickly swallowed up in silence.

  I arrived at my headstone.

  I lay down.

  I took the dry grass between my fingers. Soft? Smooth? Hard? And what color? In the dark I’m justified in not knowing. I yanked out the blades of grass one by one, grinding my teeth. “This is the real world,” I said to myself, “and it’s not here for you.”

  01/22/2015: All the cartilage has crumbled.

  01/23/2015: The flesh that remains is just thin leather. Arsenic runs through the remaining hair, but there’s no one left to poison.

  01/24/2015: Soon I’ll be nothing but calcium carbonate and calcium phosphate. A chemical formula.

  For my fourth birthday since my death, January 30, Euridice arranged a wonderful surprise for me. She had me meet her at the beach and there she handed me two plane tickets to London: “I understand how you feel, dead for just a few years, it’s depressing, I’ve been through it myself.”

  The tickets were used bus tickets, because of course we didn’t need real tickets, since we were invisible. Just as we had no need for reservations for the five fabulous nights in whatever five-star hotel we might choose. We would get drunk for free on all the alcohol we wanted to take from the minibar. And, best of all, we were going to see Amy Winehouse in concert.

  Euridice really helped me a lot. I’d never had her initiative and willpower, but then she never had my twenty-five years of age. There’s always a reason to envy other dead people. A more intact skeleton, fewer insects at the corner of the mouth, or a nicer past. More people at your funeral, more chrysanthemums around your headstone, less fading in the letters that make up your name. Now that we’re all stagnating in the bottom half of the hourglass, with no more time at our disposal, our past is the diamond that we wear every day, jealously. We always want ours to be the one that glitters the brightest.

  Like greedy thieves we ask the others what they did for a living, whether they had children, if they achieved their dreams, and with every good memory we’d like to plunge our hands right into them and steal it. Were you famous? How many people did you have sex with? The questions can get very cynical: how many people did you have under you? Now that we’re under everyone, in the foul belly of the earth, that’s an important question.

  I don’t have Euridice’s initiative. I don’t have her self-confidence, and my self is lost forever. Still, what do I care about being the best, now that my identity is no longer a valid currency in the world? The past is a diamond that we wear every day. Every one of its facets is different but every facet reenacts the last instant of life. Every facet of my diamond is as cold and white as a bathtub.

  The Royal Albert Hall was a labyrinth full of gilt friezes and stairways upholstered in velvet, too many entrances and too many exits, too many coat checks, too many dead blonde English girls directing you to the correct row. We found our seats. Amy Winehouse came onstage almost immediately, alone, without applause and without musicians. It was dark; she stood at center stage with her skinny legs, her black eyes, a skimpy little yellow dress that fell above her knees, and six-inch crocodile high heels. She swayed, she set down an empty glass and grabbed the mike, then she smiled. Her hair was piled high in her usual teased sixties-style beehive, and out of the middle of it stuck little cloth bees on metal wires. The audience clapped at the pun.

  The meaning was clear. In English, her hairdo was called a beehive, and so Amy had simply added the bees. It’s pretty simple. We can no longer chat with our parents, sweethearts, neighbors, grandparents, children, siblings, friends. Now that the living can no longer hear us, our words remain inside us, raw and misshapen, like steaks gone bad. We turn them over on our tongues, tirelessly, our carrion-words, until we finally make puns of them: that’s all we can do. Rhymes, alliterations—what else can we do with them? It’s a sad and moving game. Now that the alphabet has gone bad and words no longer communicate anything, we love making them communicate with each other. It’s a little bit like playing with Barbie dolls: a regression to childhood, something that begins in old age, and after death goes on and on and on.

  Amy grabbed the microphone.

  “Hi, everyone. I’m glad you’re here. Don’t feel sorry for me, my intestine’s as empty as a crystal vase, the alcohol that killed me ensures that it doesn’t fill up with anaerobic bacteria.”

  She started singing. She was strange and wonderful. Her octaves followed scales that weren’t the traditional musical scales. They were spiral staircases, twisting in ever narrower and tighter coils, suspended in midair.

  I had imagined that people’s voices changed once they were dead. But dead Amy’s voice was more like Amy’s voice than it had been when she was alive. It was a sound as identical to itself as a memory: distant, vague, circular, it kept coming back to itself like a carousel. It was a déjà-vu voice, it was in our heads. Amy sang in playback and each one of us was the memory of her voice. In the middle of her best song, while she was saying, “And I go back to,” she fell to the floor. I would have gone to help her, but I know that you can’t die twice. Amy wasn’t moving. Not even blinking.

  The song went on.

  Folded up on her side on the floor, skinny and limp as a long insect, eyes closed, one high heel shoe kicked off her foot, and a black sea of hair poured out onto the stage, she went on, without missing her high notes and without moving her lips. In the deserted and silent Royal Albert Hall, two living ushers slowly gathered up crumpled playbills and empty beers from under the seats. A dented water bottle. A cell phone. A straw. We listened to Amy. No one complained about the fact that her body was not performing along with her voice. No one seemed to miss the ritual of lips opening and closing in time with the song.

  “Back to Black” ended.

  “Thank you. Sorry I’m not in better shape, I’ll come to soon enough, but first I’ll sing another one for you. Where’s my father? Daddy, are you there? Do you see my father in the audience? It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter, now I’ll sing you one from my new album, I hope you like it. Daddy, this one’s for you, I love you so much.”

  The lights went out. She started singing again in complete darkness. Lying there, motionless, eyes half shut. The theater was closed for the night.

  That night we went to sleep in a five-star hotel on Oxford Street. We walked through all the doors until we found an unoccupied room. All
night long, on the silk bedcovers, we talked.

  I talked about Alberto.

  Euridice told me about her unsuccessful career as a writer: when she was alive she hadn’t had time to publish and now she couldn’t remember what the point of publishing had been.

  When she was alive, Euridice had been a cosmic pessimist, but now that the cosmos was no longer her hotel—now that she had checked out and was only touring the place, without living in any of the rooms—the positive and negative aspects of that place were no longer any of her business.

  01/28/2015: Freedom, so important for the living, becomes unbelievably shabby the minute you die: reality can no longer impose any limits on it. The same thing goes for freedom of speech: no one can hear you. There’s nothing sadder than an excess of freedom. I’m lucky: I have a little less than the others, because I’m in love. That’s a limit. A line. My one and only line, a barbed wire that separates Alberto and me from everything else.

  I was very happy to go back to work.

  When we put prices on things, I’d always talk to Alberto.

  I hoped that the fact that I was dead wouldn’t be a problem. Love demands a future, and I don’t have one. What’s done is done. My everyday actions, my work and my friendships, my walks all have a meaning that goes no further than itself; they protect me from the boredom of eternity but they lead to nothing. What fascinated me about Alberto was that everything he did, even eating, had repercussions on his life: the food made his body rounder, movement tired him, the movies he saw made him more cultured and added to his pleasure. Me, on the other hand, they gave nothing; the images had turned stingy. It was frustrating.