Hollow Heart

by Viola Di Grado

  One time I sat down next to Alberto and his girlfriend, Sara.

  She is prettier than me, she smells of life in progress, and her hair grows and grows and grows. When she looks at someone, that someone returns her look. When she speaks, people listen. Her hands communicate messages of cold and heat, depending on the outside temperature: her skin isn’t a solitary and apathetic material, the way mine is. She has sufficient facial nerves to smile, and the nerve endings of her lips haven’t yet ended.

  All of these characteristics are very attractive in a human being; it was perfectly normal that Alberto should fall in love with a woman like her. How could I blame him?

  I walked with them down Via Etnea. I walked with them as they held hands along the paths of the Villa Bellini. I sat with them in his blue Fiat when they went out to buy groceries. I followed them among the shelves, I laid my hand on the package of chocolate cookies that he’d picked up and put back. I laid my hand on the can of corn he’d brushed when he’d reached for the tuna. I stood in line with them at the cash register. I went home. To Alberto’s home. I would sit with them at the table while they ate. I would sit with them on the little balcony while they read the paper and talked. I would sit on a chair, in the bedroom, while they fucked.

  02/04/2015, 5:39 A.M.: Underground, my white bones hand over to the third group of fungi what remains of my flesh.

  I left. I walked down Via Etnea. I reached Piazza Duomo. The parish priest of the cathedral basilica, dressed in purple, was presenting Saint Agatha’s relics to her devoted followers.

  I walked as far as Porta Uzeda.

  There was lots of noise and movement. There was a cart on which stood the statue of Saint Agatha; she was covered with gold, with a white face and little eyes, and a glassy gaze. The cart struggled toward Piazza Cutelli; I followed it, crushed between the people, compressed in the knotted muscles, liquid amid their blood, intubated in their veins, tossed about between intestines and stomachs, bewildered, exhausted. I followed the cart along Via Vittorio Emanuele, then to Piazza dei Martiri, Via VI Aprile, Via della Libertà, Piazza Iolanda. I didn’t know where I was going. The relics continued their journey. Via Umberto, Grotte Bianche, Piazza Carlo Alberto. Men in long white tunics supported the cart. Families with children and balloons, me tossed to and fro in the depths of their flesh and mixed up with the helium in the balloons. Shouts. Piazza Stesicoro. Stands selling candy apples and chunks of sugar coal and peppermint sticks. Stands selling pistachio crepes and granitas. Ice cream. Old men sitting on benches, children riding on their parents’ shoulders, dogs with their tongues lolling out, and me in the midst of their saliva, the smog, the fumes of exhaust and ricotta, sweat, cotton candy, me liquid in the prosecco in every glass, in the bars lining the way up to the Salita dei Cappuccini, in the mouths that talked and talked, in the lips pressed together in a kiss, in the closed, dark lips. The statue made its way up the hill and reached Piazza San Domenico. At 8:07 P.M., the relics came to a halt at the Church of Sant’Agata la Vetere.

  At 8:07 P.M., in my body, the Dactylium fusaroides never stop for a second.

  At 8:07 P.M., the relics were greeted joyfully in the church.

  At 8:07 P.M., there is no one to preserve what remains of me. Soon there will be nothing left of me, nothing left, nothing left. The Verticillium candelabrum have no idea of what they’re doing to me.

  I hurried to Alberto’s apartment, I was exhausted, exhausted, I fell to my knees at the foot of his bed.

  “I’ll always be there for you.”

  Sara lay down on top of him. Sara, her hands, her legs, her mouth devouring him.

  On my knees, I kept saying to him: “I’ll always be there for you.”

  “I’ll always be there for you.”

  “I’ll always be there for you and I’ll never hurt you, I’ll never even lay a finger on you.”

  When I got to work the next day, my boss stood up.

  “Do you want to tell me what the heck you’re trying to do?”

  “What, excuse me?”

  “You know perfectly well what I’m talking about. What intentions do you have with Alberto?”

  “None. No intentions at all. Why, did he say something to you?”

  “No, he didn’t say anything. But I can see how you’re behaving.”

  “But I’m not doing anything at all, I’m not trying to get him to break up with his girlfriend, I swear it, you’ve misunderstood me!”

  “His girlfriend? What does his girlfriend have to do with any of this, now? Dorotea, I’m not sure you’ve understood. I saw you following him and getting into his car with him . . . You need to leave him alone.”

  “But why?”

  “What do you mean why? Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Obvious? What’s obvious? That I don’t deserve someone like him? You think I’m worthless, don’t you?”

  “No, Dorotea, it’s that you’re . . . What are you doing? Don’t cry. You’re a fantastic girl, you’re sweet and you’re so intelligent, it’s just that you’re . . . you’re dead. You do understand that, don’t you?”

  I ran out of the store, slamming the door behind me.

  I’m no one. I’ve never been anyone.

  I got home. The bald lawyer from the fifth floor came in with me, along with his wife. While she was searching for her keys in her purse, he read aloud what was written in the announcement posted on the front door: TOMORROW A FUMIGATION CAMPAIGN WILL BE CARRIED OUT THROUGHOUT THE CITY. THE POPULACE IS THEREFORE URGED TO KEEP ALL DOORS AND WINDOWS CLOSED AND TO TAKE IN ANY LAUNDRY THAT HAS BEEN HUNG OUT TO DRY.

  I went upstairs to the apartment. My mother wasn’t home. I opened the first drawer in her desk. I pulled out the pictures she’d taken of me as a little girl, the ones that had been rejected by the magazine Lulù Bimbi, the ones with the delayed exposures and my body dissolving into the wall. I leafed through them one by one.

  Then the pictures she’d taken of me surrounded by flowers in front of the house: in a sunny corner of the sidewalk, baby’s breath, chrysanthemums, lilies, and me. Me. Me Me Me.

  I also found pictures of me, her, and Aunt Clara at Costa Saracena. We were on the glider on the terrace: I was smiling in my mother’s arms, wearing a diaper. In another picture I was alone, sitting in front of the TV, clutching a toy telephone. In another one we were in Trecastagni and the sky was gray, it must have just rained, I was wearing a pair of light-blue overalls and I had a serious expression on my face, I must have been about four. The third picture was almost the same but there was an opaque imprint of Aunt Clara’s finger on the right-hand corner of the photo.

  I overturned the drawer. Everything fell onto the floor.

  Buttons and business cards, pamphlets, more pictures, two vials of Lexotan, a broken brooch, a piece of blue tile worn smooth by the sea. I picked up the photos. I left the room, I walked through the house, from the dining room to the kitchen, to my bedroom, to the broom closet, to inside the armoires and the walls. I left the pictures on the floor, I left them behind me, a wake of photos, one after the other.

  Me in diapers. Me smiling. Me in front of the wall, my hair loose, me me me me me, the bread crumbs of Hop o’ My Thumb to help me find my way home. Unfortunately, by the time I reached the bathtub, the bag was empty: there were no more bread crumbs.

  I collapsed on my bed.

  Geremia was lying on the pillow. I crushed him to my chest like a teddy bear: I’m in the cradle, I’m alive, my mother still loves me up close.

  February 6 was Alberto’s birthday. He blew out the candles at his apartment, I said: “I love you.” Sara embraced him with a smile, I said: “I love you.” He unwrapped the dive watch she had bought him, I said: “I love you.” I slammed a fist down on the table, he furrowed his brow: “Did you hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Is someone there?”

 
“There’s no one, Alberto, you’ve got to cut this out.”

  I stood there, motionless, behind the table, as they cleared away the dishes. I stood there, motionless, as they turned on the TV and put in the DVD of All About My Mother. I stood there, motionless, until they were done watching and turned off the TV and put on their coats. I followed them to the door. I followed them into the door. Hard? Soft? Light? Dark? Weak? Strong? Alive?

  They turned the key and locked me.

  I heard their voices echoing down the hall; they were walking away. I heard Alberto saying: “It was something banging.”

  “Now, that’s enough, you’re losing your mind, I told you no one was there.”

  At home, Greta was sleeping fully dressed.

  No one took off her high-heeled shoes. No one turned back the covers for her. No one closed the shutters or turned off the lights in her bedroom. No one lay down beside her, shut her eyes, gave her a kiss, held her hand.

  02/08/2015: White, white, white.

  The next day was Sunday. I brought a cappuccino and some pistachio pastries to his house. He seemed much better: he was walking around his apartment. Sara was ironing one of his white shirts and singing a horrendous pop song. I caressed his shoulder. Soft? Smooth?

  They started fighting about me.

  He said: “I’ve had it! Get out of my apartment!” and he was clutching his head with both hands. Sara gathered up her things from the various rooms, laughing, and left. He shut the door. I could have passed through it and gone back to be with him, but it struck me as an obscene act. My immateriality had never before struck me as so vulgar. I stayed inside the door. I stayed the door.

  I thought of Anna: how long had it been since I’d seen her? I thought: “The city of confusion is broken down: every house is shut up, that no man may come in. Isaiah 24:10.”

  On February 12 Alberto missed work because he had a fever; my boss told me so. After work I bought two cipolline and two accartocciate, stuffed pastries I found in a first-rate bar on Corso Sicilia, and went to see him. He was reading a book. I got close to the page, but as always the words concealed their content from me.

  I stayed to watch him brush his teeth and get into bed.

  He turned out the overhead light. He lay down on the bed. I lay down next to him. You could hear traffic out on the street and, at a certain point, an ambulance. I drew closer and closer to him until there was no space between us. We were joined together like bones in a poetic articulation. The room was our articular capsule, solid and perfect. The half-open door, as insidious as a fissure in the articular cartilage, would return him to the world in a few hours. But for now Alberto was all mine. I hugged him close to me, to my whole woman-shaped void.

  My legs on his, my arms on his chest. It was so sad, sad, sad to be able to touch only in one direction. To know that my touch, in spite of all the intensity that I put into it, was just air on the blind wall of his body. I’d have given anything to have even just one of the twenty-seven bones that each of my hands contained when I was alive, so that Alberto could sense my touch. I’d have given anything to get back the extraordinary enchantment of tactile perception.

  I tried to squeeze him. My fingers were shipwrecked in his chest. My face pressed through to his sternum. Alberto screamed.

  Horoscope for the sign of Leo (for those who died between July 23 and August 22): Mercury will form a retrograde ring in your sign. Don’t try to put it on, though: no one wants to marry you.

  The next day, Alberto missed work. I was so frightened that I just sat on the floor and refused to do anything, with the risk of my boss firing me. But he said nothing. Perhaps he understood. Is that possible, to understand me? After all, there was nothing to be alarmed about: it was just that his fever had returned. Of course. I stood up.

  I paced back and forth in the store. I threw myself against the shelves. I ended up inside the wall, in a blind chunk of plaster. The phone rang while my boss was in the bathroom. I picked up the receiver.

  “Mario? Mario, is that you? Honey?”

  His wife. I emitted a husky, inarticulate sound, like the ghosts in the very worst Japanese horror movies.

  “Who is this?”

  Right, who am I? Who the hell am I?

  A painting without a canvas. Life without atoms. Breath without flesh. Pure anachronism.

  Alberto didn’t come to work the next day either.

  At 10:20 I left work and hurried to his apartment. He wasn’t there. His clothing, with the exception of his buckskin jacket, was no longer in his armoire, and his toothbrush and bathrobe were gone from the bathroom. His suede shoes and his sneakers were missing from the shoe rack. Four pair of black socks and two pair of gray ones were missing from his drawers.

  I went home.

  My mother wasn’t there. I set the table with the Christmas tablecloth. There were no more red plastic plates, so I got out a chipped orange china plate. I placed it in front of the chair with the teddy bear. I lit a white candle at the center of the table. I filled the bathtub. I undressed. I got in and stayed there for a week.

  I didn’t leave even when my mother came in to open the window to let in some fresh air. I even let a spider build its house on me, stretching from my right breast to the rim of the tub. I let two identical cockroaches run over me, and they felt only the chill of the steel.

  I stopped going to work. What was the point now?

  Every day I went to Alberto’s uninhabited apartment but he was never there. I looked for him in every room and even in the armoire. In the broom closet. Under his bed and under the bed in the guest room. In the shower, where the soap was still caked in a corner. Not in the drawers, because when you’re alive your body can’t fit into such tiny spaces.

  Alberto had stopped going to his apartment.

  I knew that this, where the living are concerned, meant that he was missing. I knew that for the living it’s imperative to return to your residence, that returning home is an integral part of the condition of living people. When children draw a house they turn the windows into eyes and the door into a mouth, so greatly do they identify their bodies with houses.

  Of course, we dead—even without our material bodies—still live in our homes, but it’s not important. If we fail to come home one day, if we sleep on a bus, if we spend the night out walking or sitting on the steps of a palazzo in the historic center of town, it makes no difference whatsoever. And in fact, in their drawings, dead children never transform windows into eyes. On the contrary, at the cemetery, bending over their own ruined skeletons, they play at turning their eyes into windows: they fill them with flowers, like on windowsills.

  When I got home I shut myself up in my room with the phone. Every half hour I called Alberto’s house, but no one ever answered. I called Sara’s house too. It took a lot of nerve. No one answered. I went into my mother’s bedroom. She was sleeping naked in the middle of the bed. Was it already that hot out? Or was she so depressed by this point that she just lay down without even bothering to put on her nightgown? I lay down next to her. On top of her. My legs on her legs. My lips clamped to her breast all the way down to the hard bone.

  She opened her eyes. I opened my eyes. She screamed.

  That night I wandered through the city. I looked for him everywhere. Alberto was nowhere to be found. Morning came. Then afternoon. Then evening. I looked for him at the cathedral with its pigeons and its shorts-clad tourists, I looked for him at the filthy bottom of the Amenano River, which reeks of carrion and vanishes underground. In the Roman aqueduct, in the overgrown, beer-can-littered paths of the Parco Gioeni, on the scalding steps of the Church of the Santissima Trinità, in the Church of Sant’Agata al Borgo. On the sidewalks of the Scogliera, and in the middle of the sea, deep down in the sea, inside the fishes. After four days I couldn’t take it anymore.

  I went back home. To my bedroom. To my bed.


  I took Geremia out from under the pillow, I clutched him to my chest. I wept. I looked at him. I looked at him with envy. He still had palmate hands, which meant that not enough of his cells had died yet to separate his fingers. His face and his brain and his organs too were still almost undifferentiated. He wasn’t yet an individual, the way I had been in life.

  It’s the death of billions of cells that makes us individuals. All cells die that fail to find around themselves the molecular conditions necessary to repress their own self-destruction, and it is their death that sculpts our shape.

  The finished form of our hands, our eye sockets, our lips is only the result of a chain of failures, of suicides averted, of lives protracted beyond their wishes. The tip of the nose, the cavity of the nostrils, the eyes that look out onto the world and do not close are the result of a molecular constriction that has prevented a whole series of predestined deaths.

  That fetus was as close to God, to heaven, to the abstract and infinite matter of the universe as anything I’d ever seen. It was a pure death impulse not yet entirely inhibited by development. That fetus was all of us before the death of our cells could carve our absolute into squalid little cookie cutters.

  My breasts and my elbows, my lips—the whole map that was called Dorotea Giglio—stuck out like headstones commemorating the death of the billions of heroic cells that managed to eliminate themselves. We are a collection of all the cells that haven’t managed to carry out their ancestral kamikaze mission. Our flesh, so cleanly divided between one finger and the next, is the floor plan of a forgotten necropolis.

  In July of 2011 I’d never been so close to myself: I too, like all the thousands of billions of cells that died every day inside me, suddenly no longer found around myself the conditions necessary to forestall my suicide.

  The next day I put Geremia into my big gray travel bag and moved to Alberto’s place.