Hollow Heart Read online

  With every cigarette an image, just like the Little Match Girl on Christmas Eve. And like her, after the last cigarette, I died: nothing new there.

  12/27/2011: My body has gotten smaller, or else the coffin has gotten bigger.

  12/30/2011: The aerobic germs are new in town and they attack the tissues that my anaerobic germs have crumbled to bits.

  2012

  On New Year’s I went to look for myself on the bed of the Cassibile River, where Lidia drowned herself. Anna and Euridice came with me.

  We ventured all the way to the lakes. I plunged my arms into the water. My fingers into the mud. I excavated, I probed.

  Euridice: “Did you know that in the old days the cavity in the heart where blood gathers was called the lake?”

  Euridice: “Did you know that our hearts pumped seventy-five milliliters of blood with every beat?”

  I searched underground as well. Now that my body no longer enclosed me, I could be everywhere and anywhere. I scratched the bark of the pine tree Euridice was leaning against and checked the liquid that oozed out. I crushed seven ants with my shoe to see their red. My blood could gush out anywhere: anatomy has become geography. My blood secretly irrigates the parched hills.

  Anna: “The new wine mourneth, the vine languisheth, all the merryhearted do sigh.”

  “Quit quoting from the Bible.”

  “It’s Isaiah and he knew very well that the world would end and then begin again. Now we need only wait for it to begin again.”

  My blood at the base of Mount Etna, subterranean, hemmed in by rock. My blood that pushes up from under the stalks of plants and the roots of oak trees. Clotted inside each plant, dried in the open mouth of every red petunia. To breathe in, now, is a gust of wind.

  The myocardium makes the mud pulse all the way to the slimy bristles of the earthworms, to their tiny mouths that suck at the dirt and the seeds and the eggs and the fragments of decomposing plants. The aorta pushes the worms out of the soil, into the sunlight. My tissues, once they’ve decayed, will garb the entire island: a garment of flesh stretching all the way to where the sea begins. The intricate corals of my arteries, I remember, were sixty thousand miles long: if you link them all together and wrap them around twice, they’ll adorn the throat of the Earth’s entire surface. When I grow up I’m going to be the world. When I grow up, and my body has vanished, I will be petals and murky rivers and endless eyes and ladders made of spread fingers and smoke-ice-eyelashes-bark-hail-wool-liver-iron-moon-fly wings.

  It’s just a matter of time; my innards are already spreading like a true story. Through the mud as if by word of mouth, a rumor made up of rotted glands. By now the arteries can no longer keep the secret to themselves: everyone, take, drink, this rain and these lakes and these rivers are my blood.

  Anna: “They shall not drink wine with a song; strong drink shall be bitter to them that drink it.”

  It started raining. I looked up but the water wasn’t red. Euridice had stopped talking. Her face remained expressionless.

  “Listen, exactly how long has it been since you passed away?”

  She lowered her eyes to her notebook and started writing.

  “Hey, are you listening to me? Or are you still underground?”

  She went on writing.

  “Please, tell me.”

  She shut her notebook and walked away. I followed her along the rocky walls.

  “Leave me alone, Dorotea. Go away.”

  “No, I want to know. I also want to know why you never go to visit your body.”

  She turned around, her eyes staring, her gaze cold: “If you don’t leave me alone, I’ll go to your house and throw all the photographs against the wall and then I’ll slam all the doors and then I’ll scare your mother to death, I’ll make her scream until she pisses herself and her vocal cords explode and she loses her voice for good. I’ll chase her to the window, I’ll shout in her ears, I’ll make her jump out.”

  I fell silent. I watched her walk away.

  Every now and then, while I was lying in bed at night, aping the things that living people do before they go to sleep (listening to music on an iPod, leafing through magazines, looking at the ceiling), I’d find myself engaging in what had once been thoughtful reflection, but was now rummaging around inside myself, groping around in the dark. That inner process that once led to an understanding of the world now rammed its head blindly against the imagination.

  There was no way out: on those walls, the ideas were frozen like prehistoric engravings, hieroglyphics inside a tomb, drawings that never meet the things they depict. My mind was a furious whirligig of puzzle pieces that never stopped to form a picture. At times they’d slow down enough to create the illusion of an image: a face, an idea, something real. Then I’d say: finally, I understand. Blood is red, my mother is a brunette, my mother loves me.

  But then I’d discover a monstrous lie in that harmony: the puzzle pieces were in the wrong places. Misunderstandings are the gaping edges of whatever it is we call freedom: without my senses, I was so completely free that I could interpret everything in whatever way I chose, without the constraints of perception. Reality was an extinct wild beast, and I could give it all the names I wanted. But names weren’t good for much, without my senses to call reality to me.

  Reality was useful only to the others. Supine on my bed, I wanted to get angry, but even the stones of my anger, rather than manifest themselves in shouts and fits of rage, remained inside me like kidney stones.

  How I wish I could actually reflect.

  But now to “reflect” was a treasure map to a lost privilege, so lost that it had become legend to me. It was a mythological verb: it was trapped inside a labyrinth without even being able to find the minotaur. It was set within quotation marks that weren’t even the same as those of the dialogue. Now I reflected without understanding, meaning I wasn’t reflecting at all anymore. It was a game of snakes and ladders: every time I misunderstood I’d lose my turn and be sidelined forever. Now I reflected the way mirrors do: whatever they find within themselves, they never understand its meaning.

  On January 4 I went to the cemetery with Euridice. After watching my decomposition for half an hour, she said: “I have to tell you something. I like your body. It’s really lovely.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’d like to keep it. I’ll take it to the movies with me, I’ll confide my secrets to it, we’ll have dinner together every night, and I’ll dress it in yellow and red. I’ll tell my friends it’s my sister.”

  “What are you talking about? You can’t do those things with my body!”

  “It will be a character in my novel, Euridice la Scrittrice’s best friend. It will help her on her mission of escaping suicide. My book will be a masterpiece.”

  “That’s enough of that. You’re talking nonsense, you can’t do those things with my body, I told you.”

  “Why can’t I? Who says?”

  “It says so right here, on my headstone! It says that this body was called Dorotea Giglio, and I’m Dorotea Giglio, I was her, and now she’s no one.”

  “I can’t see anything on your headstone but marks that mean nothing.”

  I got up and left.

  By the main entrance, next to a pair of weather-beaten headstones, stood two dead girls. Black hair, immaterial bodies dressed in pastel-colored summer clothes, and next to them their little exhumed skeletons. They carried armfuls of pupae. They’d rock them slowly, then put them back to bed in the holes of their lips.

  I left my headstone and went to Lorenzo’s apartment.

  He wasn’t home. The apartment was empty.

  I walked through dark rooms, touching things. In his room I opened the second dresser drawer, where he used to keep our loose photographs. They weren’t there anymore. Just pencil sharpeners and fliers and paper clips and a leather desk diary t
hat had never been used. Where were the two of us at Vendicari, with a flamingo beside us, and him in a pair of goggles with a seashell in one hand? And us hiking up Mount Etna, in heavy hiking boots, with tired smiles? Us in Barcelona in front of one of Gaudí’s undulating facades?

  I was so tired. I was so tired and I was tired of being tired in the past tense, I wanted to be tired in the present. Instead, even tiredness is in the past. I’m not anymore—I was and that’s that.

  Oh, how I miss the present indicative. To be able to say “I live here” or “I’m going to the movies.” Actions under way, tall and muscular and clothed in possibility, whereas now actions are stiff, naked fetuses, just completed and already sealed in little caskets for children, without any right to engender consequences. Nostalgia for when hope had some logical meaning, projected as it was into the future. Now it walks backward like a crayfish, and however much you might hope, what you’re left with is never any different from things as they happened.

  What I miss most of all is missing things. Remembering the past isn’t heartbreaking or romantic anymore. It gives no comfort; it’s just a form of calisthenics, or even worse, a muscle spasm.

  01/05/2012, 2:03 A.M.: My mouth is falling. My whole face is falling. I’m falling apart. My cheeks are puffy and full of keyholes. The rest of my body is swollen and corroded too. I’m falling apart, I’m falling apart. Lorenzo threw away his photos of me.

  2:43 A.M.: No, I didn’t die of love. I really wish I had: I’d be carrying on the legacy of literary figures like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary. Instead, you recover from love. One day you wake up and the heaviness you felt in your chest is gone. Another day you find you’ve stopped thinking about it. You start living again, without rancor, like a lamed dog. And what could be sadder than that, that your love wasn’t meaningful and powerful enough to persist? That a blind biology, responsible for your survival, should have uprooted your passion like some tremendous typhoon? The foundations of love and trust upon which you built your home have been destroyed. Just as the words spoken under the covers and the dreams of the future and the sacrifices with which you furnished every room have been destroyed. Something healthy and sadly primordial inside you, something that is yourself much more than you ever could be, has devastated every piece of furniture, every wall, leaving you frighteningly free and alive in the middle of the world. I faced up to that something. That typhoon, that biology. I faced up to it, and I beat it. I won, I won, I won a bunch of insects. I won the butterflies that tear out my hair, one strand at a time: he loves me, he loves me not.

  And I go on winning: the Dermestes lardarius arrived today of all days, delivered to my doorstep, right to the heart of my flesh. God, I’ve won so many insects you wouldn’t believe it. I won flesh flies with big black eyes and striped wings. Swarming on my lips like lipstick, they strip them of flesh until they’re gone. Silence: the flies are my last words. Silence: the awards ceremony, deep underground, is still under way.

  On January 9, my first day back at work after the holidays, my boss said to me: “Sit down.”

  “I’m fine standing up. What is it?”

  “I just wanted to tell you there’s no need for you to go on pretending with me, I figured out months ago that you were dead.”

  It came as a shock; I had nothing to say in response.

  “You know, I wasn’t that surprised when I found out. My wife has never left me, not even after she died. Someday I ought to introduce you.”

  “Am I fired?”

  “Eh? No, no. Of course not. You know how fond I am of you.”

  “Sir, you’re the only person I know who can see me.”

  “That’s enough now, you’re making me blush. Now go organize those packs of paper, it’s already ten o’clock.”

  When I got home, my mother was on the couch with a strapping big man with a beard.

  His skin was pockmarked and his eyes were enormous. They were drinking cheap wine and she was laughing at his stupid jokes. He had a pronounced accent from another city not far away, and he was eyeing her lustfully. I sat down next to them.

  I listened to them talk. My mother was wearing a long emerald-green dress that had been washed too many times: the fabric was pilling around the boat-neck collar. I got up and went to take a look around. There were empty plates on the kitchen table and an empty baking dish coated with tomato sauce. There were crumbs on the floor and dark patches of grease on the stove. In my mother’s bathroom, her IUD box sat empty. I went into her bedroom and lay down on the bed to wait.

  Outside there was silence, except for the sound of traffic, which never changes: whether I was a little girl, a grown woman, or dead, it was a sound without a message. On the dark-walnut nightstand was a black-and-white picture of me when I was just a few months old, in a pair of denim overalls, with a pacifier in my mouth. Then there was a violet scarf and a Moroccan jewelry box full of rings, some of them valuable, others nothing more than costume jewelry. On the wall was the Victorian painting that Aunt Clara had given her: two girls in the countryside seen from behind, though their joy was unmistakable. Then there was a print that Aunt Clara had given her: Dulle Griet—“Mad Greta”—by Brueghel. A tall skinny witch runs straight toward the mouth of Hell, her hands full of stolen jewelry. All around her the city is in flames, ravaged and overrun by monsters.

  The door swung open.

  They came in: they were kissing and they were tipsy. She was laughing too hard and her hair was a mess. He shoved her against the wall and lifted her thigh; he kissed her on the mouth and on the neck, long and hard. She went on laughing, then started panting. He unzipped his jeans. She slipped away and took off her dress, her worn black-lace bra, her panties. She lay down on the bed next to me.

  Some nights, on the seashore, Euridice and I would play an exciting role-playing game.

  The game was called “life.” We’d play the roles of two living people with their future ahead of them, just waiting to accommodate their plans. It was a little bit like the parlor game “I’m going on a trip and I’m going to pack,” but the winner was the one who told the biggest whopper.

  She said: “Next year I’m going to compete for a literary award.”

  I said: “I’m going to go on an organized tour to Indonesia.”

  She said: “In two years I’m going to enroll at the university.”

  I said: “I’m going to get married.”

  And then she, in a serious voice, with her cunning eyes looking straight at me, said: “I’m going to have a baby.”

  She had won.

  Hi, I’m Dorotea Giglio (1986–2011). We went to elementary school together. I was the one with freckles. Do you remember that time at Luigi’s party, Luigi from class 3C, when we invented a cocktail made of Coca-Cola and jam and peach juice? It was disgusting. I know that we haven’t seen each other in eighteen years, but I heard that you were killed last year in a moped accident. Well, I happen to be in your neighborhood—I’m dead too—and I was just thinking that if you had any free time one of these days, maybe we could get a drink together . . . It’s up to you, this is my number, ciao. Ah, sorry about asking for your number. Here it’s easy to get other people’s numbers. Unfortunately though, the deceased almost always keep their cell phones turned off, and I’m not having a lot of luck; I tried to find you in your room, but you weren’t on your bed, nor under it. I tried to find you at the spot on the asphalt where you first stopped living: you weren’t there. Evidently you stopped waiting. I hope you’ll hear this message and call me back.

  My mother went on seeing the man.

  I followed him to his office: he was a civil servant who worked for the city government. I followed him home: he was married and had a fat nine-year-old daughter and a wife with a downturned mouth and a dead look in her eyes. Then there was a mangy dog and a mountain of unread books, perfect, uncreased parallelepipeds, their pages too intimate with on
e another, almost as if glued together, certainly never glimpsed by human eyes. His apartment was furnished in bad taste, with framed prints of Tower Bridge and English taxis and crude paintings of Parisian boulevards. He watched Arnold Schwarzenegger movies on TV and used a lot of mouthwash. He loved sausages and computer magazines. He beat off in the shower every morning and chatted on Facebook every night. He’d bring my mother flowers. I’d steal them from the vase and take them to my grave to replace the withered ones. Then I’d go back home.

  They’d left. I picked my mother’s forest-green dress up off the chair. I went downstairs and walked through the closed door of the darkroom. Using the dress as a blanket, I lay down to sleep on the floor.

  On the evening of February 2, Man brought over a rented DVD and a pizza.

  She put the pizza down on the dining room table and went back to him, kissed him greedily, took him by the hand, smiled; we all went into my mother’s room. They undressed. The lights were off except for the sand-yellow Japanese table lamp on the nightstand. They kissed, they eyed each other, they licked each other, they started moving, I lay down next to my mother. He was caressing her breasts, he bent over her, over her thighs. She started panting. She spread her legs; I spread my legs.

  02/05/2012, midnight: I feel so sorry for my body. I’m sorry that I failed to show it sufficient gratitude, when there was still time. I’d like to thank it for the tremendous wars it waged on viruses, the perfection of hunger and pain. I’d like to, but it’s too late.

  I slashed our veins, and now they no longer belong to anyone.

  They say that in the last instants of life a suicide always changes her mind, but this indecision actually continues even in death. The people who go to the cemetery to visit their loved ones would laugh at their own grief if they had any idea how much greater the grief of their loved ones is.