Hollow Heart Read online

  I found Anna sitting on a bench in the Parco Falcone. She told me that she’d quit her job and had lately been spending her days on that bench, praying and reciting Isaiah. She’d lost her mind. I had no idea what had become of Euridice, and I didn’t care a bit. I spent all day and all night in Alberto’s empty home. I never went out, I never even looked out the window. Every morning I’d get up and wander through the empty rooms.

  The washing machine was empty too, and so were the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, the glasses, the bowls, the hats on the topmost shelf. I’d never noticed how much emptiness there is in objects.

  One rainy Saturday, I went back to visit myself at the cemetery: even my heart, under the flies, was hollow by now. Just like Lidia’s. Like my mother’s and Clara’s hearts when they eventually die of old age; then they’ll all be the same, four collapsed hearts. Four grottoes of corroded pulp. Four old hands cupped as if to scoop up dirt. Four breakfast bowls, which at the house in Trecastagni are stitched together by a spiderweb. Four rinds of old fruit, four in four different places without ever touching. Four without blood and heat, four without anything, four empty cradles.

  On February 25, 2015, I opened the refrigerator; it was empty except for a package with four strawberries inside it. The next day they were still there. The third day, same thing. Every morning, as soon as I got up, I opened the refrigerator and looked at them. The fourth day, suddenly, the strawberries were no longer themselves: they had been transformed into soft objects covered with a light-brown fur. On the fifth day there were small green worms crawling on them.

  I took them into Alberto’s bedroom, placed them at the center of the bed, and lay down next to them. I knew that they had something to tell me: something for me, something to understand. It was just a matter of time. If I just waited with determination, on the empty bed in the empty room in Alberto’s empty home, I’d prove myself worthy of their secret. And then Alberto would come back. I put them away in the drawer, between the condoms and the aspirin.

  02/26/2015: My bones are so fragile by now. Before long they’re bound to break. My skull has green patches around the eyes and mouth. Soon I’ll stop being organic material, I’ll turn into white dust. By that day probably even the name on my headstone will have vanished entirely. And then remembering me won’t be enough anymore: only radiocarbon will be able to calculate when Dorotea Giglio died, how long ago she walked the earth and spoke, read books, grew up, laughed, cried, grew older.

  Hi, I’m Dorotea Giglio (1986–2011). The one who always wore a pink dress with little blue clouds. You made fun of me for that dress. You made fun of me as if it were my fault it was ugly, as if I myself were the ugliness of that dress, as if I could never be anyone in life other than the person wearing that horrendous dress. That was how I felt. I don’t remember exactly what you would say, but you really hurt me, I used to cry at night. In the morning, before going to nursery school, I’d always tell my mother that I didn’t want to put that dress on, but she didn’t understand and she’d make me wear it, saying that she’d paid a lot of money for it. Anyway, I don’t hold it against you anymore, not at all, and in fact I’d like to see you and get a drink together. I don’t know if you still like playing with Play-Doh, but I sort of do. They told me that you jumped off your balcony when you were twenty. I know that we haven’t talked since we were both five, but I killed myself too, so I think we’d have a lot to talk about. Ciao, hugs to you.

  Today is March 1, 2015.

  Soon it will be April: a peak month for both tourism and suicides. Anna, Euridice, and I all wait anxiously: the days are all beautiful because they precede a major holiday. The days are like what’s behind the windows of an Advent calendar. To every new suicide we’ll introduce all the others, we’ll give them fried riceballs and mini-pizzas, we won’t ask any of them why they killed themselves. We’ll offer bracelets to the ones who, like me, slashed their wrists, because they usually want to conceal the cuts: not out of any sense of privacy or regret but rather to block a door. They’re afraid they might be able to go back to where they came from.

  Today is March 1, 2015.

  Aboveground, spring has already arrived, but underground a black ooze is spreading, littered with dissolved scraps of my flesh and the rags of the sky-blue linen dress in which I was buried. In the Parco Falcone, surrounded by plane trees and palm trees and empty beer cans, the first geraniums have bloomed. They burst out of the soil, without shyness, everywhere. At the foot of the red, orange, and blue jungle gym with the little metal slide. Under the empty benches. Under the chairs where old men play cards. Flowers spring up everywhere: the sun bestows its rays equitably upon them all; none are outsiders. There’s plenty of sunlight for all of them, and all of them will grow. Today is March 1, 2015; underground my flesh has vanished, aboveground Alberto has vanished.

  You are a psychoanalyst.

  An urban legend fabricated by the dead for the dead says that across the sea there is an island of psychoanalysts who see-hear-understand the dead. Euridice told me about it. We were drinking vodka and lying by the water on the diving piers of Piazza Europa. We were looking at the water. The same waves that once triggered the nausea of seasickness now trigger the nausea of Sartre. Euridice stood up and pointed into the distance: “There it is.”

  “Actually, I remember pretty clearly that when I was alive Calabria was over there.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “Sure, of course I am. It’s you, you just make up too many stories.”

  “No, it’s true, one hundred percent true, I swear.”

  Deep down, we just have this great need for stories. I need them too. In fact, I’ve tried plenty of times to talk Euridice into letting me read her novels, but she says that would be cannibalism.

  You’re a psychoanalyst, and this bottle with the story of my death inside it has come to you.

  Cure me; cure us.

  My pain is collective, it’s a field plowed by too many souls. I can furnish my pain with my thoughts, but it still remains nothing but a rental property. I can wander through its rooms, fooling myself into believing that I built all this, but it’s no good, every visit will leave me with a new and terrible corner, a new darkness holed up in there. There’s nothing to be done about it: I’m strictly a tourist in my pain.

  My pain is my mother’s pain, and the pain of her mother, who used to lock herself up with her in the guest bedroom when the sadness became too overwhelming. She would say: “Lie down with me,” and they’d lie down, and she’d say: “Now let’s sleep.” She’d shut her eyes, and then my mother would close hers.

  My pain is the stale air of the dusty house in Trecastagni and the stale air in my apartment. My pain is thirdhand, or fourth-hand. It’s my mother’s pain and it’s her mother’s mother’s pain and the chain goes on without an articulation, without a break.

  Cure me, cure us.

  I’m writing to you even though everything seems so irremediable. I’m writing to you because in reality something has changed. I’m writing to you because my worst defect has actually always been my optimism. I was so optimistic as to hope that death would finally put an end to my suffering. I died of optimism.

  The days after Alberto’s disappearance went by slowly. I no longer did anything, I didn’t bother anyone, I was a perfect ghost: my displacement from life was complete, perfect.

  The strawberries, in the drawer, had become a shapeless gray mass, and ants were eating them. Every night, stretched out on my double bed under a poster of Ella Fitzgerald, my ears pricking up at every footstep on the apartment house stairs, I watched the TV with the sound turned off. Every morning I’d get up. I’d open the fridge, the washing machine, all the windows and armoires and the doors and the kitchen cabinets, then I’d retrace my steps and shut them all.

  Ciao, my name is Dorotea Giglio (1986–2011). You don’t know me. I saw you on the news, you had a resig
ned face and your hair was turning white. You were from Librino. Your husband had shot you out of jealousy and then he’d shot your three-year-old daughter, and after that he’d killed himself. I’d like to get to know you. Why don’t you come visit me? I’m in Catania, in the center of town, I have a very comfortable place. I spend lots of time in my bedroom and in my bathroom too. It’s a beautiful place, and has been since I died there. I play at doing my makeup, as if other people could still see me. I pretend to shave my legs with the razor I used to kill myself: after death, objects no longer carry the baggage of memories and symbols; they turn back into objects. At night I take a bath in the tub where I cut my wrists. I cut them open again in the same place, like buttonholes, but there’s nothing inside them.

  Opening myself without having a life inside threatening to leave is no more dramatic than unstitching a dress. Opening myself is a keyhole into an uninhabited room, but I go on doing it, fist clenched, razor in hand. I fall asleep that way, dreaming of emergency, and in those dreams the body is still a house: there’s still someone to contain, someone to evict.

  On February 28 I went to work and said to my boss: “I’m very sorry, but I can’t work here anymore. You’ve been very nice to me, but now I have to go.”

  “Where are you going to go?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll travel the world until I find Alberto.”

  “Dorotea, listen . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “You can’t go.”

  “What do you mean I can’t go? Why not?”

  He opened the top drawer of the cash register. He pulled out a letter.

  “At this point . . . Yes, maybe it’s best for you to read it.”

  He held out his arm and handed it to me.

  I opened it.

  I looked at it for a long time, in terror. The rectangular shape of the opaque, unlined white sheet. The words in black ink produced by a fine-tipped .5 millimeter felt-tip pen. There was a lot of room between one line and the next, and in that space the extremities of the letters stretched exaggeratedly upward and downward, like the fins of fish abandoned on the beach. I was trembling. The letter ended an inch from the bottom of the sheet of paper. The last mark on it was an ellipsis, but that was followed by a signature.

  I looked up.

  “Please read it to me, I don’t know how to read.”

  He took it. He started reading.

  Dear Mario,

  I’m sorry to have left the way I did, without a formal resignation. I believe I owe you an explanation. Since I started working for you, something has been happening to me that I never would have believed. It’s the girl you told me about, the one who used to work for you and who killed herself. I know I must seem crazy to you, but I’ve seen her. I’ve seen her lots of times. Not only at work, at home too. For instance, when I was making dinner, sometimes she’d appear before me. I was terrified. I sensed her presence beside me in bed at night. She even stole a scarf that I’d bought for Sara. It was getting so I couldn’t sleep anymore. Do you remember when I had a fever? That’s when the apparitions started to proliferate. She appeared constantly. The other morning, Sara was there too, and I felt her hand touching my shoulder. I swear it. Sara never believed me. She thought I was crazy. She still thinks I’m crazy. We broke up. My life has become a nightmare. That morning, Sara was ironing and when I felt the hand on my shoulder, I screamed and scared her to death and she almost burned herself with the iron. She started yelling at me, telling me that I was out of my mind, so I had to kick her out of my apartment. In other words, you can just imagine how I felt, my life has become a true nightmare, Mario. I’m leaving Sicily, I’m going to go stay with my sister for a while. Then we’ll see. But you must understand why I absolutely can’t stay in Catania.

  With all my best,

  Alberto

  I took the letter out of his hands and ripped it to pieces.

  “Dorotea, I’m sorry, I . . . Try to understand . . .”

  I was shaking. Was I shaking? I was crying. Was I crying?

  “Where does his sister live?”

  “No, Dorotea, no.”

  “No, what? No, what?”

  I doubled over onto the floor.

  He came over to me, he knelt down. Through my tearless tears I saw his elderly face, his smile. His pity.

  I ran out of the store.

  I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t chase after a person who would never want me. I couldn’t go back to the starting point either, to when everything was damp and dark and organic and there was no loneliness yet: I had a cord that linked me to someone else.

  I went home, I threw open the door to my mother’s bedroom. She wasn’t there. I fell to the carpet, the way I had when I was still alive and I had one of my attacks, hands on my eyes, alone with my tears and the darkness of my fingers.

  I lay there, motionless, waiting for her to come back.

  An hour later she came home and entered her room.

  I got up, I set the table downstairs with the red Christmas tablecloth, the one with the reindeer. In the right corner you could still see the wine stain: why had no one ever removed it? Would it be there forever? I lit a white candle at the center of the table. I filled the bathtub. I got in. Stretched out in the water, surrounded by those solid walls, I felt safe. I had made up my mind. It would be quick and painless. The tub, its walls wrapped around me like hard petals, was reassuring. It was a hope. It was a uterus but without the abuse of birth.

  I looked at my hands.

  I only had to find a way of getting her into the tub, then it would be very easy. An instant. Push her underwater and hold on. Count to twenty the way she had counted by the River Cassibile as the water poured into Lidia’s lungs, expelling the air forever, filling her whole body.

  It doesn’t take much to drown. First, apnea. Then the apnea ends and the nerve centers go crazy, followed by convulsions. A final arrhythmia, then you lose consciousness, and you stop breathing. You remember, Mama, that you don’t need to breathe to be together.

  In 2011 the world ended: I killed myself.

  The world ends every day for hundreds of people, but Anna says it will begin again soon. It’s called resurrection, we’re all invited, the Bible speaks clearly. “Be not dismayed,” says Anna.

  On that day, our bodies will rise from the earth, sluggish but still self-confident, even though the self has long since been evicted. Anna takes both my hands as if they still belonged to me and says: “Do not weep.”

  Our bodies will come toward us: no need to run, there are souls for everyone. The blood will surge up imperiously, once again filling the capillaries like canals in an abandoned city. Kidneys, lungs, liver, heart tissue will all be repopulated with cells. The flesh, so worn, may seem difficult to restore: decimated abodes, from chest to thigh, to tendons, with buckled walls, usurped by plant life, but suddenly inhabited once again. The bones will join together once again in poetic articulations. On the newborn articulations, articular capsules will rise like cradles. The highways of nerves will no longer be deserted: there will always be someone going somewhere. Red blood cells will bloom again to protect these roads. Further down, the sarcophagus of the stomach will become a bridge again. The worms will slither away, the spiderwebs of secretions will flake apart. The entire amazing city that is the body, ravaged by the barbarism of enzymes, will reemerge into the light. From now on, everything will be in constant movement. Electricity will return to the brain: the city had been left in darkness for far too long. The blood will never set again: everyone will forget its collapse, the traitorous gravitational force that chased it downward, and the way the muscles hardened to follow it into the grave.

  Feverishly, counting a rosary of glands, our souls will zip to the pulsating center of the city, the registry of hopes, the kennel of regrets, the dark castle haunted by illus
ions, the one and only: the heart.

  It will be difficult to travel the rough roads of the arteries, damaged by mud, to return home to that organ that now lies in ruins, and still to respect it as it is, as we did when it was shaped like pendants hanging from the necks of lovers and balloons at the carnival. As when children drew it in the sand and adolescents drew it on school desks, on their arms, on tree bark. As when it starred in every sentimental metaphor: in those days it was lovers and pop songs, not larvae and bacteria, who implored us to “open up your heart to me.” Difficult to get up there, to the summit of the body and of human dignity, crushed inside galleries of veins, now dark and gloomy and chewed up by bacteria. And once we are there, what pity we’ll feel for our limping, fragile, crippled hearts. They will resemble more than ever the afflicted love that we have assigned them, the thorny, flame-engulfed heart that protrudes from Christ’s chest in paintings.

  Like a majestic derelict hotel, hidden behind the brambles of the sternum, the dark atria of the heart will once again be home to blood. The left ventricle, deformed by flies, will once again remember how to pump adequately. The sinus node will once again know how to speak the electric language of nerves. The arterial vessels will no longer be empty flowerpots, boarded and occupied by only the most daring roots.

  The hotel will resume operation: the ramshackle beams of the ventricles will be trodden by millions of blood cells every minute. All will be reborn to the solemn notes of an organ: not the one that celebrates death at funerals, but rather the organ that keeps us alive. The lungs will have to accept the air they are offered. The muscles will have to make peace with the brain, just as the legs will take us places and the hands will touch the world. The eyelids, gummed up with dirt, will be opened like Christmas presents: best wishes for a merry resurrection.