Hollow Heart Read online

  Our sense of smell will intuit the spring, and our feet will feel the barely wet grass, but the neurons will have to cooperate. Our bodies will take their second steps, every bit as clumsy as their first steps when they were babies. And just as our parents did back then, we will kneel down smiling and praise them: “Good job!” They’ll fall to a seated position: too soon for long hikes. It will be sunset: the new blood will be reflected in the sun as the sky is in the sea.

  Then the transformation: we will be reunited, one inside the other.

  It’s hard to believe. But I can’t do otherwise. I prick up my ears, but my heart is still defused. For how much longer?

  Anna says: “Don’t cry.”

  I wait at the cemetery, holding my body by the hand. Now without the customs barrier of the flesh, my grip goes all the way to the bone: it’s called love, and it no longer hurts.

  The tub was ready. The sun was setting. Some dogs were howling and others were already sleeping.

  I went into my mother’s room.

  She was sleeping, and next to her slept Euridice, her arms wrapped around Geremia.

  “What are you doing here? Get out of my house this instant, you bitch! If you even try to scare her . . .”

  “I don’t want to scare her.”

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  “I’ve been here for years and years. Sleeping in this bed. From when you were one year old until the day you died.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  She set Geremia down on the floor. She sat down.

  “It’s true. I wanted to keep Greta company. She can’t sleep on her own. You know, Clara is so busy with her work, and she has so many men, while Greta has always been alone. Maybe because she’s used her pain to build a dam, so all the love that others give her changes course and flows away, lost. Lost, you understand? It’s not that she didn’t love you . . . You know it, don’t you, that she loves you with all her heart? Besides, I can’t seem to sleep alone either. For years, from my death until I moved here, I spent nights clinging to my body, but I could never sleep, because it’s so cold on the river bottom . . .”

  I couldn’t believe it.

  “Lidia, it’s you.”

  “My body was found in 1987, you were one year old. They buried it, but I couldn’t bring myself to stay near it: it was monstrous, swollen, ravaged, torn to shreds. Underwater I’d never noticed what bad shape I was in. I couldn’t bring myself to stay near it, to sleep with it, Dorotea, and I couldn’t manage to get any sleep in the house in Trecastagni either; it was too empty, and the pictures of me had all disappeared. I started to spend my nights here, I felt less lonely. And Greta liked it better too: she stopped sleepwalking. At night she no longer went out in search of me because she no longer needed to, I was here with her. I’m sorry my presence made you have nightmares. Please, forgive me.”

  I lay down on the right side of the bed. My mother was in the middle and Lidia was to her left.

  Outside the wind was howling. The windows in the room were banging, and so were the windows in my room, and the ones in the kitchen and the bathroom.

  I saw Lidia’s arms reach out toward my mother and pass through her chest. I saw her whole body stretch and pass through the skin. In a few seconds the entire transparency of Lidia had fused with my mother’s body. From outside they seemed like a large pulsing cell, with a heart of viscous living matter, and a large glistening membrane enveloping it.

  I summoned the nerve to imitate what she had done.

  I began the embrace with the arms, then the breasts, the stomach, the genitals, the thighs, the legs. At a certain point I felt an incredible heat. I felt my abstract matter deploy itself as a black light, merging, with pleasurable and violent friction, with a complicated reality of flesh and movements, of sounds, of organized actions, of gurgling machines and shattered colors, of assonances, of orchestras, of conjoined silences, of sticky figures, of curdled solids and spongy voids, of soft and porous elastic darkness, sometimes as hard as a closed door, other times as tense as a hammock. Within a few seconds there was nothing around me, because everything was within, everything was together. We were there. Stable and whole right down to the clamp of the bones, steeped in blood, intact right down to the heart. I smiled at Lidia, even though I couldn’t see her. Greta’s body enclosed us both.

  The eyes flew open. The two eyes on my mother’s face like flowers from the rock. Inside, in darkness, the other four.

  Today is March 1, 2015.

  I write that in 1972 Violet Trefusis died. She said that whatever you do, you must always be extreme.

  That’s the way I see things too. In my life I’ve made plenty of mistakes, but I never stopped halfway out of fear, I never hid, I never surrendered, I never shut my eyes. I remained transparent and exposed to the sun like a lens, and I caught fire.

  Today is March 1, 2015.

  At eight in the morning my mother received a phone call and hurried to the clinic where Aunt Clara had been admitted. A baby girl was born; her name is Dorotea. The father is unknown. In Aunt Clara’s arms, and then in my mother’s, Dorotea cried like all newborns do, then she smiled. In my mother’s arms, Lidia and I held her.

  Outside the sun was blazing hot, and the grounds of the clinic were full of bodies. Alive or dead, damaged or intact, happy or sad or simply waiting. Bodies full of eyes. They trudged along, or they remained motionless, looking up at the windows.

  From the day I died to today, I’ve seen so many motionless people.

  Motionless on their chairs. On their unmade, sweaty beds, in dark rooms where the windows are never opened anymore. In hospitals, bandaged like mummies in sterile sheets and white bedcovers. Under the neon lights of operating rooms. In their cars, with their hands still on the steering wheels. Standing in the middle of the road, like traffic signals, or with their eyes closed on the roofs of apartment buildings, covered with pigeons. Their arms extend horizontally like someone about to leap into the void, or they form a noose around the back of the person they love while she’s asleep. Their hands clutch pistols or the last of the sleeping pills. Their legs are motionless because they have nowhere to go. Their eyes are despairing: they wish that their gazes still met with a response. Each of them has his chair, her apartment building, his side of the road before the car ran him over. We cling to the last piece of the universe that recognized us: you are here, you are you, for a little while longer.

  Clinging to Lidia and gathered inside Greta—curled up, scattered like oxygen, vigilant as poison—I hold my family close.

  Three hours after Dorotea’s birth, my mother went to the cemetery. My mother went to visit me. We’re sitting on the ground by my headstone. By the last of my bones. The sun is yellow, the flowers vertical. The grass is green, the sky is starting to peel, turning red: soon it will be sunset. The branches of the pine trees around us extend into the air like nerves, and the smiles extend lazily across our faces.

  When I finish writing in this diary I’m going to tear out the pages and slip them into a big glass bottle: I have a perfect one at home, we used to put the flowers that my mother photographed in it. It belonged to my grandmother, she got it on a trip to Ireland that they all took together: she, Clara, my grandparents, and Lidia. A month later Lidia would turn twenty-one, and two months later she would be dead.

  Somewhere there’s a photo she took in which the two others are holding hands on a gleaming lawn, smiling.

  I’ll go down to the sea and leave the bottle with the letter among the waves. I don’t know what’s written in it, but I know it will reach you. I don’t know who you are—maybe my father?—but I know that I wrote it myself.

  Today is March 1, 2015, and aboveground spring has arrived. Today is March 1, 2015, and my mother has brought me flowers.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Viola Di Grado was born in Catan
ia, Italy, and currently lives in London. Her first novel, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool, was the winner of the 2011 Campiello First Novel Award and a finalist for Italy’s most prestigious literary prize, the Strega.