Hollow Heart Read online

  She smiled. “Do you want a little more juice?”

  “No, thanks, it’s full of sugar: it’s bad for your teeth.”

  “Why, what a good little girl you are!”

  She smiled again. Where had she learned to do that?

  Later, while they were clearing the table, I went to the bathroom, shut the door, and studied myself in the mirror. I concentrated. I lifted my cheek muscles. My cheeks tugged at my lips, and my lips uncovered my teeth. My heart raced with excitement: it was a mystery, but it worked inside of me too.

  My mother went on doing second-rate photo shoots for weddings, and between jobs she’d photograph flowers that she bought from the florist on our street and scattered over the filthy rims of toilets in the public restrooms or on some dented car, or in the open mouth of a Xerox machine, or set precariously on a manhole cover.

  She held a couple of shows at her friend Adriana’s gallery, and I think that hardly anyone came to them, because she was angrier all the time and talked to me less and less. She never attended the parent-teacher meetings but luckily Aunt Clara gave me all the school textbooks. I met Gaia and Flavia, who copied my classwork. I quickly learned to draw on the well of myself for everything I didn’t have. Like that shark in the encyclopedia of biology, Isistius brasiliensis, that swallows its own teeth to get the calcium it lacks.

  At night my mother would read a book and drink chardonnay from the bottle. She’d fall asleep. I’d give her a kiss on the lips. But it wasn’t a kiss, it was a way of sucking venom out of a snakebite.

  I took in her sadness and I never spat it out. I kept it inside me, mixed with my own. My soul was infected, I had a Siamese-twin soul, it burned in my throat.

  I didn’t want to grow up.

  I wanted to remain a little girl for the day my father would come home.

  I was afraid that, when that day finally came, he’d open the door but he wouldn’t recognize me. If I was too grown-up, I’d no longer be the little girl he’d seen on my third birthday, and then he wouldn’t want to take me back. It would have been better to die than to become someone else. Instead I kept growing. It started inside my mouth: the gums emptied themselves of baby teeth and in their place rose teeth that were larger, more solid. The clothes got smaller and the hair got longer. The shoes started to pinch the toes. Even the facial features grew. The diameter of the waist and the tip of the nose both grew. Everything on my face that was soft and round turned hard and pointy. The desk sank lower and my bedroom grew narrower. Hair grew under the arms and between the legs. The legs grew too, they became very long and thin, and the knees as white and protruding as the eyes. My voice grew and turned darker, the fingernails grew and filled up with black. The fingers grew, the city grew, the shops changed, there was more and more smog filling our lungs, the wet patches grew on the ceiling in my bedroom, and the freckles spread across my face. On the ceiling the wet patches took the shapes of animals scratching at the walls of their cage because they want to get out but they lack the strength. My face, rather, took on the shape of my mother’s.

  In winter and fall and spring I came home from school on foot, alone, and I waited for her to come home with her flowers. She didn’t talk to me much. In the summer she’d take me to the beach at Lido Sole and underwater I’d search for sea urchin skeletons and I had goggles on, they were so tight that it felt as though they were encapsulating my eyes like pistachio shells. Underwater there were seashells that I could turn over. Fish that I could catch. Abalone shells that I could collect and string on a piece of twine and hang around my neck. A stronger wave washed roughly over me, my mother was sunbathing on the raft with her eyes closed behind her big cat-eye sunglasses and under her large red sun hat. I swam for shore, panting, as the waves got bigger and bigger. My ears were full of wind and my nose was full of saltwater, and so was my throat, and the waves were full of white detergent bubbles and dark spongy seaweed: the signs were unequivocal, my father wouldn’t be coming home.

  One morning the door buzzer buzzed and I ran to the window with my heart racing, but it wasn’t my father, it was the mailman. I stood there looking out until my mother appeared in her nightgown: “I’m going to do some shopping. Don’t go out.”

  When I heard the sound of the door locking behind her I took the poppies off the windowsill. She’d told me about photographing them spread out and scattered on the curb of the sidewalk.

  I drank the water from the vase.

  It was disgusting. It slopped off my lips and drenched first my dress, then the red-and-blue Persian carpet. I swallowed. I vomited onto the carpet.

  In the days that followed I did this again a number of times. I don’t know why I was doing it. But I do know that my mother didn’t notice a thing. When I’d wake up at night from the dream of the empty jar I’d go get the flowers from the windowsill. The dream would continue to obsess me for several minutes afterward: the sensation of suffocating, the curved glass around my body. Looking out at the deserted street, which was illuminated by a single streetlight that isolated the recycling bin for glass, I’d drink and then throw up. I was a stone fountain. I was the drainage canal Lidia’s swollen corpse passed through at night.

  My mother was sleeping a lot now. Every night, before going to sleep, I’d continued kissing her on the lips. My kiss was an antidote to cure her of her illnesses: depression, anxiety, Lidia’s death, my own birth.

  When I turned seven she took me to church. She’d never been religious. Everything smelled like incense. The light was bruised and humiliated, the way it is in all churches. We listened to Mass without ever looking each other in the eye. The church sold prayer cards. One card said: “Jesus is looking for a house to share with you.”

  My mother bought it and put it in my Tweety Bird coin purse.

  Jesus is looking for a house to share with you.

  I was afraid of Him. I imagined Him lurking behind doors, ready to ambush me. I imagined His body, sculpted and bloody, emerging crabwise from behind the living-room curtains. I imagined Him watching TV with us at night, crucified on the wall between the bookshelf and the bathroom door. If I was chilly, He’d offer me His winding sheet, but only because He wanted praise from my mother: “He’s such a good boy, always thinking of others.”

  At dinner He’d multiply the fishes because my mother as usual hadn’t bought anything. Every morning He’d pull the nails out of His hands and dip them in my milk, so when I drank it I’d drown, and He’d come to my rescue, His muscular arms moving with lightning speed to force the nails up out of my throat and away from my mouth. Even then my mother would say to me, as I slumped over on the floor, bloody-mouthed: “You see what a good sweet boy He is? Not like you, who are good for nothing and take up all of my time.”

  When she got home from the weddings she photographed she was often drunk.

  She’d give me a dry little kiss and go to bed. Other times she wasn’t drunk and was actually far too wide awake, and so I’d tell her a story set in Costa Saracena where we all lived on the seabed, the whole family together, including Aunt Clara and the dead grandparents, like fish. She’d pull her glass vial with the magic potion out of her drawer.

  She’d gulp down her goodnight Lexotan.

  Once she was asleep I’d take three drops myself: I thought that the more of it we took the sooner my underwater story would come true.

  On the day of my First Communion it was very hot out.

  Aunt Clara had put together a party at her beach house. The two sisters walked together, in silence, among the festively bedecked tables. They each wore a white lace dress, long and old, let out in the sleeves and the waist, and their hair was pulled back in the same style. They moved among the guests, distributing cold antipasti and even colder smiles. Their shoes were also practically identical, patent leather décolleté pumps. Also the gray makeup and round circles of rouge on their cheeks, the red lipstick, the furrowed brows.
They’d always been a matched set: the tense, uneasy faces, predisposed to wrinkle even in early childhood, and the gray bug eyes, like poorly sewn buttons on a cheap jacket. The dark circles scooped out under their eyes with strange precision, like the insides of spoons, where, on days like that one, you could see sweat gleaming. The long, shiny red lips. The well-shaped nose with flaring nostrils. The fair skin. The hair bark brown, like mine.

  Then the same awkward hostility toward the other: my mother manifested hers with silence, Aunt Clara with pat phrases. The two things—silence and pat phrases—fit together perfectly: a harlequin pattern of opposite colors in which neither one ever triumphed, and neither ever took offense. There were no quarrels, no misunderstandings. There was nothing, not even feelings, just dinners and parties. The only things they’d tell each other about were Clara’s nightmares and my mother’s sleepwalking, which had vanished by the time I turned one, though, eliminating one topic of conversation. When they smiled at each other it was by accident, it was like the smile of someone in a coma, in the dark room of a house where the body continues to grow without being aware of it. In any case, the smile disappeared immediately, as if sucked back down under the surface.

  Most of all, though, they had the same eyes. It’s certainly true, but I didn’t mention their most important characteristic. Their most important characteristic is that they are identical to the eyes of Lidia Who Died in the River.

  I imagined them frequently, those eyes: what they were like when Lidia was alive and what they were like when the water was pouring into her lungs. Then what they were like underground. I imagined them serious and feminine like the Eye of Horus painted in the pyramids, then round and watchful like a blue Turkish evil-eye bead, then squared off and geometric like the eye in Chinese ideograms. But I’d never seen them. All the pictures are hidden in that drawer, in that room with the locked door, in the villa in Trecastagni. Once they hung in the little living room, across from the fireplace: you can see from the bare patches on the wall, a brighter yellow than the rest, and from the small holes left by the nails.

  I’d never seen them, those photographs. All I knew of Lidia was the silence of her sisters: the way that, at the table, between one phrase and the next, their eyes would meet by accident and they’d fall silent. I knew that this was why my mother and my aunt never met each other’s gaze: not because they hated each other, but to keep from seeing those eyes.

  That morning they walked among the tables like statues of saints, with closed marble faces, slow as if being borne on a bier, covered with relics. I left the party and went down to the beach. It was deserted and silent. It was the dwelling place of the one who hadn’t come to my party, and never would.

  I went on growing. My breasts grew. My sadness and yearnings grew. Under my eyes the flesh sunk into dark circles that never dissipated. I grew. My mother started seeing an overweight man who was a teacher but after two months he broke up with her over the phone. She lay stretched out, clutching the receiver with one hand; I lay stretched out beside her, holding her other hand and listening to the conversation. It went on for half an hour and at a certain point she threw the lampshade at the window. The window glass was only scratched and the lampshade went rolling across the parquet floor. She was crying. The lightbulb broke and so did the external layer of my endometrium. Transparent shards on the parquet and menstruation all over my thighs. My mother took some Lexotan and fell asleep, and I went to sleep in my bedroom, leaving my first blood on her bed.

  I went on growing. Everyone knows that any excessive growth within the body is a tumor. Our cells are programmed to die before exhausting their capacity for growth. Cancer cells, on the other hand, not only go on growing but invade the cells surrounding them.

  As I grew, I invaded my mother. I was her illness.

  I took up more and more room, I needed a bigger desk and more answers to more questions. I needed money for new clothes and bras, and for medical treatment for my scoliosis. I needed to have my spine straightened at the gym and I needed the walls of my room, ruined by dampness, to be repaired.

  She glared at me and started spending more and more time out of the house. I’d wait for her in her bed.

  Her table and chair were covered with clothing from the market and no one ever turned off the ceiling fan. The old parquet floor in her bedroom creaked and protested like the floors of Nijo– Castle in Japan, which—due to special nails and clamps installed underneath the surface—creak in imitation of a nightingale’s song when you walk on them. I read that they’d been built that way to warn the samurai whenever an intruder was walking in the hallways. Sometimes at night, now that I’m dead, even my footsteps make them creak, and when that happens my mother opens her eyes, but she sees nothing.

  The bills kept piling up and Aunt Clara started to worry about it. Otherwise, I didn’t go out much. One night when I was thirteen, as I sat on the sofa watching IT, my mother handed me a pair of pajamas and my toothbrush: “Get out of here, come back tomorrow.”

  “Where am I supposed to go?”

  “I don’t care. You’re suffocating me. Go stay with Clara.”

  “But she lives so far away.”

  She waited in silence for me to leave. I stayed outside the door, sitting on the doormat.

  I could have left for real, once and for all. I could have gone and spent a few days at Gaia’s and then found some other place to live. I could have stayed with Diego, the brother of one of Flavia’s girlfriends, who was always so nice and who lived alone. I should have left. But I stayed there and waited. Like always. I was a castaway on a desert island. I was the desert island. Two hours went by and she still hadn’t opened the door. What if she really didn’t want me there anymore? Would I really have to leave and start a strange, sad new life somewhere else? I was swept by panic. Would I have to break away from her? Would I ever be able to?

  I thought about the parasites in chapter nine of the encyclopedia. The ones that inject infected bacteria with both toxin and antidote.

  If the bacterium succeeds in killing the parasite and therefore recovers, its recovery coincides with its death. This is because the antidote leaves its system but the toxin persists and kills it. The bacterium cannot live without the parasite’s genetic module: by now, the parasite is part of the bacterium.

  I waited on the doormat with my heart in my throat.

  After two hours, my mother reopened the door.

  I went on growing.

  I left my new inner foams on the bodies of older boys, stretched out in the seats of new cars or on the wet grass in the Parco Falcone, at night, with chirping crickets in the background. The first time was when I was fifteen, with an acne-faced boy from another class. He fucked me in the abandoned farmhouse behind the school, surrounded by overgrown underbrush shaped like taloned fingers, by the broken-in, worm-eaten door, against the low wall, next to a pair of rusty shears. I bled vertical, pouring down into the damp soil. On my way home, I kept thinking about the rusty shears.

  I grew, and the dampness behind the walls of our apartment grew with me. It grew like some hidden blood, leaving wider and wider veins of gray patches. It grew and it crumbled the wall. The plaster fell to the floor like dead skin, I found small dark pieces of it on the soles of my feet. I grew but I’d understood the secret mechanism of grief. I’d understood that grief is a Russian nesting doll: it never ends, it just hides inside new grief, and every new instance of grief contains all the previous ones. So my grief was invisible but it was there, inside every stupid daily disappointment.

  I grew and grew, without restraint. I grew like a tumor.

  I understood that I should have died many years earlier, on my third birthday, the one I couldn’t remember, the one where my father was there and then suddenly he wasn’t. I knew that the picture on my headstone shouldn’t have been of a young woman standing 5’ 6”, scrawny and a stranger to her father, with a scar on h
er nose from a fall on Mount Etna for which he’d never consoled her, and in her eyes billions of experiences he’d never know anything about. All the organic life that had taken me from the 3’ 4”, perhaps 3’ 5”, that I stood when he left me to the 5’ 6” I had now attained was life infected, defective, an unnatural prolongment.

  The picture on the headstone ought to be of the chubby little girl that he had left behind. I should have stayed that way, my face relaxed and wrinkle-free, like the untouched sheet in a dead person’s bedroom. I should have stayed like a borrowed book: smooth pages, spine intact, just as it was, ready to be returned to its owner. I should have stayed like a fossil: buried in my dusty home until his return exhumed me.

  When I turned eighteen, I saw Aunt Clara again after such a long time.

  Her hair had gone back to chestnut and her second marriage was over. I came home from school, opened the door, and my drugstore bag full of antidepressants dropped to the floor: they’d hung up a green-and-red streamer that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY. I know where those streamers were sold, in the store downstairs from our apartment. Whenever I went in I’d look at them.

  She and my mother had made lunch for me. That is, Aunt Clara had made it while my mother drank, most likely. They were sitting in chairs waiting for me in the dining room. Aunt Clara had cleaned the whole apartment; the floor was gleaming and so was the glass in the windows. As usual, they were a matching set: both had their hair tied back and both wore low-cut black dresses. When my mother handed me a slice of white-and-red cake, I smiled. Then I saw myself in the oval mirror behind them, the opaque mirror that was split in two.

  There was no smile, no flash of teeth between parted lips. My mouth was closed, my face sealed like a zinc casket.

  I went on growing. I continued to survive. The only reason a cell in our body grows and survives is because it is surrounded by molecules that suppress its instinct for self-destruction. On a cellular level, growth is a mischance. Our cells survive only through a chance bond, which delays and disguises their suicidal impulses. I met Lorenzo at a party on the beach and almost immediately fell in love. I was twenty. Lorenzo was thirty and had a watermelon-slice smile, large dark liquid eyes that feigned empathy, a muscular body, and straight teeth. He was pragmatic and taciturn, he had a fanatical love of insects and, in general, anything that expressed no emotions.