The Purple Room

Mauro Casiraghi

THE PURPLE ROOM

Original
Title

La camera viola

Translation
by

 
Jennifer Delare

Paige E.
Gribb

Wendy Tombs

Copyright

© 2016 Mauro
Casiraghi

To
Gioia De Angelis

wherever
she is now

after
all these years

“I have always felt I lived on
the high seas,

threatened, at the heart of a
royal happiness.”

Albert
Camus

1

I
stopped waging war on the ants after I got out of the hospital. I don’t kill
them anymore.

I
started exterminating ants sixteen years ago. My wife and I had just bought our
house in the country, about a half an hour north of Rome. The garden was full
of weeds, and the porch needed painting. I had always lived in the city, and
the idea of mowing the lawn, planting roses, and spreading manure didn’t thrill
me at all. My wife Alessandra, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to get started.
She pointed to the trail of red and black ants coming out of the sandstone wall
and marching straight for our kitchen.

“Make
them disappear,” she said, planting a kiss on my mouth.

That
afternoon, I went into town and bought the Exterminator’s Kit. I added one
percent poisonous powder to ninety-nine percent water, filled the included
spray bottle and set to work. I squirted the ants without remorse. I watched
them stagger, then curl up and die, and felt like I was waging a righteous war.
Alessandra was pregnant with Michela and to me our house felt like it was
already teeming with romping children. I had to protect my family.

The
ants came back every spring, regardless of the slaughter. I’d get out my spray
bottle and set to work again. Killing them became a routine, like washing the
car or mowing the lawn.

I
don’t know exactly when things started to change. I just remember that Michela
was still little, and the menacing silence of the country was keeping me up at
night. I was afraid of burglars. There was so much talk about our neighbors
getting drugged and robbed in their sleep that I started getting up late at
night and doing rounds of the house, checking the reinforced door, the barred
windows, and the burglar alarm. I kept a length of iron from an old gas pipe under
the bed, just in case.

No
one ever broke in. They didn’t even try, as far as I know. In thanks for my
efforts, a few years ago my wife left me and took our little girl with her.
Since then I’ve been alone, guarding an empty fort.

The
war on the ants continued, even after Alessandra and Michela had gone. While
other people were on their summer vacations, I spent afternoons with a bottle
of wine in one hand and the spray bottle in the other. I would kneel down drunk
and wait in front of the crack in the wall. Every time an ant came out, I tried
to hit it with a squirt of my poison.

The
design studio in Rome where I worked would reopen at the end of August, and my
days would fill up again. Eight hours in front of a computer and two stuck in
the car, staring blankly at the faces of the daily traffic jam’s other victims.
In the evening, I’d collapse on the couch and fall asleep before I could get
around to eating dinner.

Saturday
afternoons belonged to Michela. Movies, pizza, clothing stores. Sad zoos and sad
circuses. On Sundays, weather permitting, I’d go scuba diving with Roberto off
the coast of Monte Argentario. I liked going down a hundred feet and staying
there as long as possible. More than anything else, I liked the silence and
darkness that surrounded me.

That
was all before the accident.

This
morning, I threw the Exterminator’s Kit away. Now I’m sitting here in the
garden, watching the ants go in and out of the crack in the wall. I feel like,
as long as they’re here, I will be, too.

At
four o’clock the alarm on my cell phone goes off. I set it to remind me about
my doctor’s appointment. I really don’t feel like going, but my mother will
call to hear the latest, so I don’t have a choice.

I
get up from the patio chair, grab my keys, and drag myself to the car. I
haven’t washed it in months. A while ago, someone wrote,
Wash me, asshole!
on the back window. I see it every time I look in
the rearview mirror, but I haven’t bothered to wipe it off yet.

I
drive down the hill, past a flock of sheep and a tractor. I pass the cement
frames of thirteen apartment buildings and a new shopping center they’re
building on an old pasture. I take the main road towards Rome. After fifteen
miles, I reach the Raccordo Anulare, the ring road that encircles the city. I
merge into traffic, switch on the radio and try to relax.

The
traffic along the Lungotevere, hugging the Tiber as it winds through the heart
of Rome, is even slower than usual. Franco is a good friend; he’ll let me park
behind his SUV in the hospital courtyard. I still have a ways to go, though,
before I’ll reach the Ponte Garibaldi bridge and cross to the other side. I
can’t stand being stuck in here. It’s so claustrophobic. I ditch the car on a
sidewalk and start walking.

It’s
a beautiful day. The green river sparkles in the sun. You can almost forget
about the trash all along the banks. I see couples everywhere. A man and a
woman in a convertible are waiting at the traffic light. She puts her hand on
his knee and nibbles on his ear. A young tourist couple with smiling, sunburned
faces push a stroller toward Trastevere. On the other side of the road, an old
man and his wife are waiting for the bus. Hunchbacked, bent over, eighty years
old, and
still
holding hands.

I cross the river at the Ponte Sisto
bridge. A boy and a girl are making out. Lips locked, hands under T-shirts,
deaf and blind to everything except the movement of their tongues. They’re like
statues. I regret leaving my camera at home. I just stand there watching them,
jealous, until the boy notices and glowers at me.

“What the fuck do you want?”

I get out of there fast. People
can be selfish and merciless when they’re in love, especially towards those who
are not.

“How’s your appetite?”

Franco checks my eyes with a
penlight. His big, thickly mustachioed face is close to mine. His breath smells
like coffee and peppermint.

“Normal.”

“Are you sleeping well at night?”

“Falling asleep is hard. Lots of
images whirl around in my head.”

“How about your job? Have you
started back?”

“Not yet. Maybe in September.”

“Well, don’t wait too long. It’ll
do you good to get back to work.”

He turns off the penlight. We’re
done. I button up my shirt.

“There’s one more thing,” I say,
like it’s not very important. “I still have those gaps in my memory.”

Franco looks at me, stroking his
moustache.

“When is your last clear memory
from?”

“A week before the accident.”

“Well, then it’s nothing serious.
It’s called retrograde amnesia. Memory loss can happen after a coma like
yours.”

“Can you do anything about it?”

“Don’t worry. It’ll all come
back. You just have to be patient.”

While Franco flips through his
calendar to schedule our next appointment, I decide to tell him about the
woman.

“I must have met her before the
accident. We were in a bedroom. Not at my house, somewhere else. She was
looking out the window. I don’t remember anything else about her.”

Franco looks me in the eye,
trying to figure out whether I’m serious. For a while, after my divorce, I used
to joke around all the time. Whenever I opened my mouth, it was to mess around
or say something stupid. I’d talk about anything except how I was feeling. Now
it’s different, though.

“See that ficus?” He points at a
plant flourishing in the corner of the room. “You could have ended up like
that. A vegetable. You could have been paralyzed. You could’ve had permanent
brain damage. But you’re here, safe and sound, with a little bit of amnesia.
You were damn lucky. Do you realize that?”

I nod silently. It’s at least the
third time he’s said that.

“You know what I think?” he goes
on. “Lucky bastards like us should be able to see things differently. So stop
brooding over everything. Go back to work, go out, have fun. Who cares about
some woman whose name you don’t even remember? The world is full of beautiful
women. Enjoy life, Sergio!”

He slaps me on the back. Hard. We
agree to go out for dinner sometime.

Back at the car, I see a flyer
stuck under the windshield wiper.
Find
your soul mate
. It’s an ad for a dating agency. I check the address. It’s only
ten minutes away by foot.

That famous photo by Doisneau is
hanging in the waiting room. Two lovers are kissing in the middle of a Parisian
street. It looks like they’re unaware of being photographed. Actually, the
photographer caught them kissing and asked them to do it again, to repeat what
they had just done. The image is both candid and staged. It’s a good choice.

“We’re all set with your
enrollment. It’s time to fill out your profile.”

The woman shows me to her office.
She sits behind a glass-topped desk. I can see her smooth legs crossed
underneath it. She must be around forty, with dyed red hair and a nose job. I’ve
forgotten her name. She told me five minutes ago, and I’m too embarrassed to
ask her again.

“Age?”

“Forty-five. Almost forty-six.”

She types my answers into the
computer. She’s sitting in a strange, twisted position, with her crossed legs
pointed one way and her torso the other, toward the screen. She turns her head
unnaturally, like a doll. Her body seems pliable, flexible, ready to respond to
commands. I try to picture her naked on a rumpled bed, waiting for round two. I
try, but I fail. As soon as I see myself in underwear, entering the frame, the
image fades away.

“What do you do?”

“I’m a graphic designer.”

Her painted fingernails click on
the keys. She’s not wearing a wedding ring. Not that that means anything. I
kept wearing mine for a long time after Alessandra left me.

“Divorced?”

“Six years ago.”

“Children?”

“One. She lives with her mom.”
For no reason at all, I add, “It’s her birthday on Saturday.”

The woman smiles, looking me
straight in the eye. She’s about to ask me an important question and wants my
undivided attention. It feels like she’s looking right through me.

“Now, tell me your vision of the
person you want to meet.”

“I don’t know.”

She blinks. “What do you mean,
you don’t know?”

“I don’t really have a clear
idea.”

“You must have preferences.
What’s your type? Tall, short, thin, plump? Blonde, brunette, redhead? With a
degree, divorced, Italian, foreign...?”

“Whatever you think.”

“You don’t have a type? I’ve
never come across that. Every man has an ideal woman. Tell me about yours and I
promise I’ll find her for you.”

I’m starting to sweat. Why on
earth did I come here?

“Maybe I used to have a type. I
guess I did, yeah—but now I want to start from scratch.”

A patient sigh, a swish of her
skirt as she shifts on the chair, a red mark where her knee had been pressing
against her calf. I get lost in that kind of detail.

“I know how you feel, Sergio. We
all experience heartbreak and lose faith in love sometimes. That’s why I’m
here. I just need you to tell me some kind of preference I can use to sort
through the hundreds of women in our system. Take a moment to think about it.”

My headache is coming back. It
hasn’t happened since the first few days after I got out of the hospital. It’s
like a cold knife slowly piercing my skull, just behind my ear. I wish I were
out of this office, at home, sitting in the garden until dark and watching the
ants march back and forth.

I close my eyes, and again that
memory emerges from the darkness. Her silhouette against the light of the
window. Her hair loose on her bare shoulders. The wall of the room all around,
like a frame. The color of the wall...

“
Purple,
” I say aloud.

I open my eyes. The woman is
gazing at me, blinking.

“Sorry, what did you say?”

“She has to like purple,” I
repeat, forcing myself to smile. “It’s my favorite color.”