The Purple Room (14 page)

I tell the
barman I’ve changed my mind again. Now I want a grappa. He gives me a nasty
look and sets my glass on the counter with a grunt that sounds like, “Jerk”.

“If you have
something to say, say it out loud,” I tell him.

He looks at
me, nonplussed. “Say what?”

“I don’t know.
Is it a problem if I want a grappa?”

“No, man. Just
make up your mind.”

“I just did.
First the fruit juice, then the grappa. I’ll pay for both.”

“So?”

“There’s no
need to mouth off at me.”

“Mouth off? I
didn’t say anything.”

“Yeah, right,”
I say, putting the money on the counter. “You didn’t say anything.”

The barman
turns to his older colleague, who’s stacking up the plastic chairs. “What’s
this guy’s problem?”

The elderly
barman keeps on stacking chairs. He couldn’t care less.

I get to the
hospital complex at ten past midnight. As soon as I step through the gate, the
security guard sitting in his guard shack stops me. “Yes?”

“I have an
appointment in General Medicine.”

“An
appointment? With who?”

“The doctor on
shift.”

“The doctor’s
name?”

“I’d like to
surprise her, so I’d rather not tell anyone I’m coming.”

“You can’t
just go in like that.”

“I only need a
few minutes. I’ll just go and say hello and then leave.”

“No way. Come
back tomorrow, during visiting hours.”

“But I don’t
have to visit a patient. I want to speak to the doctor.”

“You can’t.
It’s against regulations.”

This must be
the evening for tough guys. First the barman. Now this one with his uniform and
a gun on his belt. He’s positioned himself in front of the entrance now, legs
wide apart and hands on his hips. A little Fascist boss.

“Fine,” I say.
“I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“That’s more
like it. You do that.”

“There’s no
need to take that tone, you know.”

“What tone?”

“Like a
Fascist.”

“What?”

“You should
listen to yourself when you talk. You sound like something out one of
Mussolini’s propaganda newsreels.”

“How dare
you?”

“How dare
you
use that tone with me?”

“Listen, you’d
better get going or I’m gonna call the cops.”

“Call them.
Call your friends, too. Call whomever you like.”

I turn around
and walk back out. The little Fascist follows me out of the gate to check where
I’m going.

I go around
the corner of the hospital complex and keep on walking, right around the block until
I get back to the entrance. The security guard is inside his little shack
watching TV. Every now and then he glances towards the street, then goes back
to watching TV. I can’t get through this way. There must be another entrance.
The complex is enormous. I think about it and I get an idea. I should have
thought of it before.

I go to the
emergency room. At the reception I tell them that I’ve got a pain in my ear.
They’ll think it’s just an ordinary earache and put me at the bottom of the
priority list. Waiting time: at least an hour. I stay there for a while,
watching the comings and goings of the injured, the sick, the old people who
feel lonely and come here looking for company, pretending to have some ailment
or other. Then, while the nurse is busy filling out a form, I sneak out of the
emergency room and climb over a hedge. I’m in. I wander around for a while
until I find the right building. The corridors are deserted, ghostly. The
hospital at night is disquieting. It feels like a spaceship gone adrift. I wander
through the halls, feeling lost. I see a doctor smoking next to a coffee
machine.

“General
Medicine?”

He lifts up
four fingers.

I take the
elevator to the fourth floor. I go into the ward. The rooms are dark. The
patients are sleeping. There’s no sound but for the occasional cough.

At the end of
the hall there’s an office with a glass door. A blue light shines from inside.
I knock softly.

“Come in,”
says a female voice.

There’s a
nurse sitting at a desk.

“I’m looking
for doctor Decesaris.”

“Down the
other hall, at the end, on the right.”

I go back and
turn down the second corridor. At the end there’s an office like the other. As
I walk towards the backlit door, I feel my knees turn into butter. I stand
there with my hand on the knob, and I tell myself that behind that door is
Gloria, thirty years on. A stab of terror, brief and intense, flashes through
me from head to foot. It’s the feeling you get just before you dive off a cliff
into the sea. Your instinct of self-preservation tells you not to do it. Your
body pulls back, afraid of being injured or killed. You know from experience,
however, that nothing bad will happen to you, as long as the water is deep
enough. So you close your eyes. You jump.

Now it’s the
same thing, but the other way around. My common sense tells me I’m doing
something foolish, that I’m heading straight into pain and suffering. My
instinct, on the other hand, wants me to open the door. My eyes want to see
Gloria again. My hands want to touch her, at least once.

I enter
without knocking. The office is dark. Only the computer screen gives off a
little light. There’s no one at the desk. I look around and then I see her.
She’s standing by the window, looking out. She’s wearing a white doctor’s coat
and holding a cigarette. I was right. She’s a smoker. I gather all my courage
and I say, very softly, so as not to startle her, “Gloria.”

She turns her
head and looks at me. Even in the dim light, I can see she wears glasses.

“It’s me,
Sergio,” I say, nervous and excited. “Sergio Monti. Do you remember? In high
school? I know it’s strange, we haven’t seen each other for years. I’ve got so
much to tell you... You know that I work nearby? It was destiny for us to meet
up again.”

Gloria takes a
step forward into the light shining from the monitor. The cigarette smoke wraps
her in a blue coil.

“Do we know
each other?” she asks, in a voice I don’t recognize.

I look at her
more closely. She has gray hair, thick glasses and a neck covered in wrinkles.
This woman is much older than Gloria. Twenty years older, at least.

“I’m sorry,” I
say, backing towards the door. “There’s been a misunderstanding.”

“Who are you?
What do you want from me?”

“Nothing… There’s
been a terrible mistake…”

I’m almost out
the door, but the doctor follows me, pressing me with questions.

“What are you
doing here? Who let you in?” She calls out down the corridor. “Fausto! Come
here a moment.”

Fausto’s a
male nurse. Pretty tough-looking, too. He comes out of a nearby room with a
sleepy face. “What’s wrong, doctor?”

“This man
here––”

I don’t give
her time to finish. I spin around and start running. I leave the ward and dash
down the stairs. In a moment I’m out of the building. I sprint towards the
exit, turning to see if Fausto is chasing me. The hospital paths are dark and
no one is following.

When I get to
the main gate, I remember the security guard. He’s sitting in his shack, eyes
fixed on his TV. I speed up, hoping to pass unnoticed, but he raises his eyes
just as I’m about to go through the gate.

“Hey, you!” he
says, jumping up from his chair. “How did you get in?”

“I flew,” I
say.

“You’re a
funny guy, huh?”

He positions
himself in front of the gate, his arms crossed over his chest.

“Let me
through.”

“Oh, no you
don’t. I’m going to have some fun now, too.”

“Come on. I
was only joking,” I say, trying to diffuse the situation.

The guard
shakes his head. “You’re not going anywhere until the cops get here.” He points
to his shack. “Just sit in there quietly while I call the them.”

I bow my head,
obedient. Maybe it’s the shock of meeting the
other
Gloria, or maybe it’s the shame at finding myself in this
situation. Whatever the case, I feel a lump rising in my throat, and all of a
sudden I’m crying like a baby.

The security
guard gapes at me. “What... what are you doing?”

I bury my face
in my hands and cry harder. Sobs shake my shoulders and chest. Big tears flow
down between my fingers and fall onto my shoes. The guard stares at me,
embarrassed. It’s just the two of us. He must feel kind of sorry for me. He
comes closer, saying, “Come on, now. Don’t cry like that…” He stands there with
his arms hanging at his sides, biting his lip, not sure what to do.

I don’t know
what comes over me. All of a sudden, I shove the guard backwards with all my
might. He staggers, collides with the door of the shack and falls inside, pulling
the chair over on top of himself. He stays there on the floor, waving his legs
in the air like an overturned crab. Before he can get up, I rush out of the
gate and down to the corner where I parked my car. I get in, turn the key with
trembling fingers and pull out as fast as I can. Only when I’m far away do I
put down the window and let the cool night air in.

Who knows why,
but in that moment I think of Daniel. I think about him, just sixteen years
old, driving round the city looking for adventure. Then I think about me,
forty-five years old and running away like an idiot. My face out the window, my
mouth dry, my eyes fixed on a road full of potholes. I feel like Sergio Monti
in Sergio Monti’s car.

It’s not a
nice feeling.

16

“Hi, Dad?”

“Micky… How
are you?”

“Awful.”

She sniffs, as
though she’s been crying.

“What’s wrong?
Have you been arguing with your mother?”

“Will you come
and get me?”

“Why, where
are you?”

“I’m in front
of the tobacconist’s, in town. I caught the bus.”

“Don’t move.
I’ll be right there.”

I was going to
stay holed up in the bunker for a good while. I’d taken stuff down to drink and
covered up the windows so the light couldn’t get in. Just the thought of going
out in the sun makes me feel sick. If Michela has come this far, though, she
must have a good reason. I put on a clean T-shirt, pick up my sunglasses and an
old straw hat that Alessandra used to wear for gardening. I go out and get in
the car. I left it out in the sun. It must be at least a hundred and twenty
degrees inside.

Michela’s
there waiting in front of the tobacconist’s in the main square. Army pants,
tank top, backpack. She’s not wearing the silver necklace anymore.

I open the car
door. “Come on. Get in.”

She gets in
the car without a word. Her hair is hiding her face, but you can see just the
same that she’s been crying. Her black eye liner has dribbled right down to her
chin.

We pull up in
front of the house. Before getting out she turns to look at me.

“You look
terrible,” she says. “What happened to you?”

“You should
see yourself. Did someone give you two black eyes?”

“Anything’s
better than your ugly grizzly-bear mug,” she replies, without smiling.

I open the
gate and let her in.

I stay behind
to watch her walking through the garden. It’s been six years since she last set
foot in this house. When I got out of the hospital, Alessandra and Michela came
to pick me up. They brought me home, but they didn’t want to come in. We said
goodbye out on the street. “Look after yourself,” Alessandra said, and off they
went, leaving me there with my bag, my medical records, and the feeling I’d
been a weight they’d managed to free themselves of.

Michela walks
right past her old swing without even glancing at it, heading straight for the
front door.

“Well? Are you
going to let me in?”

Just as we
walk inside, her phone rings. She rolls her eyes and answers.

“There’s
nothing to explain,” she says over the phone. “I don’t want to go and that’s
it… I said no… I don’t feel like it anymore, okay? I’m free to make my own
decisions… What can I do about it? It just means you won’t have to give me a
present at Christmas… Actually, don’t give me any gifts anymore.”

She blows out
her cheeks and widens her eyes.

“Yes, I’m
listening to you… Where do you think I am? With Dad… Because I felt like it… Okay,
here he is…”

She hands her
phone to me. “Careful. She’s pretty pissed.”

I take the
phone and say brightly, “Hi, Alessandra.”

“What’s going
on?” she fumes.

“I don’t know,
actually. Michela just got here and she still hasn’t told me––”

“I’ll tell
you, then,” she interrupts me. “At the last minute, your daughter has decided
not to go to Paris. The flight’s the day after tomorrow, it’s all been planned.
I paid in advance and now she doesn’t want to go.”

I look at
Michela. She’s sitting on the couch and has turned on the TV.

“Why doesn’t
she want to go?”

“Who knows?
This morning, out of the blue, she said she didn’t want to go anymore.”

“All right,
let me talk to her. Then I’ll call you back.”

I sit down
beside Michela. She’s watching a music video.

“What happened
between you and Daniel?” I ask.

She stares at
me as if I had a crystal ball or something.

“Who told you
it has to do with him?”

“Well, does it
or doesn’t it?”

“Yes. But how
do you know?”

“You were
going to Paris for him, not to study French. We both know that.”

Michela turns
away, her eyes riveted on the screen. I can’t think of anything else to say. We
sit there in silence. After a while I see a black tear trickling down her
cheek. She’s crying again. The corners of her mouth are turned down and her
chin is trembling, just like when she was little. Sometimes she used to cry for
no reason, as if she just needed to give vent to her emotions. I never did know
how to console her in those moments. Just like I don’t know how to now.

“Micky…” I
say, without the slightest idea of how to continue the sentence.

Michela leans
against me and sobs. I put my arm around her shoulder and hug her. Her tears
wet my shirt.

“I hate him!”
she rages. “He’s a bastard!.”

“What did he
do?”

“He’d been kind
of strange for a couple of days. He wasn’t calling. He didn’t turn up for a
date. Then last night he said, ‘Let’s meet tomorrow morning in the square.’ I
went, like an idiot, thinking he wanted to apologize. Instead he had this
speech all prepared. He doesn’t know if I’m the right person for him at this point
in his life. Bullshit like that. In the end he said it’s best for us not to see
each other in Paris. Do you get it, Dad? That bastard dumped me right before we
were supposed to leave!”

“Um...” I nod.

I hold her in
my arms a little longer. When she starts snuffling, I get up and bring her some
tissues. Michela blows her nose and dries her eyes. Her black makeup stays on
the tissue.

“Oh God, what
a mess.”

She runs into
the bathroom. I stick my head in the door while she’s rinsing her face at the
sink. “I’m sorry, Micky. I know you were looking forward to this trip with
Daniel. We’d already bought the books and everything. Still, I can’t help but wonder
if it isn’t for the best, in the end.”

Michela lifts
up her dripping face. She looks at me in the mirror without understanding.

“To be
honest,” I continue, “Daniel just seems kind of like a pretty-boy
to me.”

“A
what?”

“A pretty-boy,”
I repeat, “with that ridiculous car and that hair cut––a spoiled
little rich kid. I just don’t think he was right for you. You deserve someone
better than that, Micky. You really do.”

Michela stares
at me, squinting like it’s hard to bring me into focus, and says, “You don’t
understand shit, Dad.”

Then she kicks
the door shut in my face.

Around seven,
I start making up some pasta sauce. Michela’s outside sending text messages, bombarding
Daniel with insults.

The telephone
rings while I’m peeling a clove of garlic.

“Is it all
right if I come to pick Michela up in an hour?” Alessandra asks.

“Actually, she
asked me if she could stay over. Didn’t she tell you? She said she would.”

“No… What’s
going on?”

“Nothing. She
just wants to sleep here.”

“What did you
tell her?”

“That it’s
okay with me.”

“And does that
seem right to you?”

“She’s got her
room upstairs. I don’t see the problem.”

“This is no
good, Sergio. This wasn’t our agreement.”

“What
agreement are you talking about?”

“How come all
of a sudden you’re taking an interest in Michela?”

“Look, she was
the one that came here. I didn’t force her to come.”

“It’s no
good,” Alessandra repeats. “I don’t like it at all.”

“What’s wrong
with her staying here? I’ll bring her back home tomorrow.”

“Watch what
you do, Sergio. Don’t go messing up my life again. Are we clear?”

“Completely.”

“Put Michela
on now.”

“She’s on her
phone.”

“Well, tell
her to call me back. And tomorrow morning you’re bringing her home.
Understood?”

I’ve barely
begun to sauté the garlic when the phone rings again. This time it’s Roberto.

“Hey, how’s it
going?” he asks. He’s in his car.

“I’m making
some pasta for Michela and me. A surprise visit.”

“I see. So
you’re busy?”

“Why?”

“I wanted to
ask if you could put me up for the night.”

“What’s the
matter, Rob?”

“Loredana was
busting my balls and I couldn’t take it anymore. I had to leave. I don’t want
to go back home tonight.”

“Come on over.
There’s plenty of room.”

“But I’ll ruin
your evening with your daughter.”

“Michela’s
just split up with her boyfriend. You’ll be great company for each other.”

“All right,”
he says. I can tell that he’s glad. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Roberto
arrived while I was draining the pasta. Michela had set the table out in the
garden. She’d even found two candles, goodness knows where. When I told her
that, in my opinion, she was much prettier without all that black eye make-up
on, she huffed and hid her face behind her hair.

When we’re
about to finish our meal, Nino drops by. He has Lucky on a leash. “How sweet!”
says Michela. She picks the dog up. “What’s his name?”

Nino tells
her, then adds, “If it hadn’t been for Sergio, this dog would have ended up
roasted.”

Michela and
Roberto both ask him what he’s talking about. Nino’s amazed that I haven’t said
anything about the fire. Then he tells the whole story.

“I can’t believe
it,” says Michela. “Dad hates dogs. He was bitten when he was little.”

She insists
that I show everyone the scar on the nape of my neck, under my hair. I must
have been about five. We were away camping and I was playing in the gravel with
some other children. Suddenly, an old shepherd dog that had never hurt a soul
came up and bit me on the head. I ended up in the emergency room. The owner of
the campground put the dog down.

“Feel how soft
he is,” Michela says, putting Lucky on my lap. The dog wags its tail and tries
to lick my face. I put it right back on the ground, then I ask Nino how Sabrina
is.

“She’s packing
our bags.”

He tells us that
his wife was listening to the radio the other day, a game show. The questions
were about Italian songs from the Sixties. Sabrina called in, just to see what
would happen, guessed all the right answers and won a trip to Majorca. A week
for two in a luxury hotel.

“The problem
is that the plane leaves tomorrow,” Nino says, “and we still haven’t found
anyone to take Lucky.”

“What about
your son?”

“He spends the
whole day in the shop and then sleeps at his girlfriend’s place in Rome. He
doesn’t want anything to do with the dog.”

“Can’t you
take it with you?” I ask.

“The hotel
won’t take him. I know it would be a nuisance for you, but it’s only for a
week. You only have to open a can of dog food once a day. He’s a really good
dog.”

“Come on, Dad,
we can keep him,” Michela says.

“You’re going
back to your mom’s tomorrow,” I say, “and the dog would die of starvation with
me.”

“I’ll come and
feed him every day.”

“Of course you
will.”

“I promise!
I’ve got nothing to do for two weeks. Please?”

Michela looks
at me with those big eyes and swears she’ll look after the dog. In the end,
fool that I am, I say yes.

After dinner,
Michela resumed her war with Daniel, a battle fought with text messages.
Roberto and I sat down outside to drink screwdrivers. The dog lay down under my
chair and has refused to move ever since.

“What have you
and Loredana been fighting about?”

“About everything,
really. The main reason is always the same––kids. In September
we’ll have been together ten years. We made a deal, right from the beginning, a
very clear agreement––no kids. I’ll admit it, I just don’t feel
like I want to be a father. It doesn’t make sense to bring children into this
world. Loredana always agreed with me. Then one day she woke up and started
saying that she wanted a baby. She’s just turned forty, you see. I haven’t
changed my mind, though. If anything, I’m more certain than I was before. Do
you know what she keeps on repeating, day and night, like a broken record?
‘You’re just afraid of growing old’,’ she says. ‘You don’t want children
because watching them grow up will make you notice the time passing. Don’t you
understand that the only way to live forever is to have children?’”