The Purple Room (3 page)

“I’ll have another club soda, please,” she says to the waiter.

I’m staring at the toes of her purple shoes, wondering what my daughter
will want to buy tomorrow. Another pair of steel-toed combat boots, most
likely.

“Sergio? Are you getting something?”

“No… Yes. Give me a minute.”

“Well, just the club soda for now, then.”

The waiter leaves. My head is a turmoil. My thoughts race everywhere,
out of control, like this morning all over again. Fighting it is useless. The
best thing to do is to concentrate on some small detail. Something simple and
practical, like the fact that the table wobbles slightly. I take a paper
napkin, fold it up, and stuff it under the table leg.
Marilena watches me
silently while I repeat this two or three times. It takes me at least a couple
of minutes.

The waiter arrives with her soda and leaves again.

Marilena doesn’t drink. She waits until I’m done folding paper napkins
and pushing them under the table legs. When there’s nothing left for me to do
but look up at her, she asks, “Is something wrong?”

“Not at all.”

“Do you want to go somewhere else?”

“This is fine.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.”

Marilena sips at her club soda and does nothing to fill the horrifying
silence we’re falling into. She’s waiting for me to make the first move. I
notice the dark fuzz on her forearms. I’ve always liked the hair on a woman’s
forearms. I find it exciting.

I cough a bit, then manage to say:

“The woman at the agency told me you work at a bookstore.”

“I’m in charge of staff management.”

“So you don’t… You don’t actually sell books, then.”

“No. I’m responsible for the people who sell the books, like I said.”

“Ah.”

She studies my face, trying to read my expression.

“Are you disappointed?” Her tone is familiar, intimate.

“Of course not. I guess I assumed… I thought you must sell books… but
it’s fine either way.”

“I don’t mean my work. I mean
me
.
I saw you leaving. Were you disappointed when you saw me?”

“Absolutely not.”

Marilena regards me gravely.

“Is this your first date?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s my fifth.”

“How did the other ones go?”

“The first was with a French widower, around sixty, a real gentleman. He
took me to the symphony. He was so well mannered and thoughtful. Then, as soon
as we got out of the theater, he asked, ‘Your place or mine,
chérie
?’ I couldn’t believe my ears.”

Marilena has a nice voice. It’s relaxing to listen to her. I get
comfortable and forget about the paper napkins, concentrating on her
soft-looking arm hair as she lights another cigarette.

“The second man was a fifty-year-old with a huge car, a wholesaler. He
asked me out to dinner. All he talked about was work, how many employees he
had, how much money he made. Right before dessert, he left to make a call and
never came back. I paid the bill.

“The third one had written ‘slight physical defect’ on his profile. I
was curious and wondered what the defect was. When he arrived, I saw he was
missing a leg. We spent a nice evening chatting, but I didn’t want to see him
again. Not because of the leg. Because he had lied. After that, I asked to only
meet people who put honesty first. Luisa said you seemed like an honest type.
Is it true?”

“I don’t know. Tell me about your fourth date.”

“I met him last week. A dentist.”

“Was he honest?”

“Too much so. We’d been talking for five minutes when he said it was
pointless to continue our date. I wasn’t right for him.”

“Why?”

“‘You’re too much like my ex,’ he said, and he left, too.” Marilena
shrugs. “It was better that way. At least neither of us wasted our time.”

She takes a drag on her cigarette and looks at me with sad eyes. “Do I
look like someone you know? Or is it the way I’m dressed? Your profile said
your favorite color is purple. Mine says that, too. Maybe I took it too far.”

She assesses her reflection in the window. I feel like an asshole for
making her get all dressed up to come here, just so she’ll be able ask herself
why her fifth date is yet another disaster.

“Marilena, there’s nothing wrong with you, I swear. It’s just that…
that… that…”

Oh God. Now I’m stuttering, too.

“Just what?”

“It’s not you, it’s me. My head isn’t working well. Not at all. I just
got out of the hospital.”

Marilena scrutinizes me with narrowed eyes. “Well, that’s a new one. Is
it a nice way to get rid of me?”

“No, it’s the clearest way I can put it right now. There’s no other way
to explain it. But it has nothing to do with you, I promise.”

She sits there staring at me, finishing her cigarette. Then she picks up
her bag and stands.

“Too bad,” she says. “You’re a little odd, but you’re also the first guy
I would have gone on a second date with. Maybe it’s because you don’t seem like
you’re looking for anything.”

She turns and leaves, holding herself proudly as she heads towards
Piazza Navona.
While I’m watching her walk away, my thoughts finally stop bouncing
around like balls in a pinball machine. I sink down into the chair and stay
there, unable to move. Her final words flash in my mind like a neon sign.
You don’t seem like you’re looking for
anything
. Maybe that’s because I have no idea who or what I should be
looking for.

That feeling I had when I opened my eyes in the hospital is back again.
Unmistakable, absurd, joyful and painful. It doesn’t make any sense. I’m forty-five
and I got divorced six years ago. I haven’t wanted a steady relationship since
then. Why do I feel like this? It’s ridiculous. Still, I can’t stop thinking
about her. That woman, with long hair flowing down her naked back, silhouetted
against the light of a window. All around her, a bedroom wall. The wall is
painted purple. A hot, carnal purple. Like lips swollen with blood and desire.

I want to laugh and cry. I’m happy and sad at the same time, and I can’t
stop thinking about a woman who I can’t remember ever meeting.

Who is she?

Who are you?

Who are you?

4

My phone is ringing in the pants I left lying on the floor. I lean off
of the edge of the bed and pick them up.

“Hi, Dad. Did I wake you up?”

“Um…”

“How come you’re still in bed? Were you up late last night?”

I look at my watch. Seven thirty. I can’t believe it.

“Micky, do you know what time it is?”

“Of course. Aren’t I allowed to get up early?”

“No, it’s just that before eleven o’clock you don’t usually…”

“It’s a gorgeous day. The sun is shining, and the sky is incredibly
blue. Go see for yourself.”

“Yeah, okay. But why are you calling?”

“Come on, Dad. You’re slow this morning.”

For a moment I flounder, wondering what else I’m forgetting.

“Oh, sorry, sweetie, you’re right. Happy birthday!”

“Thank youuu… Good thing you remembered! I was getting mad at you for a
second there.”

“You caught me off guard. I would have wished you happy birthday when I
came to pick you up.”

“That’s why I’m calling, actually. Can we do this afternoon?”

“I thought we were going to meet up this morning.”

“Mom forgot she made me a doctor’s appointment this morning. Female
stuff, you know. Does it matter if we meet up later?”

“No, except that I told Grandma we’d go have lunch with her.”

“We can go next Saturday. Today I just want to hang out with you.”

Weird. I’ve never heard her say that before.

“What time should I come get you?”

“Let’s just meet at Piazza del Popolo. Three o’clock. And shave,” she
says before she hangs up. “Last Saturday you looked like a bear.”

Fifteen years old today.

It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. I remember the day she was
born. Six a.m. on a Friday. C-section. The nurse let me see her from behind the
glass. She was so small she fit in one hand. Red and furious about being torn
out of her mother, she howled with a toothless mouth, her eyes shut and her
tiny fists tightly clenched. She already had an impressive amount of hair.
Black, shiny, and straight, like a hedgehog’s quills. I was so happy, I cried.
I felt privileged, the luckiest man in the world, but also the most vulnerable.
Now that I had a daughter, I was terrified of losing her. The horrible thought
of tragedy, of sudden, violent death, went hand in hand with the joy of seeing
her birth. It was then that I started to have that sense of danger, of menace
all around me.

My fear of forgetting even one moment of Michela’s childhood quickly
became an obsession. She was growing up so fast, and I wanted to remember
absolutely everything. I took a picture of her every day from the first time
she suckled on her mother’s breast until her third birthday. One thousand and
ninety-five photos for as many days. When she started preschool I scaled back
to one per month. I kept it up until the day my wife and I split, when Michela
was nine. Filling up files with those photos felt like putting money in the
bank. I told myself that the pictures would keep the memory of those days
intact, like a thread connecting who we were to what we would become in the
future. Whatever happened between Alessandra and me. No matter what kind of
relationship I would end up having with my daughter.

Now, I know I was wrong.

I lost touch with my daughter a long time ago, and the pictures didn’t
help. Then death came looking for me when I wasn’t paying attention. It brushed
against me in a moment of calm, of boredom and nothingness. Thirty meters down,
when the accident happened, I’m sure I wasn’t thinking about anything at all. I
would have died without a thought in my head, unaware, like an insect
splattered on the windshield of a car. No more, no less.
Memories that I thought were sacrosanct and untouchable turned out to be
as fragile as skin and bones. They can be so easily changed or warped by mental
illness, or swept away by an air bubble caught in a vein. In an instant we
become nothing, without memory, emptied. Useless containers. We might think
we’re alive, but we’re already dead, buried in a silent grave thirty meters
under the sea.

I look out of the bathroom window while I’m shaving and see two blackbirds
hopping around in the yard. A male with shiny black feathers and a smaller,
brown, less glamorous female. Now that I’ve mowed the lawn, the insects have
surfaced and are finally within their reach. The male is feeding the female,
doing all the hard work on his own. He grabs the insects and worms in his beak
and passes them to her. She swallows each one and, in an instant, has hopped up
to him again, waiting for the next beak full.

I grab my old SLR, mount the telephoto lens and head outside to take
some shots of the blackbirds. That’s when I notice that there’s already a roll
of film loaded. Nine photos have already been taken, but I have no memory of
doing it. I have no idea what’s in them.

At noon, I get in the car and take the film to my usual camera shop.
They tell me my prints will be ready in the early afternoon.

Then I drive to my mother’s. She lives on the second floor of a building
on the Tiburtina road. After my father died and Michela was born, I managed to
convince her to sell her apartment in Milan and move to Rome. Instead of
looking for a house in the country near us, she moved into a three-bedroom
apartment in a townhouse that reminded her of the one she’d lived in for forty
years. She needed a huge truck for the move. Besides all the boxes of documents
and papers she had accumulated over the years, she brought all her furniture
and clothes and all the junk that she had kept in the basement. Shoes, bags,
wigs from the sixties. A whole shelf of tools––hammers,
screwdrivers, pliers, spanners, cap screws, paint brushes, gauges, square
rulers, and tape measures. My dad’s old racing bike and the one I’d used to
chase him through the park near Monza when I was ten. Crates full of textbooks
from every school I’d ever attended, from first grade to the Academy of Fine
Arts. Bundles of carbon paper that my mother used in 1965 to copy the letters
she typed on her typewriter. It was useless to try and tell her that no one
used typewriters anymore. She just stubbornly repeated that, “It might all come
in handy someday.”

My mom is in the kitchen breading chicken breasts. Every time I see her,
she seems smaller, like a T-shirt that shrinks every time you wash it. But her
flashing eyes are still the same as in pictures from her youth. Right away she
asks me about Michela. She’s a little upset that she’s not with me. The chicken
breasts were especially for her.

“Michela’s a vegetarian now,” I tell her.

“What? Since when?”

“Last week.”

“Kids these days,” she says, and goes back to breading the chicken. “Can
you put up those curtains for me? Lunch will be ready soon.”

I find the ironed curtains and the rods in the living room, with the
rings ready to be attached. I grab the ladder from the bathroom and get to
work. As I’m hooking the rings onto the curtains, I wonder who would have done
this if I hadn’t woken up from my coma. Maybe my mother would have lived out
the rest of her days without curtains. I can picture her coming home from Sunday
mass and sitting on the couch, looking sadly at the mess of curtains, rods, and
hooks. A sign of my absence that she lacks the courage to remove.

“Lunch is served!”

I put the last ring in its place and place the rod back in its brackets.
I put the ladder away and rinse my hands at the sink, then sit down at the
table. When it’s just the two of us, we eat in the kitchen. The dining room
feels too big when Michela’s not there.

I chew silently, staring down at my plate. I can feel my mother studying
me.

“What’s wrong, Sergio?” she asks after a while.

“Nothing.”

“I’m your mother. You know I can tell when something’s wrong.”

“I told you, everything’s fine.”

“You’re worried about something, aren’t you? Or are you sad?”

“No, Mom.”

“Do you feel like crying? If you do, go ahead and cry. It would do you
good to let it out.”

I don’t answer. I keep chewing, trying to keep calm.

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know. After what happened to you…
Even as a child, you never cried. Not even at your father’s funeral. It’s not
good for you to keep it bottled up.”

“That’s enough!” I burst out. “I told you nothing is wrong.”

“All right, sorry. Don’t get upset. I won’t ask again.”

“Good.”

“Do you want some fruit?”

“No.”

“An apple?”

“No.”

“I’ll make some coffee, then.”

I watch her as she fills the
moka
coffee maker and puts it on the stove. She lights a menthol cigarette off of
the burner. It’s something I’ve seen her do thousands of times. The kitchen
fills with a smell from long ago. It reminds me of my childhood.
I feel pins and needles in my feet and realize I’ve been eating with my
legs wedged under the chair. I stand up, stiff and sore.

“I’m going to take a look in the box,” I say. I mean box fifty-three,
where my mom is collecting all of this year’s documents.

“Why? What are you looking for?”

“Something is off with my bank statement. I’m just going to check it
out.”

“Let me do it. I know where to look.”

“It’s okay. It’ll only take a minute.”

I go to the guest room where my mom stores everything that won’t fit in
the basement, like the furniture from my childhood room and my dad’s old
stationary bike.

When I was little, we would spend our Sundays biking in the park. Just
the two of us. Mom would stay home to iron and clean the floors. Dad taught me
how to ride with no hands and jump over potholes. We’d race each other down the
tree-lined paths. I always won by a hair.

My father stopped letting me win when I got older. He would beat me
every time, trying to get me to improve. “You’ll beat me next time, you’ll
see,” he’d say, winking. He had finally started having fun, but I didn’t want
to race anymore. I came up with excuses—homework, bad weather,
whatever—and then I’d sneak out and wander around downtown with my
friends until evening.

Dad didn’t seem too upset about it. He had imagined a different future
for me, anyway; he wasn’t set on my becoming an athlete. After that, though, he
didn’t know what to do with himself on Sundays. He started going to cafes with
friends. He played cards, listened to soccer games on the radio, and got bored.
He’d never even liked soccer, much less playing cards. My mom noticed he was
gaining weight and started to worry.

“You’re starting to look like the Michelin man, Gigi,” she told him when
he hit a hundred kilos.

For Christmas that year she gave him the stationary bike.

He eyed it with skepticism. “This thing is for old people,” he said.

“Try it.”

He got on and pedaled a bit, just to be nice. The next day, though, he
tried it again, tightening the clamp to increase the virtual incline. Little by
little, he started to enjoy it. Every Sunday, he would ride the bike in the
living room while my mother ironed the clothes. He would pretend he was climbing
a famous hill in the Giro d’Italia cycling race and commentated for the crowds.

“There goes Gigi Monti, breaking away! He’s leaving the group behind!
Look at him climb! Go, Monti, go!”

My mother would listen and smile as she folded socks.

I sit on the bike to try it out. I slip my feet through the pedal
straps. A strange feeling. The seat that held my father’s weight as his hands
rested on the handlebars. The sweat of his palms on the grips. What’s left of
all those Sundays spent pedaling in the living room? What became of his great
imaginary victories? I look at the odometer, the record of how far he traveled
without ever leaving the house: 99,946 kilometers. A little further, and he
would have hit a hundred thousand. A nice, round number. Just one more Sunday
and he would have done it. I wonder if he cared about the distance. Maybe, on
the day he died, he got up thinking, “Come on, Gigi. Sunday is just two days
away. This time you’ll get to a hundred thousand for sure…”

He never did, of course.

“Sergio! Coffee’s ready!” my mom shouts from the kitchen.

I get off the bike and walk to the desk where box fifty-three sits.
There are six blue folders inside, each with the name of a month written in
felt-tipped pen, from January to June. I pull out April. All the bills,
receipts, and stubs are in chronological order. My memory loss spans the last
week of the month. I find one receipt: it’s from the supermarket where I bought
the two cases of water for my mom. I remember arguing with her about it. As
always, she wanted to pay for the water. I won in the end, but she kept the
receipt anyway, “because you never know.”