The Purple Room

by Mauro Casiraghi

  Keep on walking, Sergio. Keep walking.

  “Excuse me,” the voice repeats, louder.

  I would like to keep going, but my feet stop. I’m paralyzed. Slowly, I turn around.

  “Are you talking to me?”

  Marilena peers at me. I must look horrible.

  “Sergio?” she asks hesitantly.

  Say no, and you’re safe, I tell myself.

  “Yes.” The word comes out of my mouth on its own.

  Marilena’s face lights up. “We’ve both been sitting here for at least half an hour!”

  She holds out her hand. I give it a limp shake. I can’t think of anything to say. I stand there, rooted in place, looking down.

  “Well, do you want to get something to drink?” she asks, refusing to be discouraged.

  “Yeah… Sounds like a good idea.”

  I sit down at her table.

  “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?”

&nb
sp; “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 ment
hol 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.”