The Purple Room

by Mauro Casiraghi

  The two sisters were left alone to look after her. They’d bought some wax plugs. As soon as their mother started to scream, they’d stick them in their ears. While Gloria was talking, I kept an eye on the stations. I’d gotten this urge to kiss her, but the train had already passed Piacenza and I still hadn’t worked up the courage. When we got to Lambrate, Gloria started away to go get her suitcase out of her compartment. It was my last chance. I barred the way and asked her if I could give her a kiss.

  “Well, then, you were a bigger dolt than I ever was,” says Roberto. “You should have just kissed her. She must have laughed in your face.”

  “I expected her to say no. But the point was to see if it would be a nice kind of ‘no,’ or a straight up ‘fuck you.’ At that age, the difference was very important. Instead, Gloria looked at me with a wry little smile, like she was kidding, and said, ‘Yes.’”

  “So you kissed her?”

  “Of course,” I say. “I wasn’t that big of a dolt. We locked ourselves in the bathroom and kissed until the train pulled into the station and everyone had gotten off. Before we pulled apart, Gloria looked at me like she was seeing me for the first time and said, in this strange voice, ‘Who are you?’

  “From that day on, we never stopped kissing. We kissed everywhere. At school, on the street, in the park, at the cinema, in churches. We did nothing else but kiss. Hours and hours of kisses. I’ve never kissed so much in my life as when I was kissing Gloria Decesaris.”

  I drain the last of my Negroni and realize I’m getting drunk. Roberto has had quite a lot to drink, too. He’s chewing on olives with a glassy look in the eyes.

  “I don’t know how you manage to cope, living this way,” he says shaking his head. “You sit there digging up every little bit of your past, like a mole.” He thrusts a handful of peanuts into his mouth. “I’d go crazy.”

  His phone starts ringing. He looks at the screen, snorts, then answers. “Yes, Loredana… No, I’m here with Sergio… I don’t know… I’ve told you I don’t know… Fine, do what you want.”

  “I’ve kept you out too late,” I say. “Let’s go home.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “I don’t want you two to fight because of me.”

  “It’s not your fault. Anyway, I want to hear the rest of the story. I still don’t know what any of this has to do with your amnesia.”

  While we’re walking to the car I tell him about the time I called Gloria up. Ursula answered and said she didn’t know if she’d be able to pass her sister the phone. Their mother was at it again. In the background I could hear Mrs. Decesaris screaming things like, “I’ve got a stomach ache! Who let the cat out? Gloria! Go and look for the cat!.”

  When Gloria finally got to the phone, I didn’t feel like giving her the speech I’d planned. I told her it wasn’t important, that we’d see each other at school the next day.

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” she said, “and I’ll miss you terribly.”

  Then I plucked up my courage and told her I wanted to be there with her, in her room, in her bed. I wanted to make love to her. It was what I wanted most in the world. I asked her if she wanted it, too. There was a silence on the phone, filled by a couple of her mother’s screams (“Turn on the light! Bring me my drops! My drops!”). Then I heard Gloria’s voice again. “Yes,” was all she said. Just like when I had asked her for a kiss on the train. “Yes,” she said. She was my girl, the one who said yes. I was crazy about her.

  We decided to do it on a Thursday afternoon, at my place, when my mother was at the office and my father had a union meeting. I was so tense. My stomach was in a knot and my mouth was dry. After I’d gotten home from school, I’d showered twice, but I was still sweating. I’d look at my watch every five minutes. The closer the time came, the more frightened I got. Part of me hoped that our plan would fall through. I’d just got out of my third shower when Gloria called to say that something had come up. She had to go with her mom to the vet. The cat was sick, it had gastroenteritis and might die. The disappointment made me furious. I didn’t know who to take it out on. I hoped the cat really would die.

  The days that followed were chaotic. The school year was coming to an end and we were all anxious about our final grades. Gloria became distant. The cat had recovered, but she didn’t say anything about our plans. We’d see each other briefly in class, then she’d rush off home. She claimed she was really busy. I was sure she’d changed her mind. My chance had vanished and Gloria was deserting me. Probably for an older boy. Maybe a friend of her sister’s. I was a wreck. I wasn’t eating. I moped around the house sighing, closed myself in my room. My mother thought I was coming down with something. “It’s nothing,” my father would say, winking at me. “I went through the same thing at his age.”

  On the last day of school, when I had lost all hope, Gloria took my art history book and wrote, “Today, after three, at my house. I’ll be waiting for you. G.” She didn’t say anything else, but I knew what that invitation meant. After school I called my mother at the office and told her I would be spending the afternoon with my friends. Then I set off for Pantigliate.

  Gloria lived in the suburbs, in a two-story townhouse house with green shutters. I rang the door bell. She came out through the garden in bare feet and let me in. She was wearing a cotton dress and her hair was gathered up at the nape of her neck. It was held in place with a pencil. She said her mother and sister had gone to visit an aunt. They wouldn’t be back till evening. Then she took my hand and led me upstairs.

  Her room was completely purple. The walls were a raspberry color, the curtains lilac. There was a fuchsia carpet, pink cushions and even a violet lamp. The room was divided in two. On one side was Ursula’s bed, and on the other side, near the window, Gloria’s. The sheets were purple, like everything else. She hugged me as hard as she could and gave me a kiss. It was as if she were breathing through my mouth. “Come on,” she said, “let’s get undressed.”

  I took everything off and lay down on the bed to watch Gloria take off her clothes. She slid the pencil out of her hair. It fell down over her shoulders. She lowered the straps of her dress, let it slip down and pushed it away with her foot. Then she put two fingers under the elastic band of her panties and slid them off, too. She looked towards the window. The sun was falling into the room like a sword. “Too much light,” she said.

  Covering her breasts with her arm, she walked around the bed to the window and leaned out to pull in the shutters. Right there, at that exact moment, I really understood what it meant to be happy. I just knew that, from then on, I would have to measure my happiness by comparing it to that moment. I wondered if the rest of my life would ever measure up to it.

  When I woke from the coma, the first thought I had, the first image that passed through my brain, was of Gloria, at sixteen, in front of that window. The feeling I had was the same.

  “Wait a minute,” says Roberto. “There’s something I don’t understand.” We’ve reached his car but we keep on talking, leaning on the hood. “You were working on the Elixir project before the accident, so you were already thinking about Gloria.”

  “That’s just it. For thirty years I’ve lived with the memory of Gloria buried away inside me. What you’re saying is right. I don’t know how or when I started remembering that afternoon in the purple room. Maybe it just happened because of an association of ideas, when I was looking for an image for that ad, but the important thing is that it happened. It means that, in the days before the accident, I had started thinking about her again.”

  “Ok, but what’s so strange about that? It happens to me, too, sometimes, to think about the first girl I slept with.”

  “I didn’t do it with Gloria,” I clarify.

  “You’re kidding. So what happened in that room?”

  I tell him about how, after closing the shutters, Gloria lay down beside me. She was very embarrassed, covering herself with her arms. She said she felt ugly. I started touching her. W
ith the tips of my fingers I caressed her legs, her stomach, her little white breasts. She closed her eyes and let me. I explored the whole of her body, inch by inch. I studied her moles, the places where she bent and curved, the tiny imperfections on her skin. The shape of her wide hips, her elbows, her ankles, every detail was imprinted on my hands. Little by little, as I caressed her, her breathing became regular, her muscles relaxed. Without opening her eyes, she whispered, “Now I know who you are.”

  Then she fell asleep. I stayed there a long time, looking at her. She was sleeping so peacefully. I didn’t wake her. I got up and dressed quietly. Before I left, I turned and looked at her one last time. Lying there on that bed, naked and asleep, she looked like the women in my father’s books, a work of art.

  The next day, I called her, but no one answered. I tried again in the evening, and then again the next day. Finally, her sister answered. She said that Gloria was in the hospital. I went to see her. Her mother and father were there during visiting hours, too, so we couldn’t speak alone. Gloria looked all right, just a little pale. She had to get some blood tests done. That’s all I was able to figure out. I wanted to go back the next day, but that weekend I had to go to the mountains with my parents. I promised I’d get in touch when I got back on the following Monday. “I’ll be waiting for you,” were the last words I heard her say.

  “On Monday I showed up at the hospital, only to find the bed empty. A nurse told me her father had taken her away. I must have called her house a hundred times. No one ever answered. I went to Pantigliate. The house was closed up. I asked the neighbors, but no one knew where they’d gone. Since then I’ve never had any more news of her.”

  Roberto plays with his car keys. He’s very quiet.

  “Well, what do you think?”

  “It’s a good thing you remember who the girl was,” he says. “At least you won’t have to obsess about it anymore.”

  He doesn’t say anything else. I guess my story didn’t impress him much. I still have to tell him one more thing, though. “I want to find her.”

  He looks at me as if like I’ve just announced that I want to enter the priesthood.

  “You seriously want to look for a girl you went to high school with, after thirty years? Who knows where she is now? She’s probably married, with kids Michela’s age. Or maybe she’s died of cancer and she’s buried in the cemetery in Pantigliate.”

  “I only want to know what happened to her. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Sergio. Okay, when you woke up from your coma, you thought of her. That’s nice, it really is. But you know how the brain works, right? They’re just electric pulses. Nothing more. It’s not poetic, but it’s the truth. You regained consciousness and your brain went ‘click’ and pulled up the first memory it came across. You said it yourself, that you’d been thinking of her during the days before the accident. Why attach so much importance to it?”

  I don’t know what to say. I look down, all at once feeling kind of stupid.

  Roberto pats my arm, a paternal gesture. “I’ve gotta go. Loredana’s probably sharpening her knives.”

  He opens the door and gets in his car.

  “Listen to me on this, Sergio,” he says, before he pulls out. “Do whatever stupid shit you want to do, but not this. Don’t go looking for someone who doesn’t exist.”

  14

  I leave the underground garage. Once on the road, I start driving without any particular destination. Along a brightly-lit avenue I see a billboard with the Elixir advertisement. Then another, then another, and yet another. They’ve plastered the city with them. The twenty-by-ten-foot girl in the lilac panties follows me everywhere with her indifferent eyes.

  I told Roberto that I hadn’t thought of Gloria in all these years. It’s not true. I was wrong. I thought of her right before Christmas, seven years ago. At the time, I was having an affair with Federica, the mother of one of Michela’s school mates. She lived in an enormous villa surrounded by a luxurious park. Her husband, a famous lawyer, was never at home and she was lonely. A couple of times a week, between eight and nine in the morning, I’d go and see her. Federica would let me in through the front door, without a thought for the maid or the gardener. We’d go straight up to the guest room, tear off our clothes and make love furiously, hurriedly, without a word. Then we’d dress and go down to the kitchen for a cup of coffee. For ten minutes we’d talk about out children’s school, about how it was almost winter, about our summer holiday plans. She’d call up her mother or her sister while I finished drinking my coffee, skimming the headlines of her husband’s newspaper. We’d say goodbye at the door, just like a married couple. It was a comforting pretense. After having been to bed as lovers, reciting the part of a husband and wife made us feel less guilty. It created an illusion, for half an hour, that sex and domesticity could both exist under the same roof.

  One morning, when it was nearly Christmas, I went to see her as usual. Entering her house, I saw the Christmas tree all decorated with lights and a high star that reached the ceiling. My wife, too, had decided that we should put up our Christmas tree that coming weekend. I could already see myself climbing up the ladder to look for the dusty bag of ornaments, colored lights and silver tinsel. I felt a stab in my chest at the thought of Christmas dinner with my mother and Alessandra’s parents. All those fake smiles to hide the truth, from them and from ourselves. I imagined taking Alessandra aside and convincing her to admit that it was absurd to go on like this. I would have liked to tell her about Federica, talk to her without raising our voices, calmly, until we could both own up to being frightened, unhappy and secretly furious, acknowledge that our life together was over. Then we could have put up the tree, made dinner, opened the gifts. It would have been our last family Christmas. We all could have hugged, the way you do before you set off on a long trip. After that, we would all have gone our separate ways, with pain, bitterness, and a sense of failure, but nonetheless aware of the need to start over. The strength behind our decision, I told myself, would propel us forward towards a tomorrow that, for the moment, could only seem dark and terrible.

  Even while I was thinking those things, I already knew I wouldn’t have the courage to talk to Alessandra. She wouldn’t have had the courage to hear me out, either. The terror was stronger. It forced us into a sort of slow, dull and unrelenting self-destruction.

  I went upstairs with Federica and made love with more frenzy and desperation than usual. Once we had finished, I just lay there on my back, completely still. I had the sensation that I was made of marble, that my body weighed a ton. It was embedded in the mattress and no one would have been able to shift it.

  “How do you feel?” Federica asked, stroking my arm with her finger tips.

  “Fine,” I said, without much conviction.

  “Did something happen at home?”

  “No, nothing happened.”

  “Christmas depresses you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Me, too.”

  She lay on top of me and embraced me. Our bodies fit together perfectly, her nipples pressed against mine. I was uneasy. I felt like an intruder in that house. I had the urge to leave but, at the same time, I wanted to prolong the alienation I was experiencing for as long as I could. I needed it to stay awake. I’d had enough of closing my eyes and slipping head-long towards disaster.

  “I want to show you something,” said Federica. She jumped up and put on a dressing gown. I watched her, without moving. “Come on, get dressed,” she said, tossing my pants at me. I made the effort to dress and followed her downstairs. We went outside, ran across the lawn, shivering from the cold, and went into the garage. Federica turned on the lights and showed me her husband’s car collection. There was a Ferrari, a Porsche, a Jaguar and a gorgeous 1960 Lancia Flaminia––and those were just the ones I could recognize at a glance.

  “We never use them, but Alberto keeps on buying them.”

  At the back of the garage was a
car covered by a grey canvas tarpaulin.

  “This is my Christmas present,” she said, uncovering the car. It was a nineteen-forties Bugatti. A convertible. I’m no expert, but I knew it would have cost an exorbitant amount. I sat in the driver’s seat and stroked the wooden steering wheel. Federica sat down beside me and rested her head on my shoulder.

  “How nice it would be to set off on a trip,” she said absentmindedly.

  “Why don’t we?”

  She smiled without answering. She didn’t think it was a serious question.

  “Is there any gas in the car?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Go and get dressed and come straight back here. I’ll take you to Spain. We’ll celebrate New Year’s in Madrid.”

  “Sure,” said Federica, “and Alberto will have a heart attack.”

  “Over you or the car?”

  “The car, naturally.”

  “He gave it to you, didn’t he? You can do what you like with it.”

  “That’s true. When it comes down to it, I suppose we could leave. It’s too bad you have to go to work.”

  “Who cares about work?”

  “And I have to pick up Elisa from school.”

  “Send the maid.”

  “I also have to plan a dinner party for twelve. This evening we have important guests.”

  “No dinner, no guests. Leave a message saying you’ve gone on a trip and you’ll be back after New Year’s.”

  Federica laughed, shaking her head.

  “You’re so funny, Sergio.”

  She was enjoying herself. She liked my ridiculous rebellious impulses, the little transgressions I acted out during our twenty minutes of frenzied lovemaking. Only this time I wasn’t joking. I’d made a decision. I wanted to leave in that car and not come back until after the holidays. It wasn’t a romantic getaway. It was a violent and brutal way of telling my wife––and myself––how things really stood. Maybe the only way. If I had to self-destruct, I might as well do it in style.