The Purple Room Read online

  My mother told me that Alessandra stayed with me the whole time I was in a coma. She didn’t leave me for a minute. Michela insisted on staying in the hospital, too. They slept on benches there in the intensive care hallway. For three days, for as long as I was more dead than alive, we were a family again. When I opened my eyes on the fourth day, the room exploded with joy. Everyone was around the bed, smiling. Alessandra was smiling, too, but I think that deep down she was disappointed. Maybe she had thought I wouldn’t make it. By surviving, I failed to live up to her expectations yet again.

  I put some frozen fish in the oven for dinner. I’m opening a bottle of wine when the phone rings for the third time. It’s Roberto. He was with me when it happened. Truth be told, he was the one who screwed up the timing for our swim back up, so the embolism was his fault. We haven’t told anyone that, though. It’s something that has to stay between us.

  “How are you?”

  “Fine, Rob. Any news from the office?”

  “We miss you, you know. The girls want to throw you a surprise party when you come back. I told them it was a stupid idea and that you’re not that kind of guy, but they want to do it anyway. Don’t tell them I told you, okay?

  “All right.”

  “When are you going to come by and see us?”

  “Maybe next week.”

  “Great. I’ll show you the Elixir project. It turned out exactly how you envisioned it.”

  “Thanks, Rob. Talk to you later.”

  I hang up and go look at the calendar, trying to figure out what he was talking about. What project? What did he mean?

  The accident happened on the last Sunday in April. I remember that we hadn’t gone diving the Sunday before that, because the weather was bad. I’d stayed home scanning photos and organizing files. In the afternoon I’d visited my mom and helped her carry a couple cases of water bottles up to her apartment. She had asked me to take down her curtains, too. She’d wanted to wash them. I spent Monday morning at the studio, working on an ad for an anti-wrinkle cream. We had our soccer game that evening, and afterwards Franco, Roberto and I went out for pizza. We were supposed to have a meeting to assign new projects on the following day, Tuesday.

  I can’t remember anything about Tuesday. On the calendar I scribbled something like DET, or DEN—I can’t even read it. What was it? Detergent. Detox? Denise. Do I know a Denise? The cleaning lady who comes every once in a while is named Elvira. Denise… Denise… Denise… The name doesn’t ring a bell.

  My headache is coming back.

  I go and lie down on the couch. Closing my eyes, I keep running through the possibilities in my head. Det, den, det, den… I have some bread stuck in my teeth. As I work at it with my tongue, the word dentist pops into my mind. I jump up from the couch, rush into the bathroom, and look at my mouth in the mirror. There it is: a brand new filling. White, shiny, perfect. Now I remember. Sunday evening at my mother’s I forced a curtain hook open with my teeth and popped out my old filling. I called the dentist’s office on Monday and went to an appointment the next day.

  Or maybe not. Maybe I just assume I went to the dentist—probably the same one I always go to, near my office—but I don’t actually remember it. My memory loss must start with that Tuesday, then. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday: utter darkness. On Sunday, I had the diving accident with Roberto, which they’ve told me all about. Three days in a coma and we’re up to Tuesday. I woke up on Wednesday morning.

  A week of total nothingness. The only memory that remains is of a woman looking out of a window in a purple room and the painful feeling that I want to see her again, but I can’t.

  I don’t recognize the voice on the phone at first. For a second, I think it’s her. It’s not.

  “Sorry for calling so late. I wanted to give you some good news.”

  While she talks, I can hear her nails clicking on a keyboard. She must work late. I imagine her husband (if she has one), wearing an apron over his shirt and tie, waiting with dinner ready on the table while the candles burn down and drip onto the tablecloth.

  “I assessed your compatibility with the ladies we have on file and I found a match right away. Her name is Marilena. Forty-three, single, works in a bookstore. And guess what? Her favorite color is purple. I got in touch with her this afternoon and told her about you, and she gave me the go-ahead. She’s charming, Sergio; I’m sure you’ll like her. I have her telephone number right here. What do you think? Shall I give it to you?”

  Overcome by her enthusiasm, I write Marilena’s number on a napkin.

  “Please call her right away. Don’t be one of those men who play hard to get for two or three days. Make a date for coffee or a drink. Dinner is too much for the first time. Let me know how it goes! Good luck!”

  I turn the napkin over and over in my hands. I can tell I’m about to do something stupid. I know I’ll hurt myself and someone else. Still I pick up the phone and call Marilena, forty-three, works in a bookstore, single. Favorite color: purple.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, could I speak with Marilena?”

  “Speaking.”

  “Hi, Marilena, this is Sergio. Sergio Monti. I got your number from the dating agency.”

  “Right. Luisa told me you’d be calling.”

  “Do you want to meet up for a drink?”

  “When did you have in mind?”

  “Does tomorrow work for you?”

  “Tomorrow sounds great.”

  “Where in Rome do you work?”

  “Right downtown. Torre Argentina.”

  “How about seven o’clock at Angolo Divino, the wine bar? Do you know where that is?”

  “Yes, in Campo dei Fiori. But let’s make it seven thirty.”

  “Perfect. See you tomorrow.”

  I’m so ridiculous and pathetic. What do I think I’m doing? Getting a second chance at happiness? Starting all over? With a dating agency? I scare myself sometimes. It’s like someone else is taking over. Someone who makes terrible life decisions for me and runs around the city wreaking havoc, while I stay at home hiding under the blankets.

  3

  My headache wakes me at dawn.

  I lie in bed for a while, trying to get my thoughts in order. I know I should plan out my day, but I can’t bring my commitments into focus. After a while I give up and let my thoughts wander.

  I don’t feel like breakfast this morning. Not even coffee. I feel like a cold beer. It’s starting to get hot out, and a cold beer is all I want right now.

  I sit down in the garden to drink. I find the newspaper I bought two days ago and never even unfolded. I try to read something. My eyes skip lines, slip from one word to the next, bounce from headline to headline. I give up on reading the articles and concentrate on the images instead. I do better with the cartoons. It’s too bad there are so few of them. Next I study the photos and advertisements. I notice flaws in the graphic design and imagine how I could fix them to improve the composition.

  I play this game for a while, keeping part of my brain busy while I try again to think about what I have to do today. The word “bank” pops into my head, somehow connected with my mother. A moment later, I remember I need to pay my taxes. Good. That’s a start. I know there’s something else, though. Something complex and requiring organization. Something scary. As I’m staring at a movie ad where the title takes up too much space, I remember my date with Marilena. A little more effort, and I remember the time, too: seven thirty. It’s still ten hours away. I have time.

  I put the newspaper down and look over at my neighbor’s house. Nino’s bald head bobs over the top of the hedge. He’s standing on a ladder, clipping and shaping his laurel shrubs. He gives me a nod, cheerful as always. I wave back and turn to look at my yard.

  It’s a jungle.

  The grass is so long that it reaches my calves. The hedges and trees all need pruning. When things get this bad, I usually just hire someone to do the gardening for me. This morning, I have something
else in mind. I rush into the garage and grab all of my equipment: my weed whacker, lawn mower, clippers, and gardening gloves. I strip off my shirt and get started, cutting, mowing, and pruning with a vengeance. It’s a huge and exhausting job, and it makes me feel good to do it.

  I work hard all morning, until the garden looks presentable again. The only thing left to do is cut back some of the bigger branches on the trees. I go over to Nino’s and ask if I can borrow his chainsaw.

  “Hang on, I’ll come give you a hand.”

  He holds the ladder steady while I cut off the sick and dead branches. We chop them up into smaller pieces, bundle them and load them into a wheelbarrow. Then we take them to the garage, where we stack them up neatly.

  “Now you’ve got a good supply of winter firewood,” says Nino.

  He says it, but he knows I haven’t used the fireplace since Alessandra and Michela left.

  When we’ve finished, I ask him, “Feel like a beer?”

  “Sure. I’ve got some sausages we can grill, too.”

  We carry the beers over to his place. We open a bottle of red wine there, too, and drink it while the sausages sizzle on the barbecue. We talk about the local elections, the hideous new apartment blocks they’re building in the valley, the ever-rising price of water. Nino owns a barbershop in town, but he lets his son run it. His son is twenty and can’t wait to take his father’s place. He says he likes cutting hair. Strange kid. Nino and his wife Sabrina are the most easygoing people I’ve ever met. They’re always smiling. I’ve often wondered what their secret to happiness could be. “Maybe they have amazing sex,” Alessandra once said, hinting at the fact that we no longer did.

  I go straight downtown, stopping at the bank on my way. I park before reaching the Ponte Garibaldi bridge and walk the rest of the way to the Torre Argentina neighborhood. I still have a couple of hours before my date, so I decide to do some reconnaissance.

  The bookstore where Marilena works is three stories high. I pretend to browse as I roam around the store, but really I’m looking at the shop assistants.

  On the second floor, near the travel books, there’s a blonde that could be her. She cuts a box open and pulls out a stack of travel guides that need shelving. Her hair is cut in a bob and I can see the nape of her pale, slender neck. I watch her for a good long while. On the next floor down, I spot another possible Marilena. A statuesque, forty-something brunette with heavy makeup. She’s looking something up for a customer. When she looks like she’s about to offer me her help, I turn around and leave. On my way out I come across a third Marilena. She’s replacing a colleague at the cash register. She moves slowly, dragging her feet. She has bony shoulders that she hunches and she’s wearing her hair in a ponytail. I try to catch a glimpse of her nametag, but I can’t make it out. I watch the lethargic, absent-minded way that her hands move as she takes money and gives back change. Then she puts on a pair of glasses, pulls a book from under the counter and starts reading.

  I met my wife thanks to a book. I had dropped out of the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and was traveling around Italy, looking for work and trying to make a living selling photos to newspapers and magazines. In an entire year, I had only managed to sell two shots, which I had taken at the Palio in Sienna. The horse magazine that bought them didn’t even spell my name right.

  I lived in Rome for a while during that time, making ends meet by sketching portraits for tourists in Piazza Navona. I sublet a room with a college student from Catania named Filippo. One day, our landlord told us he’d found a buyer for the apartment, and we had to leave. Just like that, he threw us out.

  Filippo asked two of his classmates to put us up while we looked for another place. Giovanna and Marisa. Two sisters from Sicily, like him. They were like mothers to us. They fed us pasta with eggplant and washed the clothes we’d been wearing for days. Filippo slept on the couch, and I stayed in the third roommate’s bedroom, since she was away for the week, visiting her family in Turin.

  I liked that room. A long shelf held a bunch of books stacked in piles. There were too many of them, so many that the supports were bending under the weight. On the wall hung a print of Balthus’s painting La Chambre. A naked woman lies draped over an armchair. The sunlight falls obliquely through a window from which a dwarfish figure in a skirt has pulled aside the curtains. I loved that painting, too. It was mysterious and disturbing, with an air of recent tragedy, or maybe impending and violent disaster. On the shelf there was a biography of the artist. Asterisks, dashes and exclamation points filled the margins. I devoured that book, feeling closer and closer to the person who had read it before me. Just like the girl who lived in that room, I was intrigued when I read that Balthus had bought a castle in Montecalvello, near Viterbo, in the early seventies. Two exclamation points and the words “must see” marked that passage.

  After a week, Filippo and I found an apartment in another part of the city. It was time to go. Giovanna and Marisa made us a cake as a parting gift. The girl who loved Balthus was coming back the next day, so I wasn’t going to meet her. I used the bathroom mirror to sketch a self-portrait. I gave myself a straighter nose and a magnetic gaze I didn’t have. Underneath, I wrote, “Thanks for your hospitality,” and the name of a bar where I offered to buy her a gelato the next evening. I left the drawing on her desk, where she couldn’t miss it.

  I waited at that bar for over three hours. No one came. Later, Filippo told me that the girl from Turin had gotten mad at Giovanna and Marisa for letting a stranger—and an “arrogant and vain” one, at that—sleep in her bed.

  The next day I drove back to the Sicilian girls’ apartment. I had borrowed a friend’s car. I had a shopping bag full of groceries in the back seat: cheese, a salami, bread, and two bottles of wine. When Alessandra opened the door, she was even prettier than I had imagined. She had amazing freckles.

  “Hi,” I said. “I waited for you last night. Why didn’t you show up?”

  “Sorry, who are you?”

  She didn’t recognize me. I had made my self-portrait so handsome that it didn’t even look like me anymore. Alessandra told me she had stood me up because she didn’t think the person in the drawing looked very nice.

  “Who knows what you must think of me in person, then.”

  She smiled, then she asked me what was in the bag. I told her I was going on a picnic at Balthus’s castle in Montecalvello. Did she want to come?

  The castle was closed. It turned out that Balthus had moved to Switzerland a long time before, and all that remained of his interest in the Viterbo countryside was an unimportant painting of its misty hills. Unable to explore the castle, we walked along the hillside and lay down under a tree to eat. The air was full of pollen. Thousands of balls of fluff floated around us like snowflakes. They drifted into our wine, got into our sandwiches, and ended up in our noses and mouths. Alessandra couldn’t stop sneezing. She rubbed her eyes and laughed through her tears. I took lots of pictures of her that afternoon. I liked her freckles, her blue eyes, the way the pollen made her squint. I fell in love with her while I was developing the photos in my darkroom.

  Now, the memory of her smile––so wonderful in those pictures from an afternoon eighteen years ago (pictures I still keep in my files but don’t have the courage to look at)––brings a pang to my heart. I can’t help comparing that smile to Alessandra’s face a few years later, contorted with fury as she screams at me to leave, to never come back, threatening to gouge my eyes out with the pruning shears I’d given her for her birthday.

  I sit at one of the outdoor tables in Campo dei Fiori, so that I can see her coming. I order a glass of white wine and drink it down fast. Then I remember I haven’t eaten yet, so I ask the waiter to bring me something to snack on—chips, olives, pepper and almond tozzetti—and another glass of wine. I wonder which woman she’ll be: the blonde one with the pale neck, the brunette with all the makeup, or the reader with the ponytail. I check the time. Marilena is late. What if she did the same thin
g I did? Maybe she found a place to hide, and watched me sitting here drinking and was so disappointed by my looks that she decided to stand me up. I look at my reflection in the window. My face looks just like any other. What would she think of it? I have no idea. Still, the agency must have a good reason for not showing us photos before dates.

  Maybe the first thing I’ll have to do is explain to Marilena why I’m using a dating service to meet people. I’ll have to justify going on dates arranged by a computer program. Some people might do it out of shyness or a lack of confidence. Older people might not feel like trying to pick up someone their own age while they’re on their way to pick up their pensions. What’s my excuse? What am I doing here?

  It’s getting dark and there’s still no one here. Marilena is over half an hour late. That’s enough for me to decide she’s not going to show up. I’m not disappointed. Actually, I feel relieved. I’ve avoided an embarrassing situation of my own making and now I can get out of here.

  I turn to ask the waiter for the check, and that’s when I see her.

  She’s sitting a couple of tables behind me, smoking a cigarette and checking her watch, just like I was doing a minute ago. She’s not the pale-necked blonde, or the made-up brunette, or the ponytailed reader. She’s a different woman altogether. She has honey-brown bangs, melancholy eyes, and little wrinkles that show around her mouth as she takes a drag on her cigarette. She’s wearing purple from head to toe. Purple shoes, purple skirt, lavender blouse, purple handbag. Fuchsia baubles dangle from each ear.

  Now what? I look down at my hands. They’re shaking. I’m not up for this date. Honestly, I never was.

  I leave the money on the table and get up to leave, head down, silently praying she won’t notice me.

  “Excuse me,” says a voice behind me.