The Purple Room

by Mauro Casiraghi

  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.”

  I keep looking. I find a note my mother wrote on a ripped-out diary page, dated Saturday the 25th. It says: To the new bride and groom, Andrea and Chiara, with best wishes for a happy future together. Next to it is the phone number for a telegram service. Chiara and Andrea. Andrea is my cousin. He lives in Cinisello Balsamo, outside Milan, and works for a company that makes faucets. We hear from each other once a year, when my mother calls her sister to wish her merry Christmas. His fiancée is from Tuscany, I think. I didn’t know they’d gotten married. Or rather, I can’t remember ever knowing about it.

  There’s nothing else in the April folder. I guess my mom must have been too worried to catalog anything while I was in a coma.

  “Sergio! It’s getting cold!”

  I try one last thing before I close the box. I pull out my mother’s phone bill and run down the list of calls until I find that week in April. There’s the call she made to dictate that “best wishes” telegram on Friday afternoon. There are another couple of calls from that morning, too. I recognize my office number. My mom and I must have talked that day, but I have no idea what we talked about.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” my mother says as she walks in. She hands me a cup. I nod and drink the coffee. Then I ask her about Andrea’s wedding.

  “Where did they end up getting married?” I ask off-handedly.

  Mom stares at me with wide eyes. I must have said something ridiculous.

  “What are you talking about? You were at that wedding. I couldn’t make it, so you went instead. Don’t you remember?”

  I try desperately to remember. On Saturday, the day before the accident, I was at my cousin Andrea’s wedding. Oh, my God. I don’t remember. I don’t remember anything about it at all. I break out in a cold sweat. My temples start throbbing, and I can feel that stabbing pain behind my ear again.

  Mom pulls up a chair and sits next to me.

  “Sergio, will you please tell me what’s going on?”

  I can’t keep it together anymore. I burst into tears like a child and tell her everything. The memory loss, the headaches, the confused thoughts. The only part I leave out is the woman in the purple room.

  “I can’t remember anything, Mom. That I went to Andrea’s wedding is something I’m hearing from you for the first time.”

  She takes my hand. She smells like menthol and cooking oil.

  “Don’t worry,” she says in a soothing voice. “I’ll help you to remember.”

  She gives me a tissue to blow my nose. I sit there quietly and listen.

  “Andrea got married on the last Saturday of April. He married Chiara, in Livorno. I meant to go, I had everything booked, but Lina’s husband died two days before, and I had to cancel last minute. You do remember my next-door neighbor Lina, don’t you?”

  Yes, I remember Lina. I remember her almond cookies that are here sometimes when I come for lunch.

  “Poor thing,” my mother goes on. “She didn’t know who to call. Her daughter lives in Canada, and she could only get here two days later. Long story short, I had to take care of her. I called the funeral home, the same one we went to for your father. They have a branch here in Rome. Remember how good they were?”

  “Go ahead, Mom. Stick to the story, okay?”

  “Well, I didn’t know what to do. I was so sorry to miss the wedding. I’d already bought them a nice gift, a crystal vase. So, that morning I called you at the office…”

  “Twice.”

  “Yes. The first time they said you were in a meeting. I tried again right after lunch, and you picked up. I told you what had happened and asked you to go to the wedding in my place. You grumbled about it, of course.”

  “What did I say, exactly?”

  “That you couldn’t care less about Andrea’s wedding, that you didn’t want to miss your Saturday with Michela, and that you had to get up early on Sunday for that damn scuba diving trip with Roberto.”

  Maybe it’s just my imagination, but something about that conversation rings a bell.

  “And then?”

  “I had to beg you, but in the end you said you could try to make it work. You called Michela, and she said she had to study that weekend anyway. So you called me back and said you’d take your scuba gear to Livorno, sleep there, and leave early the next morning for Argentario.”

  “And that’s what I did?”

  “I think so. You called me from a restaurant in Livorno on Saturday afternoon. You said the wedding was really boring, but that at least the wine was good.”

  “Do you know where I was staying?”

  “Some hotel. I don’t know the name.”

  “Did I tell you anything else?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Did I tell you anything around that time about what I was up to? Where I had been? Who I was seeing?”

  “No,” she says sadly. “You never tell me anything.”

  I touch her cheek softly. We sit there for a while in silence, just looking at each other. Then I get up.

  “You’re leaving?”

  “Michela will be waiting for me.”

  I’m already out the door when her worried voice reaches me.

  “Be careful, Sergio.”

  “Of what, exactly?” I ask, turning around.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Just be careful.”

  5

  My prints are still drying.

  “Just a few more minutes,” says Walter. Then he adds, “You haven’t been here in a while. Have you been on vacation or something?”

  I say yes, then change the subject. I ask him how work is going. While we talk, Walter fiddles around under the counter. He pulls out an envelope with my name on it.

  “It had got shoved to the back of the drawer. The girl who was here this morning is new. She didn’t know about it.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the picture you wanted blown up, fifteen by twenty-one centimeters. Don’t you remember? It’s from last month.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say. “Of course.”

  My hands are shaking as I open the envelope. I pull out t
he photo and stare at it.

  It’s a photo of a window. Just a window, nothing else. Aluminum frame. The rolling shutter on the outside of the windowpanes is completely lowered. Faded gray curtains. The white wall is smudged with dust above the radiator. The flash is reflected in the glass. You can see the blurred corner of a bed and sheets at the bottom of the frame. It’s an awful photograph. Not only do I not remember ever having taken it, but I have no idea why I would bother to shoot such an unremarkable photo in the first place. Not to mention having it blown up.

  I leave the photo lab, lost in thought, and walk back towards my car. Walter has to chase me all the way to the corner where I parked.

  “Sergio! Your prints…”

  I go back to get them.

  “Are you okay?” he asks me.

  “Yeah. I’m just in a hurry… I have to go meet my daughter. It’s her birthday today.”

  I get back in the car, open the envelope, and take a peek at the first print. My cousin Andrea and his wife are kissing under a shower of rice in front of a church. They’re photos from the wedding, as I had guessed. I leave the packet on the passenger seat and start the car. I’ll look at the rest later.

  Piazza del Popolo is completely packed. Meeting here was a bad idea. I haven’t been out much since the accident. I’m not used to being in a crowd anymore. Besides, the sun is too hot beating down on my head. I move into the shade under the arched gateway in the Aurelian Walls. There’s a flower stand. I focus on the colorful bunches of fresh flowers glistening with a fine spray of water, and I wait.

  Michela is late. Or maybe she’s already here, but can’t find me in the crowd. I try to call her but her phone is off, so I dial Alessandra’s number. Maybe she’s still with her mother.

  “Hel…” she answers. She’s breaking up so much I can hardly hear her.

  “Alessandra, are you driving?”

  “No… I’m n…driv… Wha… it?”

  She’s with Ugo, the guy who likes antique markets. On Saturdays, when I’m with Michela, they drive all around Italy looking for old chests to restore.

  “Where are you?”

  “In San Gim…ano.”

  “I’m waiting for Michela, but it’s crowded and I can’t find her…”

  “Wha… Serg… I can’t he… you.”

  “Alessandra?”

  The line’s dead.

  How is she already in San Gimignano? When did she take Michela to the gynecologist? I’m confused. I’m about to call Alessandra again, when I see my daughter.

  She’s sitting in a red microcar, one of those ridiculous little plastic boxes on wheels. The kind that rich parents from the Parioli neighborhood give their underage, unlicensed kids to drive to their expensive private schools in. Behind the wheel there’s a sixteen-year-old with a Sergeant Pepper-era Beatles haircut. He’s parked right in the middle of the road, on the crosswalk, totally ignoring the pedestrians trying to cross the street and the drivers angrily honking behind him. He and Michela are staring into each other’s eyes, oblivious, as if there’s nobody else around. Cars, buses, scooters, annoyed pedestrians––they just don’t exist.

  My phone rings. It’s Alessandra.

  “Sergio. Can you hear me now? What’s going on?”

  Her anxiety is tangible. My calling her means something terrible must have happened. I feel like telling her that Michela played us both. She took advantage of her estranged parents, telling each of us she was with the other so she could ditch us to hang out with her boyfriend. I’m about to tell Alessandra everything, when I see them kiss. A real, adult kiss. Probably with tongue and everything. My stomach somersaults. It’s the first time I’ve seen someone kiss my daughter. Then I think of the Parisian lovers in that photo by Doisneau, and of the young couple kissing on the bridge the other day. Suddenly, I don’t want to betray them.

  “I just wanted to ask what time I should bring Michela home,” I say.

  “Whenever you want. She has a set of keys.”

  “Okay.”

  “You called me just for that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought something happened.”

  “Everything’s fine.”

  “Have you bought the clothes yet?”

  “No.”

  “What did you do all morning, then?”

  “Just hung out.”

  “Put Michela on for a minute. I need to tell her something.”

  “She’s in the bathroom.”

  “Well, tell her there’s some eggplant parmigiana in the fridge that she can have for dinner. We’ll be home late.”

  “Will do. Say ‘hi’ to Ugo for me.”

  “He says ‘hello’.”

  I glance across the street again. Michela and the kid have stopped making out. She opens the door and steps out. He puts his overpriced toy car into gear, shooting out into traffic without checking his mirrors or signaling, totally ignoring the other cars. He’s the only one on the whole planet.

  Michela stays put on the sidewalk. When the stoplight turns green, she crosses the road in my direction. She’s gotten tall. Long, thin legs. Pitch-black hair hiding half her face. Pale skin, almost anemic-looking. Thin lips, no lipstick. Eyes buried under her makeup. Dark, mysterious, unfathomable. She walks by without seeing me and heads toward the square.

  I’ve never felt as distant from her as I do right now. When she was little, I thought we’d always be up front with each other. I told myself it was enough to just get her used to talking with me from the get-go. I promised myself that I’d always be ready to listen. It never worked. By age six, she was already tired of all my questions. “What did you do in class today, Micky?” “Aw, Dad! Give me a break!” When she was seven, I got tired of asking. I had other problems to deal with, especially with Alessandra, and I tried to spend as little time at home as I could. If Michela came and asked me for help with her homework, especially art class or Italian, I gladly made time. That much I could do. For everything else, I’d just tell her, “Ask your mother.”

  After the divorce, I stopped checking in with her. We met every Saturday but never really talked about anything. I never asked her how she felt about the separation, whether she was sad not seeing me around the house, or what version of the story Alessandra had given her. I acted like nothing had happened. With the excuse of shielding my child from a painful subject, I pretended like everything was just fine.

  It was Michela who finally decided to confront the problem. She must have been about ten or eleven. It was a rainy, miserable Saturday. We had taken shelter in a cinema and watched some boring movie. I slept through most of it. When we left, the rain was coming down even harder than before. We didn’t have umbrellas, so we were waiting in the lobby for the rain to stop.

  “Why did you and Mom get divorced?” she asked me, out of the blue.

  How could I tell an eleven-year-old that I wasn’t really sure? That at night, while she was sound asleep, her father lay awake for hours next to a woman he didn’t know anymore? That her mother felt the same way about me? One morning, while I was shaving, Alessandra came into the bathroom half asleep. She walked past me without a word and sat down on the toilet. She looked up and saw me in the mirror. Disconcerted, she asked me, “Who the hell are you?”

  How could I tell my daughter that for months, once I had dropped her off at school, I used to go and fuck her classmate’s mother? That when Alessandra found out, she almost gouged my eyes out with her pruning shears?

  Maybe I should have told Michela, even knowing that it would have hurt her to hear it. Instead, I shrugged off her question with stupid clichés about how adult relationships change and fade away, how we still respected each other and blah, blah, blah. Michela didn’t buy it. She knew there was an abyss between my words and her mother’s resentment towards me. She could sense that I wasn’t being honest. So she started to change her approach, too. That was the end of our conversation and the beginning of the lies.

  In the middle of the square, M
ichela looks around and realizes that we’ll never find each other in the crowd. She turns on her phone and dials my number.

  I yell out to her as my phone starts ringing. “Hey, signorina…”

  She turns around with a smile. “There you are!”

  She kisses me on the cheek. I inhale her smell: sour sweat and strawberry chewing gum. Hugging her, I swallow all my bitterness.

  “Happy birthday, Micky.”

  She touches my clean-shaven face.

  “Thanks for shaving, Dad. I like you better like this.”

  She’s wearing a new necklace. A silver Japanese character.

  “What’s this? A gift from your mom?”

  “No, from a girlfriend.” Girl, she says, making it clear it’s not from a boy. “Mom’s giving me a study trip to Paris.”

  “Cool. When are you leaving?”

  “In two weeks. I can’t wait!”

  She hooks her arm through mine. We head towards Via del Corso.

  “So we’re looking for clothes to pack for Paris, then?”

  “No. This year I just want books.”

  I’m speechless. Michela is not the best student. She’s never cared about books. Music, shoes, and clothes are the only presents she’s ever wanted. At least until now.

  We walk into a bookshop. I follow her as she roams through the bookshelves. She starts with an Italian-French pocket dictionary and a guide to Paris. Then she heads to the Literature section. She stops at the French classics, huge volumes I’m shocked to see in her hands.

  “How about The Little Prince?” I suggest.

  Michela turns up her nose.

  “That’s a kid’s book, Dad.”

  I try to explain that it’s not a book for children, or, not just for children, at least. She’s not listening. She picks up one novel after another and tosses them into the basket as if she were at a supermarket. Hugo, Dumas, Flaubert, Zola, Stendhal, Maupassant, Camus, Yourcenar. She points to a boxed set of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and asks me, “Have you read this?”

  “No. I’m saving it for my old age.”

  “Well, I’m going to cram the whole thing in this summer.” She grabs all seven volumes and thrusts them into my arms.