The Purple Room (17 page)

Hidden by the
back of the chair, someone gives a start. “Gloria, are you back?” a drowsy
voice asks.

 
I don’t make a noise, as still as a
taxidermist’s creation.

“Who’s there?”
the voice repeats.

The hand rises
off the armrest, grabs the lamp cord and pulls it. With the light on, the dark
window becomes a mirror. The whole room is reflected in the glass. There I am,
standing behind the chair, my face a picture of guilt and alarm. There’s the
person sitting in the chair. It’s an old woman with a crooked mouth and a
string of drool on her chin. She, too, is looking at the reflection in the
window. She’s staring at me with one watery eye wide open, while the other
opens and closes, trying to get used to the light.

“Who are you?”
she asks, fearful. “What are you doing in my house?”

“My name’s
Sergio, Mrs. Decesaris. I was a friend of Gloria’s in high school. I don’t know
if you remember. We met up a few times, outside of school.”

Gloria’s
mother splutters something unintelligible, grasps a cane she’s been holding
between her legs and attempts to rise.

I take a step
back towards the stairs. “Don’t bother getting up, I was just leaving.”

The old woman
is trembling all over but, with a terrible effort, she manages to stand up. She
turns and stares at me with that wide open eye. She opens her mouth, as if to
ask me something, takes a deep breath, then shouts at the top of her lungs,
“GLOOORIAAA!”

I hurtle down
the stairs, across the kitchen and towards the door, forgetting about the
fly-screen.

I smash into
it full tilt, taking it down with me.

19

It’s gotten
dark outside. There’s no trace of either Michela or the dog.

“Micky? Where
are you?”

No reply. A
noise makes me look up towards the window. Mrs. Decesaris is pressing her face
up against the glass. Her wide-open eye keeps on staring at me. Gloria’s words,
like a prophecy, have come true. It seems like the eye of the decapitated
Medusa, full of horror.

I walk away
from the house and continue on down the path that leads into the countryside. I
can’t see anything. I have to be careful where I put my feet.

 
“Michela?” I call. “Where are you?
Michela!”

I go past an
old olive press and keep on walking. I go on until I find myself in the middle
of an olive grove. The trees are black and still.

“Micky! Answer
me! Michela!”

“I’m here.”

“Where? I
can’t see you.”

“Down here…”

I turn back,
following the sound of her voice. I leave the olive grove and skirt some laurel
bushes. The scent of the leaves fills my nostrils. I push through a passage in
the hedge and find myself in a vegetable garden.

“Hey, Dad”
says Michela. “Where were you going?”

She’s holding
a flashlight. She’s pointing the beam of light at the soil. There’s a person
hunched down near the ground, picking zucchini and gathering them into a
plastic bag.

“That’ll be
enough,” the woman says, standing up straight. Then she turns to me and says,
“Hi, Sergio.”

She’s wearing
a pair of shorts and a man’s button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
She’s put on a lot of weight, especially around her hips, in her stomach and her
face. Her legs have stayed thin, though. Her hair is tied up and she has the
tan skin of a person who lives out in the open air.

“Hi, Gloria,”
I say, with an ease that surprises me. “How are you?”

I hold out my
hand. She shows me hers, covered with earth. “I don’t want to get you dirty.”

Her voice has
remained exactly the same. Her face too, apart from the extra weight, is the
same. There is something else, though, that makes her different from the girl I
remembered. Something that has nothing to do with the passage of time. I don’t
know what it is yet, but it makes me uneasy. Gloria seems on guard, ready to
defend herself. As if she’s afraid of me.

“Your daughter
was telling me about your trip. What an incredible coincidence.”

What coincidence?
I’m
about to say, but Michela jumps in first. “I couldn’t believe it! We stop in
the café to ask for directions, Dad sees a picture hanging on the wall and
says, ‘I had a school friend with this name, Decesaris. The initial’s the same
too’. And the barman says it’s the same person. It’s crazy!”

“Yeah,” I say,
playing along. “I was curious, so I thought I’d come and say hello. Have you
lived around here for long?”

“Four years.”

She doesn’t
add anything else. We set off towards the house. Michela lights the way with
the flashlight. Lucky pops out from the darkness and trots along behind us.
Gloria walks with her eyes fixed on the circle of light from the flashlight.
She doesn’t say any of the things that anyone else would say in her place:
How many years it’s been! What have you been
doing all this time? Do you remember the last time we saw each other?
Nothing.

“I thought I
saw a person at the window as I passed by your house. Do you live with
someone?”

“It’s my
mother,” she says. “She’s not well. She had a stroke.”

We come to the
trellis. Gloria turns on the outside lights. She notices the broken fly-screen.
Michela throws me a questioning look. I ignore her.

“Excuse me a
moment,” says Gloria. She goes into the kitchen, puts the bag of vegetables
down on the table and rinses her hands at the sink. Then she crosses to the
bottom of the stairs and calls up, “Mother! What happened here? Did you come
down by yourself again?”

No reply from
upstairs.

“I have to go
up and check on her,” Gloria says.

“Sure. Go on.
We just passed by to say hello and then we’ll be off,” I say.

“All right. I’ll
be right back.”

Gloria goes
upstairs. As soon as we’re alone, Michela gives me a punch on the arm. “What
are you doing? We came all this way and now you want to leave?”

“Gloria seems
pretty busy.”

“But you
haven’t talked at all!”

“Maybe we
don’t have anything to say to each other,” I reply.

From upstairs
we can hear the voices of Gloria and her mother. They’re arguing.

I shout
through the open door: “Bye, Gloria! We’re leaving!”

She doesn’t
hear me.

I head out,
pulling Lucky along by the leash. With every step I take I seem to sink deeper
into the ground, but I can’t stop. There would be no sense in staying here any
longer. When all’s said and done, wasn’t this what I wanted? To meet reality
head on? Banging your head on a wall hurts. It’s no use complaining afterwards.

Halfway down
the path, the dog stops, refusing to budge.

“Come on,
Lucky, don’t make me drag you.”

The dog digs
in its paws and won’t move. I have no intention of carrying it. I haul it along
through the dirt and keep on walking without looking back. I get to the car and
open the door to let Michela and the dog in. Only Michela’s not there.

“Micky?”

I turn and see
her talking with Gloria. I walk back to see what’s going on.

“Your daughter’s
starving,” says Gloria. “If you like, we can have supper together. Nothing
special. Zucchini and fresh eggs. We can make a
frittata
.”

“Thank you,
but I think we’ll stop for something along the road.”

“Let’s stay,
Dad! I really like it here,” says Michela, a little too emphatically. “Please…
I have to pee, too.”

I try to find
a plausible excuse to leave without being rude. I can’t find one.

“I’ve got some
very good Chianti,” Gloria says.” A friend of mine makes it. If you like wine,
you should taste it, Sergio.”

Sergio
. My name in her
mouth. I like hearing her pronounce it. I’d like her to say it again.

“All right,” I
say, “as long as it’s really no trouble.”

“Just give me
a minute to take a shower. In the meantime, make yourselves comfortable. Michela,
the bathroom’s on the ground floor. Then you can get a bottle of wine for your
father. It’s on the kitchen counter.”

Gloria
disappears into the house. Michela goes to the bathroom, and I sit down under
the trellis. Lucky curls up at my feet. There’s a gentle breeze blowing. It
smells of hay. There are no mosquitoes and the sky has filled up with stars.

Michela comes
back with a bottle of wine and a glass. “If it hadn’t been for me, you’d have
ruined everything,” she says.

“What,
exactly, would I have ruined?”

Michela
doesn’t answer. She lies down in the hammock and lets it rock her back and
forth.

“She’s kind of
fat,” she says, “but you can tell she was pretty when she was young. She’s
really different from Mom.”

“Yes, I know.”

The wine is
dense and has hints of vanilla. I empty my glass and we remain in silence.

It takes them
a long time to join us. Gloria helps her mother downstairs, a step at a time.
Very slowly, they come out under the portico. Mrs. Decesaris drops into a
folding chair and stares at me with her wide-open eye.

“Mother, this
is Sergio, and this is his daughter Michela. They’ve come from Rome.”

The old lady
dabs at her eye with a handkerchief and nods, her head bobbing forwards and back.
She keeps on glaring at me, as if I were guilty of some horrible crime. Still,
I’m sure she hasn’t said anything to Gloria about my intrusion a short while
ago.

Gloria has
changed her clothes. She’s wearing a loose cotton dress. She gathers her damp
hair up at the nape of her neck, securing it with a pencil. Her skin smells of
soap.

“I’ll go and
get dinner ready,” she says. “If you like, you can set the table.”

“Come on
Micky. Let’s give a hand.”

All three of
us go into the kitchen. Gloria cuts the zucchini into long thin slices and puts
them in a grill pan on the stove. Then she makes a tomato salad and the
frittata
. In the meantime, Michela and I
set the table under the trellis. Mrs. Decesaris watches our comings and goings
without saying a word.

“If you like,
I can fix the screen door,” I tell Gloria, when we’ve finished setting the
table.

“If you feel
like it. The tool box is under the sink.”

I get a
screwdriver and dismantle the frame around the screen. It’s not hard. I only
have to put the edges of the screen back in the runners. While I work, Gloria
and my daughter chat in the kitchen. Michela asks Gloria what she did after
high school. Gloria tells her she went to study art at the University of
Bologna. It must have been a good time in her life. You can tell she was fond
of the city, and of a friend––a boy––who helped her get
to know it. Someone who introduced her to politics and encouraged her to join a
committee that managed cultural exchanges with Eastern Europe. She talks about
trips to Prague, Budapest and Berlin before the fall of the Wall, when Michela
hadn’t even been born yet. For my daughter, it’s ancient history.

“Are you a
painter, too?” she asks.

“No, not
anymore. The painting you saw in the café in Montemori is the last one I did.”

After Bologna
she went back to Milan. “Back then everyone was very busy making money,” she
says, “everyone except me.”

She changed
jobs often until she decided to open a florist’s shop. In the meantime, her
older sister, Ursula, got married and went to live in Switzerland. They hardly
see each other anymore. Ever since her mother’s stroke, Gloria’s been looking
after her by herself. Four years ago she sold the flower shop and moved to the
Chianti hills.

“Did you ever
get married?” asks Michela.

Gloria doesn’t
answer. “Time to eat,” she says, picking up the
frittata
. “Dinner’s ready.”

Michela sits
down beside her, and I find myself facing Mrs. Decesaris and her staring eye.
Every now and again, she dabs at it with the handkerchief she keeps balled up
in her fist. Gloria has made her some soup with tiny noodles. She ties a tea
towel around her neck, as if she were a two-year-old. Mrs. Decesaris grasps the
spoon and starts eating. Every so often some broth dribbles out of her mouth
and down her chin, onto the tea towel.

Gloria takes a
sip of wine and turns to me.

“Thirty
years,” she says. “It’s a strange feeling, to think so much time has gone by.”

“It’s hard to
believe.”

“You haven’t
told me anything about yourself, yet. Besides Michela––and I
imagine she’s the most important thing––what else has happened to
you?”

I’m sure
Gloria imagines my life as an orderly routine, equally divided between work and
family. Married with a grown daughter, summer holidays at the seaside, dinner
parties with other married couples, a television set in the bedroom to fall
asleep in front of. She doesn’t know that our stories are similar. Both of us are
isolated from the rest of the world, like two prisoners, two exiles, each lost
in his own solitude. She doesn’t know that we need each other desperately––not
yet.

“If I were to
make a list of the great events in my life, it wouldn’t be very long. In fact,
I wouldn’t know what to put on it.”

“I don’t
believe that,” says Gloria. “Nothing memorable has happened to you in thirty
years?”

“Nothing that
would tell you about who I really am, I mean.”

“Why don’t you
tell her about when you ended up in a coma?” Michela chimes in.

I give Michela
a sharp nudge with my knee under the table. “My daughter’s always kidding
around,” I say to Gloria. “Of course, I’ve had the same experiences as everyone
else: I have a job, a house of my own, I got married. I got divorced, too,
actually…” I drink some wine and leave the concept of
divorce
hanging in the air. “Still, I can’t say that anything has
happened to change me from who I was thirty years ago. I think I’ve stayed the
same Sergio that you knew back then.”

“Lucky man,”
says Gloria, winking at Michela. “I’d like to feel the way I did when I was
sixteen. Who knows if maybe then I could fit into a size four?”

Gloria stands
up, puts her hands on her hips and starts wiggling like a belly dancer. Her
round curves rise and fall beneath the fabric of her dress. She’s very good.
Michela stares at her with admiration. It’s the same look of wonderment I used
to see in her eyes when she was five and I’d magically pull a coin out of her
ear.