The Purple Room Read Online Free

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