The Parrots Read online

  FILIPPO BOLOGNA

  THE

  PARROTS

  Translated from the Italian by

  Howard Curtis

  PUSHKIN PRESS

  LONDON

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  PART ONE (Three months to The Ceremony)

  PART TWO (One month to The Ceremony)

  PART THREE (One week to The Ceremony)

  PART FOUR (One day to The Ceremony)

  PART FIVE (The day of The Ceremony)

  EPILOGUE (Four months after The Ceremony)

  Postscript

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Also Available from Pushkin Press

  About the Publisher

  Copyright

  THE PARROTS

  He saw all kinds of birds,

  among them one that had no arse.

  Antonio Pigafetta

  Report on the First Voyage around the World

  For Arianna,

  who flies higher

  PART ONE

  (Three months to The Ceremony)

  IF ONLY MEN looked up at the sky, they would see different things. Not the things they usually see: the blackened asphalt, the yellow leaves, the puddles, the dogshit, the used chewing gum, the unmatched earrings, the coins that only the luckiest can spot.

  No, they would see different things.

  They would see the cockpits of planes glittering in the sun, clouds frolicking like dolphins in love, treetops swaying in the wind, the sky changing colour, the horizon curving with the turning of the seasons, they would see the first star of the evening and the last of the morning, the lights going on and off on the top floors of the apartment buildings, they would see flower-filled terraces, roofs bristling with antennae, sheets hung out to dry on washing lines.

  They would also see a young man standing in pants and T-shirt on the terrace of a small loft on the top floor of a Fascist-era apartment building that had once been working class and was now much coveted by property companies.

  He is leaning on the handrail of the terrace and looking down, towards the still-illuminated signs of the petrol stations and the scooters stalking the overcrowded morning buses. If he looked up instead of down, the young man would see a dark unidentified object slowly but inexorably approaching.

  Behind him, beyond the large glass door wide open on the dawn, her long black hair spread over the white pillow, his girlfriend is lying asleep on a small, uncomfortable but hypoallergenic double mattress, and inside his girlfriend, someone else is asleep—as it’s early days yet, it might be better to say “something” rather than “someone”—something is asleep, something the young man doesn’t yet know but will get to know in three months’ time.

  Hard to say why he’s woken up so early: maybe a bad dream, or maybe he’s just feeling nervous because it’s not long now till The Prize Ceremony.

  Don’t be deceived by the fact that he’s in his pants and T-shirt on a terrace in Rome on this bright spring day. The young man is a writer, a writer at the beginning of his career, so he won’t be offended if we call him The Beginner (it’s what everyone calls him anyway). That’s what he is, because he’s written and published just one novel, but one that hit the bullseye. You don’t actually have to have read it to know that it’s one of those books that will last, one of those once-in-a-lifetime novels, the work of a young man who already seems mature, as the critics have been at pains to point out.

  On the other side of the city, almost in open country, some twenty kilometres as the crow flies from the terrace on which we have just left The Beginner, in the house of the caretaker of Prince—’s estate, a full bladder drew the attention of the owner of the body in which it was imprisoned. This owner was a thin, white-haired man who loved—indeed, insisted on—being called The Master, and as we have no objection, that is what we shall call him.

  The Master grunted beneath the blankets and groped on the bedside table for the lamp switch. This clumsy gesture only succeeded in causing a tottering pile of books on a little table to fall. The Master finally managed to locate the switch, but the lamp did not come on: the fuse had blown again. One time it had been the alarm clock, another time the hairdryer, another time the electric shaver… When he won The Prize, he would have those dammed kilowatts per hour increased from two to at least six. In fact, if the book did as well as he said it would, with the advance on the next one he would even ask to be connected to the industrial three-phase. And then tumble-driers, air-conditioners, record players, cassette decks, television sets, video recorders, refrigerators, washing machines and dishwashers would all start together, simultaneously, like the elements in a mighty orchestra of domestic appliances playing the last movement of a symphony. But at the moment, with the tiny advance granted by The Small Publisher who brought out his books, all that was as remote as it was unlikely.

  What’s more, if they had The Master’s CAT scan on their desks, no publisher would ever give him a single euro as an advance, regardless of the quality of the book. But all in good time. The priority now is to let a bit of light into the room and allow The Master to pee, because he can’t hold it in much longer.

  The Master threw his tired legs over the edge of the bed and searched under the bed with his foot, but succeeded only in shifting a few balls of dust. He was looking for his flannel slippers, which always got stuck in the most absurd places, as if they took advantage of the night to walk home, calmly doing without his feet. Unable to find his slippers, The Master placed his cold feet on the floor. He grabbed a dark heap lying on the armchair that had been pushed up against the bed in the hope that it was his dressing gown (it was), put it on (inside out) and stood up. That was what the second of the three finalists for The Prize did.

  “Damn and blast!” We can assume that this was the oath uttered by The Master who, in his clumsy move to the arched window, had knocked over the chessboard precariously balanced on the desk.

  The Master threw open the blinds and a weak light penetrated his den. That’s a bit better now, he thought.

  In a manner of speaking. The morning light was dim but there was enough of it for him to contemplate the mess: the chessboard on the floor, the pieces scattered around the room. To the not easily quantifiable intellectual damage—very difficult, if not impossible, to remember the positions in that thrilling endgame—had to be added other possible damage, the alabaster pieces being quite hazardous to his bare feet. The Master’s oath was not entirely ascribable to the disaster of the chess pieces. It was also and above all related to the stab of pain at the level of the perineum which this movement had caused him: even though they had taken out the stitches more than a month ago and the scar was now completely healed, it still hurt.

  As he went back towards the bed, tacking amid the disorder of his room, The Master tried as best he could to co-ordinate his movements in order to cross a space as yet barely illuminated by the first light of day: crumpled clothes on the armchair, books covering every surface and creating unsafe architectural structures, overflowing ashtrays balanced on the shelves of the bookcase, a pair of chipped Chinese vases, a portrait resting on the floor with the frame gilded and the content so dark and greasy as to make the subject impossible to distinguish, the small electric heater with only one bar working, and the (constantly slow) wall clock marking six something… Wherever he turned his gaze, The Master found something that reminded him that his life up until now—and it was already quite a long life—had not gone as he had expected. Although he was now of an age when he could no longer even remember how he had expected it to go, which actually made him feel him a little better. What he did know was that his discontent encompassed more or less everything. It needs to be said in all honesty:
The Master was really disappointed by life. But given what was to happen later, life could have said the same of him.

  In the meantime, The Master headed for the bathroom to satisfy the urge that had roused him from his bed, and all at once realized, or recalled—at The Master’s age they amounted to pretty much the same thing—that the flushing of the toilet the day before had let him down. He looked disconsolately at the chain hanging uselessly like a bell pull for calling the servants in a house belonging to aristocrats who have been guillotined. He had vowed to call a plumber the next day, which unbeknownst to him had already become today, but in the meantime he needed to find a solution. And fast.

  He thought of doing it in the bidet or the sink, then had qualms and told himself that these weren’t things a Master did. Fortunately he now saw his slippers, his old flannel slippers as nibbled as a donkey’s ears, in a corner of the bathroom, next to the shower, and put them on. Then he pulled his dressing gown around him and went out into the cool of the morning.

  Prince—’s estate was bathed in a cold, transparent light. Tall grass besieged the pigeon house: the base for his squadron of homing pigeons—now decimated by illness and by a beech marten that had found a hole in the wire netting—which needed a good clean inside and a coat of paint outside. But not today: afterwards, afterwards.

  After The Prize. After the victory. After the glory. When it was all over. Then, a bit of manual work would actually be… relaxing, thought The Master.

  He lowered the slack elastic of his pyjamas and at last, in the meadow damp with dew, at the foot of a centuries-old pine, in the bright morning of what had once been open country in Lazio and was now a green island surrounded by concrete, he gave himself up to the sweet relief of urination. The operation lasted an indeterminate length of time, but long enough for The Master to become intoxicated with the alcoholic scent of resin, to feel the morning breeze caress his face sandpapered with beard, and to contemplate the majesty of the age-old pines and oaks that populated Prince—’s estate. Those trees, shrouded in morning birdsong and hidden by the dawn mist, seemed to him magnificent. One in particular filled him with pride, the one he had chosen as the target of his foaming jet. Being a man of letters and not of the jungle, The Master was not to know, first of all that the pine was a cedar, a Lebanese cedar to be precise, and that, to the detriment of its power, it was sick and would soon collapse onto the roof causing considerable damage to the house of the caretaker of Prince—’s estate.

  Millions of greenflies, little parasites as big as lice behind the rough bark, were patiently emptying the trunk from inside, reducing it to a sickening mush not unlike sawdust.

  By a cruel, subterranean analogy, the same thing was happening in The Master’s exhausted body, inside which millions of tumorous cells lurking tenaciously in the prostate—removed, though belatedly—were proliferating in his organism, joining forces in metastases that would soon attack his old bones and reduce them like the cedar on which he was peeing, although rather more quickly.

  In any case, that was of no concern to him right now, because the fall of the cedar would happen well after the end of this novel, and unfortunately, well after the end of The Master himself. And this in spite of the encouraging opinion which a well-known urologist would soon be expressing during his check-up—marked down, in his secretary’s diary, for that very morning.

  Elsewhere, while The Beginner was sweeping the terrace of what remained of his glass door (an event closely related to the dark unidentified object approaching slowly but inexorably) and The Master, unaware that he was entitled to an over-70s card allowing him to travel free on public transport, was punching his ticket on a bus heading to the central area where the well-known urologist had his clinic, a beautiful young woman closed behind her the door of a house in a residential neighbourhood.

  Ever since the young woman, who had recently become The Second Wife in front of witnesses and a minister of the Lord after the annulment of The First Marriage by a church tribunal, had resumed work after her pregnancy, that precise moment—ratified by the liberating slam of the reinforced door, the click of heels on the gravel drive and the hum of the twin-cylinder engine of the Fiat 500 as it started up—represented for the man universally referred to in the captions to his photographs as The Writer the most beautiful moment of the day.

  Most beautiful because The Writer, the third and last finalist for The Prize, could only write in the morning. Not, however, before observing a whole series of what could be seen either as procedures or as rituals, depending on whether they were viewed from a secular or a religious standpoint.

  First of all, then, The Writer went into the bathroom, evacuated his intestines with great satisfaction, then showered and shaved, as he did every day, in order to remain close to an ideal (a fragile one) of (his own) youth. Still in his bathrobe, he went to the big bedroom windows, drew back the curtains and looked out. A radiant spring morning in Rome. The clear sky, the newly pruned hedge—although here and there troublesome clumps broke its evenness—the sonorous noise of tennis balls that reached him as if from the far end of the neighbourhood—who on earth was winning? The Writer sighed, closed the window and drew the curtains in order not to fall into temptation.

  After which he got dressed in the kitchen left untouched by The Filipino (who at the moment was not here), emptied into the sink the lukewarm coffee that The Second Wife had left for him with instructions to heat it in the microwave, and prepared a prodigious pot of coffee with all the meticulousness of a bomb disposal expert defusing a device. As he waited for the coffee to rise with a gurgle, The Writer looked through the sheaf of newspapers The Filipino had placed on the kitchen table before disappearing (what on earth had become of him?).

  To say that he read them would be an exaggeration. What he did was leaf through them. An oblique, distracted, summary glance at the headlines, then straight to the sports page, and only then to the arts page. He checked if any colleague or journalist had written anything about him or about his latest book, the one which was up for The Prize—they had—and thought about whether he should let it go or reply, thus contravening the first principle that had made him a beloved, successful writer: Never respond. To anybody. Whatever they said. Because the only sure way to hurt a person isn’t to talk ill of them (what naïvety!) but not to talk about them at all. If you don’t talk about something, it means it never happened. Silence equals death.

  From a jug, The Writer poured himself a little orange juice, already oxidized, took a bite of the now cold toast The Filipino had prepared for him (he ought to be dismissed without mercy) and looked at the page, forcing himself to be as detached as possible. In the dead centre of an imaginary triptych which he formed with the other two, there was an old photograph of him, with the copyright of a well-known agency. There he was, near the bottom of the page, younger and bolder than he was now, equipped with an invincible smile, worn jeans and creased shirt, challenging the photographers against the background of a dazzling park: “Well? Is that all you want to know?” he seemed to be saying to the ravenous lenses of the digital cameras. Beneath it, a caption: Forty-six years old, Writer. His photograph was mounted between the two others, in a forced iconic cohabitation, which gave him an unpleasant feeling, the kind of discomfort we feel when we are hemmed in by a crowd. The other two photographs captured an old man with unkempt hair and a mean-looking face, and a young man with a ridiculous goatee and an expression of impunity (or was it stupidity?) typical of youth. Even though he knew both of them, the sight of those faces made him nauseous.

  That was why The Writer immediately went on to read the article. The author of the piece commented on the “trio”—as the shortlist of finalists was known in the profession—vaguely summarized the three books in contention, and finally speculated wildly on the likely winner of The Prize. The commentator considered the old man, whom in a couple of passages he also called “The Master” (though not without a streak of irony, thought The Writer), to be out of
the running, and The Writer to be the favourite. The Writer instinctively put a hand just under the belt of his bathrobe, and took another bite of his cold toast. Like a condor (Vultur gryphus) circling over a plateau in search of a moving prey, The Writer skimmed over the rest of the piece, which was just idle chatter, and went straight for the prey, the last sentence, extracting from it a juicy morsel: “Even though victory seems within reach, the game is far from over: to win The Prize, The Writer will have to watch out for The Beginner…”

  But if The Writer had to watch out for The Beginner, who did The Beginner have to watch out for? That was something the newspaper did not say.

  And yet on the terrace of his loft, The Beginner would have had convincing reasons to watch out. Starting with that dark object approaching, an object The Beginner could not see because he was looking down, or at best in front of him.

  As he was staring at the digger on the subway construction site, motionless in the brown morning air, his mind was elsewhere. He was thinking about The Prize, about what he would say at the event due to be held in a famous theatre that afternoon, and about other small details, the result of his insecurity and his incurable desire to please. Nevertheless, beyond the galaxy of The Prize, there was something on the ground that captured his attention.

  On the crane on the building site, towering over the digger, there sat a large flock of seagulls (Larus michahellis), rubbing their wings, creasing their feathers and jamming their gullets between their tail feathers. The Beginner had re-emerged from his thoughts and was now watching them, his curiosity aroused: they seemed to have fallen in line, as if waiting to swear an oath. There must be some kind of logic in their arrangement, but what was it? The biggest and strongest had secured the best places along the arm of the crane, the most sheltered places and the closest to the tower. Those on the end of the arm, on the other hand, the most exposed to the wind, were trying to regain ground, to move up the line, only to be forced back with a lot of pecking as soon as the attempt became more insistent. Until, exasperated and phlegmatic, they would launch themselves into the air, circling around the crane, and after one complete turn find that their places were gone, having been immediately occupied by other seagulls. And so they hung suspended in the air, beating their wings against an imaginary mirror, before again roosting in the few free centimetres at the extremity of the arm. And this merry-go-round went on uninterruptedly, like an impossible quadrille in which the dancers step on each other’s feet because the platform is too narrow.