The Parrots Page 10

  “How do you mean, gone?”

  “Dead.”

  “…”

  “That’s the real problem. Otherwise it’d be perfect. We’d win every year.”

  “Why do you say perfect? They’ve been talking about renewal for years, a change among the voters wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

  “What do you mean, a change! You really don’t get it, do you? The older they are, the better. What little time they have left isn’t enough to read all the books in the competition. So they have to choose: read or live. They can’t do both. That’s why they have to trust what we tell them.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “They have to. Obviously, they want something in return. But they make do with not very much.”

  “…”

  “Every voter who dies is a ballot paper up in flames. One vote less for us. The younger voters aren’t so easily persuaded. A change would be a real disaster.”

  “I’m sorry, we’re always complaining that this country is in the hands of the old, and when the young arrive—”

  “As if being ‘young’ was something praiseworthy in itself. What does it take to be young? Who wouldn’t like to be young? Wouldn’t you like to be young again?”

  “Excuse me, I’m not old.”

  “It takes courage to be old. To climb to the top floor of a building when the lift has broken down just to hand over a ballot paper, queue for ten minutes to grab a sandwich, skip an afternoon nap to sit through some dreary presentation, those people are real heroes.”

  “Well, if you put it like that…”

  “It’s not how I put it. It’s the way it is. The young, your young”—The Publisher paused here, and filled the pause with a mocking smile—“are the people who aren’t voting for you. They think your book’s an embarrassment. They’re voting for The Beginner.”

  “…”

  “There’s no use your making that face at me. That’s how things are. They’ve done a good job with The Beginner. They’ve had him park his arse on the right sofas, on TV and in drawing rooms, they’ve stuck him on the covers of women’s magazines. He isn’t very intelligent but it’s not vital for him to be intelligent—on the contrary. He’s polite, good-looking, blue eyes, women have a soft spot for him.”

  “I don’t think he’s that good-looking, he has a stupid face.”

  “We’re not going to beat him.”

  “Think of something!”

  “Maybe I haven’t made myself clear. We’ve done everything we were supposed to. Now it’s up to you to think of something.”

  “Me?”

  “…”

  “What am I supposed to come up with?”

  “Well…”

  The Publisher stood up and slipped behind the desk. The Writer twisted his neck to keep him within his field of vision. The Publisher walked to a wooden door built into the wall and opened it. Behind one leaf was a battery of bottles, while the other concealed a small modern fridge, like a hotel minibar.

  “Nothing for me, thanks.”

  The Publisher had taken something from the refrigerator, something small which The Writer hadn’t been able to see.

  “What’s that?”

  “An egg.”

  Holding the egg between his thumb and index finger, The Publisher shook his head, went slowly back behind his desk and sat down again. The Writer smiled, like someone who believes he’s understood everything.

  “What better to get rid of a hangover than an egg… eh?”

  But The Publisher ignored The Writer’s words, and continued to gaze at his egg as if it were a diamond.

  “This isn’t an egg. It’s a book. And all of you”—there was pride in his voice—“are my hens.”

  He delicately put down the egg, which oscillated and then righted itself on the shiny surface of the desk. The Publisher picked up a metal paper clip, bent it and twisted it until it was a kind of stiletto.

  “Watch very carefully,” he said, taking the egg in his hand. “What am I now?”

  “A farmer?”

  “A reader. I’m holding the book, I’m a reader.”

  He slowly sank the point of the paper clip into the shell, making a tiny hole. Then he lifted the egg to his lips and sucked greedily. The Writer watched him in disgust. The Publisher moved his lips, shiny and dripping with fresh albumen, away from the egg and smiled at The Writer. Then he flung away the empty shell, which landed in a bin beneath the desk, making the noise of a paper ball.

  “What did I do?”

  “You had breakfast.”

  “No. I read a book.”

  “And what was it like?”

  “Good.”

  “…”

  “You know what the eggs you bring me are like?”

  “…”

  “I’ll tell you. Rotten. They’re rotten.”

  “…”

  “And I can’t take rotten eggs to market.”

  “But they’ve sold hundreds of thousands of copies!”

  “Precisely. We’ve poisoned hundreds of thousands of people.”

  “…”

  “And now we have to reassure these people before they bring a class action against us. They can eat rotten food for months, maybe years, because they have very powerful gastric juices, they’re like hyenas. But when they realize that you’ve poisoned them, they may warn the rest of the pack to stop eating. And we don’t want that to happen, do we? So we need a certificate of quality, something that guarantees the provenance and origin of the product.”

  The Writer was nodding mechanically.

  “Good. I see we’re starting to think properly. That’s why, seeing that the last egg you brought me was rotten, we must at least put a sticker on it that says it’s fresh. And that sticker is The Prize.”

  “But how are we going to win? You just told me there’s no way we can.”

  “I didn’t say there’s no way. I said ‘there’s only one way’.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “It’s time we talked man to man,” The Publisher said, leaning forward threateningly and putting his elbows on the desk. “What are you willing to do?”

  After the five-a-side match, The Beginner ran to the station and was just in time to catch a train for the small provincial town where there was to be an event that night. The umpteenth blind date his publisher had arranged for him.

  In the foyer of the hotel, there is a green velvet sofa that looks like a mushroom grown during the night. On that sofa The Beginner, in order to hand over his documents and sign the privacy form, threw his light, functional rucksack, the kind a young explorer would carry. The dusty smell of the curtains, the burnished brass, the wallpaper swollen by damp—everything was sweet and familiar to him in this decadent place.

  He was given the keys of his room by the concierge and grasped the cold brass of the heavy keyholder in the palm of his hand.

  “Maybe you want to freshen up or rest a bit, you must be tired from the journey…” the organizers said to him as they escorted him down the padded corridors, as if he had just been given a life sentence. Yes, a life sentence, because he’s realized that this is how his life will be from now on. He has signed a confession and registered the sentence with a single unconsidered gesture: putting his signature to that wretched novel. From now on, if only he has enough faith and strength, this will be his life. The most difficult part, making a hole in the ice, is over. All he has to do now is start fishing. The fish will come. It all depends on him.

  “If you need anything…” No, he doesn’t need anything. Thank you. The Beginner smiled politely—he would be capable even of killing politely—and withdrew to his room. Shall we wager that the first thing he will do as soon as the door has closed behind him will be to clean out the minibar and throw himself down on the big bed in the middle of this strange room, open his eyes wide and spin round with the ceiling while the world outside stops and waits for him? There, look. Wager won.

  Over the course of th
e densely packed calendar of events, The Beginner has developed a harmless fetish for hotels. Deep-core sampling in his memory reveals that this weakness lies in one of the oldest layers of his consciousness, where there are fossil memories of distant, legendary journeys with his grandparents to tourist locations with a decadent reputation.

  What he loves more than anything are provincial hotels, like the one he is in now, and of these provincial hotels, he prefers the down-at-heel ones, like the one he is in now, which still preserve traces of an old, corrupt luxury, like the one he is in now. It’s an old hotel in the main square of the town, just opposite the theatre. Once the haunt of actors, commercial travellers and clandestine lovers, today it is a place for lost tourists who, over breakfast in the morning, take another look at their guidebooks to see if this really is the hotel recommended, or for solitary travellers who exchange glances of mutual suspicion in the lift. In short, the feeling is that the hotel is kept open only out of a stubborn desire not to acknowledge its own downfall.

  The Beginner wishes he never again has to get up from the mattress into which he has sunk, wishes he could spend the rest of his days in this room like a convalescent. He has two pillows behind his head. He is tired but not sleepy. With the remote control in his hand, he hops between shopping channels and erotic chatlines, the images and voices follow one another without his brain being able to put them together to make any kind of sense. He thinks again about his day. The whole of his day.

  The afternoon arrival by train, the verdant countryside outside the window, then the ring of speculative building that besieges the historic centres of Italian towns. On the platform, the embarrassment of the person sent to pick up a stranger he had only seen in a photograph on the back cover of a novel, the exaggeratedly cordial welcome by the patroness of the local book club, and a certain tangible nervousness over the organization of the event.

  A nervousness which in the evening was transformed into embarrassment. And then into melancholy, given that the event turned out so pitiful.

  Nobody came, almost nobody. The frescoed hall placed at their disposal by the municipality, freezing cold and barely warmed by two stoves, was deserted.

  When the appointed hour had long passed and it was obvious that the plastic chairs would remain empty, the patroness of the book club plucked up courage, abandoned her indefatigable smile for a moment and apologized. “I’m so sorry, there’s this flu going round… Half the town have come down with vomiting and diarrhoea…”

  What about the other half, why hadn’t they come? he would have liked to ask. What he said, though, was: “I understand. I’ve had it too…”

  Those are the words that come out of his mouth. But they aren’t true at all, The Beginner hasn’t had any kind of gastrointestinal problem, he’s fine, in fact he’s in perfect health. At most a burning in his stomach because of those miniature drinks he knocked back in his hotel room. Why did he say it, then? Partly to relieve the patroness of any remorse she might feel at having made the beginner travel so many kilometres for nothing (he had always been more embarrassed for other people than for himself), but because in the end he loves to make allowances for his fellow man. He may not be able to forgive the indifference of these townspeople towards his book, but he can understand it: when you came down to it, thinks The Beginner, he himself would never have gone to the presentation of their books.

  But he knows perfectly well that basically he did it for himself, because to The Beginner the idea (just the idea) of being ill was not an unpleasant one at that moment, the warm dream of being able to stay in bed, in his pyjamas, with a cup of soup on the bedside table and a good book in his hands instead of persevering with that literary event, treating those two or three yawning customers with the same respect and the same enthusiasm he would show an adoring multitude.

  It’s one of the riskiest of situations. An author offering himself as a sacrifice to a handful of torturers who have emerged from their houses, defying the tiredness and sadness of the evening with a single intention: to see the writer, to hear the writer, to touch the writer. To have him in front of them, naked, bound to the stake of the event, a Saint Sebastian ready to be transfixed by the arrows of stupid questions and executed by the intelligent ones. Here he is, at last defenceless in front of his executioner, in plain clothes, stripped of his fragile armour of paper, demonstrating his fatal ignorance, his brazen mediocrity. A unique opportunity to give him the admiration, and the contempt, he deserves.

  The Beginner had looked at them, inspected them anthropologically: a man in a jacket and tie, two ladies in furs, a young girl, a middle-aged man who had left in a great hurry before the end, as if he had suddenly remembered an engagement, or as if that infamous intestinal virus had finally struck him, too. The young girl might have been one of those precocious, sensitive adolescents who devour novels and poetry on the bus taking them to school while their companions share the earphones of their iPods and copy each other’s homework. From her, he had nothing to fear. She would ask him for his address and he would give her his publisher’s as a precaution, and she would send him a letter, in an envelope sprinkled with beads and scrawled over in coloured inks, in which she confessed she was in love with him. The gentleman in jacket and tie was a trickier proposition, a typical example of a provincial pedant, who would first put forward some criticisms of his book but then become unctuous and servile at the end of the event and present him with a small self-published book signed by himself in fine handwriting (a compendium of local history), begging him to pass it on to his publisher. And that was indeed what had happened.

  Luckily, it was then time for dinner, and the patroness of the event and her ladies had transferred The Beginner to a small restaurant chosen by the book club, a place which, if it had not been for the booking, would have already been closed for a while at that hour. During the dinner he had drunk himself silly with carafes of white wine, had ignored the advances of a retired female teacher who proposed grim toasts to nothingness and smiled every time their eyes met. Feeling immune because of his youth and his immature talent, he had pretended to have read a whole lot of books, and lavished scandalous and almost offensive judgements on most current books and authors (all of them very much respected by his dinner companions). Outside the restaurant, with the shutter already lowered, he had lit a cigarette and blandly thanked the patroness, and she had withdrawn together with the other dinner guests, who were by now overcome by sleep and the effort of being sociable. Pleased that he had eaten yet another meal without paying—there had been many of them since his book had been in contention for The Prize—The Beginner breathed in deep mouthfuls of smoke and contemplated the midweek desolation of that decorous little town. Now, between the restaurant and his hotel room, there remained only one final formidable enemy, an enemy he had been trying to avoid all day: the neglected provincial writer chosen to chair the debate.

  A debate without disagreements, an argument without arguments, the only sticking point being that a successful young beginner and an unsuccessful and less young writer had been seated side by side at the same table.

  As had been predictable from the start, after an initial half-hearted rejection of the patroness’s polite proposition, the provincial writer had accepted the invitation to dinner and had tagged along with the others. But The Beginner had managed, by changing places surreptitiously while his failed colleague had gone to wash his hands, to relegate him to the other end of the table, thus attracting hostile looks from him all through dinner—looks to which The Beginner could find nothing better to respond with than vague smiles.

  Because he could well imagine ending up there himself, The Beginner had immediately recognized the type, universally known as “provincial writer who hasn’t made it”. It was a very specific, widespread and in no way innocuous anthropological and literary category. Poisoned by the suspicion, if not the contempt, of their own fellow citizens, hurt by the smugness of literary society towards them, worn down by rejection and
their own inadmissible lack of talent, such people spent their wretched days exiled to their desks, writing imaginary reviews, updating their blogs, working away at novels doomed to the eternal darkness of a drawer. With the passing of the years, they ended up suppressing their feelings of failure and converting them into a sense of martyrdom. They constructed vast conspiracy theories in which powerful publishers, ensconced in the centre of things, did all they could to crush anyone outside their own charmed circle—the only proof of this conspiracy, of course, being their own misfortune. They founded small and apparently crusading publishing houses in some cellar, or directly in their own homes, clandestine distilleries where they got drunk on the very spirits they sold under the counter. By so doing, they were finally able to realize their dream and see some of their own manuscripts in printed form, just for the fetishistic orgasm of touching the cover, leafing through the pages, arranging them on display on the mantelpiece in their best room. The more enterprising of them even managed to found schools of creative writing—on the pattern of the more famous ones—in premises placed at their disposal by co-operatives or local authorities, more as an opportunity to exchange a few words with some human beings on autistic winter evenings than as an assertion of their own debatable teaching skills.

  This was what had happened to our provincial writer, who had actually had leaflets printed advertising his school of writing, leaflets of which he had given whole bunches to The Beginner, asking him to circulate them once he was back in Rome. “If it’s no bother…” “Oh, no bother…” The Beginner had replied, thinking as he said this, not “Would it be right of me to throw them away?”—he was already beyond that—but only “Where can I throw them?”

  “Would you like a drink? I have some friends waiting for me in a bar…”

  The provincial writer was looking at him with a treacherous smile. But the question had not caught him unawares. Prepared by the psychological analysis he had made, The Beginner had in his pocket the one answer which his colleague the writer could not counter without disavowing his nature and his character.