The Parrots Read online

  “Thanks. I’d like to come but… I’m going to take advantage of the time to do a bit of work. I have a piece to hand in tomorrow…”

  The provincial writer nodded bitterly. He knew perfectly well what that meant. Mutual solidarity between colleagues.

  Now The Beginner is cold, he shrinks inside his jacket, which is too casual for the way the temperature has dropped since the sun went down. If only he had been more sensible, and less trusting in tomorrow, he would have brought with him at least a sweatshirt to offer to the wind which has suddenly risen in the square, stirring the leaves on the branches in the park.

  He has preferred to take a detour through side streets which, sooner or later, must any way lead him back to his hotel. And in fact there it is: at the end of the alley, he glimpses the dim sign on the other side of the square. An inevitable doubt accompanies him during the last metres that separate him from the revolving door. Will there be a night porter? If there isn’t one, all it takes to get any porter to transform himself into a night porter is to have the courage to ring and put aside every scruple and sense of guilt at dragging a sleeping man from his bed. Here he comes, looking sleepy, his uniform creased. The Beginner just has to pretend that everything is normal, that he feels no embarrassment, no scruples, he just has to dismiss the porter with a hygienic “good night”. It’s his job anyway, just as it’s the job of writers to stay out late. So the night porter who comes and opens the door to a night-loving writer and the writer himself are two professionals of the night, made for each other. There’s no lift, but never mind, at The Beginner’s age two flights of stairs are nothing. Here is the room. We’re almost at the end of this long day.

  It’s time to sleep. The Beginner undresses, cleans his teeth, turns on the tap and thirstily gulps down two glasses full of water… Oh God, is it drinkable? But why does he always have these doubts after, instead of before, drinking? It’s ridiculous anyway, with what he’s drunk lately it certainly won’t be water that kills him. He slips under the blankets. He hears a noise, a dull thudding. The Beginner gets up and walks barefoot—the carpet filthy beneath his feet—to the window and moves aside the shutter that’s banging. There’s nobody outside. Who are those streetlamps lit for? The main square of the town looks like a bathtub without water. A cat crosses it quickly and mysteriously, dedicated to God knows what nocturnal mission. The sky above the dark roofs is starless. It will rain tomorrow, there is a smell like damp sand in the air. Back under the blankets.

  The Beginner’s final—or rather, penultimate—thought before turning out the light is for The Girlfriend: how is she getting on with the parrot?

  It wasn’t easy to get her to accept the presence—which is a little unsettling, she isn’t completely wrong about that—of that black bird in her colourful little loft. To persuade her, The Beginner had to exhume the old, but still valid, argument about moving: they’ll look for somewhere new to live, somewhere more spacious, the old promise of a love nest works every time. If only he knew that The Girlfriend is pregnant, he wouldn’t be so flippant about it. The Beginner turns out the light and falls asleep thinking—and this really is his last thought—about the hotel room in London. A bright room with lacquered furniture, clean wallpaper with bright colours, soft beds, shiny tiles in the scented bathroom, the capacious bathtub edged in marble and the sanitized toilet sealed with a paper band around it, so similar to the one they put on his book with a quotation from a rave review.

  How different the bathroom is in this provincial hotel: the dead hairs tangled in the shower ring, the disposable bars of soap so small they risk ending up in the plughole, the musty odour of stale smoke, the worn appearance of the mattress, the faded wallpaper. But the main difference is that the translator of his book isn’t here.

  The translator of his book, blonde-haired, big-eyed, firm-breasted, with agile, muscular thighs that encircled him as she moaned above him, blowing her fresh, sweet breath smelling of mojito in his face. And what about that farewell kiss (or was it just au revoir)? That unforgettable kiss in the morning light, with his rucksack on the pavement beside him, the porter looking on indifferently, a kiss both brazen and shy, a kiss which at sunrise had lost its nocturnal boldness and become knowing, intimate, almost dignified. Yes, that’s the real difference, the indelible difference, between that never-to-be-repeated hotel room in London and this shabby provincial hotel room.

  One moment before closing his eyes and falling asleep, the beginner seems to smell a smell of fresh mint hovering in the room. Where does it come from? Has the young translator been lying in wait in the shadows, jingling the ice in her mojito? Has she taken a flight from London just to give her Italian lover a surprise? Is it an olfactory epiphany? A deception of the senses? Not a bit of it.

  A smudge of toothpaste on the collar of his pyjamas. That’s where the smell comes from. It doesn’t matter, the important thing is to fall asleep caressing the charm of an image. Because the last thing you think before falling asleep must always be the most beautiful.

  *

  For The Master, the night is the most difficult time. He is assailed by a flock of memories, which he tries to shake off but can’t, they’re on his back, tearing him to pieces. Among these hungry beasts, there is a bit of everything: the prizes he hasn’t won, the recognition he hasn’t obtained, the festivals that haven’t invited him, and those that have invited him without thinking much of him, the pans from the critics, the books he has finished and those he left half-finished. The Master glimpses an abandoned hut and breaks into a run. He’s being pursued. The memories are hot on his heels, sharpening their fangs. Luckily the hut is close. He reaches it, goes in and pulls the ramshackle door shut behind him. He stands there panting, his back to the door. Out there, beyond those planks of wood, the memories are barking furiously, he’s the one they want. But inside the hut The Master realizes he is not alone.

  There is a figure in the shadows. He can hear its hostile breathing. The figure emerges from the darkness and takes a step towards him. It’s a woman, he recognizes her, and that doesn’t make him feel any safer: she’s his wife.

  She’s the age she was when she died: it’s the only way he remembers her, he never sees her looking young and beautiful, or rather, young, because she was never beautiful. Not even in his dreams. That last version of her—and the last image we have of a human being is usually the worst—has chased from his mind those that came before. The wife gives The Master a nasty look. She starts to speak. She attacks him for all the times he cheated on her, the blonde hairs on the shoulders of his jackets and the smudges of lipstick on the collars of his shirts, all the hours he stole from her, the lies he concocted. The Master says nothing.

  After her death, everything changed. His life became easy, light. The world was once again available: he was like someone who has trained for a marathon with weights on his calves and suddenly finds himself without them.

  But she isn’t the type to be intimidated by any words that old braggart utters, they’re only meant for effect anyway. She resumes her statement for the prosecution…

  Deep down, she had known it from the start. Why did he get married? The profession he chose—or rather, the vocation, because it chose him and not the other way round—can’t be reconciled with a family. Poets can’t have wives because they can’t be faithful except to beauty, nor can they have children, because nobody is more childlike than they are. To an artist, the family is a calamity to be warded off, a perversion to be cured of. If you give in to it, you either have to change profession or change family.

  At last, in order not to hear her any more, The Master flings the door wide open and throws himself to his hungry memories to be devoured. Better to let himself be torn to pieces in the sunlight than suffocate in the dark. They leap on him, sink their teeth into his flesh, pick his bones clean. But the bites of the past are less painful than he expected, they hurt less than the scratches of the present.

  Eat me. Chew me to the last mouthful, dine
out on my misery. On the edges of pain you can always discover the beginnings of pleasure.

  He has woken in a pool of sweat. It isn’t the first time his night bed has become a kind of raft, a raft adrift. Sometimes a hand emerges from the mattress, like a shipwrecked sailor might do in the swell of a southern sea. He would like to row with both arms, convey that bed of anguish safely to dry land. He switches on the light, feels the urge. He sits up on the edge of the bed, takes the measuring cup from below and pisses into it. The urine foams in the opaque plastic. He pees and suddenly feels thirsty. A two-stroke engine. He goes into the kitchen. No wine, he’s already drunk enough for today. What he wants is a glass of water, a nice glass of water. He doesn’t even have the strength to wash the glass, he takes one at random from the sink, pours some warm, gassy water into it, and drinks. An aftertaste of medicine: he must have dissolved some effervescent tablets in that glass. He goes back to bed. But he can’t get to sleep again. He’s more tired than when he first went to bed.

  How well he slept when he was young! Sleep is the one true privilege of youth. After a game of football, a day spent running in the fields, a fuck at the brothel, he would sink into a sleep as thick and dark as sludge, from which he emerged only when his mother pulled him out of bed.

  Now he can’t sleep any more, the night brings inevitable anguish with it. He goes to bed late and wakes up early. By day he is tired. So tired that for years he hasn’t managed to write anything, not even his name on a cheque, not even a telephone number in a diary, a line of poetry on a box of matches.

  He can’t manage it not because he can’t think of anything to write about, but because the very act disgusts him. A disgust superior to any effort, dispiriting, unimaginable, verging on revulsion. Every word that comes out of his head is like molten metal that solidifies in contact with the air, becomes heavy, very heavy, falls and crushes everything beneath it. The problem is with words. Because when wine lubricates thoughts, they still flow as fast and light as they used to.

  He would like to be capable of writing as he thinks, quickly, without effort, the words as agile and dynamic as athletes in a race, jumping over hurdles, one after the other, go, go, go, flying towards the finishing post, faster than the disgust limping behind them. Well, maybe writing with a computer can really transform the page into a velodrome where you sprint to the finish, maybe that’s what intoxicates young writers, what makes them write so much, what grants them the impudence to talk more about life than they’ve actually lived, what makes them believe they are so brilliant, so witty, so omnipotent and immortal. Because you can’t die while you still have something to say. Witnesses should be spared. Speak now, or for ever hold your peace.

  And he, our Master, is about to hold his peace for ever. Because what he had to say he said when he was young, in the season without seasons. When we are old we may say wise things, but when we are young we say true things. Now he is only waiting to leave this world, but he would like to do so in the best way possible, with a plaque on his bedside table. The Prize isn’t just the best, it’s the only way to take leave of the world with dignity, because there are too many sins and too many sinners, and he would haven’t enough time, or enough of a voice, to ask forgiveness of everyone.

  Poor Master, he doesn’t have much time left. Even though the tests are good, even though his prostate ended up in some plastic bag in the basement of a hospital, even though his daughter doesn’t speak to him but sent him her best wishes for Christmas, there isn’t long to go now until the final Ceremony of all.

  Nor until the other prize, the one from Torchio Wines, the one that means almost as much to The Master as the literary one, there aren’t many bottles of wine left—he drank one just this evening—a handful of stickers and he’ll finally have his computer. And maybe write a fine novel worthy of the name.

  The same cannot be said of the book with which he is competing. A kind of slender literary Frankenstein incapable of speaking (let alone of moving up the best-seller lists), assembled by emptying drawers, turning out pockets, combing through scattered sheets and notes… The Master went through his house with a fine tooth comb in search of unpublished material. Or at least publishable material: once you get to a certain age, the two words become synonymous. Who gives a damn anyway? There is no modesty or shame when you’re old.

  So many thoughts tonight, too many. Better to sleep, come on. Good night, Master. Not a bit of it. No sleep tonight. All he can do is go to the chessboard and get the king out of an uncomfortable position. Though still not as uncomfortable as his own.

  “What’s the name of the hotel you stayed in when you were in London?”

  The Beginner switched off the electric hair-clipper. In the bathroom, the only sound now was the drip of the water filling the toilet cistern. He put his head round the door.

  The Girlfriend was sitting on the bed, putting on her sandals.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because my boss has to go to London and wants a different hotel, he says he’s bored with the usual hotels in Covent Garden… I’m sorry, can you do me up?”

  The Girlfriend had performed a half pirouette and was now offering her back to The Beginner, who went to her and tied a neat bow at the back of her blouse.

  “Thanks… Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Do you remember the name of the hotel or not?”

  Sometimes, it’s when we feel too sure of ourselves that we make the most unforgivable slips, the kind that turn in a moment into the most irremediable of errors.

  Like when The Beginner, coming out of the offices of the publishing company, beside himself with joy, with the contract for his novel in his pocket, had bent down to drink from a drinking fountain, forgetting that he had his mobile in his shirt pocket…

  “The Old England Hotel.”

  Or like now, when he has nonchalantly answered The Girlfriend’s question, blurting out the name of the hotel with the timidity of an innocent child, or the boldness of a murderer (there’s quite a resemblance between the two) before going back to clipping his beard with the electric hair-clipper, completely unaware—but maybe as he’s very young it might be better to say “not yet completely conscious”—of what a simple sequence of words can cause. The wrong words.

  The Writer was sitting on a park bench, blissfully happy in the morning light.

  He was thinking again about how he had left The Old Flame on the island. Without regret. Without smugness. He had left her as it was right to leave her, as you should get rid of the past when you realize it is the past. If he thought about The Old Flame he was reminded of the cans tied to the cars of newly-weds going off on their honeymoon, something jolly but vulgar, something from which to free yourself once you’ve turned the bend of happiness. He’d felt immense joy, and relief at having liberated himself. But he’d still ended that day in the red, because although he’d got rid of one useless person, he’d lost another who was indispensable.

  His mother was in a coma, struggling between life and death, in a room in a very expensive clinic. Yes, his “poor” mum. Whom he was starting to conjugate “in the past tense”, to get used to the idea of her passing.

  From the cradle, and then putting him to bed at night, she had kept him spellbound with her stories and tales. Incredible stories, always the same and always new, which blossomed magically on her lips like buds on a branch. Stories that she invented with naturalness and ease time after time, borrowing people they knew (relatives, friends) and transforming them into fantastic heroes, magical creatures issuing from her heated imagination.

  An inborn gift, a natural talent which she had exercised with passion until her child, almost an adolescent, had given her to understand that he had better things to do than listen to her fairy tales.

  That was why, years later, when The Mother had handed him a manuscript in her beautiful, neat, joyful handwriting, consisting of big sheets torn from notepads, she had done so with a hesitation that concealed respect f
or, and reverential fear of, her male child’s wide knowledge. “I’ve been bored since your father left,” she said, “and so…”

  And so it was only then that The Writer realized that The Mother had never stopped inventing stories since the days of fairy tales, because when passions are suppressed, they don’t dry up, but are practised in secret, like heretic cults.

  And turning those pages feverishly by the light of his bedside lamp, he had been struck by a mixture of stinging humiliation and boundless admiration. Here it was, at last: the novel he had never managed to write.

  Which was why The Writer had gone back to The Mother, tongue-tied, and handed back the folder with his head bowed, as a sign of devout repentance.

  “It’s yours,” The Mother had said. “Do whatever you want with it.”

  And he had. Publishing it under his own name.

  At that moment, sitting on that park bench, The Writer was overcome by an indefinable sadness not completely ascribable to the state in which The Mother was now, nor the desperation of his decades-long creative crisis, a sadness so strong he could have peddled it to all the enthusiasts in the world and turned them into depressives, and would still have had some left over. Because he no longer knew what to do with so much sadness. And sometimes he didn’t even know what to do with himself.

  When he felt this way, being at home was almost worse. The Second Wife’s reassurances, her stubborn optimism (Your mum will get better, you’ll see, everything will be fine, you’ll see, you’ll see…), her unconditional trust in love and its infinite healing capacities (Come here, give me a hug…), instead of comforting him, irritated him. He was even upset by the superficial way The Second Wife had swallowed the excuse he had improvised on his return from his excursion with The Old Flame and the exchange that had followed:

  “Am I allowed to ask where you’ve been?”