The Parrots Page 12

  “To the sea. Following the line of my thoughts. Even thoughts lead to the sea.”

  And whenever he gave that awful, enigmatic kind of reply, she, instead of returning to the charge and pulling his answer apart piece by piece, would fall silent, still admiring, as if refuting him were an insult to his intelligence, something her upbringing and her docile nature wouldn’t allow her to do.

  When he was in a bad mood, The Writer went to the park. The only place he considered friendly. Not the bookshops crammed with titles, with those harsh lights and those piles of books that seemed like barricades, not the street with its narrow, dirty pavements overhanging the traffic, not the noisy restaurants stinking of fried food, not the sweltering buses, not the deserted shops with their assistants waiting for customers like hungry cannibals, not the cinemas with numbered seats in which it only took one transgressor to screw up the whole auditorium, but the park.

  The only place where you could still stroll without having a destination, sit down without consuming, drink without paying. A kind of refuge for the incapable and the idle, a fortified citadel in which, especially in the morning, all the most unproductive elements in the city arranged to meet: tramps, pensioners, the unemployed, truants, clandestine lovers, directors in search of a film to make—and writers, obviously. In the park he frequented, fortunately, he had rarely met any.

  The Writer would collapse onto a bench, happy to feel the spartan hardness of the iron bars on the small of his back, let his arms droop by his sides and look at the people without thinking of anything.

  Legions of old people in wheelchairs, pushed by hard-faced foreign women chattering into their mobiles in unknown languages, advanced beneath the sun. Pale expectant mothers pushing their prams along the paths of the park, looking with disapproval at children sleeping in the pushchairs of young foreign nannies who swayed their hips provocatively in front of tramps with cigarettes in their mouths and bottles of beer in their hands. Squadrons of crows (Corvus corone cornix) overturning baskets and spreading rubbish all over the lawns, owners at the mercy of dogs driven mad by living in apartments, fountains gushing murky water, light filtering through the web of branches: this was the park.

  But more than anything else, The Writer liked to watch the little children playing football on a small, scrubby patch of grass. Overflowing with indulgence, he envied them, he felt an incurable discontent at not being their contemporary, not being able to join in the game. What he would have given to run down the middle, feint away from a marker and shout at the top of his voice “Paaaasss!”

  “May I?”

  While The Writer was immersed in his thoughts, a thin, olive-skinned, distinguished-looking man had taken up position in front of him, face stretched in a broad smile.

  The Writer shrugged.

  The man sat down with the air of a person waiting for someone.

  The Writer stood up and walked towards the gate of the park. He hated sharing benches. And not only benches.

  A pity. If he had remained just a few minutes longer, he would have discovered who the man sitting next to him was waiting for, and what had become of The Filipino.

  Nobody, only the owner of the bar who no longer gave him credit, could know with certainty that this apparently elegant man was not a law professor or an eminent barrister, that he did not have files, law books or doctoral theses in his swollen briefcase, but creased shirts and dirty laundry, that he had neither an office nor a fixed abode, and that he was only a poor alcoholic lawyer who had been struck off but continued to exercise his profession illicitly and when he was broke suggested claims and lawsuits to immigrants or people who were worse off than him. The problem was that there were always fewer people worse off than him.

  Right now, The Lawyer had two clients. One was The Master, on whose behalf he was dealing with the matter of the fines, and the other was about to arrive. This other was The Writer’s Filipino, who was in the country illegally. And Filipinos should always be helped to be legal.

  Sooner or later, all writers come to Rome. Even those who do not want to come there, who say, “I’m not going to Rome even when I’m dead…” Because writers don’t come to Rome to write, to work in films, contribute to newspapers, appear as guests on television or present their books.

  They come to live there, or to say that they have lived there. But above all, they come to Rome to die. And when they die, a church is built around them. In every church in Rome, if you look carefully in the crypts, in the shrines, in the sarcophagi, beneath those of popes and cardinals, painters and captains are wedged the bones of dead writers.

  Some died in restaurants as they were waiting for the bill, or in drawing rooms because they couldn’t think of a word (a pity, they had it on the tip of their tongues), some were found stone-dead in the armchairs of their apartments with a better book than theirs on their lap, some died of exertion in bookshops because they couldn’t find their books, or collapsed at the tables of bars because their pen had run out before they could finish a beautiful sentence, some died of hunger in parks while they were in search of an idea, or were run over while crossing the street because the idea had come to them at that moment, or dived into the Tiber to make an impression on a girl and didn’t come up again, some died because no reviews had come out in the newspapers, or because nobody was publishing them, and those who were published because nobody was reading them, and those who were read because nobody understood them.

  All very sad and painful, of course, but most died—let’s be honest about it—without ever having written a decent line. With the belief, though, that they had inside them that damned book that would shake the walls of the bookshops and make other writers’ books fall from the shelves. Except that if they had it inside them, they couldn’t find it. Maybe because they had hidden it too well. Which is what happens with things we really care about.

  As for ours (our Writer that is), he was on top, very much on top. On the terrace of the five-star hotel to which The Publisher had invited him for a drink.

  “If you’re not capable of creating a work of art, you have to become a work of art.”

  From the terrace you could see the whole of Rome. The golden light of sunset fell like honey on the roofs and the hanging gardens. From that height the Spanish Steps were like the ribs of a strange fossil that had remained imprisoned in stone, the people became the tiny tips of coloured pencils and the chaotic, untidy streets converged towards the Piazza di Spagna, acquiring a glorious, unquestionable order and perspective which they never had in the cramped vision from below. In the distance, the profiles of the churches, the pinnacles of the monuments, the jagged foliage of the pines embraced the limits of the city.

  “You’re not listening to me.”

  “Sorry, what did you say?”

  “That if you’re not capable of creating a work of art, you have to become a work of art.”

  “Who said that?”

  The Writer tilted his glass because the straw could no longer extract any of the cocktail from the fruit in which it was drowned. He sucked hard, emitting a vulgar sound.

  “Never mind. It’s the substance that counts. Don’t you think?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  The Writer was watching a pair of seagulls who were hovering in the sky, enjoying the heat that rose from the cobbles and the asphalt made red-hot by the first warm day of the year. The birds were sailing with their wings motionless and arched, like handlebars taut in the evening sky.

  “Listen, did you call the person I told you to call?”

  “Who?”

  “Are you listening to me?”

  “Why?”

  “Sometimes I don’t think you realize you’re a finalist for The Prize.”

  The fact was, lately The Writer hadn’t been feeling much of anything. If he had looked for metaphors to describe the state of his brain, he would have come up with things like a disused warehouse, a closed airport, a terrain to be cleared of landmines.

  “We’r
e doing so much for you, but you’re doing little or nothing for us.”

  “Can’t you call?”

  “Me?”

  “What about the press officer? I’m sorry, it’s your job.”

  “Some people don’t like being called by the press officer, they want the writer in person to call them.”

  “Or the publisher.”

  “No, the writer. It makes them feel important. They expect a gesture of humility, a testimonial of affection…”

  “Sycophancy, not affection.”

  “The fact remains, you didn’t call.”

  “No. But the man’s always reviewed my books sympathetically, he’s hardly likely not to vote for me.”

  “No, not that. If you’re going to be smug like that, we’re not getting anywhere.”

  “Oh, come on. I’m sorry, I was just talking.”

  The Writer attracted the barman’s attention and quickly rotated his index finger in a horizontal direction, as if rewinding a roll of film. The barman understood the sign, filled a glass with ice and immediately started cutting fresh fruit for another Pimm’s.

  “In my opinion, you’re tired. You need rest.”

  “Yes, you’re right. I really do. When we’re at the end of this thing, I’m taking a holiday. There’s a cruise that leaves from Hamburg on board an ice-breaker and sails to Greenland by way of the Svalbard Islands, where they organize a photographic safari to look for polar bears, and they also stop in a bay where, according to the brochure, if you’re lucky you can watch the humpback whales reproducing and—”

  “If I fell off this terrace accidentally,” said The Publisher, getting to his feet and solemnly approaching the parapet, “what would the newspapers write tomorrow?

  “Why on earth should you fall from the terrace?”

  “Come here.”

  The Publisher leant forward, pushing his chest beyond the parapet.

  “Get away from there, you’re scaring me!”

  “Come.”

  The Writer got up from his chair and joined The Publisher.

  “If I fell off this terrace accidentally, what would the newspapers write?”

  “…”

  “Look down.”

  “Come on, stop it. Let’s go back to the table. I suffer from vertigo.”

  “Wait. They wouldn’t write anything. Because nobody remembers publishers. They only remember writers. Which is only fair. You get the glory, we get the dividends.”

  “Well…”

  “But what if you fell? What would the papers write then?”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t want to know.”

  “I can tell you what they’d write. Nothing. If you fell accidentally they wouldn’t write anything. But let’s say you wrote a letter, and then fell off this terrace.”

  “What letter?”

  “A beautiful letter, full of anger and poetry, a letter condemning prizes and their corrupt workings, the intrigues, the slander, the backstabbing…”

  “…”

  “They’d say the only true winner of The Prize had died.”

  “…”

  “…”

  “You think so?”

  “I do.”

  “…”

  “…And you know why?”

  “No.”

  “Because if a writer kills himself, he’s only doing his duty.”

  Between an action and a reaction, between a gesture and its consequences, everybody agrees that there is an exact relationship, but not necessarily a proportionate one. As an example of a gesture, let’s take the simple light pressure of a right index finger (with the nail painted scarlet red) on a plastic surface, and indicate that gesture with the onomatopoeia “click” or “double click”. As an example of a consequence, on the other hand, let’s take the page of the website maps.google.it that appeared to The Beginner’s Girlfriend as she tried to visualize the façade of the Old England Hotel, the hotel which the young secretary had booked for her boss on The Beginner’s recommendation. Or rather, what appeared on the screen when, because of her harmless but unfortunate desire to check everything down to the smallest detail—which we should never be do: let what follows serve as a warning—The Girlfriend clicked on the street view option offered by Google Maps; and she did so, not because she didn’t trust her boyfriend but, on the contrary, precisely because she trusted him, in order to go down those streets, with the charitable illusion of being there, of escaping her desk and the air-conditioning for a few moments; she did so in order to see the hotel and its aristocratic façade, without any ulterior motive, without any second thoughts; she did so to give her pride a polish, her pride at having sent her boss to an important hotel, that contemporary luxury hotel where the City meets the West End, as its website said, a really elegant place in which her boyfriend had been put up when he had gone to London to present his book. That was why she did so.

  And precisely because she was not prepared, because she did not deserve it, because certain things are best not known about, and if you really have to know about them there are many ways of finding out about them, there are no cures for her disappointment or alibis for her anger.

  When, off-centre in relation to the limp flags outside the hotel, to the left of the glittering entrance, next to a stone planter, almost at the edge of the image, she saw a rucksack placed on the pavement, a rucksack she thought she knew, and next to the rucksack the entire figure of a man, or rather, a boy she thought she knew but for reasons other than the rucksack, a boy who was holding between his hands the head of a blonde woman, a woman who on the other hand she was certain she did not know, a tall, slim woman with prominent breasts beneath her dark dress, her face up against his face, as if they were looking each other in the eyes before—or as if they had just moved apart after—a languid kiss (this was impossible to establish), and his head appeared—though it might only have been a suggestion—to have been caught in a slight, lazy rotation towards the lens of the camera, as if someone had called him from the other side of the street before photographing him. Extracting more details would have been impossible because of the not very high definition of the image, the angle of the light, the excessive distance from the lens. But, above all, it would have been pointless. Because a woman can recognize her man kissing another woman even if she’s blindfolded.

  What followed the conversation that had taken place on the terrace of the five-star hotel is difficult to reconstruct. The words fired from The Publisher’s mouth like darts from a blowpipe could have been listened to by the lizards crouching in the cracks in the warm walls, could have been crushed in their hard beaks by the crows, like seagulls’ eggs, or pecked at like seeds by the pigeons with coral-coloured feet, or maybe they could have been seized in flight by the falcon, and would have emitted the soft noise of a swallowed mouse or the electric quiver of a lizard’s thrashing tail. But the only one who could not have reported them was The Writer.

  On that terrace, with those sentences vibrating in the sunset, with the ice melting in his third (or fourth? or fifth?) drink left half drunk, with the wind drying his sweat-streaked forehead and sliding beneath his linen shirt, making him feel itchy, with The Publisher silent at last, staring at the motionless horizon—it was there, on that terrace, for the first time since he had started to write, or rather, for the first time since he had come into the world, with the city of Rome as the one unreliable witness, that The Writer saw, with superhuman clarity, the pallor of his existence compared with the blinding glitter of legend.

  And for a brief moment he saw them flying together, and then separate. Like that pair of seagulls in the sunset.

  Kissing a woman who isn’t your wife or girlfriend while the curious white Google Maps car complete with cameras and periscopes is passing cannot be dismissed as mere misfortune. Let alone as fate. It is a privilege. A privilege granted only to a chosen few, a stern divine warning that serves to remind you of your own finiteness, your own smallness, your pathetic attempt to elevate yours
elf above your own irredeemably mediocre nature. That was why destiny, or whatever, had chosen The Beginner’s book from a pile of manuscripts that had arrived by post, that was why it had had it published, that was why it had entered it for an important prize, that was why against every expectation it had made sure it became a finalist, that was why it had given it wide coverage in the press (much more than it deserved), that was why it had made sure a small publishing company on the other side of the English Channel had noticed it, acquired it, translated it, that was why it had invited The Beginner to London to present it, that was why it had put him up in an exclusive hotel, that was why it had equipped his translator with a C-cup bra size and a weakness for Italy and Italian wines, that was why it had made sure that, after a night of sex, the two of them had said goodbye and kissed with their feet on that stone pavement, at the very moment the stereoscopic Google Maps camera was capturing, with a wealth of details, one of the many insignificant frames to be sewn into its stunning urban patchwork. That was why destiny, which is the hitman of chance, had conceived all this. To remind him that such things are not done.

  “Which language?”

  “Italian.”

  The Writer mumbled the words and absorbed the cautious scepticism of the guide who was barring his way on the running board of the bus. She must have assumed he was an American, or at least a German. And with his baseball cap and his shirt unbuttoned over his chest and his aviator sunglasses he could easily have been either. But no, he was only an Italian.

  The guide held out her hand and gave The Writer a pair of headphones in a cellophane packet.

  The Writer instinctively put his hand on his wallet, as he did every time he was in difficulty, every time he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do, to check that that reassuring swelling was still there with him, that it hadn’t abandoned him, because in his life money had got him out of trouble every time he had got into it. He took out the shiny wallet, stuffed with large, colourful banknotes, and offered one at random to the young woman.