The Parrots Page 13
The guide gave an embarrassed smile and with her hand invited him to put his weapon back in its holster: he’d already bought a ticket, and the headphones were included in the price of the tour.
“Channel 1 for Italian.”
The Writer nodded, without really understanding. He could not even have said what route he had taken to get here from the hotel terrace, let alone what he would do afterwards. He was so drunk that he would have stubbornly denied that he was.
But his stomach was a cloudy fish tank, and the drinks he had had a school of tropical fish eating each other. He got on, his heart swelling with every step, and with difficulty climbed to the light-drenched upper deck. He had been preceded only by a couple of tourists, who, as they took their seats in the front, passed each other a camera with a telephoto lens.
The colours of the world seemed brighter, the tones more vivid, the light clearer, more transparent. And that must be an effect of the gin, the clear alcohol that leads to levity and clear-headedness. But the noises—of the bus with its big engines, the pneumatic drills on the building sites, the cars rolling over the cobbles—were becoming dark and menacing, and this was because of the rum, the dark alcohol that weighs down the senses and discourages all initiative. And his cheeks were red, which must be due to the Aperols and Camparis, which excite and exaggerate; his forehead sweaty because of the wine, which congeals thoughts and makes them jingle like coins; his lips salty and his tongue parched because of the tequila and the salt in the margarita, which leave you feeling as tired and thirsty as a shipwrecked sailor.
And his mind… Well, his mind was a prodigy of sensations, imbued with a reckless beatitude that would soon abandon him, but for the moment was keeping him going. Indeed, encouraging him. Even though his anxiety was merely suspended, taking the form of a premonition that would soon come crashing down on him, along with a hangover. Right now, though, on the upper deck of that double-decker bus, as the last light of day gave way to a grey dusk, between heaven and hell it was—for a while yet—heaven that was closer.
He staggered down the aisle to the front, and sat down. Once seated, he put on the headphones and after a couple of attempts managed to insert the jack in the socket on the armrest. He heard a crackling. He took off the headphones. But the world outside sounded the same.
In the meantime the bus was filling up, but he didn’t see anyone, didn’t hear anyone, didn’t think about anyone. His only desire was to get moving, to break this stasis he couldn’t bear much longer. Fortunately, the bus now set off, shaking like the deck of a ferry when they switch on the turbines in the engine room.
Slowly, the bus moved out of the noisy dock of the station. The Writer took off his sunglasses and tipped his cap back. He looked at the sky, vast and impregnable above the heads of the tourists. He reached out a hand to touch it. And this time the sky did not retreat, but let itself be caressed.
The imposing brick structure of the baths of Diocletian
If a writer kills himself he’s only doing his duty
Built in only eight years at the end of the second century AD
You’d get all the critics on your side
They could accommodate up to 8,000 people
Nobody would ever again be able to pan a book of yours
Both sexes were admitted to the baths but at different times
Home and dry at last
The Aqua Marcia aqueduct that supplied
The Olympus of writers
From which the name “Termini” derives
Top of the best-seller lists
Via Nazionale, decreed by the government of the newly unified country
Never mind fiction, top of the general list
Quirinale, the highest of the seven hills
You’ll never again be able to ruin your reputation with a minor novel
The great basin of the Dioscuri, which the poet Shelley
There’ll be tons of reviews
The fountains are enough to justify a trip to Rome
Reassessing is their job
Torre delle Milizie, from the top of which, according to legend, Nero
Nobody will be able to deny your stature
Thirteenth-century fortress built on the remains of the Servian Wall
We’ll reissue the complete works
The transept windows lighten the volumes
Of course we’ll choose the paper together
Which later became the Embassy of the Republic of Venice
A lovely Morocco leather cover
Famous balcony from which Benito Mussolini
Red with gold lettering
Vamos a tomar la via de los foros imperiales
With his elbow, The Writer had inadvertently pressed the button on the audio guide and was now on channel 2.
Back to 1
Known as the Coliseum. It could accommodate up to 300,000 people
On 2
Gladiatores destinados a ser devorados por las fieras
1
The classis pretoria, the famous military fleet
Channel 3
Trois niveaux d’escaliers ici se chevauchent
1
In the first sat the emperor, in the second the senators
Your opportunity
Used as a quarry for material
Revenge on other writers
After the sack of Rome by the Goths
Front pages of the newspapers
Now running alongside the cavea of the Circus Maximus
A street or a university course
Velabrum or river port
Piles of books
Boarian Forum
The windows of the bookshops
Here the Sibyl predicted for the emperor the coming of Christ
Maybe a gift edition or a boxed set
Sacred area of greatest architectural importance from the fourth century
Boxed set
Palace of the Chancellery
Boxed set
Marbles plundered from the Theatre of Pompey
Boxed set
Clement VI
If it’s gratuitous it’s a cowardly act
Alexander II
But if it’s a protest
The magnificence of the Castel Sant’Angelo
Think about it
Formerly Hadrian’s Mausoleum
An act of humility
The Vatican. The oldest absolute monarchy in the world
We’re sure to win
Transformed into a fortress and finally a prison
To leave a mark on history
Tosca, the lover of Cavaradossi
The road to immortality
Typical colours of Rome are pink, orange and peach-yellow
Take all the time you need
Piazza del Popolo
Remember it’s a week to The Ceremony
The work of Valadier, who was also responsible for the slopes of the Pincio
A week
Along the kilometre and a quarter that goes from the Piazza del Popolo to
You have a young wife
A race between Berber horses
Your children have their whole lives in front of them
The weakest set off from what is now the Via del Vantaggio
Time heals everything
Belonging to the Barberini family
Life isn’t a solution
Taxes and tallage, which earned him the famous comment Quod non fecerunt barbari
It can be done
Which the Romans call Esedra
Think it over
Palazzo Massimo, now the Museum of Civilization
Give me an answer
In 1964 the mummified corpse of a little girl was found during excavations
It depends on how you see it
A discovery that moved the entire city
It isn’t the end
Next to the little girl’s body
It may be only the beginning
A small treasure
If you want to win The Prize
A splendid ivory doll
If
That is the end of our tour
You want
The commentary was written by Professor
To win
Thank you for choosing
The
Rome Open Bus
Prize
Wishes you
(If you want to win)
Goodbye
It
All
Depends
On
You
When an attack is made on our lives, we are usually the last to know. The attack is prepared in distant places, far from us and our insignificant little daily gestures. The fuse is lit, sometimes it burns for a very long time, it crackles, almost risks going out, has a little strangled sob, then starts burning again, inexorably.
At other times, though, the explosion is sudden, and takes even the attacker by surprise. But that’s of little importance, because in both cases the fuse burns. We bustle about, minding our own business, and the fuse burns, we follow our dreams, and the fuse burns, we sin, and the fuse burns, we are absolved of our sins, and the fuse burns, in parallel, behind the scenes, the fuse burns. And we can’t snuff it out or cut it. Because we are the ones who thought up the attack, made the home-made device by assembling mistakes, triggering lies and mixing the weaknesses according to an infallible recipe, and then planted the bomb in the unlikeliest corner of our lives, in the knowledge that one day, when the fuse has burnt all the way down, then we will indeed hear a great bang.
A boom that will make us as free, fast and light as a blast, an explosion that will break everything that enchains us, so that everything is recomposed in a new, different order of rank and meaning. And the firework display is so spectacular, it’s worth an entire life.
The Beginner had been prostituting himself at a book-signing in a bookshop in the city centre. He hadn’t called The Girlfriend to tell her he’d be late. If he had, she wouldn’t have answered the phone. But he couldn’t have known that.
He had stayed longer than he should have in the bookshop. Answering people’s questions (questions from which it was obvious that almost nobody had read his book) without losing your mind was a task that required commitment and thought.
His unsteady, irregular handwriting, the pen wandering desperately over the page in search of support, the constant anxious request for the date—What day is it today? What day is it today? What day is it today?—as if with each inscription his brain wiped out the chronology, and his constantly changing signature, as if there wasn’t just one person signing but many, like a primary school pupil doing his first spelling exercises, or a schizophrenic with multiple personalities: all these details revealed with incontrovertible clarity that he was merely a beginner, because professionals adopt an initial, a cryptogram like a national health doctor’s, or a kind of monogram like the one you find on shirts, and, if they are actually forced to write a whole sentence, always write the same one, all their lives.
It wasn’t just a question of signing, there were also the confessions, the outpouring of feelings, because that was another reason—the main one, in fact—why the people waiting their turn had come. A middle-aged woman had declared that she was in love with him, a pensioner had handed him a typed manuscript, a housewife even confessed to him that she never read books because she was too tired in the evening after she had finished her work.
However, there had been a shock during the procession of signatures. Emerging from signing one particular book and handing it back to its owner, he had raised his head and found himself looking at an unmistakable face. A sagging face, furrowed with deep lines, framing a sardonic smile ruined by yellow teeth: The Master.
The Beginner smiled nervously, completely unprepared for this encounter. During this whole process, with all the public events the three finalists were obliged to attend, The Beginner had become familiar with the figure of The Master. He would have recognized him even in the midst of other people, from a distance, from the back, half-length, in hotel foyers, in terraces laid for receptions, and so on. The same thing, obviously, was true when it came to The Writer. Never let your enemies out of your sight is one of the basic rules for achieving victory. Keeping up a conversation at a reception after an event and pretending to listen, while actually following your enemies out of the corner of your eye, observing their movements through the golden lens of your glass, recognizing the people they are talking to (pests, journalists, agents, editors) and—if possible—moving closer while pretending to be searching for something or somebody, maybe saying hello to a stranger or a distant acquaintance within range with the sole purpose of overhearing fragments of conversation…
All skills which are not inborn, but are acquired with the experience of literature and already figured in The Beginner’s armoury. In spite of what The Master and The Writer thought, he wasn’t as innocent as all that.
So from what dark abyss of the bookshop had that stooped figure emerged? In which lair of books had that denizen of the deep been lurking? How had he managed to materialize out of nowhere, with such a sulphurous, unpredictable appearance? But above all—and this question surpassed all the others—what the hell was he doing at The Beginner’s book-signing?
All these doubts crossed, and filled, the distance separating The Beginner from The Master, the former sitting, the latter standing, the older man bold in handing over the book, the young man embarrassed in signing it. And they rumbled, in all their inappropriate obtrusiveness, in the head of The Beginner with the slowness with which an idiot grasps a concept. Late, too late, when The Master had already disappeared into the crowd and the anti-shoplifting alarm had started ringing…
On the way home, in a half-empty bus driving through the sunset to take him back to The Girlfriend, The Beginner tried to shake off that unpleasant contact, and to think of something else. He thought of the dinner awaiting him, a dinner on the terrace—the first of the season—which The Girlfriend had announced, he thought about his parrot, silent, off its food, and vowed to devote more time to its upbringing (as suggested by the Manual on the Raising and Care of Parrots) and thought about various other pointless things, whose only purpose was to keep at bay the unpleasant impression left on him by that close encounter with The Master. Hoping to throw it into some well of his consciousness, he decided he would not tell anyone about the regrettable episode. But the apparition presented itself again at every street corner with shameless tenacity: the anti-cholesterol testimonial of a bold advertising poster assumed the semblance of The Master, the siren of an ambulance speeding past on the Via Nomentana modulated into the bookshop’s insistent alarm… every involuntary distortion his nervous system imposed on reality helped to evoke the unpleasantness of the incident. Fortunately, his was the next stop.
The Master was sitting on the toilet, his trousers down around his hairless legs (after a certain age, hair deserts the body like rats leaving a sinking ship), his feet wide apart and facing in different directions like the needles of a broken compass, his clogs on the faded tiles. He had The Beginner’s book in his hand, and was looking through it in search of—let’s say inspiration.
He leafed through it without interest, as if it were the phone book of a foreign city in which he did not know anybody. He looked at the pages and they seemed to him like hieroglyphics, Sumerian tablets, Sanskrit inscriptions. However hard he tried, he really couldn’t grasp the meaning of those typographical characters lined up in neat rows. Not that this was particularly surprising, given that The Master did not have the slightest intention of actually reading the book. Heaven forbid! The only thing that intrigued him was the dedication: “with affection”, “with irritation”, “wrong direction”—he couldn’t even read what the hell was written in that dedication… With a modicum of imagination you could even read “big erection” in that rickety handwriting. Could that be the outrageous tribute The Beginner had dared pay The Master?
This thought horrified him. To someone like him, the thought of being mocked by such a novice was truly inconceivable. The suspicion was enough, and the book fell from The Master’s hands to the floor. The Master grabbed the book from where it lay open and face down on the tiles, pulled it up by the spine and turned it over slowly. The book had opened at random at the acknowledgements page.
A long, a very long list of acknowledgements, which overflowed from one page, occupied the following one, moved on treacherously as far as the one after that. It was like the end credits of a Hollywood film. The Master started going through these acknowledgements, shaking his head, but persevering, if only to measure the full extent of his distaste.
Beginners. Yuk. Disgusting.
Naïve, amorous idealists, they write acknowledgements longer than their novels and think they are in debt to the whole human race. To the writers who helped them find a publisher, to the publisher who took them on, to the friend who consoled them when they broke up with their girlfriend… They all feel it’s their duty to thank everybody, a kind of pointless family tree of gratitude, from the mother who brought them into the world to the lowliest doorman in their publisher’s offices.
At least—and this thought moved what had to be moved in the delicate position he was in—in his book and in The Writer’s (which, now that he thought about it, was almost due back at the library…) there weren’t any acknowledgements. Keep it clean, keep it simple.
The Master turned to get the toilet paper but found only the grey cardboard tube. There was no more toilet paper.
He tore a page out of The Beginner’s book and wiped himself with the acknowledgements. As they get older, writers get better, or maybe more ungrateful.
The Girlfriend was in evening dress, as if instead of having dinner at home she was about to go out, as if that long black gown with the slit and those high-heeled shoes were for a date with a man she had only just met instead of with The Beginner, whom she had been with for three and a half years (according to him) or almost four (according to her). Before she had started cooking, she had taken down the parrot’s cage and put it on the terrace, and now in the reconquered space of her little loft she was nervously pacing back and forth between the oven and the table, which was laid with wine glasses and her best cutlery. She kept raising and lowering the lid of the wok and the non-stick white ceramic saucepan to check if the basmati rice and the chicken curry were where she had left them a moment earlier, and opening and closing the fridge door and pouring herself small quantities of white wine which she then drank apprehensively before putting the bottle straight back in the fridge. With her heavily made-up, swollen eyes (and the onion she had fried tonight had little to do with the swelling) she looked like a woman who had things to say.