The Parrots Page 19

  The Master looked first for a patch of soft grass and started scraping away like a rooster.

  “Let’s go, get a move on!” The Director roared from the van. “We’re an hour late!”

  The Master examined the results but was not satisfied. So he started to scratch around, stooping over, with his eyes on the ground. At last he found a piece of wire next to a rubbish bin, took off his shoes, placed them on a low wall, and patiently began the hard work of chiselling away at the cracks in the soles.

  “I’m going to leave you here!”

  The Director started the engine and set off again.

  “No! Wait!”

  The Master ran after him barefoot. The Director slammed on the brakes and let him catch up. The Master, hair dishevelled, fringe sticking to his forehead, hoisted himself on board, panting.

  “What about my shoes?”

  “Leave them here.”

  “Am I supposed to come barefoot?”

  “How do you think Jesus Christ preached?”

  “He was a prophet.”

  “And what are you?”

  “A poet.”

  “Better still. They forgive poets everything.”

  “…”

  “Is there anything else, or can we go?”

  “Just one thing.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Do you really think I have the evil eye?”

  “Yes.”

  From the edge of the little wall, The Master’s shoes watched the white van disappear in a cloud of black smoke like a squid in its own ink.

  If only The Writer and The Beginner could have exchanged lives! If only they could have swapped their respective miseries and converted them into something very close to happiness! Without realizing it, they were both basically trying to be what they were not. Like everyone else, in fact.

  Didn’t one of them miss the carefree lightness of his beginnings? What he wouldn’t have given to feel again the emotion he had once felt!

  And didn’t the other perhaps envy the solidity of the veteran? God, what he wouldn’t have done to gain a modicum of gravitas!

  Unfortunately it couldn’t be done. And that was a real problem. Yes, a big problem.

  Even more so for The Master, who didn’t even have anybody he could have swapped his life with, because, apart from The Prize, behind his wrinkled brow, beneath the stubble of his silvery hair, between the calcareous synapses of his brain, he did not even know what he wanted. Except everyone’s harm.

  *

  Death has an enviable wardrobe. He never wears the same thing twice. On one occasion he knocks at the door modestly dressed, another time he arrives at the appointment in monochrome grey, or we may see him working in blue overalls or moving around the lanes in a green smock. If he presents himself naked, it is only because he has not had time to get dressed.

  The Writer, who had time—although not so much now—was hesitating in front of his open wardrobe. He wasn’t choosing the clothes in which he would take The Dog for a walk, or even the suit in which to go to that evening’s private view. He was choosing something important, the garments he would wear for The Great Moment—that was what he had decided to call it, because it sounded more solemn and reassuring.

  The Writer took out the hanger and placed it on the bed as if it were a soldier fallen in war. He removed the cellophane wrapping and gazed at the magnificent morning suit in which he had remarried. Jacket, trousers, shirt, waistcoat… Only socks, tie and braces were missing. The Writer took some underwear from a drawer and put it on. Then he patiently recomposed every piece of that beautifully tailored jigsaw puzzle. As he did up the trousers, he had his first surprise: he had put on weight. In the last few days he had rediscovered many appetites. Apart from making love with The Second Wife almost every day (a fact by which she herself had been surprised, but not annoyed), he had eaten and drunk a lot. He would wander around the house feeling hungry, always returning Oedipally to the fridge. Especially in the dead of night, when everybody was asleep and he was alert, his head burning with thoughts, he liked to violate the territory of the kitchen. To break into that Swiss bank vault and finish whatever leftovers there were, soft cheese in little foil wrappers, slices of cooked ham, cold mashed potatoes and dried-up omelettes, even the leftovers of The Baby’s pap had been finished off with cynical, voracious satisfaction.

  By holding his breath, The Writer had finally managed to do up his trousers. He buttoned the shirt, which smelt of lavender, and put on the jacket. That was when the second nasty surprise arrived, because it was not only the bottom part of the suit that was narrow, but also the top. The jacket was tight across the back and the sleeves were short. The Writer looked at himself disconsolately in the mirror behind the wardrobe door: he looked like a mafioso at a funeral.

  He quickly undressed and, remaining in his pants, recomposed the totem of the morning suit. Then, with an excitement that soon became frenzy, he emptied the wardrobes and drawers. Shirts, sports jackets, polo shirts, jeans, trousers, socks and ties flew around the room, his inexhaustible wardrobe piling up on the bed like a little mound of rags. After a hard struggle with that heap of clothes, The Writer emerged with some clearer ideas: a white shirt with a mandarin collar (a tie would have added a somewhat lugubrious touch), cream-coloured trousers and a blue jacket. Plus a pair of blue socks. He looked at himself in the mirror again.

  He was the very image of an immortal writer, with an elegance that was considered but not premeditated, a marriage of tradition and creativity, and that touch of the dishevelled possessed by men who are too intelligent to submit to the dictatorship of fashion. Perfect. This was how he would go to his appointment. All he needed now were the shoes.

  “All” was putting it lightly. Because when The Great Moment came, he would be on foot, and that was not an insignificant detail. He would need shoes that were appropriate to the situation, elegant but comfortable. Because you can’t die in uncomfortable shoes. So The Writer opened his shoe cupboard and tried on all the footwear he had. French moccasins, decorated Church’s, Australian half-boots, sailing shoes, tennis shoes, suede ankle boots, hiking boots, German sandals, espadrilles, even some flip-flops, but couldn’t find a single pair that suited him. If they were comfortable they weren’t elegant, if they were elegant they weren’t comfortable, if they were sporty they weren’t in keeping with the situation, if they were in keeping with the situation…

  In the end, The Writer chose the least bad pair, a kind of closed sandal (although he already knew they weren’t right), practical but inappropriate to The Great Moment. Then he went into the living room, where The Dog was lounging in his basket. He waved the lead and this time, unlike most other times, The Dog overcame the atavistic laziness imprinted in the genes of its vagabond race and came trotting towards him. The animal lifted its eyes to its master, then bent its muzzle to let him attach the lead, submitting to The Writer’s authority. This had never happened before. The Dog had always hated the lead. Putting it on was always an exhausting ballet of moves and counter-moves, feints and counter-feints. Only The Filipino had a special technique to keep The Dog still, a skill The Writer assumed was derived from ancient martial arts.

  What did the animal feel? Why had it surrendered without resistance this time? Had what was happening inside The Writer created a magnetic field? Something invisible to the naked eye, but perceptible to creatures with senses more developed than ours, like earthquakes sensed by animals before they arrived?

  Questions that could not be answered, either by The Writer—looking very elegant apart from his shoes—or by The Dog, calm and compliant, as they went out to have a dress rehearsal for The Great Moment.

  Have you thought about how? The Publisher had asked.

  Had he thought about it? Since the possibility had been presented to him—officially, so to speak—he hadn’t thought about anything else. It wasn’t actually the first time the thought had crossed his mind. Even when he was young, very young, the idea h
ad captivated him, almost seduced him, but in a heroic and completely infantile way. Every child is a hero ready for martyrdom purely out of loyalty to his imagination, a valiant warrior ready to fight to the death with his classmate to possess a football card. But now there was nothing heroic in him, or in what he had to do.

  It was an ordinary task, a job to be carried out with almost clerical zeal. Once, in a poem, he had come across a great idea: that in performing that extreme gesture there was the possibility of finding oneself in another dimension, not the afterlife, but rather the before-life. Through the looking glass, into a world that existed prior to one’s own arrival. The prior-ness of suicide.

  Suicide. Yes, for the first time that word had lit up in his mind like the sign over a casino, and seeing it flashing in the darkness scared him.

  The Writer, impeccable in his light trousers and blue jacket, and The Dog, its tail erect and its muzzle well forward, were crossing the park. The Dog was aiming its nose right and left like the self-propelled turret of a machine gun and barking at the other dogs, without breaking step. The Writer was looking up, but was not distracted. He was looking at the trees, but not the tops of them, not even the trunks. He was looking at the branches.

  Over the past week, knotting his tie, tightening the belt of his dressing gown or looking at the handle of the lead dangling from the coat stand, he had thought a lot about how he would do it. A hunting rifle? No, too noisy and romantic, and above all, too literary. The thought of his body blown to pieces and his clothes ripped open and the smell of burnt flesh made him heave. If he really didn’t want a complete break with tradition, why not go for the classic method: barbiturates. But what was the lethal dose? And what if somebody arrived in time and pumped out his stomach? Also to be dismissed was the idea of flinging himself off a flyover, because it was too ostentatious and would inevitably snarl up the traffic, while jumping out of his own window was impracticable because he lived on the ground floor, and gas was out of the question because he had a state-of-the-art halogen oven… How, then?

  Maybe there was only the rope. The good old rough, thick rope. Feeling the knot tighten around his neck, his throat close, the air burst in his lungs. How long would it last? Would he lose consciousness? Would his soul abandon his body, or would it remain trapped in the limbs and hang there kicking the air until the last spasm? The thought gave him the shivers. How long would he be suspended there, like game left hanging until it becomes high? He had read that if the collarbone wasn’t broken—and his would never break—you could last another ten minutes. No, he had to die more quickly.

  As The Writer advanced, pursued by a swarm of dark thoughts, The Dog was marking their route with steaming spurts of urine. They walked for a long time, past the windows of closed shops, office supply showrooms holding closing-down sales, luxury car showrooms and finance companies ready to finance that same luxury, estate agencies and little shops with the sign “WE BUY GOLD”, one after the other, scenes from a blockbuster about the kind of life the country could no longer afford (the country couldn’t: he could). They walked down the traffic-clogged street as far as the underground stop. Young men in wide trousers and hoodies and tennis shoes were launching their skateboards against the incomprehensible architecture of the station, only to be pushed back by the hardness of the material. The wooden boards scraped on the stone and slipped on the metal with a crash that seemed exaggeratedly loud, given the clumsiness of the moves. In order not to see or hear, The Writer went down into the station, bought two tickets, one for himself and one for The Dog, and plunged into the warm intestines of the underground.

  On the platform, as they waited for the arrival announced on the indicator board with the words NEXT TRAIN I MINUTE, The Writer approached the end of the platform and looked into the dark mouth of the tunnel. From that tube came a distant clanking sound, like the shuffling of a chain gang. The Dog, a humble four-legged auxiliary device connected to its master’s server through the lead, sensed that something wasn’t right. It had lost its self-assurance and was nudging its muzzle in between its master’s legs. The noise grew until it became a roar, like a distant roll of drums before a battle. A breath emerged from the tunnel, ruffling The Writer’s hair. It was a tickle from the column of air rushing in ahead of the train. The Writer looked at The Dog, and The Dog looked at The Writer, who placed a hand on its head and stroked it.

  How long can a minute last? Why wait? What if instead of a dress rehearsal for The Great Moment, The Great Moment had arrived? The Writer thought about The Second Wife (but not The First), thought about The Baby (but not The Boy and The Girl), and about The Publisher, and about The Prize, yes, quite intensely about The Prize. As the brakes of the train bit into the rails, The Writer had a vision: the big posters in the station no longer showed a bottle of perfume and a model with a knowing smile, but the cover of his book, with a band around it mentioning The Prize, the number of reprints and of copies sold…

  The Writer took a step towards the yellow line, and The Dog followed him.

  The train came down the tunnel, making the arched roof shake.

  The Writer took another step, and The Dog dug in its heels.

  The leather lead became as taut as a rope.

  The Writer pulled and moved one of his feet to the edge of the platform.

  The train emerged from the tunnel like an arrow of steel and light.

  And The Writer fell.

  There are dogs that would die for their masters. There really are.

  Not this one. Even if it had never seen an underground train before, it knew at what point to start pulling. To pull with all the strength pumped into its body by the high-energy dog food (for a glossy coat and perfect health) The Filipino filled its bowl with every day. To pull with all its pectorals bulging, swollen, its back arched, its tail pointed downwards and its claws scraping on the platform, to pull with its nose wet and its tongue out. To pull so hard that The Writer’s shoes skidded on the floor of the platform. To pull so hard…

  …that The Writer fell.

  But not forwards.

  Backwards.

  Hitting his coccyx painfully on the platform at the train stopped and the doors were thrown wide open, revealing this ridiculous man to the passengers.

  No, those shoes really weren’t right.

  As he returned home, with his lower back aching from the fall and The Dog more depressed than tired, The Writer, drawn there by some invisible magnetic force, stopped again halfway along the bridge. He placed his hands on the parapet and looked down.

  There was the solution, simple and economical. Within every-one’s reach. No branches, no tunnels. Water.

  Like the legendary Alaric, King of the Visigoths, for whose funeral hundreds of slaves diverted the course of the River Busento so that he could be laid to rest in the river bed, together with his glory, and his legendary treasures.

  Well, now the Tiber would welcome him to its bed and cover him for ever with its age-old waters.

  Pleased to have found such a simple but spectacular solution, The Writer could already imagine the item on the One O’clock News, with the reporter on the bridge, hair ruffled by the breeze, the Castel Sant’Angelo in the background, and the camera panning over the barges and the firemen’s dinghies as they dragged the river in search of his body… Talking of which, who would find him? Maybe a fisherman from Fiumicino, or a lifeguard from Ostia. Oh God, let’s hope not. Because in such things every detail counts: you can’t just be found by the first person who happens to pass by, but nor can you be found by someone who’s too important and might overshadow the discovery itself. Perhaps the best thing would be not to be found at all. Immersed in the waters. Then nothing more. And the mystery would become a legend. Brilliant.

  It had been a long walk. His back hurt because of the fall, and he needed to be content with doing one thing at a time: that was the way great enterprises were built up.

  In the meantime, he had almost reached home. The Dog stopped to dri
nk from the drinking fountain and greedily swallowed big gulps of water, then, at the view of the gate, pricked up its ears and curled its tail: exhausted by the overwork to which its master had forced it, it was already dreaming of its basket and its rubber toys.

  The Writer was about to go through the gate into the drive when he noticed something: a pair of shoes on the edge of the low wall on which the perimeter fence stood. He went closer: they were beautiful Timberlands, broken down by time and shaped by thousands of steps, but still in good, in fact excellent, condition.

  Was it a joke? Or the missing accessory to complete the outfit for The Great Moment? Who had left them here, and why?

  When he picked them up, he at least discovered why. A lethal whiff of shit caught him by the throat. The Writer instinctively moved the shoes away from him and put them back on the low wall. The Dog went closer and started sniffing them and wagging its tail. Then it stuck out the pink spatula of its tongue and tried to lick them, but The Writer tugged at the lead with all the strength he could muster, pulling the animal away from the shoes.

  “Don’t even think about it!”

  And he whipped it on the backside with the handle of the lead. The Dog still didn’t understand. After all, it was his thing.

  When fate crosses your path, if there’s one thing to avoid it isn’t turning your back on it. It’s turning your head away and pretending not to know it. To recognize the few significant signs amid millions of insignificant signs, to try and bring order to disorder (or vice versa): wasn’t that the work of a writer? To ignore that pair of shoes sitting on the low wall around the neighbourhood where you lived would have been more than obtuse, it would have been wicked. When fate shows its hand so clearly, all you can do is submit to its omnipotent will.