The Parrots Read online

  “Excuse me for a moment… What is it?”

  “Could you give me the scan?”

  “What’s the matter, missing your prostate?”

  There was a fearful thud, and glass showered the room like dew. The Beginner felt tiny fragments of glass frost his bare legs, and a weak current of air filled the room, made the curtains billow and lifted the corners of the tablecloth. Glass everywhere, on the carpet, on the cupboards, in the kitchen sink.

  “Darling, where are you?”

  The crash had woken The Girlfriend.

  “Here.”

  He gently moved the curtain, then drew it right back.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened?”

  He walked barefoot, a fragment of glass lodged in his right foot. He brought the foot up to the height of his left knee, twisting the sole inwards, and extracted the splinter. A small amount of blood came out. He didn’t feel any pain, although he probably would later. But first of all, before anything else, there was that dark patch in the middle of the terrace. Whatever it was.

  He advanced towards the dark—or rather, black—patch—or rather, mass—in a corner—or rather, in the middle—of the terrace, two metres—or rather, one metre from him, and two from what remained of the pane of glass.

  “What was it?”

  “…”

  A huge black bird lay lifeless on the terrace, its half-open beak looking like a congealed streak of lava, its eyes a cobalt blue, its stiff legs pointing skywards, its wings outspread as if crucified.

  “That’s disgusting… What is it?”

  Standing in the doorway, her breasts pushing against her nightdress, The Girlfriend looked on in horror as The Beginner walked towards the bird. He was silent for a while.

  “A parrot.”

  The police helicopter flew over the ring road around Rome, bestowing its blessing from the sky on a sesquipedalian traffic jam between the Cassia Bis and Flaminia exits. From above, the tailback looked like a steel lizard sleeping in the sun. Among the vehicles caught in the bottleneck, there were two which deserve closer attention.

  Neither of the two drivers was in a position to know the reason for the tailback. It was in fact due to a rather delicate operation: the removal by the fire brigade of a nest of white storks (Ciconia ciconia) from a speed camera. The presence of the winged couple had interfered with the sophisticated equipment, which explained why it had recently been malfunctioning, resulting in a large number of fines and an equally large number of appeals.

  Now although the drivers of the two cars worthy of closer attention were as unaware of each other as they were of the storks, there was a relationship between them, one that was both coincidental and elective. Not so much because the two of them were listening to the same song on the same radio station, which can happen, but because they were two of the three finalists for the same Prize.

  The Writer looked at the woman on the seat beside him. The woman was silent. The Writer raised the volume of the radio:

  …y me pintaba las manos y la cara de azul…

  …pienso che un sueño parecido no volverá mas…

  The Beginner lowered the volume of the radio and looked at the cardboard box on the seat beside him. In the mysterious darkness of the box, something was about to happen.

  All this was going in inside these two cars caught up in the traffic jam. The Writer was on his way somewhere, The Beginner was coming back from somewhere. But where?

  “To the sea?”

  “To the lake.”

  He had never liked lakes. They had always made him feel really sad, like empty restaurants, cover bands, fifty-year-olds on motorbikes and inflatable swimming pools in gardens. He had only said it for fear of meeting someone who might know him, which would have been quite likely if he had headed for Fregene or Circeo on a fine day like today.

  She was passing through the city, or so she had said, and had hired a car.

  “Would you like to drive?”

  “You drive on the way there. I’ll drive on the way back.”

  She had agreed to this pointless arrangement with a touch of amusement, as if it were one of the games they had played when they were younger. The Writer had wanted her to drive so that he could get a better look at her. If only she’d take off those sunglasses! Then The Writer could read her intentions in her eyes.

  How many years had passed since he had last seen those eyes, sometimes as calm and clear as an Alpine lake, sometimes green and sparkling like a beetle’s wings?

  They had taken the Via Cassia, heading north. As she drove, she occasionally pushed back the blonde hair that kept falling over her face and nervously touched the frames of the big Bakelite glasses that only a diva could have worn with the same nonchalance.

  He would have liked to talk, to tell her everything that had happened between the last time they had seen each other and now, but he couldn’t concentrate enough to find the words (which may seem strange for a writer, but there it is). And not only because of the inhibition her beauty had always exerted on him, and not even because he did not really know where to start—but rather because something was interfering with his thoughts. And that something was the feeling that he had forgotten something important, as if he had not switched the gas off before leaving home, or had left his car with the headlights on. The food for The Baby? No, that wasn’t really a problem, The Filipino would pick it up (talking of whom, was he back yet?).

  As they got farther from the city and the landscape became less oppressive, the unpleasant sensation also began to abandon him, as if the origin of the sensation were the city itself, or something undefined but now too distant to harm him. Warehouses gave way to cultivated fields, vineyards and vegetable gardens, villages with curious names, cut in two by the road like watermelons split on market stalls, old men on benches in squares or at the tables of bars looking impassively at the passing lorries.

  The car with The Writer and the mystery woman on board was rolling down the Via Cassia on a journey without direction and without time.

  This may be the moment to reveal the identity of the mystery woman: she was the great love of The Writer’s youth, and for the purposes of her fleeting appearance in this story we shall call her The Old Flame, not so much because she’s old, no, that wouldn’t be very tactful, but because it’s an old story, an affair that once flamed passionately and is now like a lamp with its wick dry.

  We can talk freely about her, given that The Second Wife is in her office and can’t hear us. She is sitting at her desk, replying to the mountain of e-mails that have accumulated during the night and the early hours of the morning.

  Some time later, just before The Second Wife stepped away from her desk for her lunch break, The Writer and The Old Flame were walking beside the lake, which was streaked with silvery light.

  They were walking unhurriedly, already drawn into the tranquil lakeside rhythm. They sat down first at the tables of a café, then moved to those of a restaurant, one of the many which, with the somewhat homespun optimism so common in the provinces, had already put tables outside.

  They drank house white and ate seafood salad (even though they were at the lake) and fish (even though they were still at the lake) with potatoes.

  At last she took off her glasses, and he saw her eyes. They were girlish eyes, just as he remembered them, still bright, but obscured somehow by an invisible veil of sadness, like a pale sun behind a cloud of ash.

  “I read your last book,” she said. “It was very moving.” Then she added, “There’s something I have to know.”

  “Go on.”

  “I’m the main female character, aren’t I?”

  The Writer smiled without replying. At the beginning of his literary career, every time someone close to him saw themselves in one or other of his characters and demanded an explanation, he would give a reply of an aesthetic and literary nature, to the effect that novels are works of fiction, it’s all a pr
ocess of casting a critical eye on reality, even in an autobiography the narrator doesn’t exactly correspond to the author, you always start with a real event and transfigure it through your imagination… and so on.

  Then, as time had passed, he had given up. Not so much because he didn’t find such replies satisfactory (although that was part of it, of course), as because the others found them unsatisfactory. The only thing, the ultimate thing that you could do when someone asked a question like that was to say, “Yes. It’s you.”

  Even though this could provoke a quarrel or bring a friendship to an end, it was the only possible reply. The only one capable of satisfying that morbid curiosity, that sordid voyeurism, the only truth that people really wanted to hear. For some unknown but human reason, recognizing themselves in a character in a novel made it possible for them to recognize themselves as individuals in the real world. It was like a literary Eucharist that signified their rebirth, their transition to a new life.

  Once, a friend who had recognized himself in a character had phoned him to say he was very angry with him. The Writer had listened patiently to his friend’s hasty conclusions and then, instead of rebutting them point by point, had said, “You ought to thank me. Thanks to me you’ve discovered you exist.”

  “Well? Is she me or not?”

  “Yes. She’s you.”

  “What’s that smell?”

  “We’ve got a gorilla under the knife.”

  “A gorilla?”

  “Yes, a gorilla from the zoo. Extraction of a wisdom tooth.”

  We are now inside a veterinary clinic just outside Rome, where The Beginner knew a young vet who had once come to see The Girlfriend’s cat and diagnosed toxoplasmosis.

  “I don’t have much time, I have to go back into theatre in a while.”

  “Are you operating?”

  “I’m not operating, but I’d like to assist because it’s a procedure that doesn’t crop up every day.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “What did you want to show me?”

  The Beginner handed over a huge cardboard box, which had once held a pair of boots The Girlfriend had bought from a shop in the Via Condotti.

  The Vet opened the box. “What is it?”

  “I was hoping you’d tell me. That’s why I came.”

  Holding the black parrot by one wing, The Vet took it from the box. The stiff body, the tilted head, the unfolded wing sticking out at an angle of forty-five degrees: in that pose the black parrot looked like a diligent seminarian raising his hand to ask a question. The Vet placed the bird on a metal surface, lit a powerful lamp with a telescopic arm and began to examine it.

  “I don’t understand… Where did you find this?”

  “On my terrace.”

  “That’s impossible. These birds don’t live in the wild. It must have escaped from a cage.”

  “Certainly not mine.”

  “And how did it die?”

  “Forget the post-mortem. What I want to know is, what is it?”

  “A parrot.”

  “Even I can see that. I mean, what kind?”

  “I’m no expert on parrots. It could be a macaw or an Amazon, but the colour’s really strange, and the size… It may be a genetic anomaly. You should talk to an ornithologist, I have a friend at the Natural History Museum, if you like I can—”

  “There’s no need, it’s not that important.”

  “Listen, let’s do something. Leave it with me. I’ll photograph it and e-mail the photos to my friend. Then we’ll get rid of it.”

  “Get rid of what?”

  “The body.”

  “No, no. I’ll take it back.”

  “You know you can’t just throw animals in the dustbin.”

  “I’m not planning to throw it anywhere.”

  “Oh? What are you planning to do with it, then?”

  “Bye.”

  He was planning to stuff it.

  The Master stopped on the pavement and looked up at the apartment block, heedless of the sun and the usual early afternoon traffic. With its faded façade, cracked plaster and chipped window sills, the building exuded an air of listlessness, of exhaustion, as if it were asking only to be demolished, or at the very least abandoned. But The Master did not notice all these details, shielded as he was by the Polaroid lenses of his magnificent glasses, which were held together with adhesive tape. The halls of Roman apartment blocks always smell of fried eggs, rubber and polished brass. Often, as in this case, the lifts are out of order. The Master looked at the stairwell spiralling up into the air like the thread of a bolt. He knew those stairs well, from having so often climbed them, driven on by the promise of victory, and just as often descended them again, dragged down by the gravity of defeat.

  And he knew equally well that, if it had not collapsed yet—and this could be said both of him and of the building—this really was his final opportunity to climb to the top floor and win this last prize. Which would actually be the first.

  Even though there were not many people in the restaurant, and nobody was paying too much attention to them, even the most distracted of the waiters would have immediately dismissed the hypothesis that The Writer and The Old Flame were husband and wife. The theatrical way she arched her back, the gesture with which she moved her hair away from her forehead, her shrill, childish voice, and the way he kept both filling her glass with white wine and filling the silence with his words were all signs of an invisible grammar that said more than his words ever could.

  The Writer nodded distractedly at The Old Flame’s account of the failures disguised as successes with which she had dug the grave of all those years during which they had lost touch with one another. A trench filled with the corpses of lovers executed with a karate chop to the back of the neck, wounded friendships and the carcasses of projects left in the rain to rust. The years that separated him from her, as she went on with her stories, now seemed to him like a pontoon bridge about to be swept away by the current of a swollen river.

  The Writer looked at The Old Flame: her face, spared the botox that had already devoured half her contemporaries (one, though not the only, reason he had left The First Wife for The Second) was still beautiful, although there was only a trace left of the almost indecent beauty of her youth, like a mark seen through a sheet of paper.

  Park in front of a plastic surgery clinic, and take a book to read. Sooner or later you’ll see what remains of the woman who drove you mad go in (or come out). That was the Zen concept of revenge The Writer applied to the female body. Whereas he became more interesting the older he got: “mature” according to his young female admirers, “youthful” as his older lovers said.

  After lunch The Old Flame wanted to get an ice cream. The Writer, who was more tempted by the thought of taking her to a cheap hotel—partly because he couldn’t believe he had come all these kilometres for an ice cream—acceded to her wishes. With ill-concealed annoyance, but he acceded to her wishes. And then what also put paid to The Writer’s erection (not even an erection, for now only a kind of intoxicating tingling of the bladder) was the lemon that smelt of detergent and the cone-shaped wrapper, which was why his ice cream ended up in a bin, while The Old Flame finished hers, even saying how good it was, which The Writer found excessive or at the very least irritating, and which put him on guard against the dangers of this woman who had re-emerged from out of the past.

  In order not to think about the waste of that morning, The Writer looked at the sheet of water in front of him, shining like the bottom of a steel pot left to dry in the sun. Suddenly, he recalled Latin translations he had done at school. Texts that recounted how, one day thousands of years ago, after a back-breaking journey, two immense armies had confronted one another by that same lake, strangers who had come to fight and die on those tranquil shores.

  “Why did you go to Africa?”

  “Because I wanted to do something good for people.”

  “You could have done something good for me. There w
as no need to go so far.”

  A pair of herons (Ardea cinerea) landed in the middle of a cane thicket like two inexperienced parachutists, stirring The Writer’s dark thoughts.

  After the ice cream, The Old Flame had suggested with touching candour (or was it deceit?) that they take the little boat that did a circuit of the lake and moored at one of the two small islands. The Writer had agreed, partly because of that half-hearted intention that had crept into his mind—and his pants—and partly out of weakness. And partly, too, because the thought, watered by the wine and fermented by the first sunshine of spring, that he had forgotten something was maturing in the dark cask of his consciousness, and was turning into the clear, bitter feeling that he had left the nest unattended and was now somewhere he shouldn’t be, in the company of someone he shouldn’t be with.

  These thoughts abandoned The Writer when The Old Flame smiled at him and took his arm as the boat left the landing stage, glided smoothly onto the waters, and set sail for a possible adventure.

  “Why did you leave me?” said The Writer when The Old Flame placed her head on his shoulder, but he said it so softly that the noise of the propellers and the wind covered his words.

  Years before, when The Old Flame had still haunted his heated fantasies, when she had appeared at the most inappropriate moments of the day in the form of an auroral ghost, when her white face had sunk in the deep waters of his dreams like a mermaid, The Writer would have taken advantage of a moment like this to throw her in the lake.

  The boat was empty apart from an elderly couple who were sitting in the stern, although inside the cabin for fear of catching cold, but they had got on a lot earlier than The Writer and The Old Flame and didn’t seem the slightest bit interested in them.

  It would only take a push, the noise would cover the screams, and the temperature of the water would do the rest. Of course, there would be witnesses (waiters and barmen), but he could always counter with his version for the police and the press: we parted after lunch, and that was the last I saw of her. Unfortunately, that version would be sunk by the ticket they had bought at the landing stage: a stupid stub in the bundle of a sleepy ticket-seller would land him in it. It’s incredible sometimes how the obtuseness of objects can threaten the most intelligent of minds.