The Parrots Read online

  “Invented an espresso coffee dispenser”, said one of the captions superimposed over the image of The Writer, who, as expected, was making an effort to maintain a detached and inscrutable expression. “Has been studying the Inuit people for years”, the captions continued, “Has patented a genetically modified maize”, “Trains fighting dogs”, “Sells underwear in the United Arab Emirates”, “Writes novels” …

  What did he look like? In other words, what did other people think he looked like? If the porter asked him to show him his hands—which the contestants were allowed to do—he would immediately rule out the option “Trains fighting dogs”. His stern, charismatic look might have supported the idea, but it was difficult to believe that a trainer of fighting dogs had never met a dog which, not wanting to be trained, had left teeth marks on the trainer’s hands.

  Logic would also lead one to rule out the Inuit expert. The icy wind and harsh temperatures of those inhospitable regions would certainly have left their mark on the virile but still-boyish features of The Writer: people who have lived for a long time in the cold usually have luxuriant eyebrows, thick beards, broken capillaries and scratched skin, and such was not the case with him. His discreet but sensual gaze might have been suited to the underwear salesman, but such people don’t usually look too virile and move in a guarded way, in order not to alarm male buyers or embarrass women, and that certainly didn’t apply to him… You could say anything you liked about him, but not that he didn’t look virile… The Writer smiled to himself, surprised by that flippant thought. There remained the man who had patented genetically modified maize, the inventor of the espresso coffee dispenser and… The porter was staring at him.

  The Writer smiled reassuringly and raised his eyes to heaven, pretending to be making an effort to remember something. Then he clicked his fingers, pretending to have suddenly remembered what he had just pretended to have forgotten, smiled at the bewildered astronaut through the porthole of his space capsule and headed for the avenue where his house was situated.

  The sprinklers hummed obediently, lights indicated the way like those leading to the emergency exit on a plane, bicycles stood side by side in the rack, everything seemed to be in exactly the same pointless order in which he had left it when he had gone out to meet The Old Flame. Even the SUV with the smoked windows and hundreds of horsepower sleeping beneath the bonnet was neatly parked in the space allowed in the condominium’s rules: a car and two scooters, or else a car and a motorbike, or an SUV and a Fiat 500, like The Second Wife’s… except that it wasn’t there. It wasn’t there? No, it wasn’t there. Although it should have been there at this hour, the Fiat 500 wasn’t there.

  As the sky grew dark and the light faded, wiping out the infinite illusion of day, The Writer was overcome with remorse, which had diabolically waited right until those last few metres separating him from his house door to punch him in the back. He put on speed, guided by the age-old certainty that drives heroes on their way home, which was that something pernicious had happened in his absence.

  In the last metres that separated him from the front door he thought again about the empty rooms of the Renaissance villa, smelling of wood, where he had wiped out his own traces, shaking off the guide, the visiting party of tourists and—above all—The Old Flame.

  As he searched the pockets of his raincoat for the keys, which were cold to the touch, he thought again about the peasant he had found hoeing the vegetable garden, to whom he had given a handful of banknotes to get him back to terra firma.

  As he found the keys, he heard the whirr of the little outboard motor and felt the precariousness of the plastic hull slicing through the low waters of the lake, saw again the logo of a firm making animal feed on the peak of the peasant’s cap, felt the wind striking his forehead and saw the island disappearing into the distance.

  As he took out the keys, but illogically decided it was better to ring the bell, he saw himself sitting aggressively behind the wheel, pushing the engine of the hire car to its limits, leaving behind him—this time for ever—the blondness of The Old Flame, the dampness of the little island and the sadness of the lake.

  The door opened. The Filipino (so he was there!) looked him up and down with a disapproving expression. The Writer entered, avoiding him, and hung his raincoat on the rack.

  “The Signora?” he asked as he walked towards the dark kitchen across the living room, which was being guarded by The Ukrainian Nanny as she rocked the pushchair with one hand and with the other aimed the remote control at the TV set: the same quiz the porter had been watching was on here, too.

  “Signora hospital,” The Filipino said before The Writer had time, in his neurotic inspection of the house, to enter the bedroom and bathroom in a futile search for The Second Wife.

  The Writer stopped and turned abruptly. “Is she ill?”

  “Mother ill.”

  “Mother of Signora?” said The Writer, who regressed linguistically without even realizing it whenever he talked to The Filipino.

  “No, your mother”—and this time The Filipino pointed his index finger unequivocally at The Writer.

  It was then that The Writer remembered, painfully and intensely, for the second time, that he had not had his mobile with him since the morning.

  He rushed into his study and found his smartphone exactly where he had left it (had he doubted it?). The display showed twenty-six missed calls and eight messages. Was this the revenge of the gods for having disconnected himself from the world for a few hours? At that moment, the phone vibrated (if you’re famous, or if you have something to hide, vibration is always preferable to ringing), walking a few centimetres across the desk as if it were a primitive life form, a ciliate or flagellate protozoan. The Writer pressed the answer button.

  “Where on earth have you been?”

  It wasn’t The Second Wife at the other end, but The President of The Academy in person.

  “They’ve been looking for you all day, your press officer has been getting hysterical, they’re all here waiting for you, you’re the only one missing!”

  So he hadn’t only forgotten the phone, he had also forgotten the unmissable joint presentation with the other authors organized by The Academy, one of the crucial stages in the lead-up to The Ceremony.

  “My mother hasn’t been well.”

  “…”

  “She’s in hospital.”

  “Oh… I’m sorry… Would you like us to postpone?”

  “No, no, send a taxi. I’ll be right there.”

  If we bombard a very thin sheet of gold with alpha particles, 90 per cent of them will go right through the material without undergoing any deviation in their trajectory. Only 10 per cent will turn back as if they have hit an obstacle. From this, Rutherford drew the conclusion that matter must be largely composed of a vacuum, a vacuum gathered around a heavy nucleus. The Master, who had been aroused from his afternoon nap by the sound of a car horn, would have drawn a different conclusion. This time, too, his slippers had let him down: instead of awaiting him at the foot of the bedside table, where he was convinced he had left them, they had wandered God knows where. The car horn was insistent, but who could it be? The Master got out of bed, barefoot, intending to go to the window and satisfy his curiosity.

  Largely composed of a vacuum as it might have been, the black alabaster bishop hurt a lot as he stepped on it with his bare sole. Once he had handed the fugitive bishop back to the authority of the chessboard, there remained somewhere in the room, by default, two final dangerous objects: a white pawn, easier to spot because of the colour, and a black knight (when he found them, he’d be able to resume his long-distance game).

  But to the intense pain spreading from his foot was added another sensory complication: the bishop was wet. And not only the bishop. The bedside rug was damp, too. There was a yellowish patch on the floor. How was it possible?

  The Master’s measuring jug, empty and overturned, demonstrated that it was possible.

  But th
ere was no time to think, or to repair the damage, seeing that the car horn was still baying outside, and amid all that untidiness his slippers were at least as invisible as his last book in the shops. That was why The Master decided stoically to wade across the space that separated him from the window. And as barefoot as a worm, with his foot still hurting from its collision with the black bishop, putting only his heels down, he waded through that lake of urine and looked out.

  The Director of The Small Publishing Company had got out of his clapped-out old van and was waiting outside the closed gate of Prince—’s estate.

  “Aren’t you dressed yet?”

  “What time is it? I didn’t hear the alarm.”

  “Come on, we’ll be late!”

  “I’ll be right down!” said The Master, who had completely lost track of time. And he disappeared inside the window as if he were the mechanical device of a cuckoo clock.

  “When are you going to make up your mind to put in an automatic gate?” cried The Director of The Small Publishing Company.

  Cuckoo: The Master looked out of the window again.

  “After I win The Prize.”

  In the persistent silence of the empty apartment The Beginner stared at the big charred block which was nothing other than his parrot shut up in its cage.

  It had lost that tough-guy look and seemed resigned to the cage, as if its fate were no longer of any interest to it.

  Neither the seeds nor the fresh fruit in the feeding trough had been touched, nor did the level of the water in the measuring jug seem to have fallen. Maybe it was a question of mistrust, of adaptation. Sooner or later The Beginner would make that feathered terrorist change sides, he was sure of it.

  The Beginner approached the cage to get a better look at the parrot. From close-up, he seemed to detect in the bird’s eyes something like a stern judgement, a tacit accusation that made him shudder.

  The Beginner turned away to avoid that gaze. But as he turned his bare back to the bird to look for a clean shirt in the wardrobe, he felt as if he were being watched: exactly the same distressing sensation he had felt in London, when, in the middle of the street outside his hotel, he had failed in his loyalty to The Girlfriend by sticking his tongue into the mouth of the translator of his novel.

  Unfortunately, there was no time to indulge in that transgressive memory: he had to change and rush to the event. A theatre full of people was waiting for him, and The Beginner, if he wanted to win, knew he had to be on time.

  One day, when he was a great writer, he thought as he put on his jacket on the stairs, he’d be able to grant himself the most tyrannical of privileges: that of being late.

  For anyone entering only now, the man in the middle of the stage is The Writer. He has strong hands, a sailor’s rather than a typist’s, which he rotates in the air as he speaks, so gracefully that sometimes, as now, he makes it look as if he is untying complicated knots rather than underlining his own words. The same hands then close again like a mother-of-pearl cigarette holder, revealing his pale knuckles, at the end of the propositions he maintains with the persuasive vigour of his gestures. He has a voice as tight as a cross in a football match, which vibrates over the heads of the spectators and crackles against the walls of the theatre, spreading respect and confidence. He wears his hair tousled like a boy’s, and he’s elegant, but with a kind of scruffy elegance. He wears brightly coloured shirts which he buys in a shop that only he knows—or thinks that only he knows, because The Beginner also recently discovered it—and which he keeps unbuttoned, even in winter, revealing his heroic chest and an Adam’s apple like a peach stone under his skin, an anatomical detail that makes him manly and fascinating even when he’s silent and swallowing a glass of water to recover from his own torrential speech, which would leave even a llama without saliva. His eloquence knows no bounds, his dialectic is prodigious, no rhetorician would be able to compete: The Writer is capable of talking about any subject for a sufficiently long time to convince the others that he knows so much about that subject that, if he wanted, even when the conversation comes to an end, he could still talk about it for hours. In other words, ask him a question, any question, and he will answer you. Even if you don’t ask him.

  Mainly, at presentations, on the back covers of his novels or on the covers of women’s magazines, he appears in jeans and ankle boots (or tennis shoes), which he will still be able to wear for a few years more before it starts to look ridiculous. But when that moment comes, he won’t realize it and will continue to wear the same shoes and the same shirt because, being a writer, by definition he has no sense of the ridiculous.

  “Where do you get the ideas for your novels?”

  The man who has just addressed this question to The Writer is someone we have already met: The President, the de facto host of all The Academy’s events and round tables. Stiff and elegant in his regulation jacket, he looks rather like a high-class wine waiter who has climbed up through the ranks, tasted everything and has now become teetotal and judges the wine only in thought.

  “Where do you get the ideas for your novels?”

  The question was still vibrating in the air. A little cloud of anxiety shadowed The Writer’s face slightly, but the wind of self-control blew the cloud away, and once again he gave a radiant smile.

  “It’s the ideas that get me.” (Smiles in the auditorium). “You see, a writer enjoys limited freedom, it’s the responsibility for what he writes that’s unlimited.”

  The President of The Academy nodded serenely. But then what else could he do? He could only trust that answer. He certainly couldn’t know where The Writer really got his ideas. And what else could the audience do, their heads lolling on the velvet seats filled with mites? Nobody can really know where a writer gets the ideas for his novels, not even the writer himself. Except ours. He knew.

  While The Beginner was trying to shield himself from the bright lights and a dull, perfunctory introduction in praise of the sponsor of The Prize, thanks to whom all this was possible, in the small bathroom of a one-room apartment a tampon previously soaked in urine was turning blue, thus indicating the unmistakable presence (unmistakable except in the case of a false alarm) of the hormone Beta-HCG, a hormone absent in women who were not in what is called an “interesting” state. What was really interesting was that the urine was The Girlfriend’s.

  At the moment, however, The Beginner had no way of knowing this fact, or the related implications it would have for his future life. Because some women, out of an instinct for self-preservation, keep some pieces of news to themselves, ready to use them like deadly weapons at the most appropriate moments.

  Talking of moments, The Beginner’s had now arrived.

  “How and when did you first become interested in writing?”

  “I always thought of being a writer, even before I actually started writing.”

  “Thank you. And now let’s come to you…”

  The President had turned to The Master. Who had eyes like swimming pools filled with rainwater and could not see from here to there (even though somewhere in the infinite depths of his pockets he must have his glasses). All he could do was float amid outlines and shadows, but thanks to the thermal imaging camera of his experience he was able to reconstruct a three-dimensional image of the theatre: firemen bored to death at the back of the hall, bejewelled ladies in the front rows, slumbering husbands in the boxes, restless schoolkids torn by force from their afternoons on Facebook and transported to the gallery, adolescents laughing beneath their incipient moustaches, their teachers’ stern looks, The President’s dandyish tie, The Writer’s poker-faced smile, The Beginner’s innocent (but no less lethal) shyness.

  The Master wasn’t born yesterday, he had been involved in other prizes—he hadn’t won them, of course, but he knew how to behave.

  The Master at last found his glasses in an inside pocket. At least that was something. He put them on his gibbous nose and found that, despite the greasy, opaque halo of his lenses, everyt
hing was exactly the way he had imagined it.

  “Earlier,” The President went on, “in presenting your book, I said that its poetic origins are evident in many of its pages. Yours is a very special book, almost a kind of prose poem, with an epigrammatic, fragmentary quality that somehow magically recreates unity. So I wanted to ask you, as far as your style is concerned—”

  “Here I have to stop you,” said The Master. “Style doesn’t exist. It may have existed once, but now it’s the dear departed, a completely outdated concept. Style is what we do without knowing how we do it.”

  “This definition of yours”—said The President, turning to the audience—“really deserves underlining.”

  The Master made a gesture, flinging out the palm of his hand but keeping his arm still, like a cat that only wants to play harmlessly: he was about to say “Let’s drop it.”

  “You know that, according to the rules, the authors cannot read their own works. However, if your colleagues won’t be upset with me…”

  The Beginner shook his head—why deny the poor old man his moment of glory?—and The Writer shrugged his shoulders: it is in the mercy he extends to the defeated that a victor’s greatness lies.

  “…I don’t think I’ll be accused of favouritism if I take advantage of this opportunity to ask you to read for us, not the prose from your book (which, as I’ve said, is forbidden by the rules), but some verse: I know you have some unpublished poems…”

  The Master nodded smugly.

  “Please…” The President indicated the lectern from which, at the beginning of the evening, a fading actress had read extracts from the three competing works in a manner that made it clear she understood nothing.