The Parrots Read online

  Returning to The Writer’s children: after seeing them and realizing, with a lump in the throat, how lost and disappointed they look, the considerate mother or father of a classmate will offer to take them home. And they will accept, with the resignation with which an adopted child enters a new family.

  What if that doesn’t happen? Unlikely, of course. But if it doesn’t happen, didn’t The Boy want an iPhone with unlimited voice and data for his tenth birthday? And doesn’t his mother always put at least twenty euros in his pocket (you never know…)?

  Let’s go then, how much will it cost them to call a taxi?

  Five-four. To the opposing team, obviously. That was how the five-a-side game had finished.

  The two teams had transferred to the bar for their usual after-game aperitif, a ritual which The Beginner could happily have skipped. He could particularly have skipped the dreary conversation, which, as soon as it ventured beyond technical commentary on the game or deviated from the required “update on the championship”, demonstrated a crude truth: which was that, once the game was over, those ten people had nothing in common off the field. Maybe on the field, too, judging by how they had played.

  The Beginner had eaten hardly anything, half a rice croquette, two bites of an open sandwich. His stomach couldn’t face food after the effort of the game and the cold, foamy beer he had knocked back greedily, which was now descending into his innards to appease his mysterious sense of unease.

  After the aperitif, with lactic acid in his muscles, he had accepted a lift from one of his team who had a Japanese sports car and who played with the head of a Brazilian and the feet of a Faroe Islander. Now, as he pressed the lift button with his painful finger (his team didn’t have a goalie and took turns in goal), it struck him that maybe he ought to stop playing five-a-side. After all, he wasn’t a little boy any more, he was a successful writer and successful writers don’t play football, the critics would smell a rat immediately. To have a modicum of credibility, writers have to be wimps or misanthropes.

  The lift doors opened, and as The Beginner started up the final flight of stairs that separated him from The Girlfriend’s loft he felt as though his calves were made of wood and his bones had been reduced to tiny pods, like bags of pellets.

  Why did he persist with the five-a-side? Hadn’t he had enough of shin pads and stinking feet, sweaty underwear and humiliating genital comparisons in the shower? Yes, he had definitely had enough.

  The five-a-side was an unhealthy, typically Roman habit which he could abandon without regret. The next time he was summoned on the noticeboard on Facebook, he wouldn’t even reply.

  With a final effort, he inserted the keys in the defective lock and entered the apartment. Silence. The Girlfriend was going to dinner with her female colleagues at a Greek restaurant directly after work. So The Beginner was alone. Alone with his parrot. He threw his bags down in the entrance, as The Girlfriend had told him a thousand times not to do, flopped onto the sofa, as The Girlfriend had told him a thousand times not to do, laid his head back, closed his eyes and saw again that moment when, unmarked, he had found himself alone in front of the goalkeeper and had made an unforgivable shot that had ended up beyond the—

  “In the Christian vision, sacrifice does not essentially mean renunciation, so why is obedience a virtue? Because it has the ability to give substance to the ties…”

  Who was speaking? From whose mouth had those words come? Who was in the apartment? The Beginner felt his blood freeze and his muscles stiffen. Slowly he turned. And fear took hold of him. The words were coming from the parrot’s cage.

  “Obedience is the only way we can speak to the children of Jesus, for if obedience is a virtue, it is something greater than submission…”

  The Beginner overcame his fear, got up from the sofa and went to the cage. The parrot was frozen, its eyes half closed, its beak clenched, as if reciting a prayer by heart. The Beginner walked round the cage twice. The motionless feathers, the legs hooked over the perch…

  “Obedience to the true, the right, the good, because those who obey and those who demand obedience…”

  The words continued to fill the room.

  “…are both servants… servants in the service of the truth.”

  The radio! The radio was still on, standing on the bookcase. Idiot idiot idiot, stupid bloody idiot. Not even a savage faced with the white man’s tricks would have behaved like that. How could he have let himself be scared by a stupid radio? A stupid portable radio broadcasting a religious programme…

  A religious programme? But hadn’t he tuned the radio to a station that was all about football?

  The Beginner picked up the radio, looked at it, then looked at the parrot, which was staring at him with its cold eyes. The Beginner switched off the radio. The parrot hid its head under its wing.

  *

  The vibrant light reaches the top floors of the buildings, and slices them open.

  Spring is here, in the cafés with their tables in the open air, in the women tourists sunbathing on the steps of the monuments, in the reawakening of the parks after their long slumber beneath a covering of leaves. But not everyone is able to enjoy it. There are also those who work and look outside with a sigh.

  In the office of the NGO, The Girlfriend is sitting at her desk, too tired to search on the Internet for the best combination of flights for her boss’s complicated movements (Copenhagen–Oslo and Oslo–London by plane, London–Paris by train, and Paris–Rome by plane), waiting only to knock off and go to the Greek restaurant with her colleagues.

  The spring is of no concern to The Master either: he has other things to think about. He is in a bar, one of those bars where estate agents in pointed boots and office workers with synthetic ties go to eat, where the sandwiches in the windows are covered with paper napkins as if they were corpses wrapped in shrouds, and where there is always a strange stench, as if the barman had left his hand on the hotplate.

  The Master is at a table, looking at the entrance, through which, in a moment, a thin, olive-skinned, distinguished-looking man will pass, carrying a showy leather briefcase stuffed as full as a roll: all of which details are necessary but not sufficient to identify the man as The Master’s Lawyer.

  But what is an artist—and poets and writers are surely entitled so to define themselves—doing with a lawyer? He could be availing himself of his services for matters of contracts and royalties, of course, but such is not the case with The Master. Unfortunately, life has no pity on artists, because the sickness of living which they carry with them does not exempt them from being ordinary citizens. How immeasurably distant, for example, a fine may be from a poem.

  “Very nice… Where did you get it?”

  The Lawyer had had no difficulty in spotting The Master sitting in a corner of the bar, and had walked up to his table. His curiosity aroused by The Master’s sports jacket, The Lawyer, when he was close enough to touch it, took the material of the sleeve between his thumb and index finger.

  “It was a gift.”

  The Master was very proud of that sailcloth jacket, perhaps the only fashionable garment he owned. It was one of the unmissable gifts from Torchio Wines, a company that boasted an enviable catalogue of prizes that could be won by collecting points. The Master was a regular customer, and every month, together with the wine, received sealed envelopes marked PERSONAL and FINAL OPPORTUNITY, which contained exclusive offers. You just had to order the wine by phone—it arrived by courier within three working days—keep aside the stickers over the corks, and return them by post to the offices of Torchio Wines, and that was it.

  With the first two cases (only twenty-four stickers) had come a small portable TV set, which couldn’t be configured for digital terrestrial but had an attractive design anyway. Then, with thirty-six stickers, it had been the turn of this jacket, made with the same material from which they make the sails for the America’s Cup. And much else: a set of ceramic pans, an electric knife, a mountain bike with th
irty-two gears, a two-speed hairdryer, a wine-making set complete with professional corkscrew, thermometer, capsule-cutter and wine-pourer, a robot vacuum cleaner and other things too numerous to mention. But for the forbidden prize, the prize of prizes, you needed 360 stickers—in other words, almost a bottle a day for a year, which might seem an unattainable goal, but only if you look at it with the obtuse eyes of a valley-dweller staring at a fearsome mountain peak.

  In fact, Torchio Wines are generous to their long-term customers. In spite of the prizes, the points obtained are not gradual, but accumulate. Torchio Wines really have thought of everything. And that is why The Master is now close to his goal. He only needs a handful of stickers to get the object of his desire.

  The super prize: a modern laptop with lithium batteries, ultra flat screen, and DVD writer, together with a printer, a scanner and a distance-learning course in IT, all paid for by Torchio Wines, of course.

  The Master is convinced that with a machine like that he will finally be able to plug his technology gap and rival other writers in creativity. Because in his opinion (he has no rational explanation for this, it’s just a powerful feeling), the fiendish secret of the success of many modern writers is concealed in such machines and their circuits of red-hot silicon, and it is only thanks to the agility of word processing that these writers’ torrential prose and labyrinthine plots are able to take shape. Thanks to that marvel, he, too, will be able to erase an entire sentence by simply pressing a button. The Master is excited just thinking about it. He even called Torchio Wines for information: “Can you tell me, signorina, is it just like a typewriter?” “Much more!” was the reply from the operator.

  “Here, these are the last ones…”

  The Lawyer had placed a ream of papers on the table.

  “We’ve appealed to the justice of the peace, now we just have to wait and see.”

  “So I don’t have to pay them?”

  “No, not for the moment. But we’ll have to see if the judge accepts the appeal.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “If he doesn’t… you’ll have to pay.”

  “But I thought we just had to appeal…”

  “That does work sometimes—what are you having?” The Lawyer had signalled to the young man behind the counter to come and take their order, and the young man had arrived in no time at all.

  “A decaf coffee in a glass… How so?”

  “Because… A small glass of prosecco for me, please.”

  “In the afternoon?”

  “Why? Is there an hour for drinking prosecco?”

  “Go on with what you were saying.”

  “No, I was saying that sometimes it’s enough to appeal and the justice of the peace—”

  “You did say in a glass?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  The young man had left them alone.

  “Why do you take your coffee in a glass?”

  “Because that’s how I like it. Go on.”

  “So in theory the justice of the peace would be obliged…” The Lawyer had taken a mobile from his pocket and was looking at it vibrate. “I’m sorry, I have to take this… My dear fellow!”

  The Lawyer had got up from the table and moved to an area of the bar where there was a better signal. He gesticulated a great deal as he conferred with his mystery caller, then returned to the table just as the young man was arriving with the coffee and the prosecco.

  “I’m sorry, it was an important matter.”

  “Are you going to get to the end of your sentence?”

  “OK, if the justice of the peace doesn’t summon you within a certain length of time—”

  “How long’s a certain length?”

  “I don’t remember, I have to check in the office… How many?” asked The Lawyer, having already poured two spoonfuls of sugar into The Master’s decaffeinated coffee.

  “I usually take it without. Usually.”

  “Quite right, too. Too much sugar is bad for you.”

  “Anyway, what the hell happens if he doesn’t summon you?”

  The Lawyer had already drunk the prosecco and was draining the bottom of the glass. The Master watched him irritably.

  “We win the appeal and you don’t have to pay the fines!”

  Fines. Even though he had sold the car years before, The Master was still being pursued over the fines he owed. Old fines, lost fines, fines never withdrawn, never paid, or paid but without keeping the receipts, fines that had slumbered for years in the dusty files of some office, like bacteria surviving under ice, only to then proliferate and spread until they infected him, just when The Master thought he was immune. That was why he had got himself a lawyer, a good one. “He helped me win my appeal against the admissions procedure at Rome University,” the intern from The Small Publishing Company had told him.

  “Listen, I have to go, I have to be in the office in half an hour…”

  The Lawyer had stood up, gathered his leather briefcase and put on his cream-coloured jacket.

  “Before I forget, that’s thirty-seven euros for expenses.”

  “What expenses?”

  “Administrative costs. Lodging an appeal used to be free. Now you have to pay. They do it to discourage appeals.”

  The Master had thirty-five euros in his wallet, and knew he had no coins in his pockets, but he had to perform the act of searching for them anyway. The Lawyer was a man of the world, and knew certain things, too.

  “Thirty-five will do.”

  “Come in, come in, sit down…”

  It was The Publisher who had spoken. He was sitting at a futuristic glass table in the conference room on the top floor of the publishing company’s offices. Also at the table were the press officer, an androgynous woman with angular cheekbones and the husky voice of an inveterate smoker, the designer, a bald man with elusive features and of indeterminate age, and his editor, a small, cultivated man who despised writers almost as much as he despised himself for not having become one. The Writer smiled stiffly, took two steps across the carpet towards the table, but remained standing. The Publisher noticed his hesitation.

  “Leave us alone.”

  “No, why—”

  “We’ve finished anyway,” he said, dismissing his colleagues with a glance. They gathered their papers, stood up from the leather and metal chairs, and left the room one after the other, smiling politely as they paraded in front of The Writer.

  When they had all gone, The Publisher also stood up.

  “Let’s go to my office.”

  The Publisher left the room and The Writer followed him.

  “They’re a bunch of incompetents,” he said out loud as they walked down the corridor. On either side, behind glass doors with small plates on them—VARIOUS, FOREIGN, ITALIAN—employees could be glimpsed bent over voluminous files or half-hidden behind their computers.

  “Do you know what one of my recurring dreams is?”

  “…”

  “I dream that I come in here with a can of petrol and set fire to everything.”

  “…”

  They turned at the end of the corridor.

  “A bonfire of all the paper in here. A huge bonfire of proofs, manuscripts, contracts and bills. Seen from a satellite, it would look as if someone had lit a birthday candle over the city.”

  The Publisher could not suppress his excitement at the thought.

  “Come, we’ll be quieter in here.”

  They went through a door with a plate that led to a room decorated with paintings and rugs, at the end of which stood a massive desk cluttered with papers.

  “And you know why I don’t do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Set fire to the place.” The Publisher closed the door, walked to the desk and sank into the armchair.

  The Writer shook his head.

  “Because I don’t have the guts. I’d pay someone to do it for me… Would you like to do it? Do you feel up to it?”

  Even though the question w
as obviously a rhetorical one, The Writer wondered for a moment if he was expected to answer it.

  “What are you doing standing there? Sit down.”

  As he said this, he indicated an uncomfortable chair with a steel frame and a leather seat facing the desk. The Writer obeyed. Only then did he become aware of the silence in the room, an artificial silence, as if all the sounds had been sucked out of it for an experiment.

  “We’re behind.”

  “It’s so quiet.”

  “What?”

  “In here. It’s too quiet.”

  “Acoustic panels.”

  “What?”

  “Do you see that?”

  The Publisher pointed to a strange coloured board hanging on the wall, which The Writer had taken for a piece of abstract art.

  “It’s an acoustic panel. It absorbs all the sounds in the room.”

  “Get away!”

  “If you like it, I can get you one.”

  “When?”

  “Later. Now listen to me. Do you or don’t you realize that we’re behind?”

  “Oh.”

  “A hundred and thirty-five votes, we can’t seem to budge from that.”

  “Are you sure you’ve called everyone? Isn’t there anyone you’ve forgotten?”

  “The press officer is never off the phone, we’ve raked through our diaries, done recalls, those are the votes we have. It’s because, compared with last year, at least a dozen are gone.”