The Parrots (10 page)

Of course, the arrival of The Baby was completely unexpected, and at first seemed a threat to a family order he had rebuilt with no little effort after the turbulent years of the divorce. Because although it may be true that opposites attract, it is no less certain that if they are too opposite they part. Take The Writer and The First Wife. Impossible to imagine any two people more different. And to think that once upon a time they had called each other darling.

Be that as it may, the siblings have emerged from the storms of that marriage without any obvious trauma—although it may be too early to say: in order to proclaim victory it is necessary to wait for the cyclone of adolescence. In their relationship with their father, they limit themselves to a few sudden whims of little importance, nothing that can’t be solved with a new accessory for the Nintendo Wii (the canyon wheel, for example) or a Winx colouring book. Speaking of which, it is worth noting that The Boy is more demanding and costs more, whereas The Girl is more affectionate and costs less. In future, The Writer is convinced, the proportions are likely to be reversed.

For the moment they have demonstrated incredible maturity. Both The Boy and The Girl greeted with indifference and fatalism (or maybe they just couldn’t care less?) the arrival of that little creature with its vague smell of dairy products and its bald head covered with silky down: The Baby.

In a few moments, they will come out of school in their nice uniforms, cross the garden beneath the attentive gaze of the Irish nuns, and with their colourful school bags, bigger than their backs, run lightly across that no man’s land between the exit from school and the return to the family, a no man’s land where children enjoy extraterritorial immunity and indulge in little impertinences, fierce discriminatory jokes and aggressive
games, before they recognize among the cars parked in the first and second row those of their mummies and daddies, or whoever is driving them, and resign themselves to the authority of adults.

Zzz zzz zzz zzzz… The Writer’s mobile was vibrating. The number of an intern from the publishing company appeared on the display.

“Hello, I’ll pass you to…”

“Hello,” he replied.

“Hello.”

Through the invisible Bluetooth connection, a sombre voice echoed in the car’s loudspeakers.

“We’re in a meeting. We’re checking the votes.”

“Oh… And how are they going?”

“Badly. You have to come.”

“When?”

“Right now.”

“But… but… I can’t right now.”

“Why? Where are you?”

“I’m with the kids.”

“Say hello to them for me. And say goodbye to The Prize.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Are you coming or not?”

“…”

“…”

“I’ll be right there.”

The Writer started the car. The engine fired up just as a distant bell announced the end of lessons. The SUV made its way nimbly between the parked cars and turned onto the main road, which was jammed with light and smog.

In a moment, The Writer will look in the rear-view mirror and think that he’s a terrible father, in a moment the children will come out and look apprehensively for their daddy’s car, and won’t find
it. And then they will feel the atavistic fear of abandonment, and this fear will mature in their undeveloped minds until it becomes a trauma, and one day, with sweaty hands, they will recall that moment of terror on a psychiatrist’s couch. And their account will become disjointed, and their eyes will fill with tears, because that fear controls almost all our actions and thoughts. In the name of that fear, human beings perform senseless acts, rise through the ranks until they reach the top, become rock stars, compete for literary prizes. Fear of being abandoned, that’s precisely what it is.

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 thirty-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?”