The Parrots (20 page)

“What are you talking about?”

“No, the event, I mean…”

“…”

“I hope it wasn’t the 16th at 15:00…”

In an instant, the error pierced The Master’s weary heart like a stiletto.

“I mean, my daughter left me a note and I couldn’t find it… But I could have sworn…”

The Director wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. The Master bowed his head, defeated. Then he looked up again, grabbed the microphone stem, bent it towards him and pressed the button.

“Summer is coming. If you’re looking for a book to read on the beach, you’ve found it. It’s waiting for you at the cash desk, in a limited edition at a discount price, copies signed by the author…”

The starlings at the Termini Station don’t read books and don’t compete for prizes.

They don’t care about the traffic, or about the people getting off the trains, eyes swollen with tiredness, and waiting for buses to take them back and forth from home to work and from work to home.

Once seasonal, they would come down from the vastness of the North at the beginning of autumn, meet up in the skies of Rome and then fly together towards the mild African winters. Now they winter in the city and never leave. And that’s understandable. The life of a commuter is no great shakes.

There are thousands of them. As they rise into the blue sky, they look like a blossoming rose made up of tiny lead pellets. They throw themselves on the fruit trees and plunder the vineyards. Then, having eaten their fill, they go back to sleep among the oaks and the palms, scattering tons of acrid guano on the benches at bus stops. The Piazza dei Cinquecento smells like one huge henhouse.

The lights from the streetlamps have altered the birds’ cycle of sleep and waking, and they chirrup all night long. They sound like babies crying, but what is it they want?

Ornithologists say they are stressed.

They are not the only ones
.

T
HE WRITER
had been unable to sleep a wink. Taking
advantage
of the short summer night, he had left the house as soon as a diffuse light had brightened the curtains at the window.

He had dressed in the first clothes he could find, then taken the lead and waved it in front of The Dog, which had looked at it without interest, still lazing in its basket. Sometimes he had the feeling the animal would have preferred to give up all bodily functions, to hold everything in until it burst, rather than go out for a short walk with him. With this thought in mind, The Writer had hung the lead back up on the coat stand and gone out alone to face the dawn.

The air was crisp, the city asleep. He had walked for a long time past the old Vatican walls that had led him finally to the Tiber.

Now, leaning with his elbows on the parapet, The Writer was watching the water of the river open upstream of the massive piles and close downstream, forming channels, like enormous wounds that healed instantaneously. Summer was just starting and the level of the river was beginning to fall, but the water was still heavy with the residue of the spring rains. The Tiber flowed placidly, drawing broken branches, plastic bags and scum along with it. And together with the bags it also drew The Writer’s thoughts. From the height of the bridge, in sight of the river’s eternal flow, his life seemed to him not so much finished as concluded, or rather, accomplished. Accomplished, not like something that has completed its task, but rather like something to which there is nothing to add.

The Writer was looking back at himself, searching for reasons for satisfaction, flashes of joy, detours along the relentless downhill route of his life.

He thought of all the things he had had, the things he had lost, the things he had been given, the things he had been denied—not that there were many of those—and the few he had denied to himself just for the hell of leaving aside something he could still wish for.

He had driven sports cars, he had lain on snow-white beaches and swum among swarms of tropical fish, he had skied on amazing slopes, he had mounted horses glossy with sweat and galloped away into the wind, he had surrounded himself with influential friends and sexy lovers, he had dined in the most exclusive restaurants and slept in the most luxurious hotels. And now, it was as if all that remained of the life he had lived were vague impressions, shadows behind a screen.

Everything seemed to have been carried away by the current of time. How did the champagne he had ordered by the case all the way from Rheims taste? Did the truffle he’d bought for an arm and a leg at the market in Alba really smell great? How many minutes of happiness had the architect given him, showing him the plans for the new house? Had he felt any emotion when he had taken his daughter in his arms for the first time?

The Writer felt a sudden warmth on his back. He turned and saw the sun high in the sky and people coming and going on the bridge. A pair of young foreign priests, with short hair and exposed necks, crossed the bridge with rapid strides, mixing with the tourists. How long had he been here, watching the water flow by?

“Excuse me, could you tell me what time it is?”

The passer-by replied without stopping. It was after midday. The Writer looked around him with the air of someone who has just woken from a dream.

A few paces from him, on the pavement, a Pakistani street vendor was selling his useless merchandise. At his feet, he had stick figures that danced when he clapped his hands and little electric cars that went round in a circle and got in between his legs like scared little mice.

In his hand he had a coloured pistol blowing soap bubbles that the wind immediately dispersed. Driven by a childish curiosity, The Writer approached.

“How much for that?” he asked, pointing at the plastic pistol.

“Ten euros.”

“Five. I’ll give you five.”

The Pakistani nodded, in no way troubled by that abrupt decrease. The Writer extracted a crumpled banknote from his pocket, took the pistol and gazed at it in his hands. He started walking across the bridge in the direction of home. But halfway across, he stopped and sat down on the ledge. With a solemn gesture, he aimed the pistol at his temple and put his finger on the trigger. Then he burst out laughing. Next he aimed his gun at the river and fired.

A swarm of iridescent bubbles flew up into the sky.

Never before had he felt so light and transparent.

The Writer had made his decision.

The Beginner had spent the night on the sofa of an old friend from his university days, but hadn’t been able to sleep a wink.

The squeaking of the springs, the heavy material of the
smoke-steeped
sofa, the damp that hung in the basement apartment his friend shared with a work colleague, the proximity of that apartment to some paleo-Christian catacombs, had given him a grim, restless night, one of those nights when all you can do is keep looking at the luminous hands of your watch and
hope it will soon be day. It was only when the longed-for dawn arrived that his eyelids had at last started to close, but he had made an effort and got up. Soon the two clerks would wake up to go and work in an office on the other side of the city: at the thought of having to fight for the little bathroom at the end of the corridor, and of seeing his friend sleepily spreading Nutella on bread beneath the green fluorescent light in the kitchen, with his bum crack visible under the Juventus T-shirt he had been sleeping in, The Beginner felt a kind of disdain. He wasn’t a university student any more, he’d had enough of shared bathrooms, hairs stuck on the soap bars, bills divided by calculator and stickers on the juices in the fridge according to whose mother had sent them.

He had already lived that life: but now… now he was a writer, damn it, one of the most promising around (there were even those who maintained he was potentially the greatest). All he had to do was demonstrate it. For a start, he stretched and got to his feet, splashed some water on his face from the kitchen sink, then looked around for a pen and paper, intending to leave a note for his friend. But just as he was thinking about what to write, he was struck by an awful sense of dejection. What was he doing in this place? Who was this friend of his? Why hadn’t they seen each other in all these years? The Beginner flopped back on the couch. He felt more alone than he had ever felt, like a writer without a single reader.

To hell with the note, to hell with his friend, and, yes, to hell with The Prize too. Without The Girlfriend The Beginner was lost. He too had made his decision.

The Master carefully reread the first line, mentally articulating every syllable. Then he continued.

The Master folded the sheet of paper carefully, slipped it in the envelope, and put it back in the inside pocket of his jacket. Then he closed the letter box, leaving two reminders from a debt
collection
company to germinate in the dark.

Feeling pleased, with the intention of subscribing to the latest offer in his head and the weight of his years on his back, he waved to the Nigerian prostitute who had taken up her usual position outside the gate and walked down the tree-lined drive that led to his house.

In The Writer’s house, everyone was asleep: The Second Wife, The Ukrainian Nanny, The Baby, The Filipino (yes, he was asleep, too)—everyone except The Writer.

Locked in his study, his features tense, his face illuminated by the bluish light from the computer screen, he was looking at the website of the biggest online bookseller and reading the comments on The Beginner’s novel. There were five in all.

Confidently excluding “Win4life” (he had written that one
himself
), and “Arturo”, which in all probability had been written by a friend of The Beginner’s or maybe his press officer, The Writer could consider himself well pleased with the public’s reception of The Beginner’s work. So they weren’t as naïve as publishers assumed!

The Writer passed on to the older of his two rivals. He typed the title of The Master’s book in the database. The result of the search brought a broad smile to The Writer’s face.
No matches
found
, said the screen.

Which was no great surprise, with the kind of distribution they had. Another point in his favour: if the book couldn’t be found, that meant it couldn’t be read either. And the jury would take that into account. The Writer yawned complacently.

Gratified by that double victory, The Writer could have calmly switched off the computer and gone to bed undefeated. Instead of which, he was summoned back by an obscure, morbid desire: to look up his own book.

The Writer typed his own name into the database, as if every letter were an organ of an imaginary double that was coming together, piece by piece, on that screen. When he had finished assembling the golem, he pressed
send
to give it the spark of life.

It emerged that the golem had written seven books, some of which sounded so strange and remote they might have been written by someone else (which of course they had been). The Writer clicked on the latest one.

There were ninety-two comments, two more than there had been the day before. The Writer chose the
newest first
option.

He took his eyes off the screen, hurriedly closed the browser window and from the scroll-down menu chose the
Shut down
system
option.

With excessive caution, the system asked him if he was really sure he wanted to shut it down. The Writer had never been so sure in his life. This world didn’t deserve him.

In the days that followed his decision, The Writer felt a noticeable change. And one of the first visible signs of this change was an erection in the shower. As unexpected as it was surprising, the erection manifested itself in a prodigious manner, like a quack doctor’s caravan arriving in a border town. So prodigious was it that The Writer immediately wanted to run and find someone with whom to share this little miracle, but in the end he decided it was best to keep it to himself, and he masturbated in the shower.

Apart from the intense—though very brief—orgasm, the
erection
had helped above all to reveal a hidden problem: the lack of any desire in his life recently.

Yes, there had been a time when sex had been for him, like art, a noble and important branch of human knowledge. A way to achieve wisdom, a long, effortful road to awareness along which he had stopped only to catch his breath between one fuck and the
next, exploiting every opportunity to penetrate different women in different ways.

Every time he set his sights on a woman, he had seen in her the repository of a body of knowledge unknown to him, a priestess guarding an inviolable temple that he had to take by storm at any cost. The ravines and dark caverns of women’s bodies, it had seemed to him, concealed initiatory secrets and supreme truths that would finally fling wide open the gates of knowledge. That was why he had tried to penetrate as deep into them as he could, to forage in those viscera in search of priceless treasures. In his impossible journey towards that unreachable goal, he had hoped that every fuck would be the ultimate one, the supreme revelatory one, the magic formula that would put an end to his painful apprenticeship and make him a real wizard.