The Parrots (4 page)

“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 process 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 was 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.

Anyway, alibi apart, there would never be a better moment. Courage certainly wasn’t lacking, quite the contrary. What had diminished in all this time, thought The Writer, wasn’t his
courage
, but the motive: so weak now, he couldn’t even remember it.

That day The Old Flame had entered the little rented room where he lived, where they made love and studied for their exams and dreamt of growing old together, and, instead of undressing in the most natural way and getting under the blankets, had informed him with disarming candour of her sudden pitiless intention to dump him, The Writer had immediately thought of killing her.

Strangling her, then and there. Throwing himself on her and choking her with his bare hands, pressing his mouth to hers, his lips on hers, squeezing her throat until those big eyes rolled backwards in their sockets like a tortoise on its back. Obviously he hadn’t done it. He had merely begged to see her again, lain in wait for her, rung her bell at night and talked to her through the entryphone. But the thought of killing her, as a final
clarification
, a miracle cure for that incurable pain, had never completely abandoned him.

The only thing that had lightened the nights of sobbing on those pillows still imbued with the smell of her hair, beneath the same sheets that had wrapped her scented body, was to think about the various ways in which he could kill her. Because he could not accept the idea that others apart from him could enjoy her—he was aware that it was a childish thought, and for that very reason an innocent one—which had initiated him into a kind of dionysiac priesthood of bodies.

Among the various ways in which he had imagined her dead after she had so inexplicably abandoned him, some images had imposed themselves more strongly than others.

In the dead of night, The Writer, eyes wide open, flew up through the worm-eaten beams of his room, took the roof off her building and flew into her bedroom, where he found The Old
Flame’s corpse waiting: someone had already done his dirty work for him. Then he imagined wrapping her naked and still-warm body in a soft Persian rug he saw displayed every day in a shop window on the way from his house to the faculty. As if obeying an ancient ritual, he would wash her in a tub of hot water with a bar of herbal soap, the expensive kind she liked so much, which smelt of sandalwood, musk or cypress, then he would dry her, brush her hair, put a flower behind her ear and give her a last kiss on her cold lips, before wrapping her in a shroud. Only then, like an unscrupulous antiquarian or a seasoned grave-robber on a rainy winter night, would he would load her in the boot of his car and, driving carefully and smoothly, take her to paradise, because that was where she deserved to be, seeing that she had died so young and beautiful.

At other times, he had only managed to get to sleep at dawn, exhausted, cradled by another terrible image: The Old Flame’s saponified corpse floating just under the surface of the water, her hair spread like golden seaweed, the Botticellian features of the face, her mouth open in a smile of benediction—deep down, she forgave him—and her eyes, those wonderful eyes staring up at the sky, as if waiting to commence her ascension into heaven.

But now that The Old Flame had come back to him, having passed through all those years and all those feelings unscathed, wrapped in a beauty too tragic to still be convincing, now that she was squeezing his arm in a nervous grip in the stern of this flat-bottomed boat and tilting her head as a sign of forgiveness, now that he had the strength and clear-headedness to bring that long-imagined plan to fruition, The Writer became aware of something really tragic: he no longer felt anything for The Old Flame.