The Parrots (8 page)

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, everything 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.

The Master temporized.

“Take mine,” said The President, like a literary butler, passing him the microphone as if it were a torchbearer’s beacon.

The Master stood up somewhat clumsily from the armchair in which his buttocks had been grounded. In his crumpled jacket, his swollen feet moving unsteadily in his cork sandals (poets are allowed to dress badly), he walked towards his pulpit. The lights dimmed until all that remained on the stage was a Caravaggesque face, a head topped with unkempt white hair and suffused with light in the midst of darkness. Silence fell over the auditorium. The Master dug his glasses out of his pocket again. He cleaned them on his shirt tail, which was sticking out of his trousers, and put them on. He searched in his jacket pocket and took out his notebook.

He opened it.

He closed it.

He opened it again.

He closed it again.

The differences that exist between a conventional imitation moleskine notebook and a urination diary would not have escaped a trained eye, from the format—the notebook being smaller and more compact, the diary larger—to the cover—the former stiff
with elastic, the latter pliable. Not to mention the paper—slightly yellowish for the notebook, strictly white for the dairy—and the layout—simple horizontal lines for the notebook, a preprinted grid complete with headings (
volume of urine in the measuring cup, time, voluntary urination, involuntary episode, intensity and urgency of the stimulus, notes, etc.
) for the diary.

Even though the differences are so marked, it would be unfair to ignore the slight analogies presented by the two objects. Let’s see: both have dark covers and… well, that’s it really. There aren’t actually any others.

But to weak eyes looking for an object in a dark room, such fragile similarities can become fatal. Eyes deceived rather than supported by the other senses. Like a hasty touch, which trusts the first object within reach, even though positioned, it should be said, deceptively close to the second object.

That’s why it is hardly surprising if, leaving home in a mad rush, because of the delay, in the absence of electricity (the fuse box had blown again), in the dark and without glasses, with The Director of The Small Publishing Company continuing to sound his horn implacably to hurry him up, The Master had committed a fatal and perhaps even unforgivable error.

The Master now stood at the lectern in front of the packed auditorium with his urination diary in his hand. Time flowed like liquid, emptying the space of his consciousness and filling the space of the theatre, as he cleared his throat and read in a steady voice:

The Master stared with his little eyes into the auditorium: all he saw was a kind of human vineyard, rows and rows of heads turned towards him.

The theatre was silent for a moment, holding back from
delivering
its verdict. The first to break the stalemate was The President, who started clapping, in a somewhat lukewarm manner at first, but eventually triggering a thunderous round of applause from the audience.

“You’ve really surpassed yourself. In the concision of these lines, worthy of the greatest Hermetic poets, we see a painful attempt to convey the tragic nature of existence, in a classical form invigorated by postmodernism, which recovers and recycles heterogeneous material…”

The Master was a poet.

Everything looks better from above. Even Rome. The great roads choked with traffic, the sick old snake of the walls, the flying saucer of the Pantheon taking off over the oblivious ruins, the empty streets and the arenas orphaned of champions, the elusive aqueducts and decapitated columns, the arches
sinking
beneath the weight of their own beauty, the silent temples and dazzling squares and glittering fountains, the steps flooded with light, the motionless obelisks propping up the distracted skies, the palaces of the popes opposite the beehives of their servants, the martial towers and peaceful belfries, the remains reduced to cats’ cradles and the monuments to birds’ nests, the turgescent domes and hidden cloisters, the red tennis courts like chips on the green baize of the meadows on the Via Cassia, the unauthorized swimming pools in the villas on the Via Appia and the luxuriant palms in the gardens of the Quirinale, the abandoned parks and muddy ponds, the gilded bridges over the river that descends to the sea escorted by the traffic, which follows the current or rows against it, swimming as if with flippers towards the mountains that feed the Tiber, the jungles of aerials and satellite dishes on the sun-baked roofs, the pines and lime trees and bitter oleanders along the avenues, the geraniums on the balconies and the brazen jasmine and the discreet lemons on the terraces of apartment buildings. From above, ours is quite another story.

Y
OU KNOW THAT EXERCISE
they do in theatre workshops and in workplace groups to increase collective harmony and mutual trust among the members? Blindfolded or with our eyes closed, we let ourselves fall backwards, into the arms of the person behind us, who is waiting there ready to catch us.

The only person into whose arms The Writer would have let himself fall backwards, blindfolded or with his eyes closed, was The Publisher.

That was why, when The Publisher had invited him one bright Sunday to lunch in a restaurant not far from the Villa Borghese, even though it was a place they never went, The Writer had been trusting, and had let himself fall backwards into his arms. And when, after octopus in jelly with potatoes and a fillet of monkfish, a bottle of Sauvignon and another of Rhine Riesling, The Publisher had suggested they go for a walk in the zoo to clear their heads of the wine and pointless chatter, The Writer, even though he had found the suggestion unusual, had been as trusting as before. And again he had let himself fall backwards into The Publisher’s arms.

“Poor things,” The Writer said, stopping in front of the aviary where the birds of prey were kept. “Don’t you feel sorry for them?”

The big, dark birds looked like monks sleeping on the roofs of their hermitages.

“Not me,” The Publisher said. “They’re the stupidest and laziest animals in the entire zoo.”

The Writer was surprised by this statement and looked at the aviary with closer attention. A falcon (
Falco peregrinus
) was cleaning
its feathers with its beak, hiding its head beneath its wing. A condor (
Vultur gryphus
) with an obscene bare neck was scouring the ground in search of leftover food.

“Everyone feels sorry for them because they think they’re
intelligent
. But what they have in their eyes isn’t sadness or resignation. It’s emptiness. Absence of thought. People say ‘He’s as sharp as an eagle’ when they ought to say exactly the opposite.”

The Writer watched as a majestic eagle (
Aquila chrysaetos
), sitting dark and motionless on a branch, let out a powerful stream of excrement that fell to the ground like huge drops of rain after a tremendous drought.

“Everyone feels sorry for the birds. Nobody feels sorry for the foxes.”

“The foxes?”

“Did you know that foxes are tireless walkers? They can cover more than eighty kilometres a day, and they go crazy in that shitty enclosure that’s no more than half a hectare.”

The Writer didn’t know that.

“They grind their teeth, their eyes are bloodshot, they tear out their claws because they’re constantly trying to dig their way out under the fence, can you believe that? Come, I’ll show you the foxes.”

The Publisher took a threatening step towards The Writer, who raised his hand compliantly as if to say, “I believe you.”

“How many votes do we have?” he said, in order to change the subject and chase from his mind the image of those mangy crazed foxes, walking round in circles behind the barbed wire.

“A hundred and thirty for sure.”

“And how many do we need to win?”

“A hundred and fifty to be home and dry. But a hundred and forty, a hundred and forty-five might be enough.”

“Should we beware of The Master?”

“You mean the old man?”

The Writer nodded.

The Publisher shook his head. “The Master’s all washed up. He won’t even get to The Ceremony.”

“But he’s a finalist.”

“He’s sick. He has cancer.”

“Are you sure? How do you know?”

“I have my sources. I’m a friend of The Urologist who’s
treating
him.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?”

“No. It’s bad. If he gave an interview about his illness, or talked about it on TV, he could gain votes. But he’d never do it, he’s too proud.”

“I hadn’t thought of that.”

“I had. Thinking for my authors… of my authors,” he
corrected
himself, “is my job. Anyway his publisher’s a small one, he doesn’t scare me. They won’t be able to raise many votes, just a few old acquaintances who are so desperate they’d sell their souls for a reprint.”

The Writer laughed, though he wasn’t sure it had been a joke.

“And what about The Beginner?”

“He’s the horse to bet on.”

“But his book’s no great shakes, is it?”

“Have you read it?”

“No, but I’ve been told that—”

“Read it. Now there’s a book.”

“…”

“And how many votes do they have?”

“A hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty. More or less. Like us.”

“How come they’ve got so many?”

“It’s his first book. And when it’s your first book, they forgive you everything. Don’t you remember?”

“No.”

“And besides, he’s young. Do you remember the ‘brand new’ sticker we put on the cover of your book? He doesn’t need it: his face is the sticker.”

“But he’s a greenhorn, I read his interview, a naïve mishmash of clichés…”

“Listen, I’m going to be frank. We’ve known each other for thirty years. You know how much I respect you as a man, and how much I admire you as an artist. You also know that a powerful press office and the biggest publisher on the market aren’t enough by themselves. You also need the books, and yours—no offence intended—isn’t a good book.”

The Writer did not take offence, but those angry foxes
grinding
their teeth behind the barbed wire had appeared in his mind again.

“In fact, to be quite honest, your last three books were nothing to write home about.”

“…”

Rabid foxes were throwing themselves against the electrified fence of The Writer’s thoughts. The Publisher took him by the arm and started walking, pulling The Writer’s compliant body after him.

“Let’s say a trapeze artist in a circus gets one of his moves wrong on the first night of the show. Luckily, his partner has good reflexes and catches him. The number goes down well, the audience don’t notice a thing and happily applaud. Then, when the show is over, the two of them clear things up in the caravan, and that’s the end of it.”

The two men began circumnavigating the aviary.

“Now let’s say the trapeze artist makes the same mistake on the second night. This time his partner misses him… The
audience
hold their breath, then applaud in relief. There was a net underneath. When the show’s over the owner of the circus goes to the trapeze artist’s caravan. He comes out after a while…”

The Publisher stopped—they had now walked halfway round the aviary—then resumed walking, again slowly dragging The Writer with him.

“Now, let’s say the trapeze artist gets the same move wrong for a third night running. There’s complete silence under the big top. Everyone’s holding their breath, thinking—”

“As long as there’s a net,” said The Writer, interpreting the audience’s thoughts.

“There had been. The circus owner had had it taken away.”

“…”

“And you know why he had it taken away?”

“….”

“Because he loved the circus more than he loved the trapeze artist.”

The two men fell silent. They had done a complete circuit of the aviary and had come back to their starting point. Were there foxes in circuses? Trained foxes? Were there even such people as fox-trainers? The Writer wasn’t sure. It might be impossible to train them, but surely they could be tamed. Once, as a child, he had seen a fox come and eat at the back of a restaurant, taking the food from the hands of a kitchen porter who had managed to overcome its mistrust. Word had got around and people talked about the restaurant more because of that tame fox than because of the cooking, and over time the kitchen porter had ended up becoming more famous than the cook. The kitchen porter had continued putting aside leftovers, until one day he had waited a long time but the fox had not appeared, and was never to appear again.

The Publisher resumed his speech, shooing the foxes away from The Writer’s thoughts with a stick.

“On the fourth evening, the circus has a new trapeze artist. You have to win. That Prize is a multiplier.”

“What do you mean?”

“How many copies do you usually sell?”

The Writer said a number that wasn’t too far from the truth.

“Multiply it by ten.”

“Tell me what I have to do.”

“When the time is right, when the time is right… Look.” The Publisher pointed at a sleepy eagle which had broken the
enchantment
of the aviary by throwing itself on the condor: it was flapping its wings and jabbing with its beak, trying to tear a fragment of rotten flesh from the claws of that lugubrious road-sweeper.

“Don’t you feel sorry for them?”

“No.”

The Publisher and The Writer headed for the exit.

“And how are you getting on with the next one?” said The Publisher just before stepping into the chauffeur-driven saloon that was waiting for him outside the zoo gate.

“The next what?”

The Writer was distracted: he was thinking again about the birds of prey dozing slothfully on their perches.

“Come on, now, the next book, wake up!” said The Publisher, getting in the car and pulling the heavy door shut before hearing the usual disappointing reply:

“It’s coming along.”

A writer is strong only when he is writing. He is respected and feared as long as the others don’t know what he is writing. When the book comes out, in the light of day, he becomes vulnerable. A writer writing a novel is like a serial killer who’s keeping a victim locked in a cellar. Every evening, he slides under the cellar door a tray with a little water and stale bread, just enough to keep his victim alive, anticipating the moment when he descends the cellar stairs to have his fun with her…

But what happens if the victim manages to break free? To escape from her cell, run out in the street and scream HELP at
the top of her voice? Then the serial killer is in danger. But not because he’s afraid of being caught, that’s the least of it. Now that he’s lost his toy, the partner in his secret games, whom will he torture when he goes down to the cellar?

Himself, would seem to be the most reliable answer.

So was our Writer strong, sitting there in his study? And how did his victim in the cellar feel? Did she shake with fear every time she heard footsteps in the corridor?

No, sir. The victim in the cellar wasn’t trembling or laughing. There wasn’t actually anyone in The Writer’s cellar. Only dust and odds and ends accumulated during a lifetime.

The Writer wasn’t strong for a simple reason: he was not
writing
. But it wasn’t one of those terrible writer’s blocks that reduce writers to impotence, like those clients who weep and cry for their mothers in a prostitute’s lap—no, it was nothing like that at all. It wasn’t that our Writer wasn’t writing now, at this precise moment, or even during this period of time, or in the last few years. He really wasn’t writing. Or rather, let’s be quite open about this: he had never written.

Yes, all right, in his computer there were endless strings of 0s and 1s, which, joined together in bits, and subsequently in bytes, would form words, and these words in their turn, recombined in syntagma and paragraphs and chapters, would go to make up something that by pure convention human beings called “a novel”.

What the strings did not say, and would never say, was that The Writer was not the author of his last novel, the one with which he was competing for The Prize, nor of the others that he had published. Or to put it another way: his novels were not his.

Of course, for his readers, his publisher, his fans, and for the aspiring novelists who clogged his letter box with bundles of letters and carcasses of manuscripts, this might be one of those items of news that make your glasses drop to the floor and bookshelves collapse. But it’s important to quickly pick up the books and put
your glasses back on the tip of your nose before you hear “who wrote The Writer’s books”. Because if he didn’t write them, someone else did. And that’s the point we’ve reached.

But who could it be? Well, in such delicate matters, it’s important to put yourself in the hands of someone you trust. Someone you more than trust, someone who’s family.
MAXIMUM CAPACITY 8 PERSONS.
The words were on a metal plate on the wall of the lift in the clinic. So yes, The Writer could read. As for writing…

As soon as he had arrived in the city from the provinces, he really had tried.

Big novels, filled with love affairs, lonely desperate men throwing stones at the stars, missed dates, ashtrays overflowing with cigarette ends and women dragged by their hair, raincoated figures walking the night streets, cars speeding by beneath the streetlamps, the glances of strange women behind the windows of buses: that was how he imagined the stories he would one day write.

Corduroy jackets with patches at the elbows, long walks in autumnal parks, aged rum, cigars in a cork humidor, desks with leather tops and cherrywood bookshelves: that was how he imagined himself at the time when he’d be writing these stories.

Dipping his croissant into his cappuccino at dawn, after a night spent scouring the bars, studying the transsexuals and street-cleaners to gain an insight into the darkest, most brutish of minds. Opening his notebook at the outdoor tables of gilded cafés in the centre, lying on the grass in parks on bright summer afternoons with a cigarette between his lips and the clouds for a hat. Anxiously opening the letter box and taking out the post in the expectation of the Minoan verdicts of publishers, not yet disappointed by meeting the writers he admired, challenging the critics to duels and filling diary after diary. In short, a time when he still desired to write more ardently than to become a writer. But things had worked out differently.

His novels had been born as blind as kittens, his stories had kept slipping away from him, his sentences had jammed like rusty revolvers.

In short, he had tried to write. He had tried with all his might. But it hadn’t worked. Such things do happen.