The Parrots (9 page)

Talent isn’t a gift, it’s the conviction that you are better than the others. That was what he’d thought, what he’d kept telling himself as he looked at himself in the mirror when he was young, but he’d had to think again. It really was a gift. One that he—who had wanted it so much—hadn’t been given.

Even so, he was still convinced that he was better than the others, which was why he had a first great problem: he didn’t know what he was better at. He had to discover it. And that was a second, very big problem.

Of course he was good at typing. Nobody could beat him at that. Which was why, if anybody had said that The Writer “wrote very well”, in the broadest sense of the phrase they wouldn’t have been too far from the truth. The Writer had the dexterity of a professional typist and tapped at his “qwerty” like a consummate lounge bar pianist.

But what was the use of this skill? If he couldn’t write, what the hell was he typing all day long on the keyboard of his PC?

It could be said that The Writer was copying out manuscripts onto the computer. He would add a few commas, correct little typos, start a new paragraph, nothing more.

Because, even if he had wanted to, he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—really add anything to, or subtract anything from, what was already there, which had been given to him in an almost definitive form.

This was more or less the position of The Writer with regard to writing, and life. His, and other people’s.

A good day can start with the transfer of an advance from a publisher, news of a reissue, an invitation to an important
conference abroad, the reading of an interview with himself in a high-circulation magazine, a telephone number on the back of a photograph of a woman left on his car windscreen. In other words, it can start in many ways.

A bad day, on the other hand, begins like this.

The Writer walked down the long corridors of the clinic, which smelt of mashed potatoes and disinfectant, led by a middle-aged nun who could have turned out to be a man beneath her surplice without anyone being shocked. Passing the single rooms on either side of the corridor, The Writer glimpsed the pyjamas of the sick under the wool-mix blankets that gave off sparks at night.

Through the windows that looked out on the world of the living, the morning light poured cruelly into the rooms of the sick along with the sadistic scent of the flowering wisteria.

In the corridor, hordes of assistants skated on wooden  overshoes, trudging after consultants who advanced through the wards driven by their own prestige, white coats unbuttoned and gold chains on their tanned chests, exchanging opinions on boats and publications, diagnoses and restaurants, their breath thick with coffee and cigarettes.

“Please, this way…”

The long corridor had come to an end and the nun gestured to The Writer to go in through the last door on the right. The door opened, and a man appeared in the doorway, an elegantly dressed man in a light-coloured suit and a blue tie, a man The Writer knew well.

The Publisher nodded in greeting, to which The Writer responded without enthusiasm, in fact with a certain displeasure. The nun, reassured by the unmistakable familiarity demonstrated by the two men, persuaded herself to leave them alone.

“What are you doing here?”

“It seemed the least I—”

“Thanks, but you shouldn’t have.”

“I brought some flowers. Orange carnations. The colour of determination. She’ll need it.”

The Publisher tilted his head back slightly, indicating the interior of the room.

“And so will we.”

“Why?”

“The Prize. It’s not going well. Drop by the office tomorrow.”

“Leave me alone with her.”

“Remember to change the water for the flowers. Carnations need lots of water.”

The Publisher gently closed the door behind him and set off along the corridor.

Idiot, thought The Writer. All flowers need water. He walked into the room.

The Writer has done everything to keep bad things out of his life. Suffering is a leper who walks with bells on his feet, and The Writer can recognize that sinister ringing from a distance of kilometres. And when he hears it, he barricades himself in his house, or walks faster.

Now he lives in the city with his beautiful young wife and his daughter, in a residential complex with alarms and private surveillance, and nobody will ever be able to undermine his—sorry, their—happiness.

When The Baby starts to crawl, exploring every corner of the house, sticking her little fingers in every hole she can, The Writer will carpet the house with socket protectors; when she makes her first unsteady steps he will cover the sharp corners of the furniture with foam rubber; and when, at the glorious climax of her oral phase, she puts every object she finds in her mouth, he will get rid of anything that might be indigestible and potentially dangerous, and will lock all the drawers, because that’s what you do.

And not so much for The Baby—that’s what you tell other people—as for himself, for The Second Wife, for The Filipino,
for The Ukrainian Nanny, for The Human Race. Nobody should ever again hurt himself, nobody should ever again suffer, at least in his house. Let them go somewhere else to suffer.

The Writer can’t stand suffering. Especially other people’s, that’s why he insists on eating with the television off. The news must be blacked out, television must regress to being little more than a screen on which to show cartoons for The Baby, pay-TV films for daddy and mummy, or at a pinch that quiz the porter was watching, which wasn’t bad, come on.

And even outside the house things aren’t much better. When he bought the house he made sure that the neighbourhood attracted the right sort, that only respectable people lived in the area. And that’s how it was, until a few days ago—the episode disturbed him so much that he hasn’t told anyone about it yet—a few metres from the automatic gate—thinking about it again, it’s inconceivable—just in front of the recycling bins, he saw a man, an old man with stooped back, searching angrily in the rubbish. It had never happened since he had come to live in this neighbourhood. If something like that ever happens again, The Writer will sell the house. Forget about compassion.

Life is too short to be devoted to suffering, people who suffer
want to suffer
, suffering is an invention of man: above the clouds the sun is always shining.

That’s what The Writer thinks. That’s why he has learnt to turn the pillow on the side that’s less creased, to winter
somewhere
warm and spend the summers somewhere cool, to leave for his holidays when everybody is coming back from theirs, to spend the weekends in the city and the weekdays outside—in other words, for him the glass is never half full, but always full, full to the brim.

The day of his divorce? A liberation. His father’s death? The deposition of a weary king. The end of a friendship?
Social cleansing. Everything that happens can become an opportunity.

In all these years, The Writer has been the personal gardener of his own success. He has carefully mown, watered and fenced off the evergreen lawn of his well-being. And now? Now he won’t allow anyone to get close, and fires off a volley if he so much as sees anyone lurking around the fence of his life. The obvious threat comes from outside, because inside his garden there is nothing and nobody that can harm him, he can run free without fear of tripping up: there are no obstacles or rusty tools in his garden. No offence can come from The Baby or The Second Wife—they are pure, innocent creatures who are unacquainted with evil, and wouldn’t even know how to do anything wrong. He does.

That is why now, faced with his intubated Mother, her artificial breathing, the skein of grey hair on her pillow, her nightdress with its faded colours, he can’t really forgive the salty tear that streaks his face like sea spray.

And what about this unheard-of second tear following the first? Why? Why? Why? Something has gone wrong, this wasn’t the agreement, this wasn’t planned.

“Mother…” whispers The Writer in a thin voice. “Don’t leave me… What will I do without you?”

He squeezes The Mother’s little hand, the hand of an old child, and holds it in his own, strong, masculine hand.

“I know you can hear me…”

The room is silent apart from the regular breathing of the mechanical ventilator, the working machinery, the monitors. The cold eyes of the LED lights watch discreetly over the patient.

“You can hear me, can’t you? I know you’re there…”

An imperceptible variation in the heartbeat.

“Don’t let go, mother, don’t let go, not now. There’s not long to go, we’re almost there, we’re going to win this time, it’s for
sure, The Prize is ours, it’s ours and nobody can take it away from us. Hold on mother, hold on. Think of the advance we’ll get next time…”

“Life is merely passing time and the desire to be loved. Nothing else.”

Life, life, life… How unbearable they were, these writers always talking about life. What do they even know of life? Have they ever lived? Poets, yes, they know about it. Other writers only imagine it. Scoundrels who climb naked onto a ledge and threaten to throw themselves off if nobody will listen to them, that’s what writers are. If it wasn’t for poets, who question every certainty in order to climb higher, and who extend to them the support of poetry in order to get them down like firemen with a scared cat… Life, yes, but other people’s, thought The Master.

If at least they had a bit of modesty, they’d only need a little possessive adjective, a hygienic grammatical precaution:
My
life has been, etc., etc., there’s yours, speak for yourselves. What do you know about my life?
The desire to be loved
? I never loved my wife. Nor did I ever want her to love me. At most, I desired her and that was it, but that was a long, long time ago. And she never wanted to be loved by me—by someone else perhaps, certainly not by me. She married me only to be able to despise me, to have someone to insult, to hear how her own voice sounded against a man who had run out of arguments, ultrasonic waves hitting an obstacle and turning back: the same physical principle that is the basis of radar is also the foundation of marriage. But I don’t feel sorry for her, let the old girl rest in peace, or rather, let her rest, full stop, clad in the fur coat of hate that she took with her into the grave. She wasn’t a wife, she was a factory of negatives. As for
time passing
, that was more nonsense. Time never passes,
if it ever did. Time is always in the past, in the present there is only space, looking at the objects that surround us, filling our lungs with air, listening to the sounds of our environment. And the future is anxiety, insomnia and fear of dying. But before I die, I’ll have what I’m due.

The Master angrily closed The Writer’s book and placed it with a little bang on the counter of the library.

“I’ll take this, too,” he said to the bespectacled library assistant.

We should know our enemy before the battle.

From an experiment conducted by the Max Planck Institute, it appears that dogs are capable of understanding and recognizing at least 200 words. Some breeds, like border collies, even 1,000.

For now, The Beginner’s parrot couldn’t understand a single one. All it seemed to be doing was looking across the room with its icy eyes towards the window and the faded blue of the sky. It was as if it were suffused with an impenetrable magnetic field.

A gangster who’d turned State’s evidence and was appearing in court behind bullet-proof glass: that was what the parrot looked like.

But with time it would speak, oh, yes, it would speak. The Beginner, who was getting his bag ready for his game of five-a-side and couldn’t find his boots, was sure of that at least.

Even though the
Manual on the Raising and Care of Parrots
which he had bought along with the cage suggested, on page 78, “do not leave parrots alone for too long in order to avoid the onset of psychotic behaviour of a self-harming nature (it is typical of parrots to pluck their own feathers)” and, on page 79, urged the reader to “spend more time with the bird, talking to it a lot and letting it explore your home”, it was also true that on page 80, almost at the bottom, it said that “if you really have
no choice but to leave it alone, it is best to leave a radio or tape recorder on”.

That was why The Beginner, who in the meantime had found a single boot and, given how late it was, had contented himself with that, took from the bathroom the portable radio that
enlivened
his showers, tuned in to a private station where they talked twenty-four hours a day (even when the championship was over) about the most popular football team in the capital:
“…Right now there are people who don’t want the best for the team, but are only thinking of their own interests. And I don’t only blame the players, because although they’re professionals, let’s not forget that they’re just kids… If a strong hand is missing at management level…”
, positioned it close to the cage, put his bag over his shoulder, looked fleetingly at the parrot, which was still as imperturbably silent as ever, pulled the door behind him, and set off for the five-a-side football pitch in the Viale Tor di Quinto. Where, out of the other nine players minus one, someone must surely have an extra boot to lend him.

Today must be the first or third Friday of the month because, as agreed with The First Wife, it is up to The Writer to go and pick up the children. That’s why The Writer’s SUV is parked just outside the Irish school from which in a few minutes The Boy and The Girl will come out, the miraculous duo resulting from the encounter of his chromosomes with those of The First Wife. Two finely crafted little jewels the court preferred to entrust to their mother, a decision that even The Writer found fair and reasonable. Seeing them less means enjoying them more, it means making do with being a distributor of Gormiti cards and figures and putting on those ridiculous 3D glasses in the promiscuous darkness of a multiplex cinema from time to time. But, above all, it means having peace and quiet and enough
time at his disposal to read and write. Or rather, to copy his mother’s novels in peace.