The Parrots (6 page)

The Beginner was trying to remember something situated a little way back along the straight line of his life, something that had happened when the Italian Cultural Institute had invited him to London to present his book, which had recently, and perhaps undeservedly, been published in Great Britain.

Among the first memories he recovered was one of himself on the plane, sitting in economy class, watching the stewardess mime that idiotic procedure about emergency exits—as if at the crucial moment you were really in a fit state to keep a steady nerve and follow the instructions. But that wasn’t the memory he was trying
to focus on. At last the smoke of memory dissipated and he saw himself out in the street, a street in London.

It was when he was in that street, doing something he shouldn’t have been doing, that he had felt that unpleasant sensation for the first time, that sense that he was being followed, spied on, as if someone were scrutinizing him through a periscope sticking up from a manhole or in an enemy satellite in orbit above his head. It was the same damned sensation he had felt on the terrace before the aerial attack from the parrot.

How does it feel to be successful? Not an easy question. The Beginner signing copies couldn’t have said, and The Master cursing the defective boiler or waiting in the rain for the 246 bus that was late arriving might have been able to say how it felt
not
to be successful.

If you’re looking for the right man to answer your question, there he is, wrapped in his raincoat, which is swelling in the breeze like a fish’s gills in a current. Without giving any explanation, he has just left the car in the forecourt of the car hire company with the keys in the instrument panel, crossed the parking area with long strides, walked for a while by the side of the road and hailed a passing taxi with a confident, relaxed gesture, which only ever happens in American films. But not in Rome. Where taxis never stop. Never.

“There’s Rome for you,” the taxi driver had said, indicating a car that was trying to go the wrong way down a busy street in order to avoid the electronic traffic surveillance system that guards the historic centre. And he had said it only to draw the passenger into the spider’s web of a conversation riddled with deadly clichés. But The Writer had immediately understood what kind of taxi driver he was dealing with: the kind who transforms
a ride around the block into a political rally. That was why he had remained taciturn, resolute in his silence: he had sensed the trap and had no intention of falling into it. All the driver could do was weigh him up—anyone who doesn’t speak always instils fear—with suspicious glances in the rear-view mirror.

And it wasn’t clear from those glances whether or not the taxi driver had recognized The Writer. He might have, given that The Writer was one of the few writers whose countenance was well known even to those normally unversed in such
matters
, perhaps because he was constantly being talked about in the newspapers, or more likely because of that successful TV programme he had presented years earlier, when he was still surfing the foamy crest of his world-beating debut. The driver was still staring at him, unsure whether or not the buttocks of a famous person were resting on the back seat of his Zara 6. Once he had won The Prize, such confusion would be a thing of the past. Taxi drivers would open their doors to him with a smile and shake his hand before letting him out, honoured to have had him in their cabs.

But for the moment, it wasn’t so much a famous man as a pensive man who was framed in the narrow concave surface of the little mirror as he looked distractedly out of the window. He was looking at the traffic police taking away a car, Japanese girls laden with designer bags, barmen in black aprons coming out of bars, double-parked delivery vans, but only looking. What he was thinking about was what he had done to The Old Flame. He had not thrown her in the treacherous waters of the lake, or pushed her between the jaws of the propellers while the roofs and bell towers on the coast shrank as far as the eye could see. He had not kissed her, he had not raped her (there had been a moment in which he had thought about that), and he had not slapped her and left the mark of his five fingers on those innocent cheeks. He had done worse. To return for a moment to the fatal question,
if our hypothetical journalist trying to retrace their extramural excursion had ended his report by asking, “How does it feel to be successful?” The Writer would have been able to reply with an example. He would have paused for a long time, then explained solemnly that, for example, owning a private island might be something that would approximate fairly closely to the concept of being successful. Actually, he would gloss, owning a private island surrounded by sea means being successful, while owing a private island surrounded by a lake means being successful but not quite so much, a local, circumscribed success. Besides, not all Italian authors were as successful as he was in having their books available on the foreign market.

But to go back to the islands of the lake, we have said that one of the two was private, the other not. Which is why, the private one not being The Writer’s—successful as he was, he wasn’t quite that successful yet—it’s worth focusing on the other one and on what happened there.

On that island, there was a Renaissance villa that was open to visitors. Once they had landed, The Old Flame considered this a romantic and inevitable destination. The Writer had consented: even though he already knew things would end badly, he still wanted to know how.

“Come on, let’s go up!”

The Old Flame insisted on wanting to go up and visit the villa. So her childlike enthusiasm had not abandoned her, that generalized, irritating awe at things. She could go into ecstasies over a pebble in a river, a mediocre romantic comedy or a flock of sheep beyond the guard rail on the motorway. Her enthusiasm, in short, was always on the hunt for pretexts to manifest itself.

And The Writer hated that because, deep down, he rather envied her, being someone who never got enthusiastic about anything. He had tried, but he just couldn’t. And as if that wasn’t enough, apart from enthusiasm, he had also lost interest, wonder,
indignation. He wasn’t interested in the decay of political life, didn’t become embittered about the widespread corruption, wasn’t offended by the vulgarity of public taste or the
morbidity
of crime reporting, any more than he was offended by the duplicity of friends or the predictability of lovers. Not because there weren’t things around that were worthy of admiration or disgust. The things were all there, in their place. It was he who wasn’t in his. As time had passed, it was if he had become blind to the world. He was aware of noises, he sensed movements,
variations
of light and colour: something was definitely happening behind that plasterboard wall that separated him from reality. Saying what it was, though, was difficult, because whatever it was, it was something that didn’t concern him. The Writer was
inside
, immersed in a liquid, shadowy sleep, the kind in which he imagined people in comas floated, as if wrapped in an enormous placenta through which he was vaguely aware of the unknowable territory
outside
. And yet, at the end of that dark tunnel, there was something. A golden glare, a silvery shimmer, a burst of blue flame that illuminated the cave of his existence for a moment: winning The Prize. That victory was light for his dull eyes, oxygen for the blocked pores of his skin. He half closed his eyes and saw the plaque and the cheque being handed to him, heard the thunderous applause, the popping of corks, the clink of glasses, buried his nose in the inky pages of the reprint, carefully ran his finger along the sharp edge of the wrap-around band, looked at the newspaper headlines and shielded himself from the grapeshot of the photographers’ flashes…

But these glorious thoughts crumbled like snow in the palm of a hot hand, and his bad humour grew on the glacier of his consciousness like an avalanche, became heavy and massive and rolled downhill threateningly.

“Shall we go up?”

The Old Flame had stopped outside the entrance to the
Renaissance villa, which had once been used as a shooting lodge by an old local family.

So now you want to go up. Why didn’t you want to go up that day twenty-five years ago? Old as it was, that humiliation still stung, as if The Writer had rubbed his face with an excessively alcoholic aftershave.

“It’s best if you don’t go up.”

With these words, so many years earlier, The Old Flame had stopped him from going up to her apartment to meet her parents. The Writer had prepared well, had gone over in his mind the words he would say, had tried out the best smile in his arsenal and suppressed his own embarrassment: the woman meant too much to him, and so did this meeting. But just outside the front door she had suddenly changed her mind. He had insisted, but she had been so cold and resolute as to brook no argument. Putting off that encounter could mean only two things: either she didn’t think he was ready, or she didn’t consider theirs an important enough relationship to involve the families. But if that was how things were, why had she come to his parents’? To create a diabolical asymmetry, to gain a moral credit with which to keep him in check for ever?

The Writer had emerged devastated. In a few seconds, he had been crushed beneath the weight of imaginary, immovable guilt feelings, and a resurgent sense of inadequacy had taken possession of him. The Old Flame had noticed it, and in order to
compensate
him had taken him down to the cellar. She had taken him by the hand like an air hostess guiding a lost child in a terminal, and had led him down to a typical city cellar, a claustrophobic space lit by fluorescent lights, into which not even a serial killer would gladly descend. Once there, as if they were staging the reconstruction of a rape for a drama documentary, surrounded by the smell of deflated tyres, yellowed paper and kerosene, she had dropped her jeans down to her calves and had let him take
her standing up against the wall of the room. At the height of her orgasm, he had put a hand over her mouth to prevent the sound of her pleasure spreading through the unreal emptiness of that icy cellar.

Letting him have sex with her had been much less of a bother than taking him up to her apartment and introducing him to her parents.

It’s too late to go up, The Writer had thought. From now on, the only way is down.

From the moment they had met in a bar, and he had thought he had caught in her a naturalness that betrayed nervousness, to a few moments later, at the car hire company, when she had fiddled with her handbag, looking for her licence, feigning an abnormal nonchalance, because it was neither normal, nor appropriate, to be with him in a car hire office at that hour of the morning, especially after so many years of silence and mutual
incomprehension
, The Writer had realized that he had been wrong to accept her invitation. And he had also realized that his day—looking at it optimistically—or his life—looking at it pessimistically—would somehow be ruined. And it wasn’t just the excessive expenditure of ill humour that the extramural excursion with The Old Flame had already cost him, there was also the interest to be added: the unease that had been with him ever since he had closed his house door behind him, the unpleasant feeling that he had forgotten something, something important, not crucial, but important. And putting his hands in the pockets of his raincoat to pay the taxi driver and feeling how light and empty his pockets were, he at last realized what it was: his mobile.

“The President isn’t here…”

“He’s busy!”

The intern, urged on by a secretary with a hooked nose, had tried to repel The Master’s attack on the heart of The Academy: The President’s office. But with the determination and
consummate
cunning of a veteran, The Master had faked a retreat to his right, but then suddenly changed trajectory, charging straight down the centre of the room towards the door of The President’s office. By the time the intern and the secretary had thrown themselves at him and tried to tackle him, it was too late: The Master was already inside.

The President looked at him as you might look at a neighbour who comes down late at night in his pyjamas to complain about the racket you’re making in your apartment, where you’re having a party. Then he cast a glance pregnant with reproach at the secretary and the intern, and with a nod of his head indicated to them that they could leave him alone with the old goat: he had known him for ages, in one way or another, he would manage. The door closed behind them.

“What do you want? You shouldn’t be here!”

The Master dropped his threadbare shoulder bag on the chair.

“Did you meet anyone on your way here?”

The Master shook his battered head.

“You know competitors aren’t supposed to come to The Academy.”

The Master did not pay too much attention to what The President—an old comrade from avant-garde days evicted from the tables of taverns and welcomed as President in drawing rooms—was saying. He was too busy to search in his leather bag, so he simply tipped out the contents on The President’s desk. In order: a bunch of keys, a gas bill, a slip to pick up a jacket from the dry cleaner’s, the urination diary, a poetry booklet that had arrived by post, a bill from Glauco’s restaurant, a diary from the previous year, a not very original postcard with a view of Nice
and the words “Greetings from Nice” (without signature), and finally, what he was looking for.

“What’s that?”

The Master waved the accused object in front of The President’s nose. “Look.”

The President looked, but saw only a faded black-and-white image that could have been a frame taken from stock footage of the moon landings.

“What is it?”

“A scan.”

“Male or female?”

“It’s a tumour of the prostate.”

The Master violently tore the scan from his hand.

“I’m sorry.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“You really don’t understand, do you?”