The Parrots by Filippo Bologna Read Free Book Online

because of The Prize and the official duties it involved, he had had to put up with an exhausting number of events and presentations which, when they were over and everyone could relax, always ended in cocktails. Almost a month had passed like that, a whole month during which The Beginner had eaten out almost every night, a month during which he had never gone down to the supermarket to do his shopping. He would return home with aching feet, his head heavy with chatter and wine, ears humming with the rumble of stupid questions and the clinking of glasses and plates. He would take off his shoes, unbutton his shirt and instinctively go to the fridge, open the door in search of a drink to cure (or feed) his headache and contemplate that illuminated space: half a lemon floating in a sidereal void, as if part of a conceptual art installation. Before closing the door, attracted by that moist emptiness, he would stand there for seconds on end listening tothe hypnotic hum of the refrigerant in the coils of the machine. This—he was almost convinced—must be the closest thing to the noise of an intelligence at work. If there had ever been such a thing as the sound of writing, an inner, metaphysical sound, it absolutely had to be just like the sound of his refrigerator, so different from the vulgar pounding of a keyboard.
    For reasons that could not easily be verbalized, he felt that his fridge had strong analogies with a cool kind of writing currently fashionable, especially among young authors. When he was a bit clearer about the concept, he would write a nice essay about it and send it to one of those literary blogs where all the losers who can’t get their books onto bookshelves badmouth each other and which are the equivalent of a soya beefsteak for a carnivore forced to subsist on a vegetarian diet.
    It was especially in the mirrors of fitting rooms, the photographs on documents, and in shop windows that he saw how old he had grown. There were even a few white hairs in his beard, although at the moment they were confined to the chin and sideburns.
    And yet The Beginner, in spite of that swollen belly, and those timid white hairs in his beard, in spite of the fact that even The Girlfriend had reprimanded him in a recent quarrel (“You’ve changed”), didn’t feel as if he had changed. Since the publication of his book, something had certainly happened to him, and not just to his physical appearance. But he wouldn’t call it a change—no, more like an evolution. That was it, he felt a better man, a reptile about to slough off its skin: soon he would be free of his old skin and its hindrance, and would be equipped with a bright, shiny shell of certainties, harder and tougher new scales that would protect him from even the most fearsome predators.
    The Beginner came out of the bathroom in his dressing gown and looked at the parrot in his cage in the middle of the room.
    On the way back home, having overcome his fright at that unexpected resurrection, The Beginner had seriously consideredthe idea—an idea he had not yet entirely ruled out—of throwing the box in a dustbin.
    But something had held him back from doing so, and it wasn’t so much public-spiritedness or sensitivity about recycling as a kind of respect for the dead, or rather, a solidarity with the risen: it must be extremely tedious to go back to hell. So he had decided to stop at a pet shop he knew from having once looked for new toys for The Girlfriend’s cat there, before the moggy had found an effective antidote to boredom beneath the tyres of a speeding vehicle.
    An assistant had hastened to satisfy the customer and his extravagant requests.
    “What’s your parrot like?”
    “It isn’t mine.”
    “All right but… I mean, what kind of parrot is it? Big, small…”
    “Big.”
    “Is it a cockatoo? An Amazon? A grey? A macaw? A parakeet?”
    “Maybe.”
    “Maybe what? Which of those?”
    “I don’t know. All of them. Give me the most expensive