The Parrots by Filippo Bologna Read Free Book Online Page B

never to ask a writer. Even though the question may seem relevant, his activity is private and not public. Which is why the answer will inevitably have to be evasive, like theanswer to such indiscreet questions as: Do you pay your taxes? Or: Are you faithful? Besides, the question is partly tautological and partly voyeuristic, analogous in a way to asking an adolescent if he masturbates. If on the one hand it’s quite likely that he does, on the other it’s difficult to obtain an explicit confession, and even if you were able to obtain it, would it be sincere? You would have to know if he does it frequently, how satisfied he feels, or how guilty.
    “Are you writing?”
    This question, uttered for the second time without receiving an answer, had come from the attentive and delightfully flighty young woman who was handling publicity for The Beginner’s book. The Beginner replied with a vague tilt of the head and puffed again at his cigarette while waiting for the event to begin.
    It is generally believed that nicotine helps concentration and relaxes nerves and muscles. That is why restless young men smoke as they wait to become men while their wives are in the delivery room, why tormented students flush away their cigarette butts in the university toilets before they sit down in front of the examining board, why unhappy women smoke after making love with married men. So was it for one of these reasons that The Beginner was smoking before going up on stage? No. It was for another reason. He was smoking to think, or rather, to remember. Apparently nicotine helps the memory. Apparently.
    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 tryingto 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