“Come on now, write a nice letter…”
The Beginner wheeled round in fright and looked at the room. The objects lay motionless, the half-light making their outlines
vague and unreliable. But there was nobody else here. That was a pleonastic observation, of course: after all, who could there have been?
“…if you can,” the voice continued from its hidden pulpit.
The Beginner got to his feet and ran to the light switch.
Defiled by the artificial light, the furniture and objects had lost the threatening appearance they had harboured in the darkness and appeared now in all their disconcerting banality. Not that this was much comfort to The Beginner. On the contrary, to observe that everything was stupidly in its place merely increased his anxiety.
“You know why you can’t write?” said the voice.
All right, it had been a difficult day, a colleague had got him to autograph one of his books then stolen it, The Girlfriend had found out by surfing on the Internet that he had cheated on her, then he had discovered that she was pregnant, and finally she had thrown him out of the apartment. More than a difficult day it might be more correct to call it an unrepeatable day (let’s hope so for his sake). His nervous system had been put to the test, what’s more it was late, and he was tired and confused, but he hadn’t drunk anything, or taken drugs… he hadn’t eaten anything either, but could not eating cause such powerful hallucinations in a young male in otherwise perfect health?
“I’ll tell you why you can’t write,” said the voice. “Because you don’t know how to write.”
And this time The Beginner realized whose voice it was and where it came from, but the mere fact of having realized it did not make it any easier to accept.
The cage was empty and the door open. The perch was swaying.
The parrot was perched now on the back of a chair, staring at him with a defiant air.
The Beginner retreated in terror. The bird, on the other hand,
fluttered through the room and landed on the tap of the sink. It raised its head and swelled its breast. Then it spoke.
“You think you’re a writer?”
“You… you’re talking!”
“There are those who talk and those who write,” the bird said, sharpening its beak.
The Beginner pressed himself against the wall, aghast. It isn’t possible. I’m going mad. Or else I’m dreaming, yes, that must be it, I’m dreaming, he thought. A waking dream. I’ll go to the tap, pour a glass of water over my T-shirt and if this is a dream, when I wake up the T-shirt won’t be wet, right?
The Beginner went to the sink, opened the tap and let the water run a little. He filled a glass which was drying on the sink. He emptied it over himself and felt the T-shirt stick to his skin and the cold water spread over his belly. He wasn’t dreaming. Unfortunately.
“You wrote a book. It came out well. But that was a lucky chance.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
And here The Beginner made a fatal mistake: he replied.
Because if there’s one sure way to make a hallucination real, it’s to give it a consideration it doesn’t deserve.
“Anybody can write a book.”
“That’s not true.”
From the living area, The Beginner crossed the loft to the bedroom. The parrot flew past him and glided onto the head of the bed.
“You don’t even know how you managed to write the first book.”
“Of course I do!”
“Oh, come on! The first book is like a foundling wheel in the Middle Ages. Someone arrives, leaves a baby wrapped in a bundle outside a monastery, rings the bell and runs away.”
“It wasn’t like that at all! It was three years of hard work!”
“You just happen to be the monk who picked up the bundle.”
“That book is my child. I’m the father. And I’m proud of it.”
“I bet there are times you can’t even remember when and how you wrote it.”
The Beginner turned his back on the parrot and went to the other side of the room. Beating its wings sharply, the bird joined him and perched on the curtain rail.
“I also bet you sometimes wonder if you really wrote it yourself. Am I right or am I wrong?”
“…”
“I knew I was right. Let me give you some advice—”
“I don’t want your advice!”
The Beginner drew back the curtain and opened the window.
“Quit writing, you’re only wasting your time.”
“…”
“Do you ever ask yourself if you have talent?”
“Get out!” screamed The Beginner, showing the bird the
darkness
awaiting him outside the room.
“You’re right to ask yourself that. It means you don’t have any.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“Oh, please. I’m a parrot.”
“Leave me alone!” screamed The Beginner, abandoning the consideration he had so far shown that hallucination. “What have you got against me? What have I ever done to you?”
“I’m here to save you.”
“I can save myself.”
“By yourself you’re not going anywhere.”
“Well, I know where you’re going.”
“Do you want success? Do you want fame? Do you want The Prize? If you do as I say, if you follow my advice, there may be some hope…”
For a moment, The Beginner left the parrot in the living room and in a convulsive frenzy rushed to the bathroom and
pulled the door shut behind him, while the parrot continued speaking.
“For a start, you have to change publisher, because small publishers don’t have distribution. Tell me the truth: how often have you heard people say, ‘I looked for your book, but I couldn’t find it anywhere’?”
The Beginner emptied the canvas bag for dirty washing onto the floor. Pants, socks, vests and nightdresses spilt over the floor.
“Because if you want to compete for prizes (and maybe have a chance of winning) you need a big publisher, one with lots of votes in his pocket and a good press officer, and one who pays handsome advances, not that pittance they gave you. And sooner or later, we’ll also have to tackle the matter of your agent, because you really need to change, you know? We’ll go with the best, the one who managed to—”
But the parrot was unable to finish the sentence because just then The Beginner came out of the bathroom carrying the canvas bag, and in a fury threw himself on it and literally bagged it.
Shutting the top of the bag tightly, with the parrot writhing inside and screaming furiously, he dragged it to the bookcase. He took a heavy dictionary of synonyms and antonyms from one of the shelves and slipped it into the bag, then, still holding the bag shut with one hand, with the other he pulled down other books from the shelves. Books that had been given to him as presents but which he already had, masterpieces he had pretended for years that he had read, books that already struck him as too long by page 10, books he’d been ashamed not to have at home, books not to be missed and books that you “couldn’t not have read” all slipped one by one into the bag. The bird had stopped moving: even if it hadn’t been knocked unconscious by the hail of volumes and crushed by the weight of culture, it couldn’t have been feeling very well. The Beginner took a roll of packing tape, put it round the top of the bag countless times until the bag looked like one
gigantic candy. He dragged the bag onto the landing, pulled the door shut behind him and called the lift.
A faint gleam announced that dawn was on the way. The traffic was still human, but within an hour all hell would break loose. The Beginner parked the car at the side of the road, switched on all four indicator lights, opened the boot and filled his lungs with the unhealthy early morning air. With the bag on his back, and taking care not to fall, he descended the embankment amid reeds and ferns and nettles and brushwood, following a path marked by dirty handkerchiefs, beer bottles and condoms, and reached the banks of the Aniene. A sickening smell of stagnant water and sewage caught him by the throat. The water, of an indefinable dark colour, was moving so slowly that it seemed to be refusing to follow the current. On the opposite bank, metal sheets covered with a plastic tarpaulin revealed the squalor of a desperate human settlement. As the pale sun rose behind the concrete roofs of the apartment buildings, The Beginner contemplated the bleakness of this place with a fatal resignation.
Then, with both hands, he lifted the bag, whirled it round in the air and flung it a long way, as far as he could, into the middle of the river. And the Aniene, with a splash and a gush of bubbles, indifferently swallowed the umpteenth rotten morsel offered it as a gift by men.
Explanations are even worse than goodbyes. In the following few days, The Beginner didn’t write a letter, but there were difficult phone calls and delicate exchanges of e-mails. In the end he was granted an opportunity to explain. They arranged to meet in a well-known café in the centre. The Beginner had arrived early, nervous but guardedly optimistic, a newspaper under his arm. Amid the precise trajectories of the industrious pedestrians, aimed at their targets like missiles, and the lazy, nonchalant trajectories
of the tourists, he set an unhappy pace, without rhythm and without destination. To interrupt his anguished wandering, he had gone into a café just round the corner from the one where they had agreed to meet and ordered a coffee. With the next one, that would be three, not bad for someone already feeling
palpitations
. In the end, thinking that in order to kill time it might be less ridiculous to sit and wait than wander about pretending to have something to do, he had decided to take his place beneath the white umbrella of the café where The Girlfriend should be arriving at any moment. Half hidden by the planters, a
newspaper
of property ads unfolded on the table, he looked at the comings and goings in the light-drenched street. The disc of the sun rotating high in the sky made the shop windows gleam, and cast veils of shadow that slowly devoured the pink façades of the buildings. From a distance every girl—at least for a fraction of a second—looked to him like The Girlfriend (or should he call her The Ex-Girlfriend? Come on, cheer up: all was not lost yet) until a detail or an obvious incongruity—a showy hat she would never have worn, thick calves, a blonde streak, exaggeratedly high heels—told him that his senses were deceiving him.
The Beginner had already repulsed two assaults by the waiter, the first politely (“What can I get you?” “Thanks, I’m waiting for someone…”), the second with a touch of annoyance (“Can I get you anything?” “I told you I’m waiting for someone!”), and by the time the third came around he would certainly have capitulated had he not at last spotted a woman at the end of the street whose features were compatible with the one he was waiting for. As she approached, every detail stood up to examination, indeed grew stronger, forming a female figure which at that distance seemed as familiar to him as it was strange.
She was advancing with a martial stride, dressed in blue linen. The light make-up, the metaphysical pallor and hardened features suggested that whatever his arguments, The Beginner would have
to work hard not so much to impose them as to expose them. She flung her handbag on the table and sat down.
“You’re looking beautiful,” The Beginner said with a gentle smile, clinging to the comfort of habit. But The Girlfriend’s look was eloquent, like an air-conditioner pointed at a naked, sweaty man.
“Look, I haven’t forgiven you. I came to talk about the baby.”
“Hold on, wait a minute. Isn’t it possible the test—”
“False alarms are very rare.”
“Oh. So what do I do now? I mean, what do we do?”
The Beginner anxiously noted an imperceptible swelling beneath The Girlfriend’s dress. But it was only a fold.
“What I’m asking of you is a gesture.”
“Right, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I gave the parrot away.”
“Who cares about the parrot?”
“I’ve arranged to see an apartment. Aren’t you pleased? It’s quite close to here, we can go together if you like.”
The Beginner underlined his words by showing The Girlfriend a page full of ads, some of them circled with a marker. The Girlfriend ignored them.
“I want you to give up The Prize.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“You can’t ask me to do that, I’m already a finalist.”
“Either the baby or The Prize.”
“…”
“…”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said.”
“Blackmail?”
“An abortion.”
“You… you can’t do that.”
“Oh, yes, I can.”
“Try to be reasonable.”
“No, you try. You haven’t been reasonable since you published that fucking book.”
“That’s not true!”
“You’ve become cynical, selfish, vain.”
“Me?”
“You’d never have been capable of doing something like that before.”
Here, The Beginner was wise enough to keep silent, stifling his wounded pride, which would have liked to counter these insinuations.
“Fortunately you’re still nobody.”
“In what sense?”
“In the sense that you haven’t yet won anything, you haven’t been successful, you’re not famous. Even though you already behave as if you were.”
“You’re paranoid.”
“No, you’re the one who needs to regain a little humility. I don’t want to bring a child into this world with a father like the one I saw on Street View.”
“You should be put away. In a clinic.”
“That’s where I’m going. To get an abortion.”
“Are you joking?”
To make sure she wasn’t joking, he should have looked that proud, wounded girl straight in the eye. But that was something The Beginner hadn’t been able to do for some time now.
Let’s face it, having your books brought out by small publishers can have its advantages: it’s a bit like eating in a family restaurant. That was what The Master often said, more to convince himself
than to answer the doubts of those who asked him how come he had never changed publishers in his long career, and why he had entrusted his books to a publishing company so small it was little more than a print shop.
Let’s be clear about this. The Small Publishing Company that issued The Master’s books was a fully fledged publisher with a back catalogue that brought out at least ten to fifteen new titles a year, a director who dictated the editorial line with the same love and the same care with which a grandmother knitted bonnets for her grandchildren, a press officer who worked hard (The Director’s daughter), a meticulous proofreader (The Director’s wife), a dynamic, fully computerized copy-editor who laid out the texts and took care of the various series (The Director’s daughter again), a sensitive and perceptive editor (The Director again) and an innovative young graphic artist (an unpaid intern).