And its office was The Director’s apartment. A small apartment in a somewhat dilapidated but lively multi-ethnic building in the Esquilino, populated by Sinhalese and Africans who had never complained about the presence of that unobtrusive publishing company on the first floor, so unobtrusive that it held down its expenses by “borrowing” the wi-fi from a Chinese hairdresser on the ground floor.
In other words, a small, family-run publishing company (hence The Master’s comparison with a restaurant), a closely knit team that would sooner or later take him to the top, to the victorious heights of literature, validating the nimble revenge of the glider over the mammoth power of the fighter-bomber.
But who are you trying to kid, Master? You’re perfectly well aware of the real truth. Come on, be brave, tell us how you felt every time you looked with indignant embarrassment for one of your books in a bookshop and they didn’t have it, how your hands sweated as you went through the newspaper from first page to last looking for the review you had been promised and which wasn’t
there, make an effort to remember the taste of the canned meat you were eating as you watched your young colleagues smiling at the flirtatious questions of female TV presenters.
A prisoner: that was how he had really felt all these years. But in that case, why hadn’t he dumped The Director of The Small Publishing Company? Why hadn’t he abandoned him like a dog on a motorway, as everyone does as soon as they realize how things work here? Hard to say.
Maybe because being faithful to his own publisher was the only vice an unfaithful man could allow himself. In his long, foolish life, The Master had betrayed everything and everyone, his friends, his wife… oh yes, even poetry—let’s drop this farce about loyalty to ideals—but the only person he hadn’t betrayed was The Director of The Small Publishing Company. A simple, energetic man who wore sleeveless synthetic shirts and had a thick, grizzled beard which had once been dark—rather like his past, as it happens. He had long been active on the extra-parliamentary Left, until one day he had set up as a semi-clandestine publisher, starting by printing political texts of a Marxist-Leninist orientation, and emerging little by little from the shadows, only to plunge straight back into them by specializing in the publication of poetry.
Sometimes accompanied by his wife, but usually alone, The Director of The Small Publishing Company drove around in his noisy diesel van, with a mattress and the entire stock of titles in the back (this was his solution to the problem of distribution). He was like a carnival barker or street vendor, criss-crossing the country and clocking up thousands of kilometres every year to attend every Party festival, fair, exhibition and book-related event, finding any mangy patch of grass he could as long as it gave him a few square metres free to pitch his rickety stand. He would spend summer evenings drinking warm beer and eating salty rolls with roast pork and chips in plastic bowls without moving away from the stand, then sit down on a folding stool like a Sunday angler
and read books that confirmed what he had always known about men and their destiny.
The Director and The Master, two foreign bodies that society had never been able to assimilate—or even to expel—the former as sturdy and well-built as the latter was thin and unsteady, a couple about whom, if you saw them a hundred metres away, you would wonder, Where are those two going? And at fifty metres, Where do they think they’re going? And yet they keep going, The Master and The Director keep going. But to do what? To capture The Prize? Do they really have any hope of winning? One thing at a time. In the meantime they’re going.
They’ve just left the van in the semi-deserted car park of the Parco della Musica auditorium, which from a distance appears to The Master like a huge mussel with valves made of silicon.
Unobserved by the world, sharing the weight of a large box filled with books, they cross the sun-drenched square, and their linked shadows are forced to follow them.
It was two in the afternoon, and there was almost nobody about. Which was understandable, given that the auditorium only comes to life in the evening.
Despite the modicum of visibility that The Prize had conferred on the book, it was no easy matter for The Master and The Director to get hold of this space for the presentation. The only time the owners said they were available was early afternoon on a weekday. An unusual time, nothing to boast about, agreed, but what can you do?
Nothing. You can’t do anything. You can only enter the
bookshop
and hope there’ll be someone there.
And that was what The Master had done. He had gone in through the automatic door, nervously, afraid it might close on him at any moment. This was a recent fear of his: that of being invisible, bodiless.
He had felt it for the first time one winter’s evening, when the automatic door of a supermarket on the outskirts of the city had refused to open. The Master had been overwhelmed by an unknown sensation. He had stood there as if paralysed outside the clamped jaws of the door. The little red light of the sensor stared at him with scorn. The Master had started shaking and through the big windows had looked imploringly into the supermarket. Beneath the fluorescent lights, the colourful merchandise glittered on the shelves, weary women bent down to grab products and impatient men trudged along pushing trolleys. Immersed as he was in the semi-darkness of the pavement, although lit by the reflected light from inside, nobody had noticed him. And yet, as never before in his life, The Master had felt an all-consuming desire to belong to something, to be part of something, to be there, in the midst of those commonplace people performing the even more commonplace act of doing the shopping. He had inflicted a secluded life on himself, had always derived pride from being an exile and comfort from his isolation, had found strength in solitude, had disdained drawing rooms, steered clear of cliques, mocked high society—and now all at once he wanted more than anything to belong to the most anonymous of societies, to join the most resigned of armies. Entering that supermarket and queuing at the checkout with other strangers was more than a desire at that moment, as he stood outside that blocked door: it was an urge to live.
For the first time in his life, The Master had felt as though he were a ghost knocking at the doors of the living.
He had started shaking, screaming, beating his fists violently on the glass. A cashier had come running and activated the door from the inside. Other people had arrived. They had tried to calm him down. They had brought him a glass of water. The Master had been unable to give any explanation, he had simply kept silent, trapped in his own shame.
He had returned home without doing his shopping, drunk a cup of milk with honey and gone to bed. The same night that horrible sensation had assailed him again, reaching the centre of his consciousness, and The Master had wept, making the pillow wet. Then he had got up and started emptying the drawers in search of old photographs and yellowed newspaper cuttings, scouring his bookshelves, throwing out other people’s books to find his own. Reading his own name in black-and-white capitals on a poetry collection had brought him a modicum of relief, a photograph showing him looking tanned and stern beneath a palm tree had alleviated his anguish for a moment, and a favourable review had eased his torment.
He had rushed to the bathroom in search of a mirror in which to see himself, but all he had seen was a scared old man. What had become of the young poet in the photograph? Somebody must have killed him and buried him in the garden. The thought had made him shudder, and he had felt dizzy. He had run into the bathroom and thrown up the wretched cup of milk he had been unable to digest. Then he had wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, gone to the telephone and, before the fear could completely overwhelm him, had phoned The Director of The Small Publishing Company, who was, if not the only friend he had, certainly the only one whose number he knew by heart. “I have a new book,” he had said to the irritable voice at the other end of the line. “It’s very good. You have to enter me for The Prize.” It was a lie to say the book was new, nothing that came from The Master could be new. Whether or not it was good was not for him to judge.
The fact was that The Director, being a man of powerful intelligence and strong temperament, had taken advantage of the situation, riding the regular controversy that flared up every year the day after The Prize had been awarded, a controversy in which (some) newspapers, (some) writers and (some) readers
waxed indignant over the excessive power concentrated in the big publishing groups, as well as the lack of turnover in the ranks of those allocated votes. With perfect timing, The Director had managed to obtain an interview with a
little-read
but crusading newspaper, in which he demanded more space for small independent publishers and—why not?—for books of quality.
The controversy had been taken up by other organs of the press and had made a dent in the impenetrable armour of The Academy. The Director had taken advantage of it to get The Master’s book, printed in haste for the occasion, considered for The Prize.
In truth, the campaign had only succeeded because it enjoyed the consent of the big publishers, who were happy to have a third competitor in the race as an unquestionable demonstration of their openness and of the equal opportunities represented by The Prize.
That was how The Master and The Director of The Small Publishing Company had ended up, miraculously, as finalists.
And that was also how, miraculously, they had ended up in this bookshop.
As soon as they entered, The Director noticed that there was almost nobody there, and The Master noticed that there was not even a poster advertising the event.
The female cashier looked at this pair less with curiosity than with anxiety. The Director and The Master came straight to the cash desk, and with a joint effort placed the big box noisily on the counter.
“Shall we leave it here and you’ll see to it?”
“Sorry, I don’t understand, see to what?”
“In case you don’t have enough copies of the books, we’ve brought these.”
“What books?”
“For the event (clever this one, eh?),” said The Director with a nudge in the elbow to The Master, who was looking around uneasily.
“But… I don’t know anything about it…”
“Listen, signorina, don’t make us waste time,” The Master intervened, The Director stepping aside for him. “Call your manager.”
“The manager’s on his break.”
“Call him anyway.”
“I told you he’s—”
“Call the assistant manager, and if he’s on his break too, call whatever damned person is responsible, and if you can’t find that person either, call the delivery man—I just want to speak to someone.”
“Maybe I can be of help.”
“Anyone but you, damn it!”
The girl lost her veneer of false confidence, pressed a button and put her pale lips to a microphone.
“Someone in charge to the cash desk, someone in charge to the cash desk, please.”
The announcement echoed around the shop, like a voice in an empty stadium.
Time passed, during which the three of them avoided one another’s eyes.
As they waited, The Director guarded the cash desk and The Master moved away and, with his hands behind his back, started strolling between the shelves. In the whole shop there were a handful of potential readers, who were wandering listlessly around the various sections. Without too much conviction, they extracted books from the shelves, picked up the suggestions of the month, read the blurbs, turned them back and forth like fans, opened them halfway through and pushed their noses into the hollow between the pages, then put them back again, disappointed.
Beneath the artificial light, piles of thrillers blew ice or dripped blood from their glossy covers, blocks of best-sellers marked an obligatory route, a gallery of faces of well-known TV comedians stared out from other covers. In the Italian Fiction section, The Master looked for his book: it wasn’t there. He checked to see if the titles were in alphabetical order: it wasn’t there. He felt a lump in this throat. With long strides he reached the Poetry
section
and, by now in a state of some confusion, started running through the names on the spines of the books: at last, at the end of a row, right in the corner, jammed against the wall of the shelf, he found an old book of his. His anguish eased, and he felt a deep love suffuse him. As if it were a sparrow caught in a trap, he freed his book and took it in his hand. He blew away the dust, stroked the book, leafed through it as gently as if it were a living creature: if it had been possible he would have liked to throw it in the air and let it take flight. A heavily made-up middle-aged woman, hair dyed a Titian red, looked at him curiously. The Master held out the book, inviting her to take it. The woman took it reluctantly and examined it.
“Do you know his work?”
The woman shook her head.
“He’s a great poet.”
“…”
“The greatest poet alive today.”
“Thank you, but I was looking for a cookery book,” said the woman, handing him back the book. “Can you tell where I could find one?”
The Director called The Master, who joined him.
“We can’t find the person in charge.”
“Go and find him!”
“But I can’t leave the—”
“Go!” The Master roared, and banged his fist on the counter, making the coins in the till jingle.
His temples throbbing, his hair unkempt over his thin skull, his face no longer just pale but ashen, The Master was beginning to look like a demonic mask.
Afraid of him now, the girl came out from behind the till, slamming the flap. The Master remained motionless, stunned by his own outburst.
The Director of The Small Publishing Company passed his thick fingers through his beard as if they were the widely spaced teeth of a comb. “I just thought of something,” he said.
“…”
“What day is today?”
“How should I know?”
“I can’t remember if it was the 15th at 16:00…”