There had been a time when he had experienced that story in a heroic way, like a stylite stuck up on the high column of pain, indifferent to time, exposed to the rain and wind of love. But now?
Everything had changed. He did not love her, nor did he hate her. He did not even want her, as he had at the beginning of that strange morning. What was she to him, now? A fragile legend, a decapitated Venus. That was what she was. An elegant way to say that she had become—simply, odiously and irredeemably—of no more interest to him than the rest of the human race.
In Rome strange things happen that can only be explained by the fact that they are strange and happen in Rome.
Among the many, some had struck the imagination of The Beginner as soon as he arrived in the capital.
The flower-sellers for example. An excessive number of
flower-sellers
. Flower-sellers in the streets, in the squares, at traffic
junctions
, on street corners, flower-sellers outside schools, barracks and hospitals. Every damned day, at all hours of the day, in all weathers and all seasons, with their plastic buckets beneath the spouts of the fountains, the flower-sellers were there.
One flower-seller for every person in love in the city, The Beginner had thought the first time he had noticed that unusual presence.
There are flowers for leaving people and flowers for winning their hearts, flowers for seduction and flowers for betrayal, flowers for lying and flowers for swearing, flowers for birth and flowers for death. There are flowers, and above all flower-sellers, for every state of mind of every inhabitant of Rome. Every Roman has his own personal flower-seller, ready to rescue him at those moments in life when he finds himself powerless to deal with the amazing meaninglessness of existence, stunned, dazed, without ideas or words, his head as empty as a vase, which can only be filled with equally stupid and senseless flowers. Pointless, wonderful, scented tributes to human frailty.
But the strangest of all the things that happened in Rome was something else: moped chains without mopeds. Sheathed in coloured rubber tubes, tied to posts, to traffic lights, to bus shelters, to traffic islands, bolted to the bars of gates or basements, with the links intact and the padlocks closed, in defiance of the laws of theft. Every time The Beginner saw one, he couldn’t help wondering
how it had ended up there
, imagining the events that had led up to its being there, events of which the chain represented nothing other than the obscure seal. Maybe the thief had opened the chain without forcing the padlock. But how? With a hairpin like you see in spy films? Or with one of those tools that only thieves and panel-beaters use? Or maybe, more simply, he had the keys. But if so, how did he get hold of them? What if it was the actual owner of the moped who had stolen it? But did it make any sense to steal your own moped? And besides, even if you could get past these logical obstacles, you had to assume that after opening the padlock and stealing the moped the thief had taken care to turn back and lock everything up again. All of which implied a great deal of time at his disposal, combined with a remarkable degree of self-control and a fanatical love of order that was positively anal.
So much for the chains. Then there were the mopeds
themselves
. Abandoned at the sides of the street, and gradually
cannibalized
, as if invisible mice or mechanical bacteria picked the bodywork clean at night, starting with the softest parts, first the saddles with their foam-rubber fillings, the plastic chain guards, the rubbery wire casings, then the more difficult Plexiglas
windscreens
, the tough indicator fairings, the indigestible Bakelite rear-view mirrors, until the mopeds had been reduced to sinister skeleton-like frames.
Something else apparently inexplicable, which also happened in Rome, and at that precise moment, was that the shoe box on the seat beside the driver’s seat of The Beginner’s car was moving.
Or rather, that something inside it was moving, and as we know that what was inside was the corpse of a black parrot, that could only mean two things: one, that the parrot wasn’t dead, and two, that it was alive.
When the box jumped, The Beginner, who had been planning to consult the Yellow Pages in search of a good taxidermist as soon as he got home, took fright, skidded, got back on the
carriageway
—provoking in a motorcyclist a fervent and moving invocation of the dead people in his family—pulled over and cautiously opened the box. From under the lid, electric eyes were staring at him with a look of hatred.
The Beginner came out of the shower and stared at his own naked body in the mirror. The down that climbed like ivy up his abdomen from his pubes and sprouted on his chest, the swollen belly, like that of a drowned man or of Christ being taken down from the cross, or like the ascitic fluid that accumulates in the abdomen in the sick or the cirrhotic: he wasn’t looking well. Lately, 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 to
the 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 considered
the 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 cage you have.”
He had chosen a big cage, the biggest they had in the shop. The assistant had even gone down to the basement storeroom to fetch it, and had re-emerged with a huge cage, almost an aviary: it had taken the two of them to load it on the roof rack of the car. The Beginner had also bought a perch, an expensive manual on the raising and care of parrots, and two food troughs. Now he had to figure out what to put in the food troughs.
“Mostly they eat seeds, but there are species that also eat vegetables. If you were just able to tell me more precisely what kind of parrot it is…”
“Seeds and vegetables. Mine eats everything.”
He had bought a basic feed, thinking that he could easily
supplement the parrot’s diet with fruit and vegetables (The Girlfriend was a vegetarian, and there was never any lack of greens in their apartment).
So that was why the same cage that had crossed the centre of Rome on the roof of The Beginner’s car now hung in the middle of the room, abnormal in comparison with the dimensions of the little apartment.
Cautiously, The Beginner approached the cage. The bird was no longer looking at him with hatred, but had assumed a tough-guy look, like a terrorist ready to blow himself up with everyone in the building rather than reveal where he has planted the bomb.
The seeds in the food trough and the water in the bowl were untouched. The bird seemed stiff and distant, as if stuffed. The Beginner distinctly heard the creaking of the old lift and
recognized
The Girlfriend’s energetic steps on the final flight of stairs. The key turned in the lock. The door opened.
“…”
“Hi, darling.”
“What is this? A joke?”
“No, a present.”
According to an unwritten code, those competing for The Prize were not supposed to put in an appearance at The Academy before The Ceremony, a simple hygienic measure designed to guarantee the transparency of the voting and let the machinery of The Prize proceed calmly and correctly. The Master was perfectly well aware of this. But he was also aware that he wouldn’t get another chance.
He rang, and as soon as someone came to open up he crossed the threshold of The Academy with his head down, like those who enter an underground train without waiting for the others to get off. The intern who was working there stammered something,
but was pushed back by the weight of this old dehorned bull. The Master was at home, he knew the labyrinthine layout of the apartment by heart. The corridors lined with books, the drawing rooms wallpapered with books, the bedrooms covered with books, even the toilet was tiled with books: every hallway, every chapel of this dilapidated apartment which was now the offices of The Academy was filled with books, which had accumulated over the years like files in the basement of a Roman courthouse.
The ladies who every year dragged themselves up to the top floor didn’t know. The critics didn’t know. The journalists didn’t know. The writers didn’t know. Even The Master, who had lived long enough to know—or to think that he knew—everything there was to know, didn’t know. Know, that is, how many books could still be crammed in.
It depends on the materials and the construction techniques, but generally the average weight a floor is able to bear is about 200 kilograms per square metre, which is calculated by gradually filling water mattresses or by using hydraulic jacks. What weight were the floors of The Academy able to bear? What was the maximum load per square metre? Hard to say.
How many plates can a waiter carry without dropping them? How many betrayals can a wife take before she walks out? How many kilometres can a car engine go before it gives up the ghost? How do you recognize the snowflake that will cause the branch to snap?
And what is the title—and how many pages does it have—of the book that will make the floors of The Academy collapse?
“Are you writing?”
This is the only question 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 the
answer 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.