The Parrots by Filippo Bologna

of taxi driver he was dealing with: the kind who transformsa ride around the block into a political rally. That was why he had remained taciturn, resolute in his silence: he had sensed the trap and had no intention of falling into it. All the driver could do was weigh him up—anyone who doesn’t speak always instils fear—with suspicious glances in the rear-view mirror.
    And it wasn’t clear from those glances whether or not the taxi driver had recognized The Writer. He might have, given that The Writer was one of the few writers whose countenance was well known even to those normally unversed in such matters , perhaps because he was constantly being talked about in the newspapers, or more likely because of that successful TV programme he had presented years earlier, when he was still surfing the foamy crest of his world-beating debut. The driver was still staring at him, unsure whether or not the buttocks of a famous person were resting on the back seat of his Zara 6. Once he had won The Prize, such confusion would be a thing of the past. Taxi drivers would open their doors to him with a smile and shake his hand before letting him out, honoured to have had him in their cabs.
    But for the moment, it wasn’t so much a famous man as a pensive man who was framed in the narrow concave surface of the little mirror as he looked distractedly out of the window. He was looking at the traffic police taking away a car, Japanese girls laden with designer bags, barmen in black aprons coming out of bars, double-parked delivery vans, but only looking. What he was thinking about was what he had done to The Old Flame. He had not thrown her in the treacherous waters of the lake, or pushed her between the jaws of the propellers while the roofs and bell towers on the coast shrank as far as the eye could see. He had not kissed her, he had not raped her (there had been a moment in which he had thought about that), and he had not slapped her and left the mark of his five fingers on those innocent cheeks. He had done worse. To return for a moment to the fatal question,if our hypothetical journalist trying to retrace their extramural excursion had ended his report by asking, “How does it feel to be successful?” The Writer would have been able to reply with an example. He would have paused for a long time, then explained solemnly that, for example, owning a private island might be something that would approximate fairly closely to the concept of being successful. Actually, he would gloss, owning a private island surrounded by sea means being successful, while owing a private island surrounded by a lake means being successful but not quite so much, a local, circumscribed success. Besides, not all Italian authors were as successful as he was in having their books available on the foreign market.
    But to go back to the islands of the lake, we have said that one of the two was private, the other not. Which is why, the private one not being The Writer’s—successful as he was, he wasn’t quite that successful yet—it’s worth focusing on the other one and on what happened there.
    On that island, there was a Renaissance villa that was open to visitors. Once they had landed, The Old Flame considered this a romantic and inevitable destination. The Writer had consented: even though he already knew things would end badly, he still wanted to know how.
    “Come on, let’s go up!”
    The Old Flame insisted on wanting to go up and visit the villa. So her childlike enthusiasm had not abandoned her, that generalized, irritating awe at things. She could go into ecstasies over a pebble in a river, a mediocre romantic comedy or a flock of sheep beyond the guard rail on the motorway. Her enthusiasm, in short, was always on the hunt for pretexts to manifest itself.
    And The Writer hated that because, deep down, he rather envied her, being someone who never got enthusiastic about anything. He had tried, but he just couldn’t. And as if that wasn’t enough,