The Parrots by Filippo Bologna Page A

apart from enthusiasm, he had also lost interest, wonder,indignation. He wasn’t interested in the decay of political life, didn’t become embittered about the widespread corruption, wasn’t offended by the vulgarity of public taste or the morbidity of crime reporting, any more than he was offended by the duplicity of friends or the predictability of lovers. Not because there weren’t things around that were worthy of admiration or disgust. The things were all there, in their place. It was he who wasn’t in his. As time had passed, it was if he had become blind to the world. He was aware of noises, he sensed movements, variations of light and colour: something was definitely happening behind that plasterboard wall that separated him from reality. Saying what it was, though, was difficult, because whatever it was, it was something that didn’t concern him. The Writer was
inside
, immersed in a liquid, shadowy sleep, the kind in which he imagined people in comas floated, as if wrapped in an enormous placenta through which he was vaguely aware of the unknowable territory
outside
. And yet, at the end of that dark tunnel, there was something. A golden glare, a silvery shimmer, a burst of blue flame that illuminated the cave of his existence for a moment: winning The Prize. That victory was light for his dull eyes, oxygen for the blocked pores of his skin. He half closed his eyes and saw the plaque and the cheque being handed to him, heard the thunderous applause, the popping of corks, the clink of glasses, buried his nose in the inky pages of the reprint, carefully ran his finger along the sharp edge of the wrap-around band, looked at the newspaper headlines and shielded himself from the grapeshot of the photographers’ flashes…
    But these glorious thoughts crumbled like snow in the palm of a hot hand, and his bad humour grew on the glacier of his consciousness like an avalanche, became heavy and massive and rolled downhill threateningly.
    “Shall we go up?”
    The Old Flame had stopped outside the entrance to theRenaissance villa, which had once been used as a shooting lodge by an old local family.
    So now you want to go up. Why didn’t you want to go up that day twenty-five years ago? Old as it was, that humiliation still stung, as if The Writer had rubbed his face with an excessively alcoholic aftershave.
    “It’s best if you don’t go up.”
    With these words, so many years earlier, The Old Flame had stopped him from going up to her apartment to meet her parents. The Writer had prepared well, had gone over in his mind the words he would say, had tried out the best smile in his arsenal and suppressed his own embarrassment: the woman meant too much to him, and so did this meeting. But just outside the front door she had suddenly changed her mind. He had insisted, but she had been so cold and resolute as to brook no argument. Putting off that encounter could mean only two things: either she didn’t think he was ready, or she didn’t consider theirs an important enough relationship to involve the families. But if that was how things were, why had she come to his parents’? To create a diabolical asymmetry, to gain a moral credit with which to keep him in check for ever?
    The Writer had emerged devastated. In a few seconds, he had been crushed beneath the weight of imaginary, immovable guilt feelings, and a resurgent sense of inadequacy had taken possession of him. The Old Flame had noticed it, and in order to compensate him had taken him down to the cellar. She had taken him by the hand like an air hostess guiding a lost child in a terminal, and had led him down to a typical city cellar, a claustrophobic space lit by fluorescent lights, into which not even a serial killer would gladly descend. Once there, as if they were staging the reconstruction of a rape for a drama documentary, surrounded by the smell of deflated tyres, yellowed paper and kerosene, she had dropped her jeans down to her calves and had let him