The Parrots Read Online Free PDF Page A

empty restaurants, cover bands, fifty-year-olds on motorbikes and inflatable swimming pools in gardens. He had only said it for fear of meeting someone who might know him, which would have been quite likely if he had headed for Fregene or Circeo on a fine day like today.
    She was passing through the city, or so she had said, and had hired a car.
    “Would you like to drive?”
    “You drive on the way there. I’ll drive on the way back.”
    She had agreed to this pointless arrangement with a touch of amusement, as if it were one of the games they had played when they were younger. The Writer had wanted her to drive so that he could get a better look at her. If only she’d take off those sunglasses! Then The Writer could read her intentions in her eyes.
    How many years had passed since he had last seen those eyes, sometimes as calm and clear as an Alpine lake, sometimes green and sparkling like a beetle’s wings?
    They had taken the Via Cassia, heading north. As she drove, she occasionally pushed back the blonde hair that kept falling over her face and nervously touched the frames of the big Bakelite glasses that only a diva could have worn with the same nonchalance.
    He would have liked to talk, to tell her everything that had happened between the last time they had seen each other and now, but he couldn’t concentrate enough to find the words (which may seem strange for a writer, but there it is). And not only because of the inhibition her beauty had always exerted on him, and not even because he did not really know where to start—but rather because something was interfering with his thoughts. And that something was the feeling that he had forgotten something important, as if he had not switched the gas off before leaving home, or had left his car with the headlights on. The food for The Baby? No, that wasn’t really a problem, The Filipino would pick it up (talking of whom, was he back yet?).
    As they got farther from the city and the landscape became less oppressive, the unpleasant sensation also began to abandon him, as if the origin of the sensation were the city itself, or something undefined but now too distant to harm him. Warehouses gave way to cultivated fields, vineyards and vegetable gardens, villages with curious names, cut in two by the road like watermelons split on market stalls, old men on benches in squares or at the tables of bars looking impassively at the passing lorries.
    The car with The Writer and the mystery woman on board was rolling down the Via Cassia on a journey without direction and without time.
    This may be the moment to reveal the identity of the mystery woman: she was the great love of The Writer’s youth, and for the purposes of her fleeting appearance in this story we shall call her The Old Flame, not so much because she’s old, no, that wouldn’t be very tactful, but because it’s an old story, an affair that once flamed passionately and is now like a lamp with its wick dry.
    We can talk freely about her, given that The Second Wife is in her office and can’t hear us. She is sitting at her desk, replying to the mountain of e-mails that have accumulated during the night and the early hours of the morning.
    Some time later, just before The Second Wife stepped away from her desk for her lunch break, The Writer and The Old Flame were walking beside the lake, which was streaked with silvery light.
    They were walking unhurriedly, already drawn into the tranquil lakeside rhythm. They sat down first at the tables of a café, then moved to those of a restaurant, one of the many which, with the somewhat homespun optimism so common in the provinces, had already put tables outside.
    They drank house white and ate seafood salad (even though they were at the lake) and fish (even though they were still at the lake) with potatoes.
    At last she took off her glasses, and he saw her eyes. They were girlish eyes, just as he remembered them, still bright, but obscured somehow by an invisible veil