The Parrots Read Online Free PDF

of sadness, like a pale sun behind a cloud of ash.
    “I read your last book,” she said. “It was very moving.” Then she added, “There’s something I have to know.”
    “Go on.”
    “I’m the main female character, aren’t I?”
    The Writer smiled without replying. At the beginning of hisliterary career, every time someone close to him saw themselves in one or other of his characters and demanded an explanation, he would give a reply of an aesthetic and literary nature, to the effect that
novels are works of fiction, it’s all a process of casting a critical eye on reality, even in an autobiography the narrator doesn’t exactly correspond to the author, you always start with a real event and transfigure it through your imagination…
and so on.
    Then, as time had passed, he had given up. Not so much because he didn’t find such replies satisfactory (although that was part of it, of course), as because the others found them unsatisfactory. The only thing, the ultimate thing that you could do when someone asked a question like that was to say, “Yes. It’s you.”
    Even though this could provoke a quarrel or bring a friendship to an end, it was the only possible reply. The only one capable of satisfying that morbid curiosity, that sordid voyeurism, the only truth that people really wanted to hear. For some unknown but human reason, recognizing themselves in a character in a novel made it possible for them to recognize themselves as individuals in the real world. It was like a literary Eucharist that signified their rebirth, their transition to a new life.
    Once, a friend who had recognized himself in a character had phoned him to say he was very angry with him. The Writer had listened patiently to his friend’s hasty conclusions and then, instead of rebutting them point by point, had said, “You ought to thank me. Thanks to me you’ve discovered you exist.”
    “Well? Is she me or not?”
    “Yes. She’s you.”
     
    “What’s that smell?”
    “We’ve got a gorilla under the knife.”
    “A gorilla?”
    “Yes, a gorilla from the zoo. Extraction of a wisdom tooth.”
    We are now inside a veterinary clinic just outside Rome, where The Beginner knew a young vet who had once come to see The Girlfriend’s cat and diagnosed toxoplasmosis.
    “I don’t have much time, I have to go back into theatre in a while.”
    “Are you operating?”
    “I’m not operating, but I’d like to assist because it’s a procedure that doesn’t crop up every day.”
    “I can imagine.”
    “What did you want to show me?”
    The Beginner handed over a huge cardboard box, which had once held a pair of boots The Girlfriend had bought from a shop in the Via Condotti.
    The Vet opened the box. “What is it?”
    “I was hoping
you’d
tell
me
. That’s why I came.”
    Holding the black parrot by one wing, The Vet took it from the box. The stiff body, the tilted head, the unfolded wing sticking out at an angle of forty-five degrees: in that pose the black parrot looked like a diligent seminarian raising his hand to ask a question. The Vet placed the bird on a metal surface, lit a powerful lamp with a telescopic arm and began to examine it.
    “I don’t understand… Where did you find this?”
    “On my terrace.”
    “That’s impossible. These birds don’t live in the wild. It must have escaped from a cage.”
    “Certainly not mine.”
    “And how did it die?”
    “Forget the post-mortem. What I want to know is, what is it?”
    “A parrot.”
    “Even I can see that. I mean, what kind?”
    “I’m no expert on parrots. It could be a macaw or an Amazon, but the colour’s really strange, and the size… It may be a geneticanomaly. You should talk to an ornithologist, I have a friend at the Natural History Museum, if you like I can—”
    “There’s no need, it’s not that important.”
    “Listen, let’s do something. Leave it with me. I’ll photograph it and e-mail the photos to my friend. Then we’ll get rid of