The Parrots Read Online Free PDF Page B

it.”
    “Get rid of what?”
    “The body.”
    “No, no. I’ll take it back.”
    “You know you can’t just throw animals in the dustbin.”
    “I’m not planning to throw it anywhere.”
    “Oh? What are you planning to do with it, then?”
    “Bye.”
    He was planning to stuff it.
     
    The Master stopped on the pavement and looked up at the apartment block, heedless of the sun and the usual early afternoon traffic. With its faded façade, cracked plaster and chipped window sills, the building exuded an air of listlessness, of exhaustion, as if it were asking only to be demolished, or at the very least abandoned. But The Master did not notice all these details, shielded as he was by the Polaroid lenses of his magnificent glasses, which were held together with adhesive tape. The halls of Roman apartment blocks always smell of fried eggs, rubber and polished brass. Often, as in this case, the lifts are out of order. The Master looked at the stairwell spiralling up into the air like the thread of a bolt. He knew those stairs well, from having so often climbed them, driven on by the promise of victory, and just as often descended them again, dragged down by the gravity of defeat.
    And he knew equally well that, if it had not collapsed yet—and this could be said both of him and of the building—this reallywas his final opportunity to climb to the top floor and win this last prize. Which would actually be the first.
     
    Even though there were not many people in the restaurant, and nobody was paying too much attention to them, even the most distracted of the waiters would have immediately dismissed the hypothesis that The Writer and The Old Flame were husband and wife. The theatrical way she arched her back, the gesture with which she moved her hair away from her forehead, her shrill, childish voice, and the way he kept both filling her glass with white wine and filling the silence with his words were all signs of an invisible grammar that said more than his words ever could.
    The Writer nodded distractedly at The Old Flame’s account of the failures disguised as successes with which she had dug the grave of all those years during which they had lost touch with one another. A trench filled with the corpses of lovers executed with a karate chop to the back of the neck, wounded friendships and the carcasses of projects left in the rain to rust. The years that separated him from her, as she went on with her stories, now seemed to him like a pontoon bridge about to be swept away by the current of a swollen river.
    The Writer looked at The Old Flame: her face, spared the botox that had already devoured half her contemporaries (one, though not the only, reason he had left The First Wife for The Second) was still beautiful, although there was only a trace left of the almost indecent beauty of her youth, like a mark seen through a sheet of paper.
    Park in front of a plastic surgery clinic, and take a book to read. Sooner or later you’ll see what remains of the woman who drove you mad go in (or come out). That was the Zen concept of revenge The Writer applied to the female body. Whereas hebecame more interesting the older he got: “mature” according to his young female admirers, “youthful” as his older lovers said.
    After lunch The Old Flame wanted to get an ice cream. The Writer, who was more tempted by the thought of taking her to a cheap hotel—partly because he couldn’t believe he had come all these kilometres for an ice cream—acceded to her wishes. With ill-concealed annoyance, but he acceded to her wishes. And then what also put paid to The Writer’s erection (not even an erection, for now only a kind of intoxicating tingling of the bladder) was the lemon that smelt of detergent and the cone-shaped wrapper, which was why his ice cream ended up in a bin, while The Old Flame finished hers, even saying how good it was, which The Writer found excessive or at the very least irritating, and which put him on guard