That was why The Writer immediately went on to read the article. The author of the piece commented on the “trio”—as the shortlist of finalists was known in the profession—vaguely summarized the three books in contention, and finally speculated wildly on the likely winner of The Prize. The commentator considered the old man, whom in a couple of passages he also called “The Master” (though not without a streak of irony, thought The Writer), to be out of the running, and The Writer to be the favourite. The Writer instinctively put a hand just under the belt of his bathrobe, and took another bite of his cold toast. Like a condor (
Vultur gryphus
) circling over a plateau in search of a moving prey, The Writer skimmed over the rest of the piece, which was just idle chatter, and went straight for the prey, the last sentence, extracting from it a juicy morsel:
“Even though victory seems within reach, the game is far from over: to win The Prize, The Writer will have to watch out for The Beginner…”
But if The Writer had to watch out for The Beginner, who did The Beginner have to watch out for? That was something the newspaper did not say.
And yet on the terrace of his loft, The Beginner would have had convincing reasons to watch out. Starting with that dark object approaching, an object The Beginner could not see because he was looking down, or at best in front of him.
As he was staring at the digger on the subway construction site, motionless in the brown morning air, his mind was elsewhere. He was thinking about The Prize, about what he would say at the event due to be held in a famous theatre that afternoon, and about other small details, the result of his insecurity and
his incurable desire to please. Nevertheless, beyond the galaxy of The Prize, there was something on the ground that captured his attention.
On the crane on the building site, towering over the digger, there sat a large flock of seagulls (
Larus michahellis
), rubbing their wings, creasing their feathers and jamming their gullets between their tail feathers. The Beginner had re-emerged from his thoughts and was now watching them, his curiosity aroused: they seemed to have fallen in line, as if waiting to swear an oath. There must be some kind of logic in their arrangement, but what was it? The biggest and strongest had secured the best places along the arm of the crane, the most sheltered places and the closest to the tower. Those on the end of the arm, on the other hand, the most exposed to the wind, were trying to regain ground, to move up the line, only to be forced back with a lot of pecking as soon as the attempt became more insistent. Until,
exasperated
and phlegmatic, they would launch themselves into the air, circling around the crane, and after one complete turn find that their places were gone, having been immediately occupied by other seagulls. And so they hung suspended in the air, beating their wings against an imaginary mirror, before again roosting in the few free centimetres at the extremity of the arm. And this merry-go-round went on uninterruptedly, like an impossible quadrille in which the dancers step on each other’s feet because the platform is too narrow.
All at once, a shudder ran down the line of seagulls, spreading along the crane’s metallic conductor. Their feathers stood upright, their wings opened and the line broke. The seagulls rose in flight and circled the arm, unsure whether to come to rest or leave. Then they flew away, scattering nervously, as if something had disturbed them.
The Beginner felt a shudder at his back. Maybe it’s the brisk air of the morning on my bare neck, he thought. Maybe I shouldn’t
go out on the terrace in my pants, he thought. Maybe I’m getting a fever, he thought.
But no, it was none of these things. It was as if he felt himself being watched by the menacing eyes of a stranger. He sensed a looming presence, the atavistic but indemonstrable certainty that he was not alone on that terrace. A sensation which lately he had already felt at least once.
He inspected the terrace: the rack of dormant jasmine, the stone vases in which lizards took shelter on hot summer nights, the rubber hose coiled in a corner. A slow pan of the buildings surrounding the terrace offered nothing better: closed windows, lowered blinds.
He leant over the railing: the small, faded pedestrian crossing beneath the pines, the pines themselves climbing vertiginously, their tops challenging the roofs of the buildings, not a single passer-by in that measly stretch of street, only a Carabinieri car returning in resignation from a night patrol.
Even though the sensation had become even more distinct and intolerable, The Beginner did not yield to the instinct to turn: there wasn’t anybody on the terrace because there couldn’t be anybody. So he decided to go back inside.
The question is: as he closed behind him the massive glass door that slid obediently to the end of the runner, and especially as he drew the heavy curtain to stop the light from flooding the room so early, could The Beginner imagine the fearful crash which, in a fraction of a second, would shatter the window into a thousand pieces? No, he couldn’t. You can bet on it.
With the house at last empty and silent, The Second Wife trapped in the Fiat 500 as she drove alongside the river, The Baby fast asleep in her room and The Ukrainian Nanny ironing in the
linen cupboard beside the screen of the baby monitor so firmly imposed by The Second Wife and equally firmly challenged by him (only two months old and already on video—how can we complain if they end up on Big Brother?), The Writer only had one thing left to do. Something shameful, unforgivable and irrevocable: to write.
The Writer sat down on the ergonomic stool The Second Wife had given him for his birthday (sceptical at first, he had had to think again: it did wonders for his backache), switched on the
computer
, waited for the smiling face of a baby, which he had chosen as a screensaver, to appear, looked for a particular file with the suffix .
doc
to which every additional word added a nerve-wracking amount of time waiting for the word processor to launch, and double-clicked on it. During that interminable moment it took the application to load the file, so slowly as to make him regret having opened it, the telephone rang at the far end of the living room.
Someone answer it, thought The Writer. Damn, just when the file had opened and he had glimpsed—maybe—a clause to be moved to the next paragraph.
“Someone answer it!” This time the words, which he had
previously
only thought, emerged from his mouth. But the telephone kept ringing, and nobody had responded to its call.
Anyway, seeing that The Filipino wasn’t there and that not even the author of a novel can guarantee that every character will be available at all times, and given that nobody in the whole house was lifting a finger to answer the telephone, which was still ringing, The Writer had no choice but to get up from his desk.
A pity, just when the sentence was on the verge of coming together, first in his brain and a moment later on the keyboard. The telephone rang again, and The Writer approached it. Against the light, the corridor was shiny with wax polish, the surface of the floor looking like asphalt after a nocturnal shower. The telephone rang, and The Writer walked, without speeding up
or slowing down, taking care not to slip on the polished floor, as a painful domestic experience had taught him. The telephone rang, and The Writer reached it. The telephone rang, and The Writer lifted the receiver.
“Hello?”
“It’s me.”
There was only one person in the world who could call and say “it’s me” without being The Second Wife. Let alone The First.
“This is your prostate.”
“What is?”
To hear this line, you would have to be in the centre of Rome, in the prestigious clinic of an even more prestigious Roman urologist. The Master had answered mechanically. His attention had come to rest on a poster hanging on the wall, just behind The Urologist’s armchair.
He couldn’t take his eyes off the image, which was surrounded by a plethora of diplomas and testimonials to victorious campaigns around the world. Where had he seen that painting?
“This.”
The Urologist pointed with the tip of his pen to a darker area floating in the grey sea of the scan. A kind of lunar crater shaped like a chestnut, a pyramid built on the moon by an alien civilization and recorded by a space probe: his prostate as shown by the ultrasound.
Those eyes, once bright and now watery, had become small and sharp over time after perusing thousands of close-packed lines in cheap editions in the gloom of furnished rooms, but still managed to establish a familiarity with that picture.
It was a reproduction of a painting. At the bottom there was a small semicircular bay, a cove imprisoned between an inlet and
a bare, twisted tree. In the centre, a man standing on a rock, his trunk tilted forward, leaning towards the water. Behind him, an elemental horizon and a flake-white sky. From every part of the picture, hundreds of creatures, fish, birds, reptiles, were
converging
on him, like lines towards the vanishing point in a study on Renaissance perspective. Turtles, crabs, lobsters, a seal or a sea lion—The Master couldn’t tell which—even a shark and a
hippopotamus
, as well as seaweed and plants, all seemed attracted by the man’s magnetic force. The animals had come from the depths of the sea, the expanses of land above sea level and the boundless skies to hear his words.
“And this dark patch…”
In the Wien Museum in Karlsplatz. That was where he had seen it.
Vogelpredigt
des Hl. Franziskus
: in his mind that caption echoed like the chorus of a song. As a young man, The Master had studied German for a while, not enough to master the might of Germanic philosophy as he had hoped, but sufficient to remember the name of that little painting.
“…is the tumour.”
“But didn’t you take it out?”
“Of course we took it out. Why else would we have done the operation?”
The Urologist laughed, The Master didn’t.
“This is the image of the prostate we removed, and this is the area affected by the carcinoma, do you see?”
The Master could not see. The professor traced a kind of
half-moon
, making a mark with the cap of the biro on the surface of the image. “In your case a radical prostatectomy was the only solution. The result of the biopsy on the lymph node was
negative
, which means the tumour probably wasn’t invasive. In any case, I’m convinced we caught it in time!”
In time, maybe. But we need to see where we caught it, thought The Master.
“The picture seems reassuring.”
“Which picture?”
“What do you mean, which picture? The clinical picture, what else?”
The one The Master was looking at, that was what else. The Master abandoned his prostate, sunk there in the murky backdrop of the scan, and took shelter again in the intense contemplation of that image.
It was a painting by Oskar Laske, a pupil of Otto Wagner,
St
Francis Preaching to the Birds.
How envious he felt. Not so much of the painter, who wasn’t even all that gifted—too graphic for his taste—but of the saint.
The Master would have liked to read his poems and stories to men and animals, and have them listen admiringly, docile and grateful. Basically, St Francis’s sermons were readings
ante litteram.
The birds were the readers, and the wolves the critics. And the cruel wolf of Gubbio that St Francis had single-handedly tamed and made as playful and tail-wagging as a puppy was that critic (the only one) who spoke well of him only because every time one of his books came out The Master wrote to him expressing respect and admiration for his latest literary effort.
“Anyway, look, a cancer of the prostate at your age isn’t a rare occurrence, you’re not the first and you won’t be the last, and there’s very effective chemotherapy now which is less stressful for the organism…”
Hypnotized by the painting, The Master felt as if the spaceship of his youth were abducting him in a cone of light and carrying him back in time.
Now the spaceship had taken him to Vienna, a crash landing in the Resselpark, the prostate still in its place, ready to produce all the quantity of seminal liquid that the hypothalamus had requested, with a raging snowstorm beating down on the city, and on his young shoulders.
The snowflakes were whirling about him with such fury that he had felt as if he were being attacked by a swarm of frozen wasps. Floundering in the storm, he had headed straight for the massive building at the far end of the park. Beyond the curtain of snow a light could be glimpsed inside the building. Without knowing what the building was, he had pushed open the door and gone in.
Wooden floors and warmth. Light and silence. A refuge for wayfarers sheltering from the cold? More than anything else, a museum. A deserted museum. Nobody to greet him at the ticket office, nobody in the cloakroom. Hesitant at first, The Master had taken this as a sign of charitable welcome, and pushed on inside, starting to walk through the warm, desolate rooms, still half numbed by the cold, until he had noticed a human presence at the far end of one of the rooms. He had taken off his steamed-up glasses and approached. The human figure had turned out to be a girl, standing motionless in front of a painting. The Master had come up behind her to get a better look at both the girl and the painting.
The painting was
St Francis Preaching
to the Birds
by Oskar Laske. The girl was very beautiful. She was staring at the painting as if it were a window wide open on a dream, and she was crying: her cheeks were streaked with big tears.
“…by a study carried out on a number of Asian and African men who had died of other causes, more than 30 per cent of fifty-year-olds given post mortems present signs of a carcinoma in the prostate…”
The Master ignored this bothersome interference and
reestablished
radio contact with the spaceship of memories.
Without a second thought, he had asked her in his laboured German, “Why are you crying?”