Read The Parrots for Free Online Page B

weathers and all seasons, with their plastic buckets beneath the spouts of the fountains, the flower-sellers were there.
    One flower-seller for every person in love in the city, The Beginner had thought the first time he had noticed that unusual presence.
    There are flowers for leaving people and flowers for winning their hearts, flowers for seduction and flowers for betrayal, flowers for lying and flowers for swearing, flowers for birth and flowers for death. There are flowers, and above all flower-sellers, for every state of mind of every inhabitant of Rome. Every Roman has his own personal flower-seller, ready to rescue him at those moments in life when he finds himself powerless to deal with the amazing meaninglessness of existence, stunned, dazed, without ideas or words, his head as empty as a vase, which can only be filled with equally stupid and senseless flowers. Pointless, wonderful, scented tributes to human frailty.
    But the strangest of all the things that happened in Rome was something else: moped chains without mopeds. Sheathed in coloured rubber tubes, tied to posts, to traffic lights, to bus shelters, to traffic islands, bolted to the bars of gates or basements, with the links intact and the padlocks closed, in defiance of the laws of theft. Every time The Beginner saw one, he couldn’t help wondering
how it had ended up there
, imagining the events that had led up to its being there, events of which the chain represented nothing other than the obscure seal. Maybe the thief had opened the chain without forcing the padlock. But how? With a hairpin like you see in spy films? Or with one of those tools that only thieves and panel-beaters use? Or maybe, more simply, he had the keys. But if so, how did he get hold of them? What if it was the actual owner of the moped who had stolen it? But did it make any sense to steal your own moped? And besides, even if you could get past these logical obstacles, you had to assume that after opening the padlock and stealing the moped the thief had taken care to turn back and lock everything up again. All of which implied a great deal of time at his disposal, combined with a remarkable degree of self-control and a fanatical love of order that was positively anal.
    So much for the chains. Then there were the mopeds themselves . Abandoned at the sides of the street, and gradually cannibalized , as if invisible mice or mechanical bacteria picked the bodywork clean at night, starting with the softest parts, first the saddles with their foam-rubber fillings, the plastic chain guards, the rubbery wire casings, then the more difficult Plexiglas windscreens , the tough indicator fairings, the indigestible Bakelite rear-view mirrors, until the mopeds had been reduced to sinister skeleton-like frames.
    Something else apparently inexplicable, which also happened in Rome, and at that precise moment, was that the shoe box on the seat beside the driver’s seat of The Beginner’s car was moving.Or rather, that something inside it was moving, and as we know that what was inside was the corpse of a black parrot, that could only mean two things: one, that the parrot wasn’t dead, and two, that it was alive.
    When the box jumped, The Beginner, who had been planning to consult the Yellow Pages in search of a good taxidermist as soon as he got home, took fright, skidded, got back on the carriageway —provoking in a motorcyclist a fervent and moving invocation of the dead people in his family—pulled over and cautiously opened the box. From under the lid, electric eyes were staring at him with a look of hatred.
     
    The Beginner came out of the shower and stared at his own naked body in the mirror. The down that climbed like ivy up his abdomen from his pubes and sprouted on his chest, the swollen belly, like that of a drowned man or of Christ being taken down from the cross, or like the ascitic fluid that accumulates in the abdomen in the sick or the cirrhotic: he wasn’t looking well. Lately,