She sat in the sun with her eyes closed, breathing slowly, trying to savor that moment of bliss. Maybe all she’d needed was a little time to reorient. After all, being on her own, without having to work, was a new state of mind. That’s when she heard a low, insistent sound coming closer to her. Diana opened her eyes just in time to see a white streak, giant wings flapping low over her head. She ducked to avoid the strike of the bird’s razor-sharp claws. She ran inside and frantically shut the French door. The seagull kept wailing, and its racket alerted three more birds, which came flying from different directions, ready to fight the enemy as a team. The wailing seagull was the biggest of them all, with wings that spanned almost five feet. Diana and the bird were face-to-face. She met its glaucous red-circled eyes; filled with rage; the bird thumped its beak repeatedly on the glass. At such close range, it looked wilder and dirtier than the ones she had seen darting across the river during her morning runs; some of its feathers were broken and stained by soot. They stared at each other with hatred. She felt as if her future assassin had singled her out and wasn’t going to forget what she looked like.
* * *
“I say, please no go on terrace, signora!” Massimo held out his hands and looked up to the heavens above, exasperated. There was nothing they could do, he said in his halting English. He and the handyman who worked around the palazzo had tried everything to keep the seagulls away: alarms, ultrasonic devices, a reflective scare tape, scarecrows in the shape of owls. Nothing worked. One just had to be patient and wait for the hatching season to come to an end.
“Nonsense. There must be a way to get rid of them!” Diana snapped, and realized she was using her old grown-up voice at last.
Seagulls are monogamous creatures that mate for life and rarely divorce. They have a strong societal structure that works effectively against predators to their breeding colonies, as they will gang up on the intruder with up to a hundred gulls and drive them away.
Diana stared at the page she’d just Googled. She added the word ROME to SEAGULL ATTACK, and a new list of articles popped up. Apparently, the birds’ numbers had been rising since the first couple mated on the terrace of a famous ethologist back in 1971. Tens of thousands had been counted years back, but by now even that number might have more than doubled; it was impossible to keep track of them. Children had been targeted by hungry gulls, sandwiches seized from their hands; old ladies had been taken to emergency rooms with bleeding heads; the population of house sparrows had been decimated; a Chihuaha had been dismembered and left half eaten. Tourists were no longer allowed to have breakfast on the terraces of their quaint hotels because of the ferocious gangs of avian families. The seagulls “had become an army of barbaric invaders,” one page declared. Fueled by the adrenaline produced by her encounter, Diana tweaked her search, typing two words into the Google home page: SEAGULL REMOVAL.
* * *
The man’s name was Ivo.
He sounded quiet and professional on the phone. His English was flawless—apparently, he’d spent a few years in Canada working on a farm. He listened to Diana recounting the attack on the roof, unfazed by her description. He said he could help, but it was necessary to meet beforehand because the procedure was rather complicated; it involved more than just one session, and he needed to explain to his clients exactly how it worked before they could made a decision.
Diana suggested they meet at the Caffè Perù on Via di Monserrato, close to where she lived. It was an old-fashioned bar with a colorful fifties decor—bright tiles and lots of mirrors everywhere—a place that the Rome for Nomads website described as “very popular among hipsters at aperitivo time.”
When Diana arrived around seven, Caffè Perù was already crowded. People were standing outside with their drinks in hand or placed on the roofs of parked cars. Guys in loose, expensive outfits and girls with heavy eyeliner and dramatic lipstick chatted amiably, smoking cigarettes, laughing, flirting. Definitely a younger crowd, she noticed, looking at ease, as if they had all just come from some interesting gallery opening and were pausing before heading toward another cocktail party. Diana quickly walked inside, feeling slightly left out.
“Diana?”
A man in a vintage fatigue shirt raised a hand from his spot at the bar. Diana had expected Ivo to be a slightly more romantic character. She had pictured him tall and muscular, with an interesting nose, and a shock of dark curls, a man who had lived in the Italian countryside and the Canadian woods. But Ivo was probably in his mid-forties, with a ruddy complexion, a beer belly and a bald patch on his head. They shook hands and he gestured for her to sit next to him on the high stool at the bar. He ordered a Diet Coke, she a mojito. Diana was excited: walking into a bar to meet up with a stranger to discuss a problem concerning her life in Rome was finally giving her a sense of purpose.
At first Ivo spoke in a rather impersonal tone, as if he were reciting a lecture he knew by heart. He said it was going to be a slow process. He would have to come at least two or three times a week.
“Driving out the gulls isn’t going to happen in a day; those birds are diehards and sometimes they fight back in groups.”
He paused and took a sip of his Diet Coke.
“It is going to be expensive,” he added.
“How much?” she asked.
He told her the figure. It was a lot, but she could afford it. And besides, something told her it was going to be worth it. Not so much because it would allow her use of the terrace, but because she felt very strongly that it was going to be an adventure. Moreover, she sensed it was a way to exercise her power, perhaps a battle she could win. And as such, it was exactly what she needed.
Suddenly Diana started seeing seagulls everywhere.
At daybreak, the cawing started, its chorus resonating throughout the city, like a call to prayer. In the grayish light of dawn she watched their silhouettes perched on the slanting roofs and terraces they had elected to make their homes. At night, as she walked along the Via dei Fori Imperiali, flocks of them swirled above the beams that illuminated the ruins. They fluttered like moths around a lamp; lit from below, their wings acquired a golden glow so that they looked like fleeting ghosts against the blackness of the sky.
* * *
Women had been openly flirting with Mark throughout the years they’d been a couple, even when Diana was standing right next to him, holding a drink, with her wedding ring in plain sight. She was pretty in a harmless way: devoid of mystery or complexity. Her skin was too white, her eyes too blue, her freckles too childlike, her body too soft. She knew that as soon as she turned her back, the women in the room would ask themselves how was it possible that she, of all people, was the wife of such a sexy, successful man. An architect who looked like a film star? Diana came from some money—was that the reason? The women—younger, older—flirting so openly with Mark didn’t think her worthy of their respect.