In the following days Diana was possessed by a new fever. Something new had ruptured her quiet routine. She couldn’t quite name it yet, but it was like being in love again. She waited impatiently for Ivo to come back, but the love object wasn’t him. It was the hawk she wanted to see, to understand. To touch.
She no longer went for a run in the morning, forgot to buy food at the market and deserted the kitchen. She abandoned the novel completely now as well and used the laptop only to read whatever she could find out about hawks. She downloaded a book on falconry and watched a documentary about the Arab sheiks who bought hawks for astronomical sums at live auctions and flew them in the desert. Tended by servants, the sheiks camped at night in futuristic tents lit by bright neon lights and decorated with carpets and traditional fabrics. As they waited for the first light of day, they lay on carpets in their pristine, perfectly ironed tunics and white headdresses, each one lost in the screen of his phone. There was a scene where the sheiks were sitting cross-legged around a roasted sheep placed on a mound of rice and served on a silver plate. The men pulled and tore the meat off the bones with their hands and ate avidly, in a similar way to their hawks. In one scene, one of the men invited another to eat the heart. It had been reserved for this one sheik, perhaps because of his higher rank. Diana watched the man rip the heart from the rib cage. It was as big as a child’s fist, and the man bit into it.
* * *
Like most people living in big cities, she had never been interested in the avian world and its activity, but now, thanks to Ivo and his visits with Queen, she began to pay attention. He told her stories about the many other kinds of birds who lived in the city, and Diana began to walk around with her head turned upward.
The sky turned out to be such a busy universe. There was always something going on, unbeknownst to most people who walked beneath it, Ivo said. All one had to do was look up: birds fell in love, mated, competed, built nests, traveled south, stopped to refuel, to rest or to build a permanent home. Ivo told her about the Villa Doria Pamphili Park, up on the Gianicolo hill, how it had turned into a tropical oasis. A few parakeets, imported by pet shops from faraway countries, had escaped from their cages, found a home among its forest of maritime pines and reproduced exponentially. They had doubled in size and got stronger and bolder thanks to their regained freedom. Now the park was filled with their loud chittering and the constant flutter of bright-green feathers zooming from branch to branch. Then there were the starlings—swarms of them flew every evening in beautiful formations over the Tiber. According to Ivo, they flew into the city when nights got too cold in the countryside. To them, the light, the heat of people and traffic felt like a room with a fireplace to gather in. Diana watched them glide over the river at dusk and land on the plane trees along the Tiber. They kept calling one another, making sure not to leave anyone behind, and quieted down only when everyone was in place, like noisy children just before the light is turned off.
The sky over Rome was a highway teeming with life. A vast territory that gave Diana a sense of relief, unlike the ruins, the buried chambers, the underground catacombs. Her gaze had lifted and she felt light, energetic and somehow hopeful—although she wasn’t sure what exactly she was hoping for.
* * *
More than two weeks had gone by, and despite Ivo’s interventions, the gulls on the terrace hadn’t budged yet. Every time Diana attempted to walk out on the terrace, she heard their cawing, more aggressive than ever. At the end of another day of flights, she decided to confront Ivo.
“I’m just wondering…” she asked. “Could it be that Queen isn’t aggressive enough, in this case?”
They were sitting at the table in the kitchen. Ivo had placed the hawk back into her box, hooded and ready to go into sleep mode.
He seemed annoyed by her question.
“That’s not the point.”
By now Ivo had become used to Diana and was no longer so awkward around her. After Queen’s last flight of the day he would accept the Diet Coke she kept in the fridge especially for him. He had even yielded to her expensive refreshments. Feeding him had become a matter of principle for Diana, as though her objective was, snack by snack, to tame him, just as he had done with his bird.
She was getting used to him too. The dirt encrusted on his fingernails, the pungent smell emanating from his body, the blotchy and reddish skin, his grimy clothes, no longer troubled her. Despite all of that—or was it thanks to that?—Ivo carried within himself a kind of medieval energy that redeemed his looks.
“The thing is she’s alone against a large group,” he said, slowly lifting another Parmesan cube. “She needs to guard her back.”
Then he gestured toward the window.
“You see how she goes out and scares them off but after she flies back she always sits against a wall? She’s thinking strategically: she knows they could come back in force and attack her from different directions—that’s how clever she is. She makes sure she always has her back covered on one side.”
Diana nodded.
“Right. That’s very smart.”
“I told you that it would take time to drive them out. We’re almost there.”
There was a brief silence.
“It’s spring already and I haven’t been able to have lunch on my terrace once,” Diana said. “How much longer do you think, realistically?”
Ivo scratched his chin.
“Let me put it this way. If I brought Darko they’d work as a team and look after each other’s back. And that would be a completely different scene.”
“Darko?”
He paused and took a sip of his soda.
“My peregrine falcon. He’s three years old and a very challenging hunter. Peregrine falcons are the fastest animals on earth.”
“So why don’t we?”
“It’s not a good idea.”
“Why?”
He paused and wouldn’t answer. She raised her eyebrows quizzically.
“It’s not a clean job,” he said finally.
“How so?”
Ivo put down his glass and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He stood up, ready to go.
“There might be blood.”
Diana felt a thrill move along her spine. The idea of two predators reclaiming the territory on her behalf excited her beyond any expectation. But maybe this was wrong, maybe she was supposed to renounce her plan in order to avoid collateral damage.
“What exactly do you mean by that?” she asked in a guardedly casual way.
Ivo collected his leather jacket from the back of the chair and slowly put it on. “You can’t predict what will happen. What I’m saying is once my birds are together and feel safe enough, they will go all out.”