Mr. Palomar

Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino … “Shoo! Shoo!” Mr. Palomar rushed to the balcony, chasing away the pigeons that were eating the gazania leaves, piercing the succulent plants with their beaks, clinging with their claws to the branches of the overhanging bluebells, eating the blackberries, pecking out leaf after leaf at the parsley in a box near the kitchen, digging and scratching the pots, pulling out the soil and exposing the roots of the plants, as if the sole purpose of their flight was to ruin everything. The pigeons whose flight had once delighted the city squares had left behind a corrupt, dirty and polluting offspring, neither tame nor wild, but integrated into public institutions and therefore impossible to exterminate. The sky of Rome has long since fallen under the tyranny of these birds, which have made life difficult for all other species of birds in the region, which invade the free and diverse kingdom of the air with their similar, plucked, lead-gray uniforms.