The Last Man Standing

by Davide Longo

  On the other hand the woman at the pharmacy, one of those waiting for oil, asked him how his journey had been as soon as she saw him come in. Leonardo said it had been fine and asked if he could have some cotton balls and sterile gauze. Before he left the woman complimented him on the dog and remarked that they would meet again in the evening when the oil was distributed. Leonardo said Elio would see to everything.

  As he made his way to the bar pushing his bicycle, he remembered a painting by Balthus of a young girl who could have been the pharmacist when she was young and the way she had not yet lost her adolescent confidence in the sensual gesture of raising her arms and doing her hair. It was said that nearly all women born with that quality lost it when they grew up, while those who had it later in life had nearly always picked it up along the way, not having originally possessed it. This to him seemed to reward hard work rather than talent, something that hardly ever happened in nature, and the thought generated a surge of good humor in him.

  Pulling his shirt out of his trousers and checking that the smell of the dog’s urine was not too powerful, he went into the bar.

  “Our professor!”

  The postman was leaning against the ice cream freezer with another man who did not live in the village but was there to see his ailing mother. They were in the corner of the shop where it had once been possible to leaf through a national daily or local weekly and sports magazines. Now the fridge was silent and back issues of a hunting magazine were stacked on it. Danilo, the proprietor, and three other men were sitting around a table playing cards.

  “Good morning,” Leonardo said.

  None of the four looked up from the cards to answer his greeting.

  Leonardo went to the bar and stood at an angle to it, so as to be able to keep an eye on the bicycle, which he had left outside with his shopping bags slung from its handlebars. The postman whispered something to the man beside him who smiled, revealing very irregular teeth: he was dressed for fishing and a thick white beard under his chin linked his ears by the longest possible route. The postman, in contrast, had a freshly shaven face; he was separated from his wife, and it was several months now since he had given up explaining to people why letters were not reaching them or were arriving weeks late. In any case, the explanations he offered came from a ministerial circular, which, as everyone knew, meant that they had only a limited connection with truth.

  Danilo slammed down his last card, then got up and went behind the bar, and without Leonardo saying anything made him a cappuccino without froth. When it was ready he put it down on the bar and, giving an expressionless glance at the dog’s snout sticking out of Leonardo’s pocket, went back to his cards. His companions had totaled the score and dealt the cards for the next hand. All four looked contrite, as if only playing to punish themselves.

  “But I think,” the man with the postman said, “they must be found. We have to know what they look like and find out what they plan to do.”

  Leonardo looked down at Bauschan’s smooth head. A fly had settled on one of the dog’s ears; he smiled and blew it away.

  “I’d like to know what the professor thinks,” the postman said.

  Leonardo looked at him. In the first months after his return, the postman had come every morning to deliver letters from the lawyer, the court, the publisher, and readers offering either support or expressing disappointment at what had happened, but with the passing of time the only letters that kept arriving were written in his own hand and returned by the woman to whom he had sent them. A correspondence that made sure Leonardo and the postman still met roughly once a week.

  “About what?” Leonardo said.

  “We know you’re just back from a trip. You must have some idea about what’s going on.”

  “The professor has other things to think about,” said one of those at the table. “Unlike the rest of us.”

  No one laughed, but the men near the fridge exchanged glances with the card players. Leonardo took a sip of coffee and wiped his lips with a napkin from the dispenser.

  “I saw nothing unusual,” he said.

  The postman drank from the glass of white wine he had on the freezer.

  “You must have been lucky,” he said smiling. “To listen to this group it seems they’re everywhere.”

  An alarm went off. Danilo pressed a button on his big wristwatch and the alarm stopped, then he went to the counter and used a remote control to switch on the television in the corner of the room. The other players had already put down their cards and turned their chairs to face the screen. After the music introducing the broadcast, a woman newsreader with an expensive hairdo commented on images of an encampment in the middle of a forest with shacks of cardboard and sheet metal hidden in luxuriant vegetation. The camera showed men in uniform circulating among these rudimentary shelters with their camp beds and improvised pallets, blankets, gas cookers, and other objects.

  Finishing his cappuccino, Leonardo walked toward a wall with two doors, one leading to the toilet and the other marked PRIVATE. A man with a shaved head was sitting on the floor in the space between two video poker machines. His sharp, serious face was like a tool used for prying open doors. His eyes were black but not at all malicious.

  “Will you come to supper with me, Sebastiano?” Leonardo asked.

  The man looked up but did not move. His legs were drawn up to his chest, hiding his mouth.

  “Please come, we’ll make some pasta,” Leonardo said.

  It seemed to take Sebastiano a long time to get to his feet, and he made Leonardo, himself more than one meter eighty tall, look tiny. Sebastiano was as thin as a rake. He had large bones and hairy legs sticking out from a pair of Bermuda shorts stained with fruit. He looked like nothing so much as an enormous prehistoric bird.

  “Can I pay?” Leonardo asked, turning to the bar.

  Without taking his eyes off the television screen, Danilo placed the palm of his hand on a black book beside the till to indicate that he had marked it down. Now the newsreader with the expensive hairdo was giving the latest news about the eastern front, while a small panel was showing images of a roadblock where three National Guards armed with machine guns were forcing several unkempt and very dirty people to get out of a car.

  Before he left the village, Leonardo gave Elio the money he should have repaid him the evening before, then he and Sebastiano set off for home, pushing the bicycle. It was mid-September, but the one o’clock sun was hot on the asphalt, making it shimmer in the distance. Leonardo asked Sebastiano to walk on his left, in order to give shade to the sleeping dog in his pocket.

  Lupu and his family arrived early in the morning.

  Leonardo, woken by the sound of cars, came out onto the veranda in pajamas and raised an arm in the gray light of early morning to greet them. They did not have the van of previous years but two cheap secondhand cars, and they were not wearing their usual dinner jackets over white tank tops, but T-shirts with slogans in English and well-worn sneakers.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” Leonardo said.

  Lupu stood beside his car staring at Leonardo, as if trying to make out something he should have been able to see even at that distance. Despite his tanned skin and powerful arms, there was an unfamiliar fragility about him. His cousin, who had gotten out of the second car, was looking at the vines sloping down beyond the low fence of the yard. All the others had stayed inside the cars.

  “Come in,” Leonardo said, “I’ll make you some coffee.”

  At a nod from Lupu, his wife got out of the red car with their small son and older daughter and Lupu’s two brothers, both similar to him, even if different in build. The daughter was seventeen now and already a woman who had learned to show herself off to her best advantage, while her mother had grown thinner in the face and broader in the hips. In the second car were Lupu’s cousin’s wife and a teenage boy Leonardo had not seen before. This boy had different eyes from all the others; uncertainty seemed to have produced something sharp and fearle
ss in him. None of them were wearing gold on their necks, fingers, or wrists.

  They sat on the veranda and accepted the coffee Leonardo had mixed from real and ersatz coffee, and then they put their cups on the floor and watched the rising sun dispel the gray from the vineyard and the forest beyond the river.

  Bauschan was gnawing at one of Lupu’s wife’s sandals. Leonardo called him and the dog sprang over to him. His eyes had been open now for a couple of weeks, turning out to be a silvery light blue. Ottavio had established that he was a cross between husky and some sort of hound with his pendulous ears, plus a touch of setter in his back and gait. There were broad black patches on his ash-gray coat.

  “That’s a dog who will follow you even if you throw yourself in the river with a stone around your neck,” Ottavio had declared before launching into a long speech from which Leonardo understood that the dog would grow to medium size and would be incapable of excelling in any of the special qualities of his ancestors but would preserve a decent dose of each.

  “Now go and have a rest,” Leonardo said. “You can settle in over the store like in previous years.”

  He took the cups to the sink and washed them, and then he looked out of the studio window. Lupu and the others were standing in the middle of the yard holding plastic bags and old triacetate sports bags with the logos of firms, banks, and sponsors that no longer existed.

  The teenager was the only one not carrying anything; he was talking to the others in an excited voice. He could have been sixteen but was probably one of those boys who long retain the traits of adolescence only to lose them from one day to the next. When the adolescent had finished speaking, Lupu said a few words. The boy lowered his eyes as if they had suddenly grown heavy, and they all moved toward the storehouse.

  During the morning Leonardo reread The Death of Ivan Ilyich. By eleven o’clock he had come to some conclusions he thought he could develop, but by eleven thirty they already seemed odd to him. The sun beat down relentlessly; none of the few distant wisps in the sky could really have been called a cloud. Since they had retired, Lupu and his family had made no sound; the guest rooms, that was the name Leonardo used these days for the rooms above the store, seemed as empty as ever, apart from an orange towel spread over a windowsill.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” Leonardo said to the dog.

  He and Bauschan crossed the yard, but when they reached the vineyard the dog stopped. Turning to follow his gaze, Leonardo saw Lupu at the door of the store in shorts and work shoes.

  They descended the headland together and halfway down entered one of the rows of vines, following it until the vineyard ended in a field of parched grass. The vines were heavy with grapes, the bunches a powerful violet under a thick coating of dust. Lupu let a bunch slip into his hand as one might lift the breast of a woman who was no longer young, but to whom one feels an enormous debt of gratitude.

  “This winter at the workshop I worked nights so no one would know they’d taken me back. I’d go in through the back after dark and find a note telling me what needed to be done. For a while Tashmica was able to do a few hours cleaning there too, but then they did not ask for her again.”

  Lupu delicately picked a grape, dusted it on the sleeve of his shirt, and put it into his mouth.

  “No one even trusts official papers. The man who took us on for the peaches had problems and had to ask us to go. We’ve spent the last month near the mountains with a relative.”

  Bauschan was tormenting a large lizard. The reptile seemed stupefied by the sun and made no attempt to get away. Leonardo watched its tail, detached from its body, writhing on the ground.

  “What will you do after the grape harvest?”

  Lupu thrust his hands into his pockets and looked over to where the haze was growing denser and the sky was turning opaque with heat. He seemed to be listening for a far-off noise.

  “I don’t know whether to go back to the town. Mira’s afraid of going back to school. Before we left we took everything to my sister’s; it’s not safe to leave stuff in an empty home, those people come in and steal and smash everything.”

  “Who comes in?”

  Lupu shrugged.

  “Gangs. People say they’re searching for outsiders, that they’re everywhere and that it’s not true the army has dealt with them. I haven’t seen them. I did see two bodies on the pavement, but they weren’t outsiders.”

  Leonardo picked a ladybug from a leaf and watched it walk on his finger. It was a pale orange and extremely elegant. In the heavy midday silence he imagined the sound of its footsteps.

  “When you’ve finished, you can all stay on here,” he said.

  Lupu nodded without conviction. Bauschan, sitting in the shade, was watching the final twitches of the lizard’s tail. The main body of the reptile, a few centimeters away, was interested only in soaking up the heat it needed to keep its tiny heart beating.

  “How long do you think the harvesting will take?”

  Lupu looked at where the vineyard ended and the hillside began. A ditch had been dug and the strip of meadow beyond the ditch turned to forest farther up.

  “Four days. There’s two less of us than last year.”

  Leonardo removed a fragment of earth from one of his sandals.

  “Starting tomorrow?”

  “As soon as possible.” Lupu gave a half smile.

  “That can’t be too soon,” Leonardo said with the other half of the smile.

  At the end of the first day of the harvest they ate in the courtyard on a board propped on two trestles, after which the women carried the plates to the wash house behind the store while the men sat watching the smoke rise from their cigarettes and disperse before it could reach the starry sky.

  For a while Leonardo studied their gas-lit faces, unable to read either doubt or exhaustion on them, and then he wished them goodnight and went indoors to undress, brush his teeth, rub cream into his sunburned arms and neck, and get into bed.

  He would have liked to fall asleep instantly to wake again free of the constant pain in his arms, legs, back, ankles, and hands, as well as in the stomach muscles he had forgotten he had since the year before. That had been the last time he had found himself thinking the same thoughts in the same bed.

  Until he was twenty-five he had been a good long-distance runner and every evening, summer and winter, had covered a fifteen-kilometer course along the river and out of the city before returning to the old center. But after taking his doctorate he sacrificed sport to his university duties and work on his first novel. In a few years his longer muscles grew slack and the occasional outings he attempted in shorts after that led to cramps and a massively discouraging exhaustion.

  During the last thirty years his shoulders had curved and narrowed while his legs grew thin and his stomach got bigger even though he had always been a moderate eater and never drank alcohol. He now had the body of a man of fifty-two dedicated to books, intellectual speculation, and conversation. Not much use in the world now unfolding before his eyes.

  With these gloomy thoughts, Leonardo got out of bed and went into the kitchen in the dark. He poured a glass of water and went to the large window: there were no lights on in the guest rooms and the building was silent. Moonlight seemed to have covered the courtyard gravel with a thin layer of water.

  Seven years since I last made love, he thought.

  Bauschan had dirtied the parquet in two places and was now asleep on the carpet with his head between his paws, probably drunk. He had spent all day eating windfall grapes fermenting in the sun; seeing him stagger about, Leonardo had thought it best to put him indoors.

  He crouched down and stroked Bauschan’s neck. The dog seemed to smile in his sleep.

  Taking pen and paper from the drawer, he sat down at the table. When he had finished writing, he put the paper into a buff envelope, addressed it, and put it on the dresser, planning to mail it the next day when he went to get the money to pay Lupu. Going back to bed, he fell asleep immediatel
y and dreamed about a hotel room he had known many years before.

  “You really want the money now?” the cashier asked, looking over her spectacles at him.

  “Yes,” Leonardo smiled. “Please.”

  The woman touched her breast. Clearly her mind was somewhere else.

  “I realize it’s not very professional of me to mention it, but you took out a considerable sum only last week. I have to say this because this new withdrawal could cause a problem of liquidity.”

  Leonardo understood from the woman’s expression that a tediously practical complication was about to come into his life.

  He had known for some time that most people had emptied their accounts down to the last cent, hiding the money in their homes or goodness knows where, so as not to have to worry that they might one day be told at the bank that their money was no longer there. He had also known that it had been devalued or burned, or simply that money transfers no longer existed so that it could not be moved from one place to another, but Leonardo had never been sufficiently interested to get the idea into his head that one day his money might simply disappear. His only shrewd move had been to choose that particular bank because it had its central office in A. and no apparent ties with the major banks that had in the past closed down because of scandals, the mortgage crisis, or the fall in exports. He had deliberately chosen this particular bank because it raised money locally, kept it in the form of cash in a safe, and redistributed it in the same area.

  “When will it be possible for me to withdraw my money without causing problems?”

  The woman pursed her lips to indicate that she could not answer that offhand. The two of them were alone. The bank’s gray marble walls dated from the Fascist era, erected like the rest of the building in the middle of the village a century earlier. Only one of the building’s three doors was open; the others had been masked with opaque paper to prevent anyone seeing through to the other end of the hall. This despite the bank’s proclaimed motto: “Territory and Transparency.”