The Last Man Standing

by Davide Longo

  Renato, a sociology lecturer, was waiting at a little corner table well away from the window. With his short hair, broad swimmer’s shoulders, and his tanned face despite it being autumn, the man was the very image of health and hunger for life. He looked like one of those winged lions on the end of banisters in apartment buildings where no expense has been spared on the marble. They shook hands, sat down, and ordered freshly squeezed orange juice and barley coffee.

  “You and I are both people of superior intelligence,” Renato had started, “So I’m sure you won’t mind if I skip the ‘I’m so sorry’ and ‘I can imagine how you must be feeling.’”

  Leonardo nodded in the most macho way his lanky figure allowed him.

  “I’m not here only for myself,” Renato went on, “but on behalf of many of your colleagues, most of whom, I must say at once, will not have the courage to support you in public, but share my esteem for you and believe that what has happened cannot be other than the logical consequence of things.”

  Leonardo waited, but the man seemed to have nothing more to add.

  “What things?” he felt forced to ask.

  The man smiled, like an experienced skipper warned by a radio station of bad weather at sea.

  “Most of the girl students,” he said, “are sluts and use their bodies to try to get what they want, and then they yell rape if for some reason they can’t have it. As though any man who cares for culture must be a eunuch! A castrated man stuck behind the lecturer’s desk to entertain a gaggle of female idiots showing themselves off for their own amusement, in the certain knowledge that the teacher wouldn’t know what to do with them if he had them.”

  Leonardo studied his coffee: it had delicate verdigris reflections, striking if entirely inappropriate, and tasted like boiled cabbage. He had never drunk barley coffee before, but then he had never spent three nights in a row without sleeping either.

  “I’m grateful for your moral support,” he started, “but—”

  “Our support is unconditional,” Renato interrupted, a fragment of orange hanging from his lip making him look even more deeply committed. “And we’ll bring pressure within the university to have this business set aside. The fact that you are also a writer doesn’t make things any easier, but many of us have passed the same way and could tell you that what in the morning may seem to have been a storm almost always turns out by evening to have been nothing more than a gentle breeze. But I would advise you not to try to extricate yourself just by fencing with a mere foil. You must reply with the same weapons used to attack you. You don’t know it yet, but you have much more to lose than to gain. The sooner you make that clear, the sooner you will be able to take a milder view of things.”

  Leonardo realized the pointlessness of any attempt at explanation. Taking his silence for tacit agreement, the man placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “Here’s my cell phone number,” he had said, “give me a call.”

  Leonardo took the card he offered. The man got up.

  “I won’t hide it from you, but I always thought you were probably a bit of a wimp. A man with lots of brain, but not much in the balls department. I have to admit I was wrong. You even deceived me.” Then he squeezed Leonardo’s hand, paid the bill, and left, offering Leonardo a final smile from the other side of the window.

  Leonardo had never seen or heard of him again, but a year later, by which time he had already lost his job at the university and any chance of seeing his daughter again, he had noticed his name in the pages of a daily paper to which Renato had begun contributing a column, commenting and explaining the ins and outs of current affairs.

  Six months later the daily closed down. By that time Leonardo had moved to M. and heard nothing more, good or bad, about Renato or any other of his former university colleagues.

  He spent the afternoon sitting on the veranda staring at the rows of vines on which the grapes had started to wither, the air full of the constant buzzing of bees attracted to the ruins of the store by the smell of cooked grapes.

  The hot weather continued and the vegetation on the far side of the river took on a ferocious yellow hue. Clouds above the mountains hinted at autumn, but for the time being the wind confined them to France.

  It was already evening when Elio came into the yard on his bicycle and stopped short of the steps. He was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and blue striped trousers. His folded jacket was clipped to the pannier rack. Drumming his fingers on the handlebars as if describing the scene in Morse code, he stared at the pile of blackened rubble.

  “Well, look at that,” he said.

  Leonardo picked up his glass from the African wood table and drank a mouthful of water. It tasted good. At the time he had decided to move to M. the excellence of the water had come first in the list of advantages he had looked forward to. This list had been one of the last ideas suggested by his psychiatrist. In fact, after a month of telephone calls, the man had told him he could do nothing more for him unless he came to the office by car. Leonardo had promised to think about it but had done nothing. So, from one day to the next, what he had thought of as an essential lifeline had been cut off. And this had been the second point on his list.

  “Would you give me a hand to finish the grape harvest?”

  Elio looked at him as one might look at someone on the bridge of a ship heading to a place from which he was unlikely to return.

  “You must be joking.”

  Leonardo shook his head.

  “If you don’t, in a few days the grapes will have to be thrown away.”

  Bauschan came out onto the veranda and sat down beside Leonardo. He had a slipper in his mouth, but his serious eyes were fixed on Elio. Apart from a shambling gait and huge paws, there was almost nothing left of the puppy with the round stomach he had once been; he seemed more like the miniature version of an adult dog.

  “Even if we did harvest the grapes, what could we do with them?” Elio said. “The wine growers haven’t even harvested their own.”

  Leonardo drank more water. Far off, beyond the river, he thought he could see movement amid the yellow stubble. It turned out to be two men carrying jerry cans down to the waterside. The sky was clear, but the heat made the atmosphere transparent.

  “Maybe I can give them to the cooperative,” he said.

  “Do you think they’ll be getting orders anymore?” Elio snorted. “Most of the wine used to be exported to northern Europe and America. Have you noticed it’s been nearly a year since the last truck passed on the main road?”

  Leonardo went back to contemplating the point where the hill met the river. The two men had stopped on the bank; one was filling a container, while the other was watching the road that touched the edge of the river two hundred meters lower down before regaining height with a couple of sharp bends.

  “Anyway, if you could spare a couple of afternoons to give me a hand I’d be grateful,” he said.

  Elio set the bicycle on its stand and took a few steps toward the veranda. Leonardo heard him go into the house, take a glass, fill it with water, drink, rinse it, and put it back in its place. When he came back out he placed his hands on the back of the empty chair.

  “The people who started the fire were not the ones you think,” he said.

  Leonardo watched the men on the other side of the river carry their containers across the last open stretch of field and disappear into the forest.

  “Who was it then?” he said.

  Elio put his hands in his pockets.

  “The schools are still shut and the boys are hanging out all day with nothing to do. The other day four or five of them had a few words with that young man who was staying with you.”

  Leonardo rubbed one of Bauschan’s ears between his fingers. It was like silk. The sun was sinking and the shadow of the blackened walls of the store was reaching the edge of the veranda. Elio returned his hands to the back of the wooden chair and studied them, as if he suspected they might have changed color while
in his pockets.

  “Gabri’s in touch with her sister in Marseilles. She says they’re going to close the frontier, and these may be the last good days for crossing it. I’d like her to take the children, but she doesn’t want to go alone.”

  Bauschan barked twice at the hazel grove near the house and a few seconds later a stocky shape emerged from the thicket. The wild boar looked fearlessly at them, then it grunted and three striped piglets came through the opening it had made.

  The little family filed past the veranda at a gentle trot and disappeared behind the remains of the store. When they had gone, Bauschan sniffed the scent of forest in the air and lifted his head to see what the two men might have to say about it.

  “There seems to be some gasoline at C.,” Elio said. “Shall I get you some too?”

  Leonardo shook his head. The sun had half disappeared behind the mountains; the sky was turning red and a few clouds that looked like ginned cotton were appearing in the east. The buzzing of the bees had stopped.

  Adele’s house was neither a farmhouse nor a modern home but one of the few buildings built in the seventies of the last century, when the hills were about to become a pilgrimage destination for tourists from the Nordic countries and America.

  Coming into the yard, Leonardo was greeted by cries from the geese in the poultry pen. There were three of them, one male and two female, and they usually scratched around freely, hurling themselves at anyone who ventured on their territory. After their most recent ambush, the postman had started leaving the mail in the fork of a pear tree a few meters from the gate.

  Hearing the noise of the geese, Adele came out of the house, her hair thrown roughly back, as if she had just been walking against the wind on a pier in Normandy. She was wearing a flowered dress under her apron and her legs were enclosed in brown tights. Her shoulders were those of a woman who had done a lot of swimming in her youth, but she had the hips and legs of an elderly peasant woman. On her feet were a pair of flip-flops.

  “Ciao, Adele. Do you have time for a treatment?”

  “Time’s the only thing I do have,” the woman answered.

  The kitchen was cool and full of cheap furniture. On the mantelpiece several vases with medicinal herbs were lined up and a yellow clock was ticking on the wall. The walls badly needed a coat of whitewash, but the total effect of the atmosphere was somehow restful. The table was set for two.

  “We can do it another day,” Leonardo said. “It’s nearly dinnertime, I forgot.”

  Adele dropped a leek into the pan boiling on the stove, then rinsed her hands.

  “If it hadn’t suited me I’d have said no,” she said, drying her hands on her apron.

  They went into the room where she kept her massage bed. Leonardo took off his sandals and lay down.

  It was a small room with walls of a gentle yellow. No posters, pictures, shelves, or books, just a small table holding a jar of ointment, a wristwatch, and a notebook.

  Adele sat down on the stool, took a little ointment from the jar, and began working it with her thumbs into the soles of Leonardo’s feet. She did this for about ten minutes without a word from either of them. Her fingers moved quickly as if running over a pattern they knew well but that sometimes needed to be explored with careful precision. Through the only window Leonardo watched the donkey grazing in the field behind the house.

  “Have you heard what happened yesterday?”

  Adele nodded, and the little oval she wore around her neck with the portrait of her husband moved against her wrinkled chest. When Leonardo was a boy, the man had toured the Langhe district in a small truck selling viticultural products. He was of Ligurian origin, and it was said he had been a billiard player when young, good enough to compete in serious championships, but in his free time doing the rounds of the fairs to relieve the farmhands in the bars of the money they had earned working with animals.

  Adele first met him at the railway station in Genoa. She was just back from South America, where she had been living for six months with a shaman, and the man had been in Viareggio and reached third place in the national championships.

  Before she agreed to marry him she had made quite clear what he already knew, that championships were fine but fleecing people at fairs must stop. In any case, cheating people out of their money involves constant traveling; you cannot do it to the local people where you live. The men, blinded by pride, may allow themselves to be milked for years, but sooner or later their women will find a way of getting their own back on you.

  He was a man known for good sense and discretion and would not have wanted to argue. Leonardo had once seen him dominating the billiard table in the bar, but when a stranger challenged him he had handed the cue to someone else, saying his wife was waiting for him at home.

  “Do you think I ought to do something?” Leonardo asked Adele.

  “What would you like to do?”

  “Go and talk to the people who started the fire.”

  Adele went on working on Leonardo’s thin feet. Her hands were barely warm, like ashes disturbed hours after a fire has gone out.

  “Last year Laica had six puppies, but the next day there were only five. Bitches sometimes notice one of the little ones is too weak and eat it to make sure there’s enough milk for the others.”

  Leonardo locked his hands behind his head and looked up at the flowered lampshade, noticing the black shapes of dead flies inside the ridged glass bowl. One was much longer than the others: a huge wasp.

  “Is that a metaphor?” he asked.

  “Don’t use words like that with me. You being a professor doesn’t interest me in the least. You don’t even know how to light a fire without matches.”

  Leonardo let his head fall back and dozed off. He was awoken by the cracking of his own feet as the woman squeezed them between her hands. He had no idea how much time had passed.

  “There,” Adele said.

  Leonardo got off the bed and slipped on his sandals. Adele looked at the notebook where she had divided the pages in two columns.

  “You’ve already paid,” she said “Last time I hadn’t any change to give you.”

  They went back to the kitchen where the pan on the stove was spreading a good smell of boiled vegetables and rosemary. Beyond the misted windows there was little light, but he could make out a pile of firewood and the white of the birches that formed a crown around the courtyard.

  “Is Sebastiano at home?” Leonardo asked.

  Adele took a piece of cheese wrapped in parchment paper from the refrigerator and put it on the table.

  “He’s upstairs. Tell him supper’s ready.”

  Leonardo climbed the stairs and went along the corridor that led to two bedrooms and the bathroom. Sebastiano’s door was closed. Leonardo knocked and looked around the door. The room was tidy with nothing but a single bed, a wardrobe with two doors, a writing desk, and a bookcase. On the walls were a crucifix and a poster of Machu Picchu. Sebastiano was standing by the window. Leonardo knew that the night before he must have seen the glare of the fire.

  “No one was hurt,” he said.

  Sebastiano turned, showing his hollow cheeks and humped nose. He was ten years younger than Leonardo, but a bald head surrounded by thin hair made him look older. An African totem pole in a sweat suit.

  “I need a hand with the grape harvest,” Leonardo said. “Can you help me?”

  Sebastiano nodded, parting his lips to show extra-large teeth.

  “Thanks,” Leonardo said. “Your mother’s waiting. See you tomorrow then.”

  As he closed the door, Sebastiano turned back to the window. Leonardo went downstairs and back into the kitchen. Adele had served the soup.

  “Will you stay?” she said.

  “Thanks, but I’m tired. I think I’ll read a bit and go to bed.”

  “You should always go to bed early and get up early. But you sleep too much, walk too little, and are always reading. If you were a man who works with his hands it would be all right
, but people like you need to do a lot of walking.”

  “I could always become someone who works with his hands,” said Leonardo, smiling.

  “You’re too old now to be any different. And you’ve done too much studying.”

  The courtyard was dark and there was a faint smell of fruit in the air. Leonardo went to the bicycle, which he had leaned against a wall. Adele watched from the doorway.

  “When the time comes, you should take Sebastiano with you,” she said.

  Leonardo put down the leg he had raised to mount the saddle.

  “When the time comes for what?”

  “When the time comes to go.”

  “But I’ve no intention of going anywhere,” he smiled.

  Adele touched first one eye and then the other to indicate either exhaustion or far-sightedness. On her cheeks was a complicated pattern of wrinkles and veins.

  “But that’s what you should do all the same.”

  Leonardo accidentally touched his bicycle bell and its trill spread through the courtyard. The surrounding silence was so complete it seemed the sound would radiate away to infinity without meeting an obstacle. He felt a great need for his own armchair, with a cup of coffee in his hand and a book on his knee.

  “Ever since he was a child Sebastiano has talked in his sleep,” his mother said. “I often go into his room to listen. He talks to people who are no longer alive and others who are yet to come. Take him with you, he’ll be useful to you.”

  Sebastiano could be heard coming down the stairs. He passed behind Adele.

  “You’re right to finish harvesting the grapes,” the woman said, looking up at the sky where a modest moon was shining.

  “It’s not good to let grapes rot. A sign people are going mad. Like not combing your hair or washing yourself. People sometimes come to me with dirty feet and when they realize it they apologize by saying ‘No wonder with what’s happening!’ But your feet are always clean. You haven’t gone mad yet.”

  Suddenly the geese began honking for no reason and Adele shut them up with a cry Leonardo had heard Mongolian shepherds use to make dromedaries run, and then she dismissed him and went back into the house.