The Last Man Standing

by Davide Longo

  “You had some rubber dolphins you liked to have in your bath,” he answered. “I used to sit on the floor and read out their names: there was the bottlenose dolphin, Hector’s dolphin, and the spinner dolphin, the common one. You used to look at the pictures in the book and divide them into families on the edge of the bath. The one you liked best was the beluga.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A white dolphin from the northern seas. Did Alberto enjoy having his bath at home?”

  Lucia shook her head. Leonardo moved the book that had been lying open on his stomach while he was asleep to the little table; for a moment its silvered cover reflected the sky. A few drops landed on a metal sheet in the ruins of the store. In the vineyard fallen leaves had formed a mush the color and consistency of polenta.

  “One day I’d like to talk about it,” Lucia said.

  “About what?”

  “About what you’ve done.”

  Now the rain was beginning to fall in a tired manner, almost as if engaged in work it no longer felt up to.

  Leonardo looked at the mountains: a blue deprived of light, as if painted by someone who has just lost a war. Lucia’s gaze passed over her father’s pants, his patched pullover, and the long gray hair that reached to his shoulders.

  “We could do it this evening,” she said, smiling weakly, “after Alberto’s asleep.”

  His face was open and full of gentleness. There were no hidden reasons why this should be so, just as there are no reasons on a windless day for the lake facing you to be completely still. Something uncommon but hiding no secrets.

  “All right,” Leonardo said.

  Lucia tucked some loose hair behind her ear.

  “I’m going in now,” she said.

  “Fine.”

  “And you?”

  “I’d like to finish my book.”

  “You don’t have to, if you don’t like it.”

  “But I do like it.”

  “Sure?”

  “Sure.”

  “OK.”

  For supper they boiled three eggs and half a red cabbage and heated some leftover soup on the stove, to which they added a little fine pasta, and then, when it was all ready, Lucia filled a plate, took a spoon and fork, and disappeared into the corridor. She came back a minute later without the plate or cutlery. Then she picked a CD from the many available, put it on the stereo, and joined Leonardo at the table.

  “Where’s this music from?” she asked, putting the first forkful of cabbage into her mouth.

  “Mali.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Northwest Africa.”

  “Did you go there before it was closed?”

  “No.”

  “And to Africa?”

  “Once.”

  “Mamma’s been there many times.”

  “Yes. She’s been to lots of places.”

  Bauschan let out a sigh from the rug next to the stove where he was dozing. For a couple of weeks now he had started leaving the house to patrol the environs. He ranged further afield every day, and Leonardo was sure that that afternoon he had seen him trotting among the beeches on the hillside at the front of the house.

  “The apples smell good,” Leonardo said.

  Lucia looked at the pan on the stove where they were cooking.

  “I put in a little of Adele’s honey. The sugar’s nearly finished.”

  “That was a good idea.”

  After Elio’s orchard had been plundered, the only fruit they had been able to find had been these bitter wild apples.

  “Why does Adele’s son dress in that cowhide?” Lucia asked.

  Leonardo said he did not know, but that it was a recent development. To her next question he answered that Sebastiano wasn’t dumb but had just decided not to speak. They heard Alberto leave his room for the bathroom. Neither of them made any comment. Soon they heard the toilet flush and the steps of the child going back to his room.

  “Did you go to Africa because of your books?” Lucia asked.

  “No, for a demonstration.”

  “What sort of demonstration?”

  Leonardo looked at the egg he had just cut open. It had boiled too long and the yolk had a greenish tinge.

  “At the time of the closing down, a singer organized a meeting in the Congo, a sort of sit-in protest, and he invited directors, musicians, painters, and other such people. Flights were forbidden, but those who had private planes made them available. We chartered a plane from Italy.”

  “Cool!”

  “It wasn’t bad.”

  “And what did you all do?”

  “The program was made up of a series of meetings, concerts, processions, and documentaries, which everyone would have later found some way to project in his own country, but I only attended the first session, after which I fell ill with fever and had to stay in the hotel.”

  “For how long?”

  “A couple of weeks. The others left because their governments were threatening not to let them back in, but I had a high temperature and wasn’t allowed on the flight. They were terrified I’d caught some tropical illness. Your mother wrote to the papers and moved heaven and earth, or I’d have been stuck there.”

  “What a crazy story!”

  Leonardo nodded.

  “The person playing on this recording was my doctor. He gave me the CD as a present before I left.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “But what language did you speak with him?”

  “Colin spoke both English and French extremely well.”

  Lucia moved her fork automatically from the left to the right of her plate, keeping her eyes fixed on Leonardo’s face.

  “And you’ve never seen him since?”

  “No. We wrote to each other for a time, but then the net was blocked. The last I heard was that he had moved to South Africa.”

  Lucia put a forkful of cabbage into her mouth.

  “My literature teacher had lots of books by African writers. He used to photocopy parts of them and we would read them, but some of the parents didn’t like it. He could have lost his job.”

  “That would have been a pity.”

  “One of the stories was by a woman. I think she was called Jasmina.”

  “Jiasmina Tofi.”

  “It was about a boy who was desperate to have a pair of sunglasses, so while his mother was visiting her sick sister, he sold the well in the courtyard to a wandering peddler in exchange for a pair of Ray-Bans. By the time the mother got home, the man had put up a tent near the well and wanted to be paid for the water. In the end the boy died in a brawl in a disco and his mother married the peddler, who wasn’t as bad as he’d seemed to be.”

  Leonardo nodded. “She’s a good writer. Do you want some more?”

  Lucia shook her head.

  Leonardo went to pour what was left of the soup into Bauschan’s bowl. The dog watched but did not move. When Leonardo started clearing the table, Lucia vanished into the corridor, reappearing soon afterward with Alberto’s plate.

  “Has he eaten anything?”

  “The egg. He’s left all his greens.”

  Leonardo shook the tablecloth out of the window even though there had never been any crumbs on it since they had run out of bread, then poured hot water from the water heater into the sink and started washing the plates. Lucia sat down on the sofa. The CD had finished.

  “Is there any more African music?”

  “Yes, put on anything you like.”

  Lucia calmly studied the CDs arranged by geographical origin, period, and type: there were up to a thousand of them, mostly classical, and she chose one with a green cover. Then she went back to sit down with her knees drawn up to her chest. The light from the only lamp lit up the kitchen leaving the area of the sofa and stove in shadow.

  “That’s from Senegal,” Leonardo said. “Do you like it?”

  Lucia stared at a point in the floor where the floorboards changed color. Years e
arlier there had been a leak and an area of the parquet had been soaked with water, but in the deceptive light of the lamp it looked more as if the room was on two different levels separated by a small stair. Bauschan had gone to his bowl and was eating peacefully.

  “What’s the time?” Lucia asked.

  “After nine.”

  “Then I’ll be off to bed.”

  “Yes.”

  When the girl had left the room, Leonardo finished the dishes then he moved to the studio, where he put on a cashmere pullover. Since the children had come he had been keeping his things there, thus freeing the chest of drawers and wardrobe. Then he picked up the pillow, his toiletry bag, sheets, blanket, and pajamas piled on the desk and went back into the living room.

  He brushed his teeth and washed his face in the sink, opened the sofa, and prepared his bed. When his sleeping place was ready, he sat down and studied the night through the window: everything lit by the moon looked mute, magnificent, and cold. The CD had finished and the crackling of the stove was the only sound dividing him from the silence. It seemed that to get up and put on more music would be a huge undertaking. He scratched his shoulder, then his ear, then his shoulder again.

  He had no idea what might be passing through the head of that ten-year-old boy barricaded in his room all day. He had never seen him wash, weep, shout, be afraid, sleep, or even look sleepy. He had never heard him ask about his father or wonder aloud what would happen if Alessandra did not come back. Leonardo knew nothing of the boy’s likes and dislikes. Of what upset him or comforted him. Whether he slept on his stomach or whether his hair had always been the same length.

  Though he had not heard Lucia speak for seven long years, he had immediately recognized her language, while the boy remained an indecipherable hieroglyph. An idiom invented by goodness knows who to express goodness knows what. A box closed from the inside.

  In a dream the night before, Leonardo had found himself in the middle of a desolate expanse with no vegetation, sitting in front of a man with strange marks on his skin. The countryside around them was flat, without mountains or trees, or even a church tower or the outline of a building; there was no dust or stones or fragments of anything that could ever have existed: the earth was an immense expanse of solidified amber. Eventually the man opened his hand to show a little object unlike anything Leonardo had ever seen before or that he had ever heard anyone speak of. Then after saying a single word the man let himself slip to the ground, turning into burned paper, which was immediately blown away by the wind. Leonardo was left alone with the little object in his hand and that one incomprehensible word to define it, and small marks began appearing on his skin.

  Feeling cold, he went to put another log on the fire to make the flames climb the chimney again, and then he closed the door of the stove. Going back to the sofa, he stroked Bauschan between the ears, and the dog rolled onto his back to show where he wanted to be scratched. Leonardo obliged. Ever since he had given his bedroom to the children, the dog had taken to spending the night with him in the living room, curled up beside the stove. He had been of a mild and meditative nature from the start. His eyes were like blue steel buttons on a shabby military tunic.

  “Here I am,” Lucia said.

  They made some herbal tea and sat down at the table.

  Leonardo talked for twenty minutes without any interruption from Lucia and by the time he had finished the tea was cold.

  He drank it all the same, in small sips, while Lucia contemplated the night beyond the veranda, her face expressing a subtle disappointment, as if she had just discovered that the heavy backpack she had been carrying for so long was only half full of food but otherwise contained nothing but rocks and useless knick-knacks she could have gotten rid of long ago.

  “Mamma won’t be coming back, will she?”

  Leonardo stopped lifting his cup to his lips and put it back down on the table.

  “I’m sure she will come back,” he said.

  Lucia went on looking out at the darkness beyond the window. She had a small beauty spot above her lip and an extremely graceful neck.

  “She said one week and now four have passed.”

  “Sometimes you have to stay where you’re safe. I’m sure that’s what she must be doing. As soon as things settle down a bit, she’ll be back on the road.”

  Lucia looked at her cup, identical to her father’s but yellow.

  “I must tell you something I haven’t told you before,” she said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Yes I do. Mamma said I must.”

  Leonardo waited in silence. Lucia looked up, pale and serious.

  “She said if she didn’t come back in two weeks, to give our permits to you and tell you to take us to Switzerland.”

  Leonardo touched his shoe. He had an idea the laces had come loose, but that was not so.

  “Even so, I think it’s better we wait for her here,” he said. “With the money she left we can buy all we need. The important thing is to keep warm and not get ill.”

  Lucia looked down at her cup again. A fly that had been walking on the middle of the table flew away.

  “Mamma told me you talk like this.”

  “Like what?”

  She raised a shoulder.

  “Like everything’s always fine. She said she couldn’t stand it.”

  The two men were caught a few days later in an isolated house on the main road not far from the village.

  The proprietors, a couple with a three-year-old son, he a central-heating and plumbing engineer and she a nurse, had left at the beginning of September with the idea of getting to Marseilles and taking a flight to Canada, where they had relatives. The house, hidden behind a line of acacias and an ancient elm, was no sooner empty than it was raided by thieves who had first removed everything of any possible value and subsequently what was utterly worthless, too.

  If they had resisted the temptation to light a fire, in all probability the two men would have been able to stay there for weeks, perhaps even for months, without anyone noticing. But the cold and the absence of cars on the road must have convinced them that the risk of detection was minimal. Then Giampaolo Sobrero, on his way to R. on his Ape three-wheeler to barter a cylinder of gas for a kerosene stove, noticed smoke from the chimney.

  Returning to the village, he told his friend Massimo Torchio and they went together to the bar where the men whose job it was to watch over inhabited properties were warming themselves. They all agreed something had to be done, but not knowing who or what they would find in the house, they decided to wait for the patrol. This had already been in action for a couple of weeks with meager results; all they had been able to find was a shelter made from branches and scraps of nylon behind a wall of tufa rock. There had been footprints, excrement, and rabbit bones around it, but nothing to suggest the shelter was still in use.

  When the squads came back, it was getting dark, and it was decided to put the expedition off until the next day. They took advantage of the wait to sum up their view of the situation: in the last few weeks rabbits, firewood, and poultry had been disappearing from the more isolated farmsteads, and Vigio from the Marchesa farm had lost a calf. Giovanni Alessandria’s eldest daughter claimed she had been followed by a man on her way back from the orchard. She had not been able to see his face clearly, but he was an outsider and had run off only when she reached the first houses and called out in a loud voice for someone to come out. Everyone knew Rita was not a woman to be easily scared and still less to invent stories. She had had a boyfriend from Luxembourg who had gotten up to all kinds of tricks, but eventually she had gotten out of the relationship with her house and cellar intact and her head held high, while he ended up as a door-to-door salesman for a big frozen-food chain on the Côte d’Azur.

  The next morning some twenty men armed with hunting rifles took the road for R. When they reached the house indicated by Sobrero, they surrounded it. No smoke was coming from the chimney, but there was a st
rong smell of firewood and burned hides.

  The director of the local tourist office, Vincenzo Maina, yelled out for the occupants to surrender and come out with their hands up, but there was no sign from the house. Norina’s husband then fired his rifle twice into the wall, dislodging a piece of plaster the size and shape of a cello. As the fragments fell they raised a little cloud of blue dust immediately dampened by the drizzle and a few crows took off from the roof. A few moments later a shutter on the second floor squeaked and a hand emerged waving a shirt the color of sugarcane.

  The two men were forced to kneel in the middle of the courtyard while the leader of the patrol searched the house. The rooms were empty and the furniture had been broken up and burned, as had the upholstery and parquet. The only room with its floor intact was one on the second floor where they had rigged up a cast-iron stove and a couple of mattresses. By the wall were bags of fruit and vegetables, a can of water, and a suitcase full of clothes, among them a fur and a coat. Three rabbit skins had been stretched out on a line to dry.

  Once the search was over the outsiders were interrogated: Where are you from? Why did you go into the house? Don’t you know you shouldn’t trespass? Where did you get your vegetables, fruit, and clothes? Did you steal a calf from Vigio at the Marchesa farm?

  The two men said nothing, their eyes fixed on the nearest patch of ground.

  Someone repeated the questions in French, but the prisoners still said nothing. The rain had glued their clothes to their thin bodies, and their beards and shaggy hair shone as if they had low voltage bulbs inside their heads. On the way back the party was swollen by people who came out on to the road to see the two prisoners, then the procession climbed the street to the center of the village and the school. Reaching the red gate, they all realized there was no good reason for them to have come so far, and no one knew what to do next. So they sent for the priest.