The Last Man Standing

by Davide Longo

  A little before midnight, Adele and Sebastiano went into the village to Mass; by now Alberto had been in his room for some time. Lucia and Leonardo decided to have herb tea on the veranda. The sky was overcast, but if you stared at it for long enough you could sense the moon’s path behind the clouds. The cold was very dry.

  They did not feel like discussing what the future might or might not hold, so they simply listed little events that can brighten a day. Unimportant things, just to be able to share the sound of their own voices in the darkness. To Leonardo, Lucia’s voice sounded like the swish of water in a metal basin.

  It was very late when Lucia said she was sleepy, and it would have been entirely natural if before going in she had bent to kiss her father goodnight on his cheek, but she did not do so.

  Left alone, Leonardo was touched by the memory of mornings when he had woken in the great double bed at Via B. to hear Lucia breathing beside him. Holidays when her nursery had been closed and Alessandra had already gone off to some engagement, and the light was pouring serenely through the shutters and projecting oval shapes throughout the room. At such times he had liked to lock his hands behind his head and stare up at the chandelier, immersing himself in the story he was writing at the time: the characters, the course of events, the places where they lived, and the things that were making them happy or sad. At such times he felt he understood the pleasure a horse must feel when given a huge field to roam in, with the grass tickling its stomach and nothing to be heard but the beating of its own heart. Reaching out his hand he would touch Lucia’s little calves, as perfect as a ship in a bottle. The little girl’s eyes would be closed and slightly puffed up with sleep. She was four or five years old at the time, and during the night her long hair would have formed little knots that would be troublesome to disentangle.

  As he slipped onto the sofa that had become his bed, he thought of this as the happiest of all his memories and asked himself what he would feel if Alessandra’s car came into the courtyard a second time.

  Alberto spent the morning making a harpoon by fixing a fork on the end of a stick, and after lunch said he wanted to go down to the river.

  Once they had reached the shingle of the bank he spent at least an hour trying to spear a trout darting about in the middle of the riverbed, where a strip of water was flowing, gentle and dark, through the ice. Leonardo and Lucia, sitting on a large smooth rock, discussed Achilles and Aeneas. Leonardo had once read an essay that maintained that Aeneas had been the first epic hero to hesitate before killing an enemy, the first to see death as a subjective choice and not as an action of destiny like an eruption or a conception. Alberto launched his harpoon with a cry that sounded like a twice-repeated German word. On the other side of the river, Bauschan was inspecting the edge of the forest. When Alberto got tired, Lucia asked him if he would like to go up to the little church to see if any animal had been digging up the bones of the dead.

  It was after three by the time they reached the cemetery, where they sat on the low wall enjoying the weak sun on their faces and on their gloveless hands. Alberto asked Leonardo to repeat the story of the Alpine troops preserved in the ossuary. He then asked a few questions about the Aztecs and cruel things done in antiquity. A Nordic fluorescence lit the sky while an insubstantial mist oscillated in little waves lower down.

  It was not easy to climb back up the vineyard below the house: the rising temperature had turned the earth to sticky mud.

  As they struggled up the final stretch, Leonardo noticed the veranda door was ajar. He tried to remember whether he had been the last to come out, then stopped and summoned Bauschan in a whisper of a kind one might have used to attract the attention of a relative at the other end of a bed as one kept watch beside a dead body: neither a whistle nor a word but sharing the quality of both.

  “What is it?” Lucia said.

  Leonardo beckoned the others, then bent over and followed the line of vines to his right. When he came to where the briers were thicker, he knelt down and the children did the same.

  A young man with his hair combed in a curious quiff was coming out of the house carrying a bag of food and a bag of clothes. He went down the steps and disappeared around the corner. They heard the door of a car open and close.

  “They’re stealing our things!” Alberto said.

  The man reappeared. He was in a leather motorcycle jacket of the type with showy padding on the elbows and back. This made him look hunchbacked, which he was not, even if something about his body and legs suggested rickets. As he climbed the steps a woman in a hat came out of the veranda and offered him the bottle of Fernet that Leonardo had opened for the Christmas zabaione. They talked for a minute or two, passing the bottle back and forth between them; when it was empty, the man threw it into an armchair and they went back into the house.

  “You’ve got to do something!” Alberto said.

  Leonardo merely held Bauschan close and kept his eyes fixed on the house. Alberto, a few centimeters away, stared at his pale, thin, well-shaved face.

  “Let’s go and call someone,” he said, pulling Leonardo by the jacket.

  “No!” Leonardo said. “Let’s wait for them to go.”

  “But they’ve taken over the house!”

  “Shut up!” Lucia said.

  By the time the door opened again the church clock had long since struck four and the sun had set behind the mountains. A flat, almost rosy haze had shut off the sky to the north. Two men and the woman brought out bags and suitcases. The older man was wearing Leonardo’s camelhair coat and leather gloves. His hair was an unnatural gray as though ash had fallen on his head. The plump young woman at his side was in a T-shirt. Under her arm was Lucia’s vanity case and a bag containing a packet of biscuits and a bottle of wine. The younger man, the one in the biker jacket, was carrying the stereo. They went around to the back of the house. Leonardo and the children heard the sound of an approaching engine and a few seconds later a gray car slipped through the gate and disappeared behind the mulberry trees skirting the road.

  They stayed kneeling in the mud for another minute or two, then Leonardo released Bauschan. The dog moved a few meters away and urinated at length, at the same time giving Leonardo an afflicted look as if unsure whether he had passed whatever test he had been set.

  “Bravo, Bauschan,” Leonardo said to reassure him.

  Every drawer in the kitchen had been pulled out and turned over on the floor. Leonardo moved toward the table where the intruders had left a pan covered with tomato sauce, a bottle of coffee liqueur, and a few eggshells; then he turned toward Lucia, who had stayed close to the door. He stared at the plates, cutlery and CDs strewn across the floor amid flour and detergents.

  “Let’s tidy up a bit,” he said to her.

  She said nothing but wept in silence. Leaning against the doorway, her face at a slight angle, she was like a seventeenth-century Madonna with skin as impalpable as moonlight yet enthralling the viewer’s gaze. Behind her, Alberto was holding back Bauschan so he would not cut his paws on the broken glass.

  Going down the corridor, Leonardo glanced into the bathroom: among the bottles and containers emptied at random he thought he could also see plaster rubble, but did not go in to check. In the bedroom there was a suffocating smell of urine, and the clothes the raiders had not taken away were lying slashed and piled up in a corner in a many-colored mountain someone must have pissed on.

  “What would they have done if we’d been here?” Lucia asked, looking into the room.

  Leonardo noticed the bedcover was stained with blood. Not a large patch with sharp contours, but more as if something had been rubbed against it. He said nothing but opened the window and then went to Lucia and gave her a hug.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll sort it out.”

  They were careful not to tread on the small eighteenth-century maps lying on the corridor floor among fragments of frame and glass. In the kitchen Bauschan was licking something. Leonardo lifted the dog’s h
ead to check what it was but realizing it was peanut butter, let him continue. Alberto was neither there nor on the veranda.

  Leonardo found him in the studio with his hands behind his back. He was looking through the window, toward the vineyard and hillside, now indistinguishable in the dusk.

  “All OK?” he asked.

  Alberto went on staring at whatever he was looking at. There was a terrible stench in the room. Someone had defecated on the desk and scattered Leonardo’s collection of letters over the floor. The walls were stained with the bloody imprints of hands that had taken on the color of the brickwork.

  The woman was menstruating, Leonardo thought, and she must have coupled with one man in the bed and with the other here against the wall.

  Such thoughts slipping so easily into his mind frightened him. A year ago such stains would have made him think of Basquiat’s paintings or the caves of Lascaux. A year ago such an image of entwined bodies would never have sprung so vividly and realistically into his mind. And he would never have thought of words like “menstruation” and “coupled” to describe it. Perhaps this was what barbarism was, he thought: a new vocabulary gradually taking over with new images. The first word was the Trojan horse. Which polluted the well and reproduced itself. Sickness. Cholera.

  He looked at Alberto and gave him a smile.

  “Let’s go out,” he said.

  The boy took a few paces toward the door as if to do so but instead stepped up to Leonardo and unleashed a punch at the base of his stomach.

  Leonardo doubled over in pain and Alberto punched him again, this time on the nose and in the left eye. During the few seconds this took neither of them uttered a sound, then Alberto left the room.

  Leonardo prostrated himself on the floor like a beggar about to start his day’s work.

  His testicles were throbbing and pain was spreading through his whole body. Even his buttocks had gone rigid, perhaps from some sort of muscular contraction, and he could not breathe because his whole body seemed to have petrified around the pain. His first breath was like the first breath taken after birth and he imagined it must have been taken with equal desperation. He studied his slightly trembling hands. Like the hands of a pianist told that from now on every piano will be destroyed and he will need his hands to extract all his food from fields that until then had simply been somewhere to walk while thinking out a more subtle interpretation of a prelude by Chopin.

  No living creature had ever before deliberately hit him to cause pain; he had never fought as a child and his parents had never slapped him to punish him. Now, at fifty-three, he had been called to account and found wanting.

  He could hear Lucia in the kitchen telling Bauschan not to do something, and then her footsteps came in his direction. When Leonardo tried to stand he was stopped by a sharp pain in his testicles.

  “Are you looking for something?” Lucia said.

  Without turning he moved a few of the pieces of paper on the floor. A drop of blood fell on one.

  “Something I wrote.”

  “Would you like me to help you?”

  “No. Stay with Alberto.”

  “They’ve taken his electronic game.”

  Leonardo nodded without looking up from the floor.

  “Wait outside, both of you. Take Bauschan with you.”

  There was no sound of the girl’s shoes moving. Leonardo began rummaging among his papers again. Blood was pouring from his nose and he realized his eyes were full of tears.

  “Papa?” said the girl after a little.

  “Yes.”

  “They’ve taken all the sanitary napkins.”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll find some more.”

  “But it’s difficult!”

  “We’ll find some, I promise, now please go away. I’m trying to do a bit of tidying.”

  Leonardo heard her footsteps move into the living room. When he was certain he was alone he took his handkerchief from his pocket and blotted his nose. The box of letters was by the wall. Some had been opened, perhaps in search of money, and then torn up, but most seemed intact. He collected them and put them back in the box together with the torn pieces, then picked the box up and carried it into the kitchen. His nose had stopped bleeding and the pain in his testicles seemed to have dulled and spread into his belly. He could hear the children’s voices in the yard trying to keep the dog outside.

  He put the box of letters down on the sofa and took a brush, dustpan, and trash bags from beside the sink. He decided to start with the bathroom.

  The fragments of plaster had come from the wall above the toilet. The intruders must have been attracted by a loose tile and, suspecting a secret hiding place, had smashed a few more to uncover it. Finding nothing, they had perhaps defecated in the bathtub out of sheer spite. They had certainly taken razor blades, scissors, the electric shaver, shampoos, the hairdryer, toothpaste, and medicine. Perhaps even more, but with such a mess it was difficult to say.

  Leonardo opened the window, swept up the rubble and broken glass from the floor, cleaned the bathtub, and put everything in a plastic bag.

  When the bag was full he realized it was too heavy to be lifted without tearing and tried pulling it along the floor, but the pieces of broken glass in the corridor ripped it and its contents came out, getting mixed up with the rest of the filth.

  He stood for a minute staring at the part of the kitchen cut off by the door, then turned abruptly and went into the bedroom. Near the upended bedside table he found the keys he was looking for. He picked them up and put them in his pocket.

  Hearing the glass door open, Lucia and Alberto turned and Bauschan lifted his head. When Alberto met Leonardo’s eyes he looked away.

  “I’ve put a suitcase on the table,” Leonardo said. “Take what you need for the night and put it inside. We’ll come back for the rest tomorrow.”

  “Where are we going?” Lucia asked.

  “To Elio’s house.”

  While the children were getting ready, Leonardo went to his book room. The door had been forced. He went inside with Bauschan and turned on the light. Now that the bookcases had been overturned the room seemed bigger. There was a strong smell of gasoline in the air.

  He walked up to the mountain of fallen books in the middle of the room. He had once seen a similar installation in a major museum in New York, though the pile had been crowned with a wax Moses that had an enormous wick coming out of his head.

  The jerry can Elio had left for him was lying empty in a corner. Gasoline had been poured over the books, but for some reason the pile had not been set on fire. He told himself he would never know why, and this seemed more seriously disturbing than anything else.

  When he closed the door and left the room he knew he would never go in there again. He had eight books under his arm. He could have taken more, but he decided eight was right.

  Snow was falling outside when they woke the next morning, and after breakfast with some chamomile Elio’s wife had left in a cupboard, they waited, each in a different room, for the snow to stop so they could go back and collect what had been left in the other house. Lucia had taken over the double bedroom, Alberto the child’s room, and Leonardo the sofa in the kitchen. From the window he could see large, slow snowflakes drifting obliquely down into the square. On the roofs opposite the snow was now as thick as a dictionary. The few passersby on their way to the grocery store would look up at the lighted windows. When they did this Leonardo waved to them. The only sound in the house was the crackling of wood on the kitchen stove.

  At midday, as it was still snowing, Leonardo put the chains on the Polar and they drove out of the village. The driver’s side window had been smashed by the thieves, but Leonardo had patched it with an opaque sheet of nylon.

  When they got to the house, Leonardo told the children to look especially for food, medicine, and clothes; they would be able to come back for the rest later. To save Alberto from having to go into the rooms with excrement and blood, Leonardo set him to collect
ing what could still be eaten from the kitchen. The boy made no comment but got to work.

  There was no longer any bad smell in the bedroom and studio after a night with the windows open, but the rooms seemed contaminated by something obscurely connected with excess. When he went into them, Leonardo felt dazed, as though just waking from a dream in which he had done something contrary to his usual moral code. The whiteness and orderliness of the countryside outside the windows was confusing. Bauschan, as though aware of Leonardo’s bewilderment, kept close to him.

  When the trunk of the Polar was full they went back to Elio’s house, having listed the things they had not found: the computer, the stereo, eggs, biscuits, pasta, vegetable oil, many of the medicines, sheets and blankets, gloves, and scarves. Alberto did not mention his video game and Lucia said nothing about the sanitary napkins. Leonardo made no reference to money.

  They entered the storeroom from the back and took only a few minutes to unload what had taken nearly two hours to collect, since Lucia suggested it might be better if they stayed there long enough to sort the stuff out. Leonardo realized she did not want to go back to the house again and said it was a good idea to divide the jobs that needed doing. By the time he went back into the yard the snow had stopped. He decided to take a short walk. The white blanket was soft and dry, the river below him a line of Indian ink.

  He walked for half an hour without any particular purpose or in any particular direction. Bauschan stayed a meter or two ahead, diving into the snow and occasionally raising his eyes not to the sky but toward something immediately above the hills. The light seemed to be coming to them through heavy air and appeared exhausted on arrival. There’s a mournful beauty in all this, Leonardo thought, a beauty he should make friends with, since from now on no other friend would be possible.