The Last Man Standing

by Davide Longo

  “Number two,” shouted the cripple.

  “No,” yelled the curly-headed youth, trying to struggle back to his feet. Everyone watched, but no one spoke.

  “That’s enough, you idiot,” the cripple said. “Go back to your place.”

  The boy went and sat down again with his head bowed. Another got up: about eighteen years old.

  He leaped over the front row to the woman, who was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, weeping. Crouching beside her he said a few words, at which she shook her head. Then, when he leaned closer to her ear, she moved sharply away so that he lost his balance and fell. Someone laughed. Then he got up and stood for a few moments staring at the woman’s hips, as if he had heard there was something precious there, but was not quite sure. Then, without warning, he punched her face, knocking her backward into the dust. After a moment of astonishment she tried to scurry away on all fours, but the boy threw an arm around her waist and dragged her toward the coach. When they got there the woman pushed with her feet against the steps at the door, making them both fall backward. This time nobody laughed.

  Showing no emotion the boy got up, twisted the woman’s arm behind her back, and banged her head three times on the step. Leonardo saw a wound open on her forehead and blood pour down her face. For the first time since he had been hit himself, he managed to open his swollen eye: he felt tears gush out of it and soak his face down to his chin. Getting to her feet, the woman climbed into the coach without offering further resistance.

  A few minutes later the boy came out, raised his fist in triumph, and was received with shouts and applause. Then a third youth got up, handed his ticket to the cripple, and made his way to the bus.

  Leonardo spent the rest of the morning huddled in a corner of the cage without raising his eyes from the floor, while David, beside him, watched with his sad little eyes the procession of boys and some girls coming and going from the coach. This continued until afternoon, by then the air had grown cold and the sun had vanished behind a cloud just above the mountains. They lit the fire and the monotonous and deafening music started again. Leonardo, from his corner, watched the youngsters dancing and wondered if Alberto had climbed into the coach.

  Bringing him food at first light, the doctor found him crouching like a dog.

  “We’ll be leaving soon,” he said.

  The man had changed his pants and had a clean shirt on under his blazer. Leonardo took the plate the doctor had left near his feet and threw it at the wall. A potato fell on David’s head; he jolted in his sleep without opening his eyes. The doctor went away without saying a word or sweeping up the excrement.

  The procession of vehicles left in the early afternoon and when it got dark stopped right in front of the hotel Leonardo had walked past with the children a week earlier. The climb had been slow because several of the cars were out of gasoline and had to be towed by the trucks and the coach. Leonardo noticed that many of the vehicles had been riddled with bullets. Even the roof of the cage was peppered with holes through which the sun filtered in blades of yellow-blue light. Noticing this, Leonardo got to his feet for the first time, and holding on to the bars moved to the far end of the cage, from where David was placidly contemplating the countryside beside the road. He saw several round scars on the elephant’s body that could have been bullet wounds.

  When they were into the hills the vehicles were parked in a circle and the fire was lit in the middle of a little amphitheater once used for children’s shows. The amplifiers were set up and the stakes impaled with animals, and the youngsters began drinking and dancing as usual. Alberto, sitting on the concrete steps with other children, was sharing a pouch from which each inhaled in turn. Every now and then one or other of them would throw a pinecone at the bald girl, who was tied by a short chain to the bumper of one of the cars. The woman kept her head bowed, and even when hit did not react in any way. Her dress had been torn to shreds and her face was a dark stain the fire seemed unwilling to illuminate. A three-quarters moon appeared from time to time from behind the clouds, but its light was lost long before it could touch this part of the earth. The strong wind blowing from the sea brought nothing mild with it. All was cold and tense. Leonardo could see the great wind turbines rotating and the red lights above them marking the escape route along the crest of the hills.

  He lay down with his head against David’s stomach and closed his eyes. He imagined Bauschan and Sebastiano sitting at the entrance to a cave, a fire behind them and their eyes fixed on the sea, waiting for something to come from far away. His feet could only just support him, but they did not hurt anymore and the pain in his shoulder had faded to a slight numbness. Only thirst still tormented him.

  Even though he tried to ration the water he was given, the bottle would already be empty by midafternoon. The elephant would drink his two bucketfuls and eat though barely awake, spending the rest of the day with nothing. Leonardo wondered how he managed to survive.

  With sleepiness beginning to confuse his thoughts he heard someone fiddling with the lock on the door. He thought the doctor must have come early, but when the door opened he saw a boy in black trousers and a yellow shirt, with painted face and no eyebrows like all the others.

  “Come,” the boy said.

  Leonardo struggled down the short ladder and followed the boy across the field. His bandaged feet trod uncertainly on the damp grass. The boy walked ahead, knowing Leonardo could not escape. He gave off a strong feral smell, as if he had just emerged from an uncured bearskin, and his hair was cut in a triangle with its point between the tendons at the back of his neck.

  The young people were waiting on the steps of the little amphitheater while below, facing it, Richard was sitting in his pastel-shade tunic with Lucia at his side. When Leonardo came before them she continued to look at the ground. The boy who had brought him made him kneel and went off to sit with the others. Leonardo looked at Lucia’s white, shaved head, wishing he could weep on it and then dry it with his hands. She was wearing a decent blue dress and long earrings Leonardo had never seen before. Her face and body were intact yet seemed lifeless as if they had disintegrated or been contaminated.

  “They tell me you’re a dancer,” Richard said.

  Leonardo studied his straight nose, thin lips, long hair, and honey-colored beard framing his light smile: every part of his face expressed beauty and gentleness, yet its light and warmth, like those of a will-o’-the-wisp, somehow had more to do with the extinction of life than its creation. Leonardo looked at his calm blue eyes and found them utterly insane. There was nothing human there. They were more like the eyes of a majestic bird of prey or a great creature from the depths of the sea, infinitely solitary and universally feared.

  “I’d like you to dance for us,” Richard said.

  There was no mockery in his voice. Leonardo noticed the cripple was sitting a little higher up behind them. Armed with a pistol.

  “I can’t dance,” Leonardo said. “I’m not a dancer.”

  Richard smiled.

  “You’re too modest, dancer,” he said, offering his hand.

  Leonardo dropped his eyes and felt the man’s fingers slithering through his hair, loosening the knots of congealed blood that glued it together. Keeping his eyes on the ground, he saw little pieces of straw falling and shining in the shadows. The fire was warm on his shoulders. It was many days since he had felt such heat. Richard pushed Leonardo’s hair back one last time and withdrew his hand.

  “From now on you will dance,” he said, “and you will be delighted to do it, because that will give us pleasure.”

  Leonardo looked at the man’s neat feet, at his long, well-proportioned hands and perfect teeth. Christ in our time, he thought; a Christ generated by the times we live in and thus certain to make converts and to build a church and sow his word throughout the earth.

  He was forced to his feet and led toward the fire. A couple of youths with spades had spread a circle of embers across the concrete which glowed
red in the wind.

  “Take off your bandages,” the cripple said.

  Leonardo’s eyes searched for Lucia, but she was still looking down as though the whole world was confined to the few centimeters of ground between her feet. But Richard’s predator eyes were staring at him, revealing neither malice nor amusement, only an infinite power of concentration.

  Leonardo breathed in the smell of meat, bodies, and burned fur weighing on the air. The unskinned snout of a small boar impaled on one of the stakes had caught fire. He sat down and began to unwind his bandages.

  “Get up,” the cripple said as soon as he had finished.

  He moved unassisted toward the embers. The usual hypnotic music was coming from the amplifiers. He placed his right foot on the embers, then his left. At first all he felt was a light tickling, like walking at midday on a sun-warmed beach, but when the first pangs rose up his legs he began to dance from one foot to the other. The audience drove him on with cries of “Dancer!,” stamping their feet on the steps.

  He began waving his arms, leaping, and gyrating. A mad exaltation filled him, and the pain in his feet faded.

  He closed his eyes and danced faster, more frenetically, then opened them again and saw Richard’s light but penetrating expression, which brought back familiar dreams from his childhood of warriors with matted hair and women huddling in caves. Nightmares involving dogs, bones, cold, and bodies burned on high flaming pyres in faraway villages. Recurrent visions from which he woke terrified and certain there would never be a place in the world for him.

  In his mind he passed down a corridor opening onto rooms with no floors. If he had gone through one of those doors, he would never have been able to get back and his body would have been degraded to a shell capable only of killing and violating and, in the end, opening his own veins with a shard of flint and waiting for death with his eyes turned up to the moon.

  In some hidden corner where it had been hidden for goodness knows how long, the memory came back to him of a spring morning many years ago. He and Lucia had woken late, as often happened on Saturdays, and had breakfast at the kitchen table, listening to a radio program Lucia did not entirely understand and that Leonardo only loved for the voice of the female host. Then they had washed and started to get ready to go out. When Leonardo had laid out Lucia’s clothes ready for her on the sofa, the little girl had taken off her pajamas, pulled on her pants, and begun to leap about on the bed, calling out that she was like Tarzan, Mowgli, and Jesus.

  “Jesus too?” Leonardo had asked.

  “Jesus died with torn pants, didn’t you know that?”

  He remembered that while Lucia had finished getting dressed he had listened to the sound of cars on the wet road and realized he had now come really close to the secret, no matter how close he may have been before. He must preserve that perception, he told himself. Not the perception of what he himself was but of what that child had been, what she was now, and what she would become.

  He recalled his mind to the present. She turned to look at him with the eyes of a dog that has escaped to run free along the safety barrier of the autostrada but has finally agreed to return and come back. He was aware of this because he felt new pain in his feet and humiliation for what he was doing. The youngsters were whistling, cheering, and throwing pinecones and bits of wood at him. Then Richard raised a hand and all was silent, except the music, which continued to vibrate against the immobility of the bodies and the natural world around them.

  Leonardo took a step forward and felt cold concrete refresh his blistered feet. The wind had dropped. An elongated cloud was fleeing to the east leaving the moon behind, like a reptile that has laid her egg and wants to be far away when it hatches.

  Richard stood up, and taking Lucia by the hand helped her to her feet. She was tiny beside him, as if small enough to fit into the palm of his hand.

  “We are grateful to you, dancer,” he said. “Now you can go back to your cage.”

  Panting, his mouth parched although full of saliva, Leonardo looked at him. There had not been the slightest note of derision in the man’s voice. He turned and hobbled through the surrounding silence to the wagon. No one followed to make sure he went to the cage. He climbed the stepladder, entered, and closed the door. David was watching him in profile.

  “It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

  He sat down with his back to the partying in the arena. The shouts and the music, the smell of meat, and the crackling of branches thrown on the fire reached him; then he realized the smell of meat was coming from himself. He looked out at the night before him, so inexorable and ancient, and wept tears quite different from the tears he would have once wept.

  After that evening, the young people started coming to see the cage where David and Leonardo spent their days. Only Richard could give the order to open it, but that did not stop them from goading Leonardo to dance or prevent them from throwing stones and food at him through the bars. When he saw them coming, he would crouch in a corner or hide behind David, trying to make himself invisible. Sometimes, having tried to provoke him with sticks and stones in the useless hope of getting him to react, the kids would stay there to study him in silence as though Leonardo were the unusual creature and not the elephant, for whom they seemed to feel little or no curiosity. As soon as they were bored, they would go away and Leonardo would be able to emerge from his hideaway to collect the food. It usually turned out to be something his teeth could not cope with: bones, such as the skull of a hare or a badger, or the paws of a wild boar or fallow deer, but sometimes he was lucky and found an onion, some potato peel, or a rabbit skin he could chew for its fat before laying it out to dry.

  One night, while he was asleep, they threw a live trout at him. When the youngsters stopped laughing and went back to dance, he watched the fish struggling on the floor, opening and shutting its gills, until he was sure it was dead; he then spent a long time rubbing it on the bars to remove its scales before eating it.

  His feet hardly hurt him at all which, according to the doctor who had treated them again and bound them up, was not a good sign. In fact, an extremely hard, black calloused crust had formed under the soles, which allowed him to move about the cage as if in rubber-soled shoes and to cross easily from the side he used as a toilet to the side where he ate and slept beside David.

  During the days they spent on the hillside and those passed in a new encampment some thirty kilometers into the valley, Leonardo was able to assemble a more detailed picture of the tribe whose jester he had become. Most of the young people were between fifteen and thirty years old, leaving aside the cripple who was evidently Richard’s trusted right-hand man, and there seemed no hierarchy in the group. All the males had equal access to weapons, drugs, and alcohol, while the females were excluded from the distribution of weapons and never left the camp. There were no fixed relationships, and the females coupled with anyone without preference or exclusion. This could happen in public or in the cars or coach at any time of the day or night. The group of children that Alberto had joined was held in high esteem, especially by Richard, and Leonardo never saw anyone mistreat them or make fun of them. They were involved in the partying and were given alcohol and drugs, but when the older males went out to hunt, they stayed in camp with the girls. One of the youths who had captured them, the dark thickset one, busied himself with skinning the animals after hanging them from a hook that stuck out of the cab of one of the smaller vans. Then the skin and entrails were thrown away and the rest of the animal was impaled on a stake to cook by the fire. A small fiberglass cistern had been installed on another truck for water. This was kept at a certain level by a pump that drew from the river running beside the road or from the streams that carried quantities of water down the hillsides. Even so, Leonardo never saw any of the youngsters drinking from the cistern or using water to wash in. Their only form of bodily care concerned their hair and eyebrows, which the boys shaved every two or three days. Some of the young people had lo
nger hair than others and wore rings and earrings or had metal pins in their ears or other parts of their faces, but this seemed to be a matter for individual choice. The only things that clearly identified members of the tribe were their shaved eyebrows and the colored markings on their cheeks and foreheads. There were no uniforms; they all dressed as they liked and sometimes the boys returned wearing garments they must have found while out plundering. None of them had anywhere to keep their clothes. What they had taken was either left lying around or thrown on the fire, and despite the severity of the weather no one possessed a jacket or any heavy clothing.

  The scraps of conversation Leonardo could catch above the thumping beat of the music were nearly always connected with challenges, squabbles, songs, or direct invitations to sex. Their vocabulary was basic, approximate, and stuffed with expletives. Even so, it revealed presence of mind and alertness. It would not be accurate to say they lacked intelligence, but it was as if the electricity had left some parts of their brains to concentrate on areas related to aggressiveness and the pure pursuit of pleasure. There was no distinction for them between wanting to do something and actually doing it; the inconvenient processes of thought had dissolved to make way for untrammeled need.

  Leonardo noticed they were incapable of feeling remorse or regret for anything they did, or of remembering what had happened the day before or wondering what would happen the next day. He even began to doubt whether or not they could remember anything of their past or of other people who had once been close to them or of the places they had come from.

  Richard seemed to be their only law. Every evening when the hunters laid out their haul of dead animals and knick-knacks on the cloth, he would emerge from his trailer and walk among the young people, talking to them like a father, confessor, or servant.

  As the days passed, Leonardo noticed that Richard was beginning to look increasingly disappointed when it was time to examine the booty. On one occasion he went back into the trailer without imparting his usual benediction or handing the cripple the urn with the drug in it. This caused an icy silence to fall over the tribe, and once he was out of sight the youngsters stared in astonishment at the door that had swallowed him up. This made it clear to Leonardo that what Richard really wanted from the raids was not the sort of food and trinkets the boys regularly brought back but gasoline, women, and other prisoners, and he decided that until the boys found him a new girl, Lucia would be safe from the fate of the woman with the shaved head.