by Davide Longo
“Screw her! Screw her! Screw her!” yelled the young people.
A second pistol shot drowned their voices; it passed over Leonardo’s head and was lost in the farmyard. This time David only walked around on the spot, making the floorboards shake. When Leonardo looked up he saw the woman taking off her pants. She was not wearing underpants. Her flesh had the whiteness of fresh lime, with a tuft of black hair under her belly.
“Screw her! Screw her!”
Leonardo looked at Richard, and this time he saw no mirror image of Christ but just a cunning, inordinately arrogant man of thirty-five. Mediocrity and fear marked him like a drop of oil on a surface of water, and they were a mediocrity and fear with no redeeming qualities whatever. His was a third-rate mind decked in feathers.
“Enrico!” Richard called out irritably.
The cripple pushed his way through the yelling youngsters pressed against the bars of the cage and came as near as he could to where Leonardo was standing. He pointed his pistol between the bars at Leonardo’s head.
“Screw her! Screw her! Screw her!”
Leonardo looked for Salomon among the boys but could not see him. Instead he met the eyes of Alberto, who was staring at him eagerly from the shoulders of the blond youth who had captured them. Under his green paint, he no longer had the face of the child Leonardo had known so much as the snout of a predator used to raiding the lairs of other animals among the bushes. He had pulled his hair back into a ponytail.
“Do what they want,” the woman said, lying down on the floor.
Her calm voice cut through the shouting like a sword slicing through a coat of mail. She was now naked apart from her socks and a flesh-colored bra scarcely able to hold her huge breasts. Beyond the farmyard the hilltops were a vivid white against the railway gray of the sky. Very soon it would begin raining or snowing again.
Leonardo moved toward her.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
She shook her head to dismiss this as irrelevant. Her eyes were not black but a lively dark brown. He lowered his trousers and lay down on top of her. She smelled of earth and of something long buried. It was not a good smell but one that gave the impression of having existed long before humanity, to have been part of this planet, and many of the creatures living on it, since time immemorial. Leonardo remembered the other women he had slept with: a fellow student, Alessandra, then Clara. The first two thin and supple; the last slender with big breasts. All had light-brown eyes and smelled of paper, tobacco, and dried bark. All had offered him carefully rationed warmth.
Leonardo felt his penis stiffen and slide into the woman. For a moment he lay still, lost in the simplicity of what was happening and the warmth of her belly, and then the floorboards began to thump under the blows of dozens of hands.
“Screw-her-now! Screw-her-now!”
Leonardo rested his chin on the woman’s shoulder and watched the leaves of a holm oak growing near the farm move lightly in the wind. Her breasts pressed against his thin chest at every breath.
“Am I hurting you?” he whispered.
“No.”
He began moving slowly and soon he was standing alone in the middle of a white room waiting for someone. The shouts of the youngsters were no more than a distant hiss and their handclaps the noise of a train that had already passed long ago. The room had no windows; it was square and on the end wall a painting had been hung. This showed a plate and a glass, both empty. Leonardo knew it had a title: “Steady Courage.” It had been painted by the person he was waiting for, but the painter, when he arrived, would not be able to add anything to what Leonardo already knew about it, simply because he already knew all there was to know. So he felt no anxiety as he waited. He might wait hours, months, or years; that did not matter. The room was white, its walls a regular shape and the painting concealed no secrets.
Leonardo felt a spoon scoop the inside of his belly as something escaped from it and traveled far away. Then he lay exhausted, listening to his body and the light scratching of his beard against the woman’s cheek.
The voices of the youngsters gradually diminished, moved off, and fell silent.
Leonardo fastened his pants and went back to sit in the place David had left for him against the wall. They were alone, and the woman was getting dressed.
When she had finished they stayed silent, each staring at their own feet. The only sound was the crackling of the bonfire on which potatoes had been put to boil. The rectangle of sky above the farmyard was an expanse of gray marble that had the same warmth as marble.
David got up, walked around the cage, then flexed his legs and crapped. Leonardo saw the woman smile.
“I’ve never seen an elephant do that,” she said. “They’re so funny!”
Leonardo looked out into the yard. Several of the young people were throwing blankets, clothes, and toys out of the windows of the farmhouse. Others were eating by the fire and still more were asleep. The bald girl, leaning against the coach, was being penetrated from behind by a smallish boy with muscular buttocks. Another was inhaling from a pouch as he waited his turn.
“What’s your name?” the woman asked.
“Leonardo.”
“Well, Leonardo, there’s nothing bad about what we’ve done.”
He looked at her in silence.
“The important thing is to stay alive. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Excellent. Do you think they’ll give us anything to eat?”
“Usually the doctor brings something, but today he hasn’t come.”
“Never mind, we won’t die of hunger. What’s the elephant’s name?”
“David.”
“Can I trust David?”
“Yes.”
The woman lay down on her side with her head supported on her hand and closed her eyes.
“Why don’t you try to get a bit of rest too?” she said.
Leonardo continued to look at her unusual body stretched out on the floor. Soon it seemed utterly familiar to him, as though she had been with him in that prison ever since he first got there. He would not even have been able to say whether she was really fat or not.
“Listen to me, Leonardo,” she said. “Try closing your eyes.”
A few moments later he heard her snoring.
The doctor came toward evening with a bucket of potato peelings among which a few pieces of gray meat could be seen. The woman asked if it was dog meat. The man said he did not know.
“Do you know where we’re heading?” she asked him.
“I’m here to give you food and that’s all,” the doctor said, throwing an armful of bushes on the floor for David. “You mustn’t ask me anything.”
While the man went to and fro carrying branches to the wagon, the woman began eating the potatoes but avoided the meat. Leonardo in contrast took a large chunk of meat and broke it in pieces, using his fingers to do what his teeth could no longer manage. Behind them David’s elastic lips were stripping the branches with a squeaky noise, like new shoes on a rubber floor. When the doctor had finished stacking David’s branches, he filled two buckets with water from a tap at the farm.
Leonardo put several pieces of meat into his mouth and began chewing.
“I think they’re trying to get to France,” he said.
The woman nodded.
“The first people who captured me tried that too, but at the frontier we were shot up by an aircraft. They were kids like this group but not as many, and on the plain they met those National Guard men. A few escaped into the forest and the rest surrendered. The soldiers forced them into a ditch and killed them all. There was another prisoner with me, a very kind elderly man. He had been high school principal. The soldiers killed him too.”
The woman put another piece of potato in her mouth and chewed it slowly.
“Have you always been on your own here?”
Leonardo shook his head.
“There was a man, but he died the same night they capture
d him.”
The children had pulled two beds out of the house. Alberto was laughing and jumping from one mattress to the other. Leonardo studied his face and gestures. For some days now he had been thinking he had never known any child named Alberto and that the girl in the trailer was not his daughter. Sometimes he felt sure he had left Lucia in her mother’s home eight years ago and had never seen her again. At such moments he experienced something like the serene drowsiness that is said to precede death from frostbite.
“My daughter’s in the trailer,” he told the woman.
She looked at the bald girl huddled against the rear wheel of one of the cars. The girl had walked all day and night without stopping. The remains of her dress barely covered her meager buttocks and her breasts.
“When they find a new girl,” Leonardo said, “this is what’ll happen to Lucia.”
The woman continued to stare at the bald girl; several children were trying to push pieces of wood down the front of her dress. All she did in an attempt to discourage them was to wave her hand.
“It won’t happen to your daughter,” the woman said.
The doctor came back with the water. He put one bucket in the middle of the wagon and took the other to David. Leonardo and the woman began to drink by cupping their hands, then she asked the doctor if he could get them some blankets. The man took the bucket emptied by the elephant and went away.
Once they were alone the woman wanted to drink some more, but Leonardo said it was better to keep some water for the next day. She asked if the elephant would drink it in the night. Leonardo reassured her that he would not. The woman went to urinate in the corner; then sat down with her legs crossed. As night fell, a cold, sharp wind shook the junipers beside the yard. Leonardo studied the dark clouds approaching from the east. During the night, or at the latest the next day, it would snow.
“It’s nearly the end of February,” the woman said.
For a couple of hours they watched the young people dancing, pairing off, and stripping the shutters from the house to keep the fire going. Leonardo read a new fury in their actions that worried him and forced him every so often to look away.
The eyes of the woman, on the other hand, showed no trace of despair or resentment. Her broad, irregular face seemed stretched as if she had long been taking in everything she had seen. Leonardo noticed two black hairs sprouting from a mole under her chin.
“What did you do in the world?” he asked her.
“I was a midwife.”
As soon as the cripple saw Richard and Lucia emerge from the trailer, he jumped down from the roof of the van where he had spent the whole evening and went to meet them, climbing over the young people sitting on the ground.
“Your daughter’s very beautiful,” the woman said.
Leonardo watched Lucia walk as far as the bonfire and sit down on the sofa Richard had ordered to be unloaded from the truck.
He stood up.
“Now I have to go,” he said.
“Evelina?”
“Yes.”
“Are you asleep?”
“No.”
“Will you do something for me?”
“If I can.”
“I’d like you to tell me how I am.”
“In what sense?”
“Tell me what my face and body are like.”
“It’s a bit dark at the moment.”
“Tell me what you saw when it was light.”
“Where shall I start?”
“With my face.”
“OK, it’s thin and hollow and where there’s no beard it’s been affected by the cold. You have a scar on your forehead and a smaller one on your cheekbone. I think you have some teeth missing, I don’t know how many, and your eyes are a very beautiful dark green. But the whites of your eyes are a bit yellow, perhaps from what you eat. Your nose is bent, I can’t remember whether to the left or the right. You have long gray hair that has grown into sort of tails. Your beard’s dark gray, with occasional white hairs. I don’t know what else to say.”
“That’s great. And my body?”
“Tall, with long legs and a very stiff back. When you were lying on me I could tell you weren’t heavy for a man of your height. I could also tell your shoulder has been bound up, and when you walk you hold it higher than the other. One very beautiful thing about you is your hands. In my work I have always paid a lot of attention to hands and I can tell you that yours, even if they are not in good condition now, are extremely shapely. But the first thing I noticed was your feet. At first I thought they were wrapped in rags, but when I realized they were naked I wanted to cry. When you were dancing I wondered how you could possibly do it.”
“Fear’s the only thing that keeps me going.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Now tell me about my smell.”
“Do you think it’s unpleasant?”
“It must be, I haven’t washed for weeks.”
“When we are alone for a long time without anyone touching us, our smell reverts to what it was when we were born. Rather like a piece of cardboard soaked in milk. It’s not disagreeable. I often came across it in the delivery room, but it was my husband who first drew my attention to it. I’d like to talk to you about him, it’s so long since I had anyone I could do that with.”
“Was he a doctor?”
“A historian of the Enlightenment. When we met he was teaching at the University of Antwerp. He had come to the hospital to see his daughter, who had just given birth. She lived abroad, too, in her case in England, but her water broke two months early while she was at a conference of antiques dealers. Gianni arrived the next day from Germany. He was a very small man of nearly seventy; I was forty at the time. He wanted to speak to me about the birth; we talked briefly in front of the coffee machine, not more than a few minutes. Apart from his politeness, nothing particularly impressed me about that frail man with thick hair. As for me, with my physique, I didn’t think any man could be attracted to me, not even one so much older.
“But a week later a letter addressed to me arrived at the hospital. Just a few lines about a boat trip he’d made the previous Sunday with a university colleague and the man’s wife. I didn’t know whether to answer or what to say. I didn’t write back. A week later a second letter came telling me about a curious event that happened in the last century to the architect who built the Antwerp concert hall. I wondered what on earth this university professor could want from me; he was not young or good-looking, but certainly he was in a position to interest more attractive women. I was confused. I had never been in a serious relationship, only been pestered by a couple of men who were sexually excited by my obesity. This had made me pessimistic and diffident. I thought he must be another of these, but when I showed his letters to a woman friend she said she didn’t think so.
“So I sent him a postcard. He answered, and for a year we wrote to each other once or twice a week. He never suggested meeting, even though he had been divorced many years before and was living alone in a house near the university.
“He had a very sober way of writing, simple and straightforward but filled with constant surprise. He avoided difficult words but didn’t use the simple ones he preferred in quite the same way as most other people. He wrote in tiny capitals, in the kind of writing one might expect from the first person from an uneducated family to have a chance of higher education. And in fact that’s how it was: his father and mother had run a grocery shop in the Lomellina district.
“I bought myself a little chest with three drawers and kept his letters in it beside my bed. I kept a sheet of paper in the kitchen with the titles of the books he talked to me about so I could buy them in the bookstore. One day, talking to a hospital colleague, I realized that a whole day had passed without me thinking once about my unattractive appearance. That evening I wrote to Gianni and said I’d like to meet him. Are you asleep, Leonardo?”
“No. I’m listening. Where did you meet?”
“In Saa
rbrücken, a little German town near the French border. I don’t know why he chose that place, it wasn’t my idea. More than a year had passed since our first meeting. I imagined us sitting in a café and walking beside the river while we talked about ourselves in the way one would expect in an affectionate relationship between a man who had outlived his physical needs and a woman who had long believed her personal appearance could never encourage any. An alliance of deficient people. But what happened was that we had tea in silence in the station bar, and then we went to one of the two rooms he’d reserved in a small local guest house and spent two days there making love in every imaginable way.
“In the months that followed we went back to writing to each other without ever mentioning what had happened in that bedroom. His letters were light and full of affection but never hinted that he’d like to see me again or do any of the things we had done together again. Then, in April, a few lines arrived in which he asked me to marry him. I answered with a postcard, and three months later we met in front of the registrar. It was our third meeting, and in the meantime I’d arranged to buy us a house and he had applied for his pension.
“In the five years we lived together he continued to talk to me with the same loving kindness and care for my body, as though it was always new to him. This was how he saw everything around him: it was as if he was born again every morning and as if when he put on his pajamas each evening he was dressing for his grave. His steps on the stairs coming down to breakfast would be like those of a boy at the threshold of life. This filled me with joy and an infinite sense of security and desire to have him inside me always.”
When Evelina stopped talking, Leonardo listened to the sounds the night should have produced but they had been trapped by the cold in a compact block of silence. The wind passed silently over the bodies of the young people lying in the farmyard and made the embers of the bonfire glow. Apart from those vermilion fragments of light, and the echo of the woman’s words, the world was a cold shadow with no tomorrow.