The Last Man Standing

by Davide Longo

  “What happened to your husband?”

  He had the impression she shrugged her shoulders.

  “The kids who captured us realized at once that it would be a bore having to drag him along with them. For several months he’d been having problems with his hip. So they tied him to the kitchen table and threw it into the river near our house. I think they did this because one of them had seen it done in a film. As the current carried him away, Gianni stared up at the sky with the same amazement that he had felt for everything. It was a beautiful sunny day. You’ll think me morbid, but as I watched him drifting away all I could think of was lying naked in bed with him again.”

  Leonardo rested his cheek against David’s rough flank and looked at the point in the darkness where he knew the trailer to be. The wind had something minimal and cold in it. Beyond the bars it was perhaps starting to snow but beyond the bars was enormously far away. Great quantities of air and food were moving around inside David’s belly.

  “I would like to know which is worse,” Evelina said. “To be raped a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run a Bulgar gauntlet, to be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fé, to row in a galley, to experience finally all the miseries we all have endured, or simply to stay here with nothing to do?”

  They were silent for a while, then he heard her get up, drink from the bucket, and sit down again.

  “Do you know the whole thing by heart?” Leonardo asked.

  “Only that bit. It has always made me laugh when the old woman talks like that after all they’ve been through. Gianni was crazy about Voltaire. He used to say Candide was the cruelest thing ever written by anyone while laughing.”

  One of the boys in the farmyard got to his feet and walked a few steps, then they heard the dull thud of his body hitting the concrete.

  “Do you think we’ll die?” he asked her.

  Evelina scratched her leg.

  “Something like that.”

  A week passed during, which it snowed for at least an hour or two every night.

  The procession, coming in sight of the town, had veered to the east and begun skirting the approach to the valleys. Leonardo asked Evelina where her home had been, and she pointed to the white mountain hovering above the town and named a small village clinging to its foot.

  At night the snow turned the countryside and the roofs of the buildings along the road white, while by day a milky sky presided over the silent progress of the procession. From time to time, the youths would stick rifles out of the windows to shoot at the deer, dogs, and white hares that populated the areas where they parked, then would run and retrieve the carcasses and throw them onto the truck without the procession stopping. Along the main road they passed abandoned cars and empty heavy goods vehicles as well as houses, but the only tracks in the new snow were those they made themselves. The days were getting longer, but the cold still made their breath visible and gripped their hands in its bite.

  During the daytime Leonardo and Evelina would cuddle together, stupefied by the rocking of the wagon. The shots would wake Leonardo from dreams in which he was talking to animals and being nourished by their milk. Evelina, in contrast, dreamed about beds too high for her to climb on to. In the evening, the tribe would camp in buildings that had once hosted car dealers and furniture showrooms and gut the animals captured during the day and cook them around the fire. When Leonardo was not called out to dance, he would stay in the cage with Evelina and David. They spent the nights talking, pressed up against the elephant, until the doctor brought them their food at dawn. Mostly they discussed places they had visited in the past and familiar events, but there was always a moment when they remembered that the places they were talking about did not exist anymore and that the people whose faces and actions they were trying to describe were dead. Then they would interrupt themselves and lie in each other’s arms listening in the silence to their own breathing, which deafened them like the squeaking of a bicycle on a dark road.

  Two boys had managed to retrieve a can of diesel from the tank of an old combine harvester; but even so, by now the only vehicles still capable of moving under their own steam were the van and the coach. Nearly all the cars had been abandoned, and the young people collected in the coach. Their empty eyes peered out through the windows at the mountains on one side and the desolate and apparently endless plain on the other.

  Leonardo felt he could detect for the first time a belief in the young people’s faces that there might be a tomorrow, and that if this was so it was something they could lose. This perception must have seemed to them like an object just dug up from under the ground, something to turn over in their hands in an attempt to understand what it was and who had buried it and why. The effort seemed to make them very tired.

  That evening, when the music was switched on and the fire had been lit, they paired off without enthusiasm and after dancing for half an hour fell into a sleep like death, from which no one woke to feed the fire.

  Richard seldom appeared. When he did, his face looked as serene and cheerful as ever, even if very pale. Lucia followed him as he passed among the young people, talking to them and blessing them, and she sat with him to watch Leonardo dance. This was the only time the tribe seemed to recover their savage innocence.

  “I’ll never be able to get her away from here,” Leonardo said one evening, returning to the cage.

  Evelina stroked his cheek.

  “Of course you will!”

  “How?”

  “Don’t underestimate yourself. Soon you’ll be stronger than he is. Perhaps you already are.”

  Leonardo looked at her. In the weak moonlight the innocence of her face was enough to send him to sleep. In the afternoon the sky had broken, showing a section of the heavenly vault.

  “What will you take with you when you go?” she asked

  This seemed an absurd question to Leonardo.

  “Lucia, you, David, Salomon, the bald girl, and my exercise book,” he said.

  “What exercise book?”

  “A book I was writing in. I think it must be in the trailer.”

  “And Alberto?”

  Leonardo said nothing.

  The next day a series of shots broke several windows on the coach, hitting one boy in the throat and wounding another in the arm. The van towing the trailer stopped, and everyone ran for shelter. Only Leonardo and Evelina stayed exposed inside the cage.

  The shots had come from a large fortified building perched on a spur half a mile from the road. Dating from the fifteenth, perhaps sixteenth century, it must once have been the seat of some minor feudal lord and was now surrounded by modern villas of shoddy design. When some of the youths fired back, it provoked a burst of return fire, more concentrated this time, that pierced the surface of the coach, the van, and the trailer. Richard, who had gotten out to take shelter with Lucia, called the cripple, who hurried over with his head down. They talked together for about ten minutes, a discussion punctuated by silences during which they stared at the sparse patches of snow on the asphalt. Leonardo knew they were weighing up the pros and cons of attacking the fortress and whether to wait for night or try to negotiate. In the end the cripple got up and came to the cage, after first taking a rifle from one of the boys and tying a white shirt to the barrel. When he opened the door, Leonardo squeezed Evelina’s arm.

  “Move,” the cripple said to Evelina from the entrance. The expression on his face was as blank and ferocious as ever.

  Evelina turned to Leonardo with a smile.

  “Don’t let yourself down. OK?”

  “I won’t.”

  Leonardo got to his feet and stroked her arm.

  “You are dear to me,” he said.

  “So are you to me,” she answered; then went to David and rested her head against the elephant’s forehead for a moment before following the cripple out of the cage.

  Leonardo watched them make their way up the little road leading to the fortress: the little cripple bent
over, with the white shirt hoisted on the barrel of his rifle and Evelina with her bulk enclosed in her dirty trousers and red chenille sweater. As he watched her, Leonardo was aware of the existence of a form of beauty he had never previously known in things. It was a wonder that was not to be found on their surface or even in their depths but that fluttered around them, nourished by a time that was not the present but the recent past or a future soon to come, at any rate not the present, or no longer so.

  An hour later the procession came to the first road signs announcing the pass and veered off the main road heading for the valley. The surrounding whiteness was untouched. The few houses on the two still high sides of the valley had been abandoned but were in good condition. There were no signs of fires or wrecking, and everything was steeped in the kind of silence one might expect after a dignified exodus.

  Leonardo inhaled the cold air to clean out his lungs.

  We’ll never make it to France, he thought, watching the setting sun turn the white snow deep cobalt blue. There’s too much snow and the frontier will be guarded. We shall all die.

  None of these thoughts affected his heartbeat in any way at all.

  The next day they managed to climb the valley as far as one of the last villages before the pass, but on reaching a hollow cutting where the road forked, they ran into a deep snowdrift out of reach of the sun and had to stop.

  They parked the vehicles on a village square, where a century earlier holidaymakers had stayed in a comfortable pale-pink three-story hotel more recently converted into a customs post and then sealed up by the military. On the other side of the square were the civic center, a bar, a haberdasher’s and a furniture store, though all that was left of any of them was their shop signs.

  The coach was parked in the middle of the square to form an L with the trailer and the van while the young people scattered around the village, which had a single main street with stone houses, to search for wood and something to eat. It was still early afternoon and several others went to hunt in the forest immediately above the houses. The frontier cannot have been more than twenty kilometers away, but the surrounding mountains were deep in snow and a steady wind was shifting great masses of clouds like a roof over the valley. Leonardo stuck his legs out through the bars to enjoy the warmth of the sun. He had seen Alberto and others head for what had once been a grocery shop with a gas pump next to it. Only two were left to guard the square. The trailer stayed shut. As usual during the day, there was no sign of the doctor. Suddenly he heard someone calling him. He turned and saw Salomon’s face just above the floor of the cage. Leonardo sat down with his back to him so that no one should see him talking to the boy.

  “Are you well?”

  “Yes,” said the child.

  “Do they give you enough to eat?”

  “Yes, but when are Mamma and Papa going to come for me?”

  Leonardo adjusted his back against the bars.

  “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I don’t think they will be coming.”

  “Not at all?”

  “No. We have to try and manage by ourselves.”

  Salomon mulled over this idea, staring at the floor deep in excrement and broken branches. Each morning, after the doctor’s visit, Leonardo had once been in the habit of clearing both out of the wagon but had not bothered after Evelina left.“It’s very dirty here,” the child said.

  “You’re right, I really must clean the place up.”

  The child nodded.

  “I’m sorry the lady has gone.”

  “So am I, but she’ll be fine where she is now.”

  “But she was a bit of company for you.”

  “I’ve still got David.”

  Salomon was playing with a twig sticking out of the cage; then he snapped it off and let it fall to the ground.

  “Alberto has told me some very nasty things about you.”

  “What has he said?”

  “That you’re worthless and if he’d stayed with you he would’ve died, but that now he’s the children’s leader and Richard loves him very much.”

  “You know what to believe and what not to believe.”

  Salomon picked up the broken twig and joined it to the branch he had broken it from, fitting the two parts together again. His nails were dirty.

  “I don’t want to do any more theater,” he said.

  “I know, but you must be patient a little bit longer. OK? Now go away. I don’t want them to see you talking to me.”

  “Will you be dancing this evening?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t like it when you dance, but it’s funny too.”

  “Just remember I’m dancing to make you laugh. That it’s what I do. OK?”

  “OK.”

  “Now go away.”

  “I don’t know where the others are.”

  “Wait for them in the coach. It must be nice and warm behind the windows.”

  “There’s a seat covered with blood. Where Giampiero was sitting.”

  “Then sit on those steps over there. Close your eyes and think of something nice.”

  “Can I think of Mamma, Papa, and Paul?”

  “Of course you can.”

  “So shall I go?”

  “Yes, go now.”

  Leonardo heard his footsteps rounding the wagon. As he made his way to the steps, Salomon waved a hand behind his back without turning. The bald girl was lying on the ground taking a little sun on her wasted body. One of her small white breasts was peeping out of her dress.

  In the evening it began snowing again and by the next morning twenty centimeters had fallen on the square, transforming it into an unwritten page. The young people had spent the night in the great hall and ground floor of the hotel, where the previous day they had piled clothes, mattresses, stoves, and wood collected from the houses in the village. The place had two glass walls and the stoves had been arranged in such a way that their chimneys led through several broken panes, which had then been resealed with nylon and old curtains. Leonardo had watched through the glass as they ate and then threw themselves onto the mattresses and drifted off into deep sleep.

  He had spent all night watching the snow falling without ever wanting to close his eyes. There was no moon, but the square was lit by a photovoltaic street lamp and the snow emerging from the black sky was tinged a deep fluorescent blue that turned to pewter as it settled on the ground. It was not cold, or at least it was not as cold as the night before, when the sky had been full of stars.

  In the morning, when he emerged from the trailer, Richard’s face was twisted with rage: now they could go neither forward nor back. They were stuck, under the gray still sky. Looking around himself, he found Leonardo’s eyes staring at him. He held his gaze for a moment, until Lucia appeared with a blanket around her shoulders and both moved pale and trembling toward the hotel. Leonardo realized the trailer’s heating must have failed.

  That evening he was taken to the great hall where the mattresses had been pushed aside to free a circle in the middle of the room. The atmosphere was warm and comfortable, but the young people seemed restless and disappointed, and even while Leonardo was dancing some preferred to look out at the snow, which had begun falling again on the parking lot below them.

  Richard and Lucia watched the dancing from behind a desk with a black-leather writing surface, and then Richard took Lucia by the hand, and without bestowing his usual blessing on the tribe, climbed the stairs and disappeared to the floor above.

  Before the cripple sent him back to the cage, Leonardo had a chance to study the faces of the youngsters. Their old naïve ferocity had given way to something still terrible but more human, and though he did not know their names, he felt that for the first time he could tell them apart. Before leaving the hall he noticed Salomon sitting pretending to smile stupidly at nothing.

  Two days later a donkey appeared in the square with her foal. Leonardo saw them emerge from the road leading from the country; they were thin
and in very bad condition. Noticing them from the hotel windows, the youngsters ran out and surrounded them; the donkey, who must have been searching for food, let herself be caught without putting up any resistance.

  A squabble then broke out between those who wanted to tell Richard and those who wanted to kill the two animals without telling him. During the ensuing brawl Leonardo noticed that the aggressive indifference that had previously characterized their actions was dwindling into petty malice.

  The cripple came out, pistol in hand, and fired a shot into the air. Leonardo saw a second-floor curtain move aside and Richard’s face appear behind the glass. Then he opened the window and stared for a while in silence at the panting youngsters in the square. He was bare to the waist, with a few blond hairs on his gaunt chest.

  “Only eat the little one,” he directed before closing the window again.

  It snowed every day of the following week. Showers that lasted only a few hours but were enough to preserve the depth of snow on the ground and prevent the procession moving forward despite a rise in temperature and the gradual lengthening of the days.

  Leonardo waited every evening for the young people to fall asleep; then he went over to Circe and spent a long time sucking her rough little teats. It had not occurred to anyone that the donkey was lactating, and Leonardo tried the keep this little source of nourishment to himself. For her part, Circe seemed happy to be relieved of the burden and stood still while Leonardo massaged her teats to make the milk descend. He called her Circe after a fable he had written for Lucia when she was little, in which a donkey named Circe decided she only had to puff out her cheeks to be able to fly. The other animals on the farm mocked and scorned her, but in the end she succeeded.

  One night he woke up to find his thoughts as still as crocodiles under the moon, all motionless below the surface of the water as they waited for their prey to come down to drink. Basic thoughts without frills, stretched taut and ready for action.

  This reminded him how much his mind used to be agitated by an infinity of imprecise ideas wriggling about like eels in a bucket. He was ashamed of this busy lack of purpose, but since this guilt too belonged to the past, he let it go.