by Davide Longo
When the doctor came that morning Leonardo watched him moving from one side of the cage to the other to give food and water to the two animals. Since Circe’s arrival, David would no longer leave his side of the cage. The two had tacitly agreed to divide the available space and limited themselves to exchanging an occasional glance. Leonardo would sleep next to one on one night and the other on the next night. When the doctor had finished, he stroked David and began to leave.
“Push the door to, but don’t close it,” Leonardo told him. The man stopped.
“Do you want to run away?” he said, studying Leonardo’s impassive face.
“No. But I need you to do something else for me.”
The doctor noticed Leonardo was looking at the hatchet he used to cut branches for David.
“What are you hoping to do?”
“Leave it on that window ledge over there,” Leonardo said, using his chin to indicate the bar on the other side of the square.
“You’re mad. You’ll only get yourself killed. And then what’ll happen to your daughter?”
Leonardo looked at the man and the entirely rational expression he always wore on his face.
“Where’s your son?” he asked him.
The man raised an eyebrow.
“What do you mean?”
“One day you told me your wife and daughter were dead but that you don’t know where your son is.”
“That’s true.”
“When did you lose him? Where did it happen?”
The doctor wiped his left hand on his side. A very slow movement. Then he looked through the windows at the several young people circling lazily in the great hall. The sky was overcast but with a strip of lighter clouds stretched across it.
“Who did you play finger-cutting with?” Leonardo asked him.
The man half opened his lips but said nothing. His eyes were very tired.
“You played finger-cutting with your son, didn’t you?”
The doctor shook his head, his face overcome with weariness at this reappearance of something he had loaded with ballast and sent to the bottom of the sea. Then he turned for the door. When he left, Leonardo could hear that he had not bolted it. He got up and stroked David’s head first, then Circe’s.
“This evening,” he whispered to them both.
That afternoon Leonardo slept a calm, restful sleep, of the kind that normally follows rather than precedes an event that may change the course of one’s life.
What woke him was the lighting of the lamp in the square; day had already retreated behind the mountains, though a trace still survived in the blue profiles of the highest peaks. Thawing snow was dripping softly from the roofs.
He looked at the hall where the young people were dozing on the mattresses. They had already cleared a space in the center of the room; soon Richard and Lucia would come down and someone would fetch him to dance.
He got to his feet, pushed open the door left unbolted by the doctor, and climbed down from the wagon.
Crossing the square to the old bar with bare feet was like crossing the middle of an immense space, big enough to walk through for days without ever reaching a destination. This did not dismay him in the least.
He picked up the hatchet left on the window ledge, stuck it into the back of his pants, and started back to the wagon. But before he got there he moved aside from his footprints in the snow and headed for the trailer instead; the door was ajar.
It was like entering the office of a methodical clerk who was able to rest for an hour or two on a camp bed between jobs. There was nothing formal, just a narrow space decorated with pornographic photographs and a large ceiling mirror that reflected a dirty green bedcover. The floor was rubber, and pans on the gas cooker had been used for cooking rice. From an iron hook over the bed hung cords, chains, and other improvised sadomasochistic contraptions, including a machine with rubber tubes designed for milking cows.
Leonardo went to the desk. Propped on its surface were several charcoal sketches and a Bible with a fabric cover. The sketches showed Lucia naked and bound. There were others in a filing cabinet above the desk. Leonardo assumed they probably featured other girls and did not open them.
He found what he was looking for in the second drawer of the desk. He took the exercise book, slipped it into what was left of his back pocket, and left.
Once back in the cage, he closed the door and began waiting. Two lamps fed by an electrical generator feebly lit the hall where the bodies of the youngsters were moving to music that was increasingly drowned by the sounds of the thaw. The mountains were hidden by a black cloak, though it was obvious they were still keeping a watch on everything.
When he saw Richard and Lucia appear at the foot of the stairs, Leonardo took his hands out of his pockets but did not move. Not yet. The dancing stopped, and he watched them circulate among the young people in the hall. Lucia was in a red dress that must have belonged to a larger woman who had been a mother, while Richard was wearing a beige tunic and a wool scarf draped artistically over his shoulders. When he saw Richard have a word with the cripple and sit down at the desk, he knew the moment had come for him to get to his feet.
The boy who had been sent to fetch him saw him approaching the hotel and briefly stopped dead at the door to stare at him in astonishment, as if he were watching the flight of an animal that cannot fly. He was young and blond, with a high forehead and a chin that seemed borrowed from someone else’s face.
When Leonardo entered the room the young people did not move, their eyes fixed on him. The music was far away and the only noise was the sound of the fires burning in the stoves. The air smelled of sweat, thunderstorms, and youth.
He came up to the desk behind which Richard and Lucia were sitting. No one did anything to stop him. Passing among the youngsters, he saw the doctor sitting near an antique stove, Salomon standing on a raised counter, and the bald girl crouched between two boys. During the last month or so her hair had begun to grow again in a confused manner, leaving large bald patches.
When he reached the desk, Leonardo looked first at Lucia, then at Richard, and finally at the cripple standing a couple of paces behind them. He realized this small, deformed, and cruel man had been waiting for this moment from the start.
“What do you want to do, dancer?” Richard said. “Cut off my head?”
Leonardo realized he had pulled the hatchet from his trousers and was grasping it in his right hand. He stared at Richard, who was watching him with amusement, placed his left hand on the desk, and with a neat stroke cut off his own thumb.
Raising his eyes from his hand, Leonardo met the pale face of Richard, who was staring at the amputated thumb as blood began to spread over the desk. Richard’s smile had hardened.
“What are you trying to prove?” he said, avoiding Leonardo’s eye.
Leonardo struck again, chopping off his index and middle fingers.
The two fingers rolled off the desk and fell into Richard’s lap; he leaped back, his tunic stained with little bright-red drops. Leonardo looked into Lucia’s lukewarm eyes and smiled at her, for a moment joining her in the far-off world where she was living. Then he turned to stare at Richard, who looked as colorless and fleshy as a funeral bloom, his lower lip visibly trembling.
Leonardo raised the hatchet a third time and cut off the remaining fingers of his left hand. One fell from the table to the floor, but the little finger swiveled around and ended pointing upward. Leonardo then extricated the hatchet, which had stuck in the wood, and, still grasping it in his fist, lowered it to his side. The young people were paralyzed. He could hear their breath cutting the air like the great strings of a cello reverberating to the tiniest movement.
He looked into Richard’s blue eyes: he had turned white, with red patches appearing on his cheeks. He placed his hands on the arms of his chair and tried to get up but his arms gave way. Leonardo waited patiently. His hand felt as if it was in flames, but he was also conscious of a sense of relief.
Leonardo smiled at him, lifted the hatchet again, and brought it down on his left wrist, cutting off the whole hand.
This time the blood spurted everywhere, hitting the cripple, who did not even bother to wipe his face. The sound of splintering bone echoed from the walls like the crash of a falling tree.
Leonardo put the hatchet down on the desk and looked at his severed hand lying in his own blood. Electricity was rising up his arm to form a circuit around his body in which he felt as well protected as he had ever been in his life. It was as if his father and mother were with him, and also his brother who had died at three months and only once had even been mentioned by his mother. A child not him but very like him, who would never now feel alone again. Then he remembered Richard.
He picked up his severed left hand and threw it into Richard’s lap. The man tried to struggle to his feet, but his eyes turned back in his head and he crashed to the ground, hitting his head on the edge of the desk as he fell. Leonardo glanced at the body curled on the floor.
“Come on,” he said to Lucia.
The girl took the hand he held out to her and stood up.
“Salomon,” Leonardo called.
The child joined them and together they headed for the door. No one tried to stop them, and when Leonardo released Lucia to offer his hand to the bald girl on the mattress, the two boys on either side of her moved to let her go.
Once outside they made for the wagon, Leonardo leaving a trail of blood that turned lilac on the snow. The young people, who had followed them onto the square in a line, watched them lead the elephant and the donkey out of the cage like a chorus silently watching the passing of a coffin. Leonardo told Salomon to see to the animals and then he turned back to the hotel.
“Fetch your bag,” he said, stopping in front of the doctor.
The man seemed even older and more resigned among all the adolescent faces.
“You’ll be able to go back later,” Leonardo added, “but for the moment I need you to come with us.”
When the doctor went back into the hotel to fetch his bag, Leonardo looked up toward the full moon and studied the big clouds with fluorescent edges being pulled rather than pushed by the wind toward the valley. He could feel Alberto’s eyes on him and saw the boy standing on a great concrete bowl. Leonardo held his gaze without feeling any need to ask questions of himself, or any indecision faced with Alberto’s hesitation. In the past he would have let other people, circumstances, or timing make up his mind for him as he took refuge behind his characteristic meekness, but that past did not exist anymore, just as the men and women who had inhabited it did not exist anymore. Now everything was terrible and simple, like his warm blood carving its way through the snow.
“The hemorrhage must be stopped,” the doctor said.
He had come out of the hotel with a leather bag, several blankets over his shoulder, and a pair of shoes under his arm.
“Later,” Leonardo said. “First we must get going.”
Reaching the corner of the square with Salomon, Lucia, the bald woman, the doctor, and the two animals, he turned to look back at the young people for the last time. They were standing still where he had left them, bewitched by the blood and cruelty they had witnessed. Among their perfect slender bodies he recognized the deformed shape of the cripple. Under the perpendicular rays of the moon his face was as composed as a funeral mask.
They left the foot of the valley by a lane that seemed likely to lead to a few isolated houses. The doctor had controlled the hemorrhage with a bandage, but Leonardo could feel blood running down his leg again. They had been walking in the snow for hours and needed to find somewhere to rest and light a fire.
After a couple of hairpin bends, the road became less steep and they came to a group of houses around a small church and a little square that would not have been able to provide parking for more than three cars. It was a tiny village that would have been inhabited a century ago but which had then been abandoned before being partly restored by city dwellers looking for a peaceful retreat on weekends.
They took the main thoroughfare, obstructed by compressed snow. Leonardo walked in front, followed by David. At points where the lane narrowed the elephant’s sides rubbed against the walls, and he let out long melancholy sighs. Salomon, the bald woman, and Lucia followed, having taken turns on the donkey the whole way. The doctor brought up the rear. The doors of some houses had been made fast with rusty old padlocks and their glassless windows revealed grain-processing machinery, plows, furniture, old sledges, hay, and wood piled up haphazardly. But the recently reconditioned houses showed clear signs of having been broken into and looted. Leonardo stopped at the end of the village in front of a large building resembling an Alpine chalet in stone with an oddly shaped terrace. The roof of the little loggia was supported by a pillar set with a large blue stone on which someone had carved a cross and the date 1845. In front of the house, level ground stretched to a bank marked by a line of beeches. Beyond these were presumably the road and the river.
“What do you hope to find here?” the doctor asked.
Leonardo examined the half-open door of the house, took off his shoes, and, after placing them neatly on the bottom step, limped toward the door.
They spent the morning on the terrace, faces turned to a weak spring sun that had risen uncertainly as if seeing the world for the first time.
No one, since they left the camp the previous evening, had asked where they were going and when they would find food. Salomon had been the only one to talk during the night. Walking beside Leonardo, he had expounded all he knew about creatures that could see in the dark, explaining how certain deep-sea fish were able to see by polarized light and so could detect their prey even in the darkness of the depths. Now and then Leonardo had turned toward Lucia, but his daughter’s eyes remained remote and blank. The bald woman, whenever she met his gaze, looked down. The doctor, at the back of the procession, contributed only a labored panting.
“They won’t escape, will they?” Salomon asked.
David and Circe were wandering around the field below the house eating the bark of several cherry trees.
“No, they won’t,” Leonardo said.
“Because they’re fond of us?”
“Exactly.”
Salomon looked at the girls and the doctor sleeping on the disjointed boards of the balcony, their hands red and swollen with warmth after the night’s frost. Then he stared at the mountain facing them and the leafless trees punctuating the brilliant white of the snow.
“Yesterday evening I was scared.”
“I know, but that’s over now.”
“Doesn’t it feel sore?”
“No. Are you hungry?”
“A bit.”
“Only a bit?”
“Very hungry.”
Leonardo woke the doctor and together they went down into the field where he showed the doctor how to milk Circe, then they went back and warmed the pot of milk on the stove. The house had been uninhabited for many years, but it was in good shape and despite the fact that others had been there before them, some dishes and cutlery had survived; also a table, a kitchen range, three beds with mattresses and blankets, a sofa, a wardrobe with men’s clothes in it, and a cellar containing a lot of tools. Leonardo and the doctor inspected the house from top to bottom without finding anything to eat, but in the attic they found some firewood and a few bales of hay that would be useful for the animals.
The doctor told Leonardo to sit down, and he began unwrapping his bandage.
“Don’t rest it on the table,” he said when the wound was revealed. Leonardo studied the dark flesh and white bone. His arm felt cold, light, and incomplete, but it was not painful. It just felt as though the limb was filling with air and sooner or later would fly away, detaching itself from his body.
“What’s that?”
The doctor was spreading o
n the wound a yellow cream from a jar.
“An ointment I’ve made from tobacco. Very basic, but it’ll prevent infection. The best I can do.”
The doctor went to wash his hands at the sink; then he sat down to bind up the stump.
“You’ll have to dress it morning and evening. This is the only bandage I’ve got so try to keep it clean. If it does get dirty, you can make another by cutting up a piece of clothing or a towel, but make sure it’s cotton and that you boil it before use. If there’s no infection, your temperature should return to normal in a couple of days and the wound will begin to heal.”
Leonardo looked out the window. He could see the river and part of the bottom of the valley. The sun, beating all morning on the road, had revealed a few patches of asphalt.
“Do you really want to go back to them?”
The doctor looked at him as though the question was entirely meaningless.
“You only have one hand and no weapons,” he said, knotting the bandage. “The child and the girls can only get in your way. If you’re lucky, someone will kill you all; failing that, you’ll die of hunger.”
The milk began hissing. Leonardo got up and took the pot off the stove using an old towel with a printed picture of Mickey Mouse dressed as a chef, and poured the milk into some containers he had found. There were two cups and a glass, and two metal containers intended for salt and coffee. He offered one to the doctor, who accepted it and put it on the table.
“I don’t care what you think of me,” he said.
Leonardo stared at him for a moment, his eyes calm and lacking in resentment; then he took one of the containers out to the balcony. When he got back to collect the rest and take them to the girls, the man had vanished.
Before dark Leonardo and Salomon checked the houses in the village, gleaning a local map, a parka, some sunflower seeds, a pencil, a little seed oil, a piece of soap, a pack of cards, an old snare, and a handful of sowing potatoes.
On their return, they found the stove had gone out; the house was dark and the girls were asleep in the bed behind the wooden partition. Leonardo and Salomon went down to the cellar, where Leonardo showed the boy how to make an oil lamp using an empty drinks bottle, a piece of rag, and the oil they had found. The boy followed the instructions carefully without getting impatient even when he had difficulty rolling the wick in the right way, and he was finally able to watch the lamp with pride as it lit the low ceiling of the room. Leonardo pocketed the lighter the doctor had left with the ointment.