The Last Man Standing

by Davide Longo

  In the morning, by the time the young people woke, he would have already milked the donkey and retrieved whatever had been caught in the snare. Often a rabbit or hare was attracted by the potato bait, but once he was surprised to find a badger and another time a fox. The animals were nearly always dead and if they weren’t Leonardo would finish them off with a stick and take them to the camp, where Salomon would tie them to a branch to skin and gut them. When Leonardo had told the child that this must be his job since with only one hand he could not do it himself, Salomon had been reluctant, but as the days passed he had proved an able and meticulous butcher.

  When they had cleaned the animal, they would go back to the water and wash their hands, arms, face, and feet, drying themselves on a large beach towel they had found. Lucia would wait for them by the fire. She showed no fear of being left alone and when they were on the march she would sometimes disappear into the woods, Leonardo imagined to attend to her physical needs, reappearing at the exact point where they had stopped to wait for her. With time the red dress got torn and one of the flat shoes she wore began coming apart, but she seemed to have no interest in the change of clothing Leonardo had brought for her.

  “Will we see the sea today?” Salomon asked. The airy valley below them was of such a dazzling green as to force them to look away. These were the first steps they had taken downhill in a long time.

  “A few days more.”

  “How many?”

  Leonardo looked toward the far hillside where the wind turbines were revolving silently. This time he had decided to take a route to the south, where the map had shown an ancient series of military trenches that, as he hoped, had turned out to be overgrown with brambles and impassable for cars.

  “Three,” he said.

  Late in the afternoon they saw the roofs of a village beneath them and the ruins of a castle high above it. All that was left of the castle was a shell of walls covered with ivy, but the village looked to be in good condition if deserted.

  Leonardo sat down on a stone and studied the castle for a few minutes, with Salomon crouching at his side. Lucia stood behind them. David and Circe, as always when they stopped, went off to eat. Nearby, a sorb tree blown down during the winter was still putting out toothed oval leaves.

  “Do we absolutely have to go there?” the boy said.

  “No, we don’t have to,” Leonardo said.

  “Then why do you want to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The hot sun was piercing the roof of leaves above them and marking out patches on the surrounding grass. Leonardo was thinking about a man he had never seen or known but who he knew to have lived in one of those houses. He could smell his clothes. For days he had been having similar visions and clearly remembering everything he had read or heard in the past. Even so, his mind was light and free, as if his immense archive of stories could fit into a suitcase in an empty house.

  “Can we come too?” Salomon asked.

  “Better not. I’ll be back soon.”

  He went down to the village through the woods, reaching the backs of the first houses: tall, narrow stone structures in the Ligurian style but solidly built in the way that things are in the mountains.

  He found an alley and walked down it as far as the main lane, which was no wider than his extended arms and paved with round cobbles. The shutters of the houses were closed, their doors ajar or wide open to empty rooms. After some fifty meters the main street opened into a space with a fountain, a small play area for children, and the terrace of a bar. A cat dozing on a low stone wall was the only living creature to be seen. Up a flight of steps was the church.

  Leonardo went in. There were no pews or fittings. High up, a great wooden crucifix was watching over the empty aisles like someone casting a final glance over his home before closing the door and leaving for a new life elsewhere.

  Leaving the church, he wandered through the village until he found the house. Access was by a set of stone steps, but the door was hidden by a vine that had spread over the whole garden. Above it a Japanese persimmon extended its branches, and in front were olive trees and what had been a terraced kitchen garden but had now been taken over by wild boars.

  First he came into a small room with a high ceiling and then the kitchen. The house had been built vertically with small rooms one above another linked by steep stairways up to the top floor, which from the outside looked like a small turret covered with ivy. There was no trace of the man who had lived there, or of the woman Leonardo knew to have shared most of his life: no garment, book, or furniture, only the great cloths and sheets of paper on which the man had traced designs in ash, anticipating what the world would become.

  In the space under a roof that must have been his studio, Leonardo found jars of burned earth, sand, and dust, each with a small label written in pencil. Also fragments of wood smoothed by the sea and strangely formed stones. He picked up one of the stones; it was gray, interlaced with white circles of a different mineral, and as he held it he could feel the man’s warm, bony hand in his palm. He could see him, small and white-haired, moving through the rooms in a pullover and bending for hours over his artwork of ashes, the work of a man who knew that all things begin in poverty. Leonardo spoke to him.

  By the time he left the garden of the house, the sun had lost its heat. He climbed back up the main lane to the square, but before reaching it he heard singing and stopped. A cheerful song sung by a woman.

  He followed the music to the door it was coming from and found himself in a bare kitchen with a table laid for three. From the stairs leading to the floor above came two female voices, one responding to the other. They were singing in old French.

  He climbed the stairs and even before he reached the top step, met the eyes of three women sitting together in the middle of a room. All the furniture, consisting of a sofa, sideboard, wardrobe, and double bed, had been moved to one side as though someone had tilted the floor to make it slide, while the other walls were hung with carpets giving it a peaceful and Arab feeling.

  The women stared at Leonardo for a moment without interrupting their song, then turned around to face the window beyond which the sun was sinking and tingeing the colors of the valley with yellow. The thin woman in the middle was about fifty and her black dress would not have looked out of place under a raincoat on some suburban street in Amsterdam or Paris. Her mulatto face was beautiful, even if tired and bloodless, sparse hair framing it like a veil. The other two were younger but infinitely more resigned. All three must have lost something; in fact, their eyes clashed with the frivolity of their song, clearly intended to raise a smile. The mulatto woman was conducting, raising and lowering her hands from her knees. When the song ended she got up and walked toward Leonardo.

  “Did you like that?”

  “Very much.”

  She was just as tall and slim as he remembered her.

  “You really mean that?”

  “I do.”

  The woman returned to the others, complimented them, and took her leave of them, making an appointment for the next day. Then she went back to Leonardo.

  “It’s such a lovely day,” she said. “Shall we sit outside for a while?”

  Leonardo followed her into the street and toward the bar. There were still two tables and a few chairs on the terrace. They chose two that still had unbroken seats and sat down, facing the hillside behind which the sun would set. The door of the bar at the back had been smashed and one could imagine excrement and screwed-up waste paper inside on the floor. Small skulls could be seen in the shadows. On the other hand, the terrace was clean and full of light. From the acacias came a good smell and the buzzing of wasps.

  “Have you ever been here before?” the woman asked.

  Leonardo remembered her face surrounded by curly hair, of which hardly any now remained.

  “No,” he said.

  She looked at the terraces rising above the houses and the two lanes, one coming out behind a swing and the othe
r beside the church. A notice said GO SLOW, CHILDREN STILL PLAY IN THE STREET HERE.

  “I first saw this place thirty years ago. I’d come to Europe as a backing singer for Leonard Cohen and the day after a gig in Nice a lighting technician brought me here on his motorbike. I was twenty-five then, and I thought sooner or later I’d come to live in this village, especially if I had a child.”

  “I often came to your concerts.”

  “Mine or Leonard’s?”

  “Yours.”

  “I read your books. Do you remember the lecture on Bolaño you gave in the theater in Nantes? I came to hear it and nearly asked your agent how I could meet you.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because I thought if you came to one of my performances you would never have done that.”

  “But how did you recognize me?”

  “Do you think you’ve changed much?”

  “Yes.”

  “Quite wrong, I knew who you were at once. But how did you recognize me? I’ve lost all my hair.”

  “I knew your voice. What was that song I was listening to?”

  “Provençal, very old, great fun. It’s about a bailiff who tells his wife he’s being tormented by a mosquito buzzing in his stomach. She sends him to the doctor at Cavaillon. The doctor agrees it’s a mosquito and suggests a natural remedy: the frog is the sworn enemy of the mosquito so all the man has to do is to eat a live frog to hunt it down. The bailiff does this because he’s afraid of what people will say if they hear the mosquito buzzing, and after a few days the buzzing does indeed stop, but now he can’t sleep because of the frog croaking. So his wife sends him back to the doctor, who this time makes him eat a live pike because the pike is the sworn enemy of the frog. Returning home, the bailiff is happy because the croaking stops, but now the pike is turning his stomach upside down. Then his wife says there’s no point in going to the doctor again because the sworn enemy of the pike is the fisherman, so all her husband needs to do is to lower a hook and line into his stomach. The bailiff agrees and his wife is able to lead him around the village by the hook and line for days. The last verse reveals that she is the lover of the doctor at Cavaillon and had sewn the mosquito into the border of her husband’s pants.”

  “A good story.”

  “The two women you saw with me have lost their children and husbands. They need songs to distract their thoughts. They have never sung before, but now we do an hour or two every day. They’ve become very good at it.”

  “Are you the only people in the village now?”

  “Yes, only us.”

  “Why don’t you go down to the sea?”

  “This is where our homes are, and even if we no longer have our men and children, we still like to sleep in the beds we used to share with them. We saved enough food to get us through the winter, and now we have the kitchen gardens and orchards.”

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “Why should we be? We’ve already lost everything.”

  Leonardo pushed back the hair the gentle wind had blown into his eyes.

  “Are they with you?” the woman asked.

  Leonardo turned to see Salomon and the animals standing in front of the church, and Lucia sitting a little way off on the edge of the fountain. Salomon was looking at Leonardo but pretending not to, as though afraid of getting into trouble. Leonardo raised a hand in greeting. The boy said ciao. David and Circe were standing meekly to his left and right as if in a bizarre Nativity scene. Lucia was staring at the rectangle of water into which the jet of the fountain was falling with a hypnotic gurgling sound.

  “Are these your children?” the woman asked.

  “Only Lucia. The boy’s been with us for several months.”

  The woman nodded.

  “May I ask what happened to your hand?”

  “I had to renounce it.”

  “In exchange for something important, presumably?”

  “Something extremely important.”

  They watched the young people. The leaves of a lime tree were still glowing in the last of the setting sun. The cat had moved to a window ledge higher up, from where it was presiding over this unusual movement of humans and animals.

  “When is your daughter due to give birth?” the woman asked.

  “At the end of the summer.”

  They spent four days in the village. On the first night he caressed Lucia’s feet, then he left the house, and, as Clarisse had asked him to, he went to the house where the youngest of the women was waiting for him. On the second night he went to the other.

  In the morning he got some sleep in the shade of a sycamore, while the young people supervised David and Circe grazing among the olive trees. In the afternoon he went back to the house with the Japanese persimmon in the garden and studied the ash pictures on the walls, holding a long conversation with the man who had created them. The man was very old, and when he said he was tired they sat in silence at a little table in front of the fireplace. On these occasions Leonardo still had his left hand and used it to hold the stones the man showed him, stones he had collected over the years for their shape or color.

  During these days Leonardo ate the polenta, vegetables, and fruit that Clarisse prepared for them, and he never set the snare. Toward evening he would sit with the youngsters in the room on the upper floor and listen to the women singing. Clarisse had washed Lucia’s hair, and she now had an ample yellow dress that left her shoulders bare. Her breasts had developed and there was something new and lively in her eyes.

  On the last night, after seeing Salomon and Lucia to bed, Leonardo went down to the kitchen where Clarisse was waiting for him by the light of the oil lamp. David and Circe were moving around in the garden under the window, between the slide and the swings. They could hear the branches rustling as the elephant pulled them within reach with his trunk.

  “That time at Nantes,” Clarisse said, “you said that in the Kabbalah, unlike Genesis, God initially fails by creating other worlds that are soon extinguished like sparks. Do you remember?”

  “He fails because he only uses the feminine principle, the principle of will and determination. When he also brings in the masculine principle of compassion and mercy, he creates a spark that is able to survive, and that spark is the world we’re living in now.”

  She smiled. Her teeth were white, her eyes like black leather.

  “But what if this too is just another attempt on his part? That he’s still learning and that the successful world is still to come? Wouldn’t that be wonderful?”

  “It would be, but I don’t think that’s how it is.”

  They were drinking an infusion Clarisse had made from mint, hawthorn, and dried medlar leaves, and then with an imperceptible movement of her hips she shifted her chair closer to the table.

  “The others are still young and with a bit of luck they may still have children. I’m not well, and in any case I’m too old for pregnancy. But I’d like to ask you something.”

  Leonardo waited in silence.

  “I’ve engraved some lines of Rilke on my husband’s gravestone, and one of Leonard’s songs on my son’s. I’d like you to advise me what to put on my own.”

  Leonardo looked at Clarisse’s smile, her perfect nose, and the hands around her cup, and he knew for certain that her hands had touched tears, seed, earth, and blood and never hesitated to respond to the feelings that had moved them.

  “A little while ago I tried to start writing again,” he said, “but I know now I shall never be able to.”

  She took his hand. The light from the lamp began to flicker; the oil was running out.

  “You’ve read so many stories,” she said. “Find one that would do for me. It doesn’t matter if it’s not one of yours.”

  Leonardo stared at the surface of the table. From the dark marks of tears on the wood he realized he was weeping, and understood that his eyes like every other part of him now belonged to the outside world, and that he would never be their master again. This c
aused him no regret. The draft from the window was bringing in the smell of the animals and the cold scent of flowers at night.

  “When I see minds that have no pride,” he said, “no anger, no passion, finding nothing to give them pleasure; when the absentminded and careworn never venture under the sign of fire; when I see sluggish brows, empty spirits, and promises of love weakly sustained, and voices and eyes that hold nothing of the universe in them; then what good fortune that I have made all of you, who have known me, a present of the whole world including the stars, just because you have known me!”

  “That’s so beautiful. Who wrote it?”

  “A woman,” Leonardo said. “A century and a half ago.”

  “Say it again slowly, I want to learn it by heart.”

  Leonardo recited it again more slowly.

  “Thank you,” Clarisse said. Then she got up and moved toward the stairs. At that moment the lamp went out.

  “I’ve got some food ready for your journey and a couple of dresses for Lucia,” she said. “Soon the one she’s wearing won’t fit anymore.”

  The beach, at the point where they reached the sea, consisted of gray, blue, and white pebbles the size of eggs, but the winter storms had swallowed most of it, only stopping a few meters short of the embankment that carried the Aurelia autostrada.

  They walked a little way along the deserted path that skirted the road. It was a stretch of coast in between two built-up areas and there were few buildings, only wooden structures facing the sea that had once been bars and bathing establishments. There were still a few abandoned deckchairs on the beach, among abraded pieces of wood and flotsam.

  When they found a place with no steps to the water, they led the animals down. Faced by such a huge expanse of water David stopped dead, and they had to wait for many minutes for him to take in what he was seeing. The donkey on the other hand went off at once to nibble at the woodwork of a fence.