The Last Man Standing

by Davide Longo

  “Can I go in the water?” the child asked.

  Leonardo looked at the deserted beach and a distant village.

  “Can you swim?”

  “Yes,” said the boy.

  “All right then, but keep close to the shore.”

  “OK,” the child said, taking off his pants.

  Leonardo watched him go into the water. The elephant had followed him as far as the edge of the surf and stayed there to watch over him with his large feet immersed in the foam. Salomon splashed him and cried out with joy. Lucia, at Leonardo’s side, watched the sun sink beyond the promontory to the west.

  “Let’s go and have a look inside there,” Leonardo said.

  The restaurant had a large terrace, a kitchen, a bathroom with running water, and a storeroom whose shelves had been emptied and tipped over. There were no beds or electricity, but in a hut next to it Leonardo found a few lounge chairs and a solar-powered battery. He carried the chairs up one at a time then remembered Salomon.

  By the time Leonardo got him out of the water, the boy was shivering. Leonardo wrapped him in the towel and took him in his arms. Salomon leaned his head on Leonardo’s shoulder and put his arms around his neck.

  “Please can we stay here forever,” he said.

  Sitting on the terrace they dined on Clarisse’s rice and carrots. The restaurant’s windows were still unbroken and even though they found nothing to eat in the place, no one else seemed to have stayed there before them. Salomon, what with all the excitement and exhaustion, ate little and asked Leonardo endless questions about the origin of waves, the depths of the sea, and how they could be reached. The lamp spread a labored, leaden light over the table, but the sky was clear and a fragment of moon lit the coast, sharply defining sea, beach, sky, and rocks.

  It was very late when the child finally fell asleep; Leonardo crossed the road to cut some branches and grass for the animals and carry them back to the beach because he did not want to spend much time away from the restaurant; then he filled a bucket with water and gave it to them to drink while Lucia sat on a deckchair on the terrace.

  “Do you like it here?” he asked, taking off one of her shoes. Her ankles were swollen and her skin had a new smell. He remembered how when she had come to him only a few months earlier she had smelled of new paper whereas now she smelled of milk and blood.

  He answered his own question. “It’s a nice place,” he said, starting the massage.

  Two days later, having finished the food Clarisse had given them, they set the snare in bushes by the road.

  It was not necessary to go very far because hares, foxes, and badgers came near the road fearlessly. Usually in not more than half an hour Leonardo would hear the trap spring and the brief cries of the animal would fill the night. Then, to prevent dogs or other predators stripping it clean, he would get up and go and remove it from the metal jaws. In the morning, as soon as he woke, he would light a fire on the beach and cook the meat to prevent it from spoiling.

  He and Salomon would spend all day in their underpants. Leonardo had persuaded the boy to stay on the veranda out of the sun during the hottest part of the day, but the skin of both had become tanned and their hair lighter, making them look like Nordic adventurers.

  The boy spent a lot of time in the water throwing stones and retrieving them and trying unsuccessfully to get David to follow him. The elephant would watch over him from the beach like a timid granny, and when the waves threatened he would take a few clumsy steps backward but without turning away for fear of losing sight of the boy. Circe, in contrast, free of her large panniers, would spend the day sheltering in the shade between the thick concrete posts that supported the restaurant terrace.

  In the evening Leonardo and the child would lead the animals over the main road to where there were plenty of bushes, and afterward they would have supper with Lucia before throwing the leftovers in the sea so as not to attract dogs.

  One morning, after a couple of hours away, Leonardo brought back a fishing line and several hooks. Now that there were no bathers anymore, the fish had come back near the shore and could easily be enticed to take a bait of little bits of meat or small bones. As dusk fell, Leonardo and Salomon would sit on the beach near the fire while the child recounted his dreams, which were populated by the animals and fish he had killed, creatures who knew he had only killed them out of necessity.

  “Sometimes I feel we must be waiting for someone,” he said one evening.

  His hair reflected the yellow of the fire, like a crocus in the night.

  Leonardo stroked his hair.

  “If we do leave here,” he said, “it will be to go somewhere better.”

  “There can’t be a better place than this,” Salomon said.

  “Then we stay here.”

  Next morning, while cooking an octopus, Leonardo saw the far-off figure of a very tall man coming along the beach with a dog, his silhouette vibrating in the heat of the air.

  He took the octopus off the fire, put it on a plate so it would not get too hard, and knelt down and waited for the dog to run into his arms.

  When he felt Bauschan’s hot body against his chest, he buried his face and fingers in the dog’s hair while the animal licked his ears and face and whimpered with joy. His scent had become that of an adult dog and his physique more compact, but with his long legs and patchy coat there was still something of the puppy about him. Then Leonardo stood up to meet Sebastiano.

  During the last months his head had grown a covering of light-colored hair, making him look like a folksinger-songwriter from the 1930s. His body was still slender though his shoulders and arms had grown more substantial. The two men embraced the way children do, turning their heads to one side with their eyes open, their hips apart, hardly hugging at all. Even so, Leonardo could feel the man’s great heart beating against his own in the same rhythm as the surf. A slow and profound but weightless rhythm. The beat of a light heart.

  “I have so many things to tell you,” Leonardo said.

  They sat down by the fire facing the sea and began to eat the octopus. Bauschan, sitting against his master’s back, stared at the elephant and the donkey, who were crouching between the pillars of the restaurant. Every so often he would let out an uncomprehending howl.

  “Alberto’s lost,” Leonardo said, “but we’ve got another boy with us now, and soon Lucia’s going to have a baby.”

  Sebastiano went on staring at the gentle coming and going of the waves, as if he had already heard these facts many times. He was wearing a flowered coat with a hole in place of the pocket and formal twill pants.

  Leonardo opened his mouth to say more but realized that there was nothing else in what had happened that he needed to report. He could remember a time when the past had played a great part in his life, but that seemed a remote period and no longer his.

  He stroked the dog in silence for a little longer. The rising sun was softening the air, and large slate-colored clouds were rising from the sea. Then he got up, went into the restaurant, woke the young people, and told them it was time to move on.

  PART SIX

  They walked eastward along beaches that had once echoed with the cries of vacationers and were now desolate and silent. Many of the villages had been raided and set on fire; others seemed intact but lifeless, like cold casts of their former selves. Empty houses, overgrown gardens, harbors without boats. Groups of cats were dozing under cars and in the shade of pittosporum bushes, taking note without interest of the passing humans. No human sound tempered the stillness; only the cries of gulls and crows and the constant lapping of the sea.

  It was sunset by the time they came to the section of beach facing the island. Leonardo helped Lucia down from the elephant and went to sit with her on one of the rocks at the end of the stretch of sand. At that point the coast extended into the sea as a rocky promontory, like a hand trying to recapture something it had absentmindedly allowed to escape. The island, a few hundred meters from the shore, seemed n
aked and unfriendly despite the oblique light of the sun—a triangle of opaline rock with nothing on it but a few shrubs, including broom.

  Leonardo looked at it: it seemed sprinkled with lime and looked like a relic from a far distant past. When he turned, he saw Sebastiano heading toward the embankment that carried the road. After a moment his figure vanished into the dark arch of a tunnel.

  “Why are you crying?” Leonardo asked.

  Salomon, sitting on the donkey, shook his head to indicate it was nothing but went on glowering at the island. He had been silent all day without ever asking who the man leading them was, or where they were going or how long it would take to get there. In a cave where they had stopped for a half hour’s rest he had found a woman’s old handbag and spent the afternoon filling it with crabs he caught on the way. The legs emerging from his shorts were as dry and dark as sticks of licorice. His bright-yellow shoulder-length hair made him look like someone born for running over moors.

  “Are you scared?”

  The child shrugged and tipped up his nose. The island was all rocky outcrops and seemed to offer no landing place. On the highest point were the circular ruins of an ancient lookout tower, now little more than a pile of stones.

  Leonardo reached down to Bauschan’s head. The dog’s hair was rough with salt, his nose cold and damp. When he looked back at Salomon, he realized the child’s eyes and the dog’s were exactly the same blue.

  “What do you mean, scared?”

  Salomon looked around as if wanting to relate this fear to something visible, then simply slid his hand down a couple of times from his throat to the top of his stomach. The elephant crapped, filling the air with a smell of rotten fruit. The sun had set, removing both the warmth and the ferocity of the day.

  “I understand,” Leonardo nodded, “but it won’t happen.”

  Salomon looked Leonardo in the eye, and then at the elephant, the island, the dog, and Lucia, who was holding her bump in her hands and glancing back at the stretch of coast they had come along. Leonardo realized the boy’s mind was occupied by one of those thoughts we live with from the moment we are born to the moment we leave the earth. Something to do with finishing a task passed on to us by those who have gone before. He remained dumb to think of the violence and grace involved in all this.

  “Now let’s eat,” he said, aware the boy had stopped weeping and that the crisis had passed.

  Salomon jumped off the donkey, came up to Leonardo, and emptied his handbag on the ground. After a moment of uncertainty, the crabs began fleeing in all directions. Leonardo grabbed one of the biggest that was about to disappear among the rocks.

  “The knife from the basket,” he said.

  The boy caught up with the donkey, which was heading for the road, and took a small knife with an arts-and-crafts handle from one of her panniers. David was ripping long sprays of bougainvillea from the embankment with his trunk. This vegetable noise was the only sound in the world. The wind had dropped, silencing the backwash of surf, and the sea just a few meters away was a motionless membrane.

  Leonardo opened the crabs and the young people ate their flesh, then Salomon went on a trip around the rocks and came back with some sea snails and limpets. By the time they had finished their meal the sand around them was dotted with mother-of-pearl shells. The smaller crabs, in translucent armor, circulated among the leftovers polishing off what remained.

  At this point they saw Sebastiano come out of the tunnel.

  He laid a series of round poles on the ground at regular intervals, went back into the tunnel, and a few seconds later the bow of a small rowing boat began to emerge from the darkness. Before Leonardo and Salomon could even get to their feet, the boat had slithered toward the waterline with a thundering echo like a drumroll.

  Sebastiano lit an oil lamp in the boat, and while Leonardo and Salomon loaded on the baskets, he collected the poles and carried them back to the tunnel. After a moment of reluctance, the donkey agreed to get into the boat and, as they left the shore, stood gazing ahead like an old sea hand.

  The crossing took half an hour, and throughout this time Salomon looked back at the shore where the elephant was staring steadily at the little light from the lamp disappearing toward the island. Leonardo put his arm around the boy’s narrow waist and felt his thin stomach shaken by sobs.

  “We’ll find a way,” was all he said.

  They landed on gravel at a little bay on the side of the island facing the open sea. A few meters from the shore, with a dexterity that betrayed long experience, Sebastiano pulled in the oars, and letting the boat bounce on the waves, guided it right up to the beach. The donkey got off by herself, and they unloaded the panniers and two large cans of water that Sebastiano had filled. Then Leonardo helped Lucia off and they were on their way.

  During the last few months Sebastiano had added to the only hut already on the island, transforming it into a house with three rooms. The room they entered contained four chairs, a table made from a door placed on two tree trunks, a basin, a stove, and three shelves with some dishes and cutlery and a couple of pans. Stretched in a corner, next to a prie-dieu, was an animal hide similar to the one Sebastiano had given Leonardo when they separated. The only furniture in the other two rooms was three lounge chairs.

  They drank a little water, pouring it into a bowl from one of the cans that Sebastiano had carried up to the house on his shoulders, after which Lucia retired to the room with a single bed while Leonardo and the boy took the other. The plastic on the beds was hard and smelled of chloroform, so they covered them with the rabbit skins they had sewn together in recent months and lay down. Leonardo had the solar battery with him but did not switch it on.

  “Have you ever been on an island before?” he asked the boy.

  Salomon thought.

  “Yes, but I was very little. They told me about it.”

  “Was it a large island?”

  “I think so, because we couldn’t even see the sea.”

  Leonardo stretched out his hand and passed his fingers through the boy’s hair. Bauschan was lying in the space between the two beds. Leonardo understood from his whimpers that Salomon was stroking him.

  “Has it gone now?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then go to sleep, we’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

  “For David?”

  “Yes, for David too.”

  Lucia’s room was smaller; she had moved the bed against the wall, right under the window. Leonardo sat beside her, listening to her breathing interrupted by little wheezing sounds. A dream. Then he took her left foot and ran his thumb over the sole. He did this many times, then switched to her ankle and the other foot. When he got up to go he felt her lightly touch his hand. She gave him time to understand the meaning of what she had done after such a long absence, then after a minute or two she moved his hand to her belly. Leonardo felt hot firm skin under his fingers, then something press against his palm, like a little dog waking up in a sack.

  For the first time he was fully aware of Good. Not like in the past, as something that burns and consumes, but as a fire you can hold in your hand and eat in small portions. A fire containing both hot and cold, both light and dark shadow, and that for this reason is more closely related to humanity than to any other creature. Because, in principle, humanity can never be separated from it, in the same way that the water of the sea, the water of the stream, and the water that forms the clouds intercommunicate and belong together.

  When Lucia released his hand he got to his feet and tiptoed to the door.

  “Thank you,” he said before leaving the room.

  As usual, he only slept for a few hours and at first light went out with Bauschan. It only took him a few steps to realize that the opaline color of the island was not due to salt or the nature of the rock but to a covering of dogs’ bones.

  He climbed up to the ruins of the tower from where he could take in the wh
ole handkerchief of land, but he could see no dogs or animal carcasses. Bauschan stayed quietly at his side with no smell to follow. Whatever happened on the island had happened long ago.

  Returning to the house, he found Sebastiano busy watering the kitchen garden.

  During the months he had been here, he had been cultivating a rectangle of land about fifty paces from the shanty. His garden offered zucchini, tomatoes, melons, and peas and, like the house, was on the part of the island not visible from the mainland.

  “Do you know why these are here?” Leonardo asked him, indicating the bones Sebastiano had raked up from his garden and piled in a little white pyramid.

  Sebastiano shook his head then emptied the bucket between two lines of tomatoes and went off to the tank where he kept the water. The sun was getting strong enough to define shadows, and from the pines at the highest point of the island came the first chirping of two cicadas.

  Leonardo looked back at the settlement on the western coast: in fact there was a fortified town or citadel enclosed within walls and ugly houses built in the previous century leading down to the sea. In the clear morning air he could make out threads of smoke rising from the upper part, already turned to ocher by the sun. During the crossing the night before he had noticed fires on the walls but had said nothing because he did not want to worry the young people.

  “Who are those people?” he asked.

  Sebastiano went back to watering the garden. Leonardo looked at him and waited for an answer, before realizing none would come because no answer existed.

  “Have they ever come looking for you?”

  Sebastiano bent down to pull up a tuft of grass from among the carrots and indicated no. Leonardo looked at the house where the youngsters were still asleep. The outside of the shanty had been painted with sea-blue paint, and Sebastiano had covered the windows with large jute sacks now swelling in the wind from the mainland, giving the whole house the appearance of an enormous and complicated wind instrument.