The Last Man Standing

by Davide Longo

  “Thank you so much for all this,” Leonardo said.

  In fifteen days they managed to scrape together four empty drums that Leonardo and Sebastiano had found by pushing on as far as a service station on the main road; also about twenty wooden planks retrieved from bathing huts, a few meters of rope, some nails and tar, and two almost complete rolls of adhesive tape.

  Each morning, after milking Circe and drinking a cup of milk, they left the donkey to graze on the island and took the boat back to the beach.

  David, seeing them arrive, would start turning around on himself and giving long emotional trumpetings.

  The first to embrace him would be Salomon, who jumped into the water a few meters from the shore, and then it would be Leonardo’s turn. Sebastiano and Lucia would join in these effusions from a distance, while Bauschan would run between David’s legs as if to demonstrate confidence in the elephant’s slowness and gentleness. Once mutual greetings were over Sebastiano and Leonardo would begin work on the hull and Salomon would concentrate on the octopuses. Lucia would pass the time sitting with her hands on her belly and watching the sparse clouds crossing the blue sky from a little shelter of branches Leonardo had built for her.

  Toward midday the two men would take the boat and the rest of the material back to the tunnel so that it would not be too noticeable, and, with the young people and the elephant, would go a little way inland to a stream, about twenty meters from the beach.

  Under a roof of birches, holm oaks, and carob trees the water had scooped out a number of pools where David was able to refresh himself and Salomon amused himself by diving from the elephant’s back. Even Lucia, without any warning, one day stripped naked and slid carefully into the water in a more secluded pool, where she spent a long time floating with her eyes half closed and her large belly turned to the sky.

  When he had refilled the freshwater cans, Leonardo would go off to inspect the snare he had set the day before. The prey it caught was more sporadic than it had been in the hills and the forest, but he did find a small wild boar and a doe whose meat, when salted, could last them the most of the summer.

  Lunch would consist of tomatoes, boiled zucchini, and dried peaches; or an omelet made with gulls’ eggs, which Sebastiano had taught Salomon to search for among the inlets on the island. They never lit a fire and before leaving were careful to cover their traces by collecting every scrap left over from their meal.

  Back on the beach, the men would work until sunset. Then everyone except the elephant would get back into the boat, which every day looked more like a clumsy catamaran, and would row back to the island.

  “Tomorrow can David come too?” Salomon asked as he watched the gray bulk of the elephant shrink until it was lost in the evening.

  “Not yet,” Leonardo would say.

  When they got to the island Sebastiano would go up to the house, light the stove, and put on the soup to heat, while Leonardo and the boy fished on the rocks until nightfall. It was then that Salomon would tell his dreams and ask Leonardo to tell his, but Leonardo’s dreams were too obscure for a child, so he would replace them with stories from the vast library of his mind. First he told African stories about man and woman; then the exploits of Achilles, the wiles of Ulysses, the misadventures of Don Quixote, the vengeance of the Count of Monte Cristo, and Ahab’s obsession. Leonardo had to tie the fishing line to the child’s wrist so he would not let the fish slip through his hands. Then they would take home what they had caught to be boiled, cured, or eaten raw. Some of the entrails were given to Bauschan, and some were kept as bait for the next evening’s fishing.

  After supper Lucia would withdraw to her bedroom, while Salomon stayed up to play with Bauschan. When the boy said goodnight, the two men were left together. Leonardo would then put out the lamp and set two chairs on the little open space in front of the house, where they would sit in the dark, breathing the smell of smoke that came from the citadel walls where fires would burn all night.

  They were good, controlled fires, but even so neither of them wanted to find out who was living there. They felt no unease and no desire to make discoveries, and even if Sebastiano had decided to speak, they would have had nothing to say to each other. In the dark they could hear Circe walking around the house, the gentle motion of the sea and the cries of gulls among the rocks. It was all they had and all they needed.

  Before going to bed Leonardo would go to Lucia to massage her feet and place his hand on her belly to feel the movements of the creature she had been carrying so long inside her and which was now almost ready to come out.

  If she was not asleep, the girl would keep her eyes fixed on her father in silence, as though the warmth of his hand was a long speech full of good sense she must not lose.

  Coming out of Lucia’s bedroom Leonardo would find Sebastiano sitting at the table, busy writing in a narrow script, like oblique rainfall, in the brown exercise book he had given him during the first days.

  Hearing him come in, Sebastiano would raise his head.

  They would look at each other for a few moments in silence, both nod in greeting, and then Leonardo would go to lie down on his bed next to the boy and the dog.

  He had no idea what Sebastiano was writing and he did not want to know. He no longer felt any desire for that act once so familiar to him, in which he had invested so much of himself and which had caused him such agonies in the long years after he had abandoned it. Whatever the reason that had driven him to try to compose what could not be composed, it had gone. The stories inside him would not outlive the beating of his heart. He knew that and it was how he wanted it, and this sense of impermanence would never disturb his sleep.

  Two days before the boat was finished, he saw them.

  There were three of them, watching from the bridge that linked the two banks of the stream, about a hundred meters up the hillside from the pool. One was a tall man, one a man with red hair, and the third was in shadow.

  “There’s someone there,” Leonardo said.

  Sebastiano looked up at the bridge, but from the way he quickly looked down again and went on filling the cans, Leonardo realized this could not be the first time he had seen them.

  “We have to go,” Leonardo told Salomon, who was swimming with the elephant in the lowest of the pools.

  “But it’s early!” the child objected.

  “I know, but we must get back to the beach.”

  Lucia had gone upstream to bathe in a more secluded and shaded pool. When Leonardo reached her, she was standing on a great rock in the middle of the stream, staring at the men who were watching her from some fifty meters further up. Her face showed no distress. Apart from the milky whiteness of her full breasts and belly, her body was slender and suntanned, and her hair now reached down to her buttocks.

  Leonardo called her. She walked to meet him and let him help her on with her dress over her wet skin; then, with the others, and moving more quickly than usual, they set out down the path to the beach.

  Halfway there Salomon turned off toward a path leading to an old house with a garden where they had found two peach trees and a fig tree heavy with fruit. Leonardo told him they could not go there today.

  “Why not?” the child asked.

  “I’ll tell you later, now go with Sebastiano. I have to stop for a moment.”

  The child realized this was no time for arguing and ran to join Sebastiano.

  Leonardo, left on his own, took the dog under his arm and hid behind a low stone wall from where he could watch the path above. The three men appeared soon afterward, walking unhurriedly in single file. One had white hair; the others were younger but were not boys. They were wearing T-shirts and overalls and knee-length shorts. They had short hair and did not have beards.

  When they disappeared behind the trees, Leonardo went back onto the road and quickly reached the beach. When the three men emerged from the tunnel, the boat was already about a hundred meters offshore. Salomon, not yet understanding what had happened, ran t
o the stern when he saw them; one of the men had gone up to David.

  “Leave him alone!” the child shouted.

  The man, who was about to stroke the elephant, pulled his hand back. The one with white hair and the other one watched the boat moving away.

  “Don’t worry,” Leonardo said. “They won’t hurt him.”

  The boy went on staring at them, with big tears running down his cheeks. Sebastiano was rowing for all he was worth. The island was getting nearer. It was a sunny day, but white cumulus clouds were forming above the coast.

  As soon as they landed, Salomon ran to the ruins of the tower from where he could see the beach. Leonardo helped Sebastiano carry the water cans to the house, then he joined the boy, who was inspecting the coast with his hand shading his eyes. Leonardo sat down beside him on the stones that had once been the foundation of the tower.

  “I don’t want them to take him away!”

  Leonardo reassured him: “They won’t.”

  He could only see one man; the others had either gone away or were sheltering in the vegetation on the far side of the road. David was standing still, like a huge sandcastle.

  “But if they are good people, why did we have to run away?”

  Leonardo could think of nothing to say to that.

  “Let’s do some fishing,” he said. “Then we’ll come back and see if they’ve gone.”

  That evening the child did not ask him to continue the story he had started the day before and sat with his eyes fixed on the point where the fishing line disappeared into the dark water, agitated by the coming storm.

  They caught a bass and two bream, which Sebastiano garnished with rosemary and set to boil in a little seawater. While they were eating, it began to rain. Sebastiano put out the basin and several cups to catch the water, then he came back in and they continued to eat in silence. No one said anything about what had happened during the afternoon or what might happen the next day.

  When he had finished his supper, Salomon went out.

  Leonardo caught up with him halfway up the hill and the two climbed the last bit together. The bones covering the ground seemed to be gradually releasing the light they had stored up during the day. In contrast, once they reached the top the coast seemed black and dense as if molded in wrought iron. Amid the gloom, the fire lit by the three men on the beach shone like a beacon. Even at that distance they could distinguish the figures sitting around the flames. They could imagine David not far off.

  “They’re still there,” the boy confirmed.

  Leonardo put his hand on Bauschan’s head and stroked it. The wind was driving the clouds inland and, in the half of the sky reflected by the sea, the first stars had appeared.

  “David’s fine,” he said. “They’ll be gone tomorrow, you’ll see.”

  They went back to the house. Lucia was in bed and Sebastiano was washing up. Leonardo went into the room with the boy.

  “Do those men want to hurt us?” Salomon asked as he lay down on his bed.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why are they staying there, then?”

  “I don’t know, but tomorrow we’ll bring David here with us,” Leonardo said.

  The child stared at him in the dark.

  “You’re not telling me lies, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Sure?”

  “Quite sure, but you go to sleep now.”

  “But what if they come here?”

  “They won’t come here.”

  “Maybe they’re good swimmers.”

  “They won’t come here.”

  As soon as Salomon was asleep, Leonardo went out to sit with Sebastiano, who was looking at the fires on the walls of the fortified town. The sky was clear and a thin slice of moon was suspended a little above the hills. The storm had disturbed the sea and a salty vapor rising from the rocks forced them to close their eyes. Leonardo stroked his stump, feeling conscious of the loss of his hand.

  “Let’s go as soon as it gets light,” he said.

  Fifty meters from the shore Leonardo signaled to Sebastiano to stop the boat.

  Sebastiano took the oars out of the water and the bow pitched to the left, breaking the straight line their journey had maintained until that moment. The three men had gotten up and were waiting in silence. The covers they had slept on were lying abandoned around the fire like open petals around a burning pistil.

  Minutes passed in which nothing happened. The elephant was lying on the sand, his belly rising and falling in his sleep. In the quiet moments of the sea’s ebb and flow, Leonardo could hear the animal’s breath and smell the cold stench of his dung, both brought to them on the wind.

  Then the oldest man understood; he said something to the other two, who began to go along the beach in the direction of the village. It took half an hour for their figures to disappear around the jetty behind the first houses.

  “Get close to the shore,” Leonardo told Sebastiano. “Then go back to the kids.”

  The old man was standing waiting for him beside the fire, which by now had gone out. When Leonardo was a few paces from him, he nodded a greeting.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “We had no intention of frightening you.”

  He was more than seventy, but his short, compact body was in no sense fragile. He had the strength of an olive tree grown in a pot. His black eyes must once have been formidable, but they seemed to have signed a truce with humanity and the world.

  “What is it you want?” Leonardo asked him.

  The man smiled weakly. “Let’s sit down,” he said.

  The three men had left a small saucepan on the embers. The water had gone cold but the man moved it to where the charcoal was still hot, then poured in a powder resembling coffee from a small envelope taken from his pocket. His movements were calm and precise.

  “We didn’t recognize you,” the old man said, “but the boy who was here just now, the red-haired one, was certain he wasn’t making a mistake. He said he used to work in the bank where you were a customer.”

  Leonardo remembered the young man with freckles who had advised him to accept the fact that he had lost his money. Ever since he had lost all sense of time, the people who had appeared in his life, even those he had only met for a few minutes, inhabited a special place in his mind from where he could recall them without difficulty. It was rather like what had happened to all the stories he had read or listened to.

  The old man took a spoon from his pocket and stirred the coffee, on which a thin ivory-colored froth was forming.

  “There are more than five hundred of us in the citadel,” he said, “most are from far away. This winter we rescued a lot of people who were dying of starvation on the coast. They’d come hoping to find a boat to take them to France, but all the boats vanished long ago and the border’s guarded by the army. If we hadn’t taken them in they would have died or become victims of the gangs.”

  The man broke off to taste a spoonful of the liquid, then he nodded that it was almost ready.

  “Inside the walls we have a kitchen garden, an orchard, a dozen cows, chickens, goats, and a small vineyard. There’s also an old furnace and a well we’ve been able to restore to active use, and what we still lack we’re building a little at a time or retrieving from the lower town. Every two or three days we go hunting in the hills. We also have two boats hidden among the newer buildings, but we only use them at night and without lights.”

  He put the spoon back in his pocket and took two glasses from the backpack, which must have been his pillow during the night.

  “Some time ago a woman who came from the north told us about a man with only one hand who was traveling with an elephant, a horse, and two children. She had never met him but had heard it said that he’d been shut in a cage and had given up his hand to be free. When you arrived we realized it must be you but didn’t recognize you at first. We haven’t many weapons, and we prefer not to use those we do have, so we keep a careful eye on anyone circulating around h
ere. We prefer them to come to us first. That’s why we didn’t approach you earlier.”

  The man filled the glasses with the hot dark liquid. He gave one to Leonardo and lifted the other to his own lips. For a while they sat in silence, watching the island slowly emerging from the darkness.

  “I worked as a marine biologist in this nature reserve for thirty years,” the man said. “It was I who built the hut you are sleeping in, because I needed somewhere to keep my tools and the instruments I used for surveying.”

  He savored a mouthful of coffee then swallowed it.

  “Two years ago, when the dogs began to be a problem, someone thought of dumping them here. There was no building big enough to house them and it would have been too costly to exterminate them, so they began sending them here from the whole Riviera. They were brought in cages by the truckload, put in a boat, and winched onto the island. They were given nothing to eat or drink, so they tore each other to pieces. Any that survived mated, producing puppies that were either devoured at birth or hidden by their mothers in some lair until they were strong enough to come out, and themselves start killing.

  “It was utter hell, but people said it was better than having the dogs in town or on the beaches. In fact there was no more economical way to get rid of them and dispose of their bodies. There’s a strong current between here and the island, and those that tried to swim back to the mainland were drowned at sea. One day on the beach we found a Labrador that had lost a leg, the only one that made it across. I hid it, but it died a day later.

  “I was living on the hillside at that time and at night I couldn’t get any sleep. The dogs snarled and howled incessantly, then they would suddenly stop. They knew that the cages would arrive the next day and wanted to save their strength. In the morning they would all be there on the beach.

  “There was the kind of silence that makes your hair stand on end while we were lowering the cages, but as soon as we opened them the inferno would begin again. They would form bands and divide the island between them, but once the weak, the old, and the puppies had been torn to pieces, they would return to fighting among themselves. There was a great deal we could learn from them, if one could face watching them. Homo homini lupus. What happened afterward proved my point. I wish I could have been wrong, but I wasn’t.