The Last Man Standing

by Davide Longo

  “She’s not in Switzerland anymore,” the woman said, removing a crumb from the table. “When her husband died, she married again, a German. Now she lives in Germany. She has suffered, but for the better: her first husband was an inconsistent man. He died at V., so far as we can understand from whoever writes those official letters. But the one she has now seems a lot better, altogether another kettle of fish.”

  “Why don’t you join her?”

  The woman looked at him as if he had just wet himself.

  “Don’t you ever watch television? Have you no idea what’s happening? When the lines were still working, my daughter used to call me every day and beg me, I’m not exaggerating, beg me to let her come and get me. But I always said no. That it wasn’t worth the risk. I’m ninety-two, I lack for nothing here, and she’s the only child I have left. You have a daughter, too, if I remember correctly?”

  Leonardo lifted the cup to his lips, regardless of the fact that he had finished his coffee.

  “Yes.”

  “Does your wife allow you to see her?”

  “No. I haven’t seen her for seven years.”

  “So I thought.”

  For a moment they studied different corners of the room in silence.

  “Now I must get on with my journey,” Leonardo said.

  “Where do you live?”

  “At M.”

  “Is that the village where The Little Song of Tobias the Dog is set?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you’ve gone back to your childhood home?”

  “Yes.”

  They heard a horn. A small tanker had stopped in front of the gate. There were two men in the cab.

  “Not that I wish it for you,” the woman said, “but perhaps sooner or later you’ll want to start writing again.”

  Leonardo smiled and shook his head. They watched the bald man open the gate and the driver bring the truck into the courtyard. Once out of his cab, the driver put on work gloves and attached a thick, ridged pipe to the tank while the bald man opened a manhole cover fastened to the ground by two locks. Both men had a pistol in a holster under their jackets. Leonardo stared at the ocher countryside and a sky the color of curdled milk.

  “I really must be on my way,” he said.

  He picked up his duffel. The woman fixed her eyes on the yellowing lily of the valley in the center of the table and waited until he had reached the door before calling him by his surname.

  “The best possible interpretation is that you did something stupid,” she said. “But no one can ever forgive you for what you did.”

  Leaving the hotel, he drove north on the same secondary roads as he had come by. The autostrada would have saved him several hours, but he had heard of fake checkpoints at which travelers were robbed, and for this reason he preferred a less obvious route well away from the larger towns.

  He drove with the window down, the hot, clammy wind filling his shirt; from time to time he took a mouthful of water from the bottle beside him. Since starting out three days before he had passed about a dozen cars and several military convoys. The villages he passed through were mostly deserted, with only an occasional old man sitting in a doorway, a boy on a bicycle, or the face of a woman drawn to her window by the sound of the car.

  About noon he stopped to fill up with gasoline. When he beeped his horn a man came out through the gate to the service station while another stayed in the doorway with his rifle lowered. Leonardo got out of the car, let himself be searched, and said how much gas he wanted. The man, who might have been about fifty, and wearing a rock band T-shirt, got into the Polar and drove it into the enclosure. Leonardo tried to check through the grill how much was being put in, but the back of the car was hidden by the prefabricated hut where the two men lived, and where a young woman with dark skin and curly hair was leaning out of a window. Leonardo imagined she must be tanned from working all summer in the open, unless she was an outsider who had got in before they closed the frontier.

  The man in the T-shirt brought the car out again.

  “See you later,” Leonardo said as he paid.

  “Take care,” the man said, turning away.

  Leonardo pulled over a couple of kilometers after the service station. Before getting out of the car he looked around. The countryside was flat and the yellow grass, mostly unmown, was bending over in the hot wind. A long way off was a hut and the ruins of what must once have been a kiln for making bricks. Then a line of mulberries and some electric pylons disappearing into the distance in the direction of an almost invisible group of houses.

  Leonardo listened to the silence for a while then got out of the car and checked that the cans were in place. He opened them and sniffed to make sure the contents had not been replaced while the car was being filled up, then he closed the trunk and mopped the sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief. He became aware of an acid stench of decomposition.

  He looked into the ditch separating the road from the fields. There was a dog lying in it, its belly swollen, a swarm of flies whirling around its eyes and open mouth. A black Labrador killed by another dog or poisoned.

  He was about to turn back to the car when he heard a whimper.

  A few meters from the dead dog, the ditch disappeared into a small tunnel no wider than a bicycle wheel. He understood at once what was going on.

  He returned to the car, started it, and moved on. He switched on the radio, but the preset came up with nothing, so he switched it off again and drove for several kilometers without slowing down until he was forced to stop at a crossroads.

  Checking to make sure there was no other car with the right of way, he noticed a group of men not far off in a field. There were six of them, armed with rifles, and they seemed not to have noticed him: two were using a long pole to explore the ditch that bordered the field, while the others were following them with their eyes on the grass.

  Leonardo put the car into gear to drive away but, as he engaged the clutch, six, ten, perhaps twenty dogs jumped out of the ditch the men were searching and all began to run in the same direction. Taken by surprise, the men hesitated then started yelling and shooting at the tapering shapes racing through the grass. The dogs had almost reached a water channel that would have given them protection, when, for no apparent reason, they turned at right angles and offered the wider target of their sides to the hunters. Leonardo saw one or two roll over in the grass, others vanished as if swallowed up by a hole, yet others exploded into reddish puffs of air. Then the shooting stopped and the men spread out to comb the field. An occasional isolated shot followed and then total silence.

  Leonardo realized his foot was still on the clutch. He put the car in neutral and took his foot off. The engine struggled, but did not stall.

  The men went back to the irrigation trench from which the dogs had come. Leonardo saw some of them go down into the ditch and throw out what looked like small soft bags full of earth. After a few minutes there must have been about thirty of these, piled in a heap.

  Then the men scattered across the field and dragged the carcasses of the dogs toward their puppies, and when this was done one of them took a can from his knapsack and poured the contents over the heap.

  Leonardo closed his eyes, his chilled sweat-soaked shirt sticking to his chest. When he opened his eyes again a column of black smoke was rising in the air. He stared, paralyzed, for a few moments with the acrid smell of burned fur coming into the car through the window, then he engaged the gears and made a U-turn. Moving away, he thought he could see in his rear mirror the men waving their arms to attract his attention, but he continued to accelerate.

  He recognized the place near the ruins of the kiln. He drew up and, while dust from the edge of the road enveloped the car, he went to the ditch. Lowering himself in, he slithered down it until he was lying on his face in the earth, a few centimeters from the dog’s carcass. Disgust forced an inarticulate sound from him, and when he touched his bare arms he realized they were dirty with yellow sl
ime. He wiped them on his shirt, got up, and walked quickly to where the tunnel passed under the road.

  No sound was coming from inside it; all he could hear was his own labored breathing and the rapid beating of his heart.

  Bending down he looked inside. The tunnel was blocked by filth, stones, and refuse brought by the water. But nothing moved or made any sound. He smacked his lips. There was no response.

  Leaping up again he checked the road: the pyre was no more than a couple of kilometers away, and he could not be certain the hunters would not follow him.

  Kneeling down he stuck his head into the tunnel and thought he saw a movement. He reached in, and, as if he had been breaking a membrane, was struck full in the face by the smell of death. Suddenly what he was doing seemed just as incomprehensible to him as when, years before, after one of his books had just reached the bookstores, he had been unable to explain to himself how he had spent three years of his life writing a complicated poem in a difficult and antique verse form, which many of his readers, and most of his critics, had already dismissed as an affected minor work.

  He lay face down on the ground in order to stretch out an arm, but also because his twisted position was making his head spin. His hand touched something soft and cold. Pulling it toward him, he saw it was a dead puppy covered with ants. He threw it behind him near to the body of its mother, and when he heard the thud as it hit the ground he retched, as if his gesture had validated the existence of a hidden part of himself that had now emerged into the light with pangs like childbirth.

  Reaching into the tunnel again, he felt something tepid and let it slide across the palm of his hand like a baker collecting a loaf from the far end of the oven.

  He pulled the puppy out. It instinctively hid its muzzle between his fingers. It must have been the first time it had seen the light. It was wet with urine, and yellow liquid had dried around its half-closed eyes. Leonardo climbed out of the ditch and sat down in the shadow of the car. Grabbing his water bottle from the seat he took a long drink, poured some water into his hand and tried to wash his arms and neck; he then tried to get the puppy to drink from his hand, but the animal seemed stunned by sleep or hunger and did not react. Even when he cleaned the incrustation from its eyes, the dog continued to keep them closed. It was black and its ears were hanging sideways, giving it an air of resignation.

  He put it down long enough to take off his shirt and stretch it over the seat. He settled the dog on top and was about to get into the car when he was stopped by a sudden pain in the pit of his stomach. With long strides, his naked thin torso marked by large moles, he ran toward the edge of the road and was only just able to drop his pants in time before a gush of diarrhea emptied him.

  Gasping for breath and bent double, he got back to the car door and took a roll of toilet paper from the inside compartment. He wiped himself carefully, wetting the paper with a little water.

  Sitting down in the driving seat, he took a casual shirt with horizontal brown stripes from his bag and began searching on the map for a road that would help him avoid the crossroads where the pyre would certainly still be burning. He found one that would not take him too far off course: it was a case of going back about ten kilometers and crossing the river. His wristwatch said a quarter past three. To the north, blue mountains closed the horizon. By eight it would be dark, but if he couldn’t get home by then at least he would be on a familiar stretch of road.

  He drove slowly, taking great care at corners as if his new passenger must not be disturbed. The dog never moved, and every now and then Leonardo reached out a hand to check its little heart, which beat rapidly under his fingers. Toward five it urinated, and when the light started to fail, it began lolling its head and emitting little blind whimpers. Leonardo stopped the car and cleaned its eyes, which were encrusted again, then he held a piece of the cheese he had eaten for lunch to its mouth, but the dog seemed not to recognize it as edible and turned away in irritation.

  Leonardo went off to urinate in the shelter of a clump of acacias then got back into the car, put on his jacket because the air was getting cool, and took the dog in his arms.

  He looked down at the plain from the height of the first foothills. With the dying of day the sky had cleared and now the sun was sinking behind the mountains, the vault of heaven a deep unshaded cobalt.

  It won’t eat and tomorrow it’ll be dead, Leonardo thought, holding the dog close.

  Far off the lights of A. and one or two other villages were shining softly, with the lights of some factory prominent among them. For several months now the minor roads had no longer been lit, the soccer league championship had been suspended, and the television closed down after the evening news at ten, not starting again until the news at ten the following morning.

  He smiled at the swarm of lights and the beauty of several fires burning on a hillside to the east. The dog’s breathing had relaxed and the heat of its body through his shirt was warming his chest; it had the smell of things that are new to the world and still have no name. Like the smell of a birthing room or a cellar where cheeses ripen. Or a paper mill. A smell of transition.

  “I won’t give you a name,” he said, stroking the puppy’s head with his finger.

  When he arrived in the square, the church clock was striking eight.

  He opened the door of the hardware shop. Elio looked up from a newspaper he must have salvaged from some packaging. The last newspaper had reached the village four months before. Leonardo went to the counter and put down the two cans he had brought in. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief.

  “Only one more in the car,” he said.

  Elio neither nodded nor shook his head. He and Leonardo were distant cousins, but their friendship had nothing to do with blood or books or with other passions that can link men, like hunting, the mountains, and sport. It was seven years now since Leonardo had come back to the village but he was still a city man, while Elio belonged as much to the hills as any man could. He spoke the dialect, he knew what was going on, he had tried the women, and played in the Sunday soccer matches against other villages. In the days when there were still summer tourists, he had spent long periods sitting with the other local twenty-year-old boys on the low wall that bordered the square, studying the German and Dutch girls at a distance before taking them in the evening to the vineyards, to the river, and up into the highest hills from where he had convinced them they would be able to look at the sea. When he was called up for the National Guard, he had done the usual thing and given a big party, then he disappeared for three days without anyone knowing where he was. He had served two years at the frontier until, in the winter of ’25, he had been hit by the bullet that now saved him from being called up again. As soon as he was discharged he took over the hardware business from his father and married the woman who had been his fiancée since he was nineteen: a woman with strong thighs and few frills; a type more likely to bore him than break his heart.

  “What shall I say about the missing oil?” Elio said.

  Leonardo raised his shoulders.

  “Tell them it was stolen from me. That’s what actually happened. Tomorrow I’ll bring the money for you to give back.”

  Elio fixed him with his calm eyes. He was not yet forty, of a reflective temperament, and Leonardo’s only friend.

  “What’s happening out there in the world?”

  Leonardo put his handkerchief back into his pocket. The mud had dried on his trousers in a dragon-shaped pattern.

  “Yesterday some soldiers stopped me before L.; they told me to go back the way I’d come and sleep in the car because the road was closed until the next day to let a convoy of armored vehicles through.”

  “Were the soldiers from OSRAM or from the Guard?”

  “OSRAM.”

  “Then there was no convoy: they were just sweeping up. According to the television most of them have stopped coming, but a few groups have managed to get through.”

  Leonardo looked around the shop. Most
of the shelves were empty, and despite Elio’s efforts to make what little was left go a long way, one had an impression of well-concealed desolation. A passerby unaware of the situation would have imagined the shop had been hit by floods, or that the proprietor had liquidity problems and was on the verge of going out of business.

  “I’ve checked the vineyard for you over the last few days,” said Elio. “If it doesn’t rain, you should be able to harvest the grapes in a couple of weeks.”

  “Good.”

  “How do you plan to do it?”

  “How do I plan to do what?”

  “Harvest the grapes.”

  Leonardo brushed hair from his brow with a gesture he had used since childhood.

  “Lupu and his people,” he said. “As usual.”

  “You think they’ll come?”

  “I’m sure they will.”

  Elio shook one of the cans and watched its contents move around until they settled again, and then he looked out at the square, where two silhouettes were passing silently under the only functioning street lamp.

  “Even if they do come you’ll be wrong to make them work.”

  “What do you mean, ‘wrong’?” Leonardo said with a smile.

  Elio lifted his handsome shoulders.

  “It’s two years now since anyone has brought in outsiders for harvesting, and those who were linked in one way or another to local firms have not been reemployed.”

  “Lupu and his family have permits, and they all came in before the borders were closed.”

  “Permits or no permits, it may have been all right last time around, but this year there’s bound to be some problem.”

  Leonardo propped his long, slender pianist’s hands on the counter. He had never played the piano, but several women had told him he had the right hands for it. Only one woman had ever said he had “a writer’s hands.” A girl he had met on the train to Nice. When they got out at the station they had shaken hands, and he never saw her again. But that had happened long before he had married Alessandra. After his marriage he had never allowed any woman to come close enough to him to comment on his hands. Apart from Clara, that is, and such a thing would certainly never have occurred to her.