by Davide Longo
Suddenly he felt very tired. There was a pain in his leg: sciatica.
“Let’s not discuss that now,” he said. “We’re tired. Just come and get the other can, because I want to show you something.”
They went out into the fresh night air. The village was sleeping peacefully; like a child with an ugly scar on one cheek, who has fallen asleep pressing the scarred side against the pillow. The window of the hardware store, bright with metal tools, was like a Nativity scene. Leonardo opened the door of the Polar and the internal light revealed the dog huddled on the seat. It was sleeping quietly, revived by the fresh air or the little water Leonardo had finally succeeded in getting it to lick from his cupped hand.
“Did you find it or was it given to you?” Elio asked.
“Found it.”
Elio, short-haired and with an aquiline nose, looked at the dog as one might look at a car damaged in an accident that will either need work to make it roadworthy or have to be scrapped. Leonardo said he had tried to get it to eat some cheese but without success.
“There are always Luca’s baby bottles,” Elio said. “But if Gabri finds out you’re using them for a dog . . .”
He considered the problem, drumming his fingers on the roof of the Polar. The sound rang out clearly all over the square and up the narrow streets leading to the upper part of the village, the castle and the stars shining above it.
“I’ll give you a rubber glove,” he said. “You can fill it with milk and make a hole with a needle at the end of one finger.”
“When they stole my she-goat and I had to feed her kids, it worked. It won’t cost you anything to try.”
“All right,” Leonardo said.
The dog was sleeping with its back turned away from them, showing the pink skin of its stomach. It had a few light-colored hairs, wet with urine, around the point of its penis. One of its eyes had begun weeping again.
“I’ve heard there are packs of dogs on the plain that attack people,” Elio said. “I hope he’s not from one of those.”
“We traveled together a good few hours and he hasn’t attacked me yet,” Leonardo said with a smile.
Elio shifted his weight to the other foot.
Leonardo’s home was a modest little farmhouse but on the better side of the hill and secluded. His father had died when he was six and his mother, to make ends meet, had sold the half facing the village to a surgeon from T.
During his years as a university student, when he came home to see his mother on weekends, Leonardo often traveled with the surgeon’s family, who liked to escape the city in search of a little tranquillity in the hills. The wife, many years younger than her husband, was an intelligent woman who wore high-necked sweaters over her enormous breasts. They had two sons: one was born prematurely and suffered from dyslexia, while the other was a brilliant chess player. When the surgeon was killed in a road accident, his wife no longer felt like making the journey to the house and telephoned Leonardo’s mother to tell her so. Both had wept at great length. Two weeks later the wife had sent a moving company to take away their furniture, and from then on that part of the house stayed empty and unsold.
Leonardo parked the car under the lime tree, hoisted his duffel onto his shoulder and carefully lifted the still-sleeping dog. On the veranda floor were two letters; no surprise and he did not bother to pick them up. The fridge was empty apart from a small amount of milk left in a glass bottle; he sniffed the milk, and finding it acceptable, poured it, before doing anything else, into the glove, pierced the point of the little finger with a needle, and put it to the puppy’s lips. But the animal ignored it.
Leonardo sat on the sofa for a while, one hand on the puppy’s hot body, wondering whether rescuing the dog had been wishful thinking. An irrational gesture that had put him at risk and in the end would benefit neither of them.
He undressed in the bathroom, put his clothes into the washing machine, and looked in the mirror. On his pale chest he had a deep red mark he must have acquired while crawling into the tunnel. He shuddered at the thought of what he had done and for a moment thought he could smell the nauseating stench of the dead puppy and its mother on himself.
Without waiting for the water to warm up, he got into the shower and roughly scrubbed his body and hair, reflecting, as he had not done for some time, that everything leads to ruin and that in his case this had happened to him in utter solitude. He felt extremely tired, but even more empty and discouraged.
When he was dry, he put on some periwinkle-blue underpants and went back to the sofa, where the dog was sleeping in the same position as he had been left. The kitchen was equipped in a functional manner. None of the furniture had belonged to his family: he had never cared for arte povera, and when he moved away he had sold everything to a junk dealer. He had then bought himself furniture in African teak, basic and without any fancy design. He had added plates, glasses, and other necessary kitchen equipment from the catalog of a department store and had everything delivered.
At the time he had attributed his choice to his haste to get organized and to the disorder of the time, but when he thought about it he soon convinced himself he would have done the same anyway. Throughout his life the objects he worked with, chose, and gathered around himself had always been a matter of indifference to him.
He found some crackers in the cupboard and sat down at the table to eat them by the light of the small neon tube above the cooker. The house he had been living in for the last seven years was one that, in the days when architectural magazines still existed, would have been worth photographing. He had had a large window put in facing the vineyard and the veranda where he could sit and enjoy the sunset behind the chain of mountains that closed the horizon like a zipper. On the western side of the house was a strip of meadow, and on the other side of the courtyard was an outhouse, its ground floor kept as a storage area and its upper floor reconditioned to accommodate a dozen people.
Leonardo finished the crackers and continued to gaze at the night through the great window.
Maybe better warm, he thought.
He heated the milk for a few seconds in a small pan, then poured it into the glove again. When he approached the dog with it, he moved his eyes behind closed lids, nothing more. When Leonardo squirted a little milk on his muzzle the puppy instinctively licked himself. Leonardo repeated the action until the dog realized where the milk was coming from and timidly began to suck the rubber finger. In the end they both stretched out exhausted, side by side on the sofa. The clock showed eleven-twenty.
“Bauschan,” Leonardo said.
Bauschan was the dog protagonist of a story by Thomas Mann, a story Leonardo could only vaguely remember but which had taught him that familiarity can develop between a man and his dog; something he had never experienced himself, having never had an animal of his own.
“Beddy-byes now,” Leonardo said, placing the dog on the carpet to prevent him from falling in the night.
The air on the veranda was chilly. Leonardo picked the two letters up from the floor and glanced at them long enough to recognize the “return to sender” stamp before going back into the house to his bedroom, where he opened the wardrobe and took a box with colored stripes from under his jackets. Lifting the lid, he slid the two letters in on top of the others, which were now almost filling the box to the top. Taking off his bathrobe, he pulled on a pair of white linen trousers and matching shirt then went back into the bathroom to comb his hair in front of the mirror. He cleaned and filed his nails, took the book he had started reading that morning from his bag, and went out.
He walked around the house to the west side, which had two small windows on the second floor and an arched door. He opened the door with a key he had taken from a nail before leaving the house and went in.
When he was a child this room had been home to a dozen casks: his father and his grandfather had known every virtue and defect of each cask at least as well as they knew the individual combination of courage, patience, and ma
lice in each of their children.
His family had been wine producers for many generations, but in his last years his father had given up the work, selling the grapes to some local wine grower. Nevertheless the casks had remained in place until, seven years before, Leonardo had sold them together with the rest of the furnishings of the house. Then he had filled the space, about ten meters by four, with bookshelves he had had custom-made and fixed to the walls by a carpenter. Apart from thousands of books there was nothing but an armchair and a standard lamp on a carpet in the middle of the room. The floor was exactly as Leonardo had found it: earth trodden down so hard that you could not even scratch it with a pointed object.
Leonardo contemplated his books, which he had missed constantly, almost physically, during the four days he had been away, and then he lit the little standard lamp and sat down in the armchair. Twenty minutes later he had finished the story of Felicité for the umpteenth time and carefully replaced the book on the shelf reserved for the French nineteenth century.
He woke about ten, and realizing the time, he ran into the kitchen where he found Bauschan collapsed on the carpet. He’s dead, he told himself, but when he touched the puppy and called him by name, he raised his muzzle toward the warm breath of Leonardo’s mouth. Then Leonardo noticed traces of feces in the room and realized that the dog had been exploring during the night. So, after washing the animal’s pus-encrusted eyes and giving him a little more milk from the glove, he took him around the house.
As he did so he became convinced the best place for the dog at night would be the studio. This square, empty room had nothing in it that could be destroyed. It contained only an office chair and a coarse wooden table under its big window.
It had been an attempt to reproduce the conditions in which he used to write in his studio in T., a pied-à-terre off an internal yard in one of the city’s main squares, where he had never wanted a telephone or doorbell or even his name on the door. But this project had been shipwrecked and the romance interrupted by the tumultuous events that had overturned his existence, and he had never gotten beyond the line he was writing when the telephone rang and the massacre started.
He looked at the little white portable typewriter abandoned in the dust on the table. It had been a present from Alessandra so he could write on trains and in hotels. He had punched out two novels on those keys, expending many hours of his life on them at a time when writing was indispensable to him for defining himself to himself and to others. Then suddenly his writing had vanished, just as stadiums and competitions and training and sponsors can vanish from the life of an athlete when he inadvertently severs his Achilles tendon by stepping on a piece of glass while playing on the beach with his six-year-old son. This was exactly how writing had disappeared from his life, and it had become a different life; and all this only a few years before his publisher went bankrupt and the newspapers and magazines he used to write for closed down and reading became something comparable to the final extravagant request of a condemned man.
“The room’s very well lit,” he told the puppy. “When you open your eyes you’ll see for yourself.”
Leonardo washed his ears carefully in the shower and examined and disinfected the wound on his chest. Its lively pink color reassured him and, since the pain of his sciatica had subsided, he decided to ride his bike into the village. He searched for a shirt with a large pocket and a lightweight scarf to go around his neck, and then he put on the linen trousers he had folded on the chair and went out.
The distance from house to village could easily be covered even by a cyclist as unfit as he was. The dog, his head sticking out of the pocket, enjoyed the fresh breeze downhill and hung his head on the uphill parts as if helping to pedal. When he reached the first houses, Leonardo left the asphalted road for an unpaved track that cut through a luxuriant hazel grove, ending in the yard of a large, neglected but busy farm.
“Ottavio!” he called.
Two very dirty and mischievous-looking sheepdogs emerged barking from the back of the farmhouse. Leonardo offered them a friendly hand, but they kept their distance and continued to bark.
“Who’s there?” someone shouted from the cowshed.
“Leonardo.”
The dogs for some reason went quiet and moved off, going to lie down in the shadow of a tractor. The yard was a mess, with sacks of animal feed, buckets, and agricultural implements all over the place. Under cover in one corner was what might have been an ancient station wagon or hearse. Leonardo was studying it when Ottavio emerged from the cowshed.
“What’s this?” he asked.
Ottavio wiped his hands on his trousers.
“A hearse.”
“Yours?”
“Of course, do you think I clutter up my yard with other people’s stuff?”
It was covered by two old sheets sewn together. On its small roof was the pointed shape of a cross.
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Not much you can do with things of that kind.”
“Then why did you buy it?”
“The funeral director at D. has moved to France. He’d been in debt to my mother for as long as I can remember so he paid up with what he had. He was an honest man; he could have left without a word. What’s that in your pocket?”
Leonardo looked down; the dog had turned around and all that could be seen was the end of his tail sticking out of the pocket. Leonardo extracted him carefully and showed him to Ottavio.
“How old would you say he is?”
“Ten days,” Ottavio said, after a cursory examination. “Maybe crossed with something useful for herding cows. Do you want to keep him?”
Leonardo looked at the dog, who seemed to be struggling to open his eyes.
“I think I do. Can you sell me any milk?”
Ottavio stared, his face red and sweat in the hair around his ears.
“Have you come here on purpose to annoy me?”
“How do you mean?”
They went into the cowshed past the immobile haunches of some twenty cows, about ten animals on each side, then passing through a metal door found themselves in a room tiled to the ceiling, in which a fan was stirring air charged with disinfectant. Ottavio took off his outdoor shoes and Leonardo did the same, placing his sandals in a small wardrobe. Both put on colored clog-like rubber shoes. There were two large zinc vats in the room, and shelves with cheeses of various sizes. Ottavio uncovered one of the vats. It was full of a yellowish liquid with what looked like thin metallic plates floating on the surface, and it smelled like shoemaker’s glue.
“What’s this?” Leonardo said.
“This morning’s milk.”
Leonardo stepped back from the overpowering smell. Ottavio closed the vat and went to a window facing the back of the farm, which Leonardo knew to be where he kept his heifers and orchard. Ottavio parked his elbows on the windowsill and contemplated his property.
“Do you hear the planes going over at night?”
“Sometimes,” Leonardo said. In fact, being a heavy sleeper, he had heard nothing at all. It had always been like that. Once he slept for five hours in an armchair at the Lisbon airport, missing all the flights that could have taken him home. Returning to his hotel he had gotten in touch with Alessandra, who had no difficulty in believing him, and then he went to bed to watch a bit of television but without being able to keep his eyes open to the end of the film.
“When the planes go over, the cows play this trick on me. A few months ago it was only now and then, but now for a whole week I’ve had to throw away all the milk. The big producers add powdered milk, but I don’t want that on my conscience. I don’t even give this stuff to the pigs.”
Seen from behind, Ottavio was a short, stocky figure with no sharp edges; veins bulging on his arms even when he was not lifting anything heavy. He was five years older than Leonardo but looked five years younger.
“Can you trust a married man?” Ottavio said.
Leonardo said yes
and thought of Elio. Ottavio nodded.
“Then just ask him about women’s periods. My daughter hasn’t had one for two months but can’t be pregnant. And my wife, who hadn’t had a period for years, has started getting them again.”
Leonardo looked at the ascetic white of the tiles. Someone was singing a song somewhere accompanied by the regular beat of something like an old pedal sewing machine.
“I think,” Ottavio said, pausing to add emphasis to what he was about to say, “that those planes are dropping something; something to calm us all down, because if not we’re all going to go mad.”
They went out into the yard where a light wind from the mountains stirred scraps of straw and blew hair about. The two dogs watched them closely from under a bench by the wall. As he mounted his bicycle, Leonardo could feel the puppy’s hot urine running down his chest to his trouser belt. He pretended it was nothing.
“They’ve seen those two in the woods again,” Ottavio said, “and they’ve also found a fire and the bones of a goat.”
Leonardo swept his hair back from his brow.
“Must be campers,” he smiled.
But Ottavio fixed Leonardo’s pale greenish eyes.
“It’s not the time for that kind of crap, Leonardo, can’t you see how the wind’s blowing?”
Leonardo looked down at his foot on the pedal. A nail had gone black where the old woman, sitting down at his table in the hotel, had accidentally placed the leg of her chair on it.
“Have you done anything for the dog’s eyes?” Ottavio said.
Leonardo looked straight at him.
“What can be done?”
Ottavio shrugged.
“If you want my opinion, wash them with his own pee; he won’t like it, but if you don’t he’ll never open them again, because they’re full of parasites.”
At Norina’s grocery shop he bought some canned tuna, a couple of dairy products, some sardines, two packets of rusks, jam, and a box of pasta, then he got the baker to give him a French loaf and some baci di dama biscuits. There were no customers in either shop and the proprietors simply served him, took his money, and called him professor when they said good-bye.
