The Last Man Standing

by Davide Longo

  “I’ll be frank with you, professor,” the woman confessed in a low voice. “We’ve had no contact with head office for a week and no couriers have come.”

  “Are you trying to tell me you don’t think any more money will get here?”

  The woman moved her mouth without speaking; her eyes shone as she shook her head.

  “I know it’s not your problem, but I haven’t been paid myself for three months.”

  Under the vertical light waiting for him outside the building, Leonardo was seized by consternation. What should he do? That morning he had woken refreshed and unexpectedly vigorous and, before going down into the village, had worked for a couple of hours, ignoring the sharp twinges of pain running through his arms and legs. Now that energy was a distant memory: he felt exhausted and soaked with sweat.

  At the post office he handed in his letter, slipping it under the glass window as lazily as the assistant took it and put it in the receptacle for outward post, then he returned to the square. The sky was a cloudless white; the sun covered the village without producing any shadows. The buildings, the two trees in the square, and the metal octagon of the old newsstand seemed insubstantial objects with no density. Everything seemed about to evaporate.

  It was then that he saw the teenage boy materialize from a side street. With his short black hair and pointed chin he was heading for the bar with studied indifference, wearing the same clothes as in the vineyard, though he had rolled up his shirtsleeves to reveal a tattoo on his right shoulder.

  Leonardo told himself that Lupu would never have dreamed of sending him to the village and decided his presence there was not a good sign. He raised an arm to attract his attention, but at that moment the boy turned his head to take a quick look at his reflection in the windows of the bar, and a second later he was inside.

  When Leonardo followed, he found the boy standing in the middle of the main room watching the four men playing cards at the only table. Making up the game that morning with Danilo, the postman, and the man with the beard was an insurance agent who had once been the local pallapugno champion and the owner of a tobacconist’s shop.

  “Got any cigarettes?” the boy asked.

  None of the players lifted their eyes from their cards. The boy took a couple of paces toward them and stopped a meter or so away.

  “I’d like some cigarettes,” he repeated in a calm, firm voice.

  Danilo looked up.

  “We don’t sell cigarettes,” he said.

  “So what’s them over there then?” the boy asked, indicating a dozen packs on the shelf behind the counter.

  Once in a London theater Leonardo had seen a show with a young actor who was famous on television. Every evening he attracted an audience of adoring girls who would have liked him as their boyfriend, as well as ladies of a certain age who would have liked him as their son or lover. In order to prove he was not just a petty small-screen celebrity, the actor had chosen an extremely complicated script and was applying himself to his performance in a spirit of frank self-denial. So much so that when in the third act his jacket was supposed to have vanished from its clothes hanger, but unfortunately was in fact still there for the whole audience to see, he had turned to the clothes hanger and the supposedly blind and pregnant actress who was playing the part of his woman, and asked her, as if the words were part of the script: “Where’s my jacket? Who’s taken my jacket?”

  Since the blind woman was not supposed to be able to see the jacket, the actress had swallowed her cue, hoping for assistance from the actor who, far from helping her, had headed with great strides for the clothes hanger and, running his hands around the jacket without touching it said, “But I left it just here.” At that point Leonardo had heard a woman behind him whisper to the friend beside her: “What a love! He’s going blind too!”

  Danilo played the four of hearts. The man with the beard took it with the six and then turned to the boy.

  “You heard what he told you?”

  The boy smiled and Leonardo realized that, young though he was, he was in perfect control of the situation.

  He also understood that what was happening in that room was the result of fear, but he himself had grown so far from his former self that he hid his awareness. He knew he was the only one among those present to have this feeling and he felt as humiliated by it as he had on every other occasion. What was paralyzing his legs and constricting his throat was exactly what he felt when watching a climber clinging by his fingers to a rock face or listening to how a man had thrown away all his possessions on a mere whim. Acts he could have easily proved to be pointless and stupid, as he had during a symposium on the extreme that he had taken part in once in Oslo, but even so such things had always filled him with a profound sense of inferiority.

  It was a truth that he had painfully been forced to acknowledge for some time, at least to himself: that the creative force in life was extravagance rather than tightfistedness, gambling rather than calculation, and that every true creative act was born of risk taking, without which nothing better than sterile repetition was ever possible. History and the march of civilization had been a long and successful attempt to reassure the meek and cowardly, constantly disguising in new clothes a terrible hypocritical reasoning in favor of logic, morality, and beauty. He with his profession, his books, his long slender body devoid of malice, was merely the ultimate development of this trend, like a fussy piece of lace worked with great skill for the sole purpose of lying covered with dust and compliments on some aunt’s bedside table.

  He noticed the card players were staring at him.

  “The boy’s working for me,” he said, trying to smile.

  Danilo stared at him. He was young and bald and it was said he had many lovers in the district though not actually in the village, because this was a pact his wife had extracted from him after they had quarreled for years.

  “If you must bring these people here,” Danilo said, “keep them at your own place.”

  Leonardo nodded, afraid he would not be able to control his voice if he spoke.

  “Let’s go,” he said to the boy, who stuck his hands in his pockets, apparently entirely at ease.

  “You’d best listen and keep out of the way,” the insurance man said.

  “Let’s go now, please,” repeated Leonardo.

  The boy took a few steps toward the door then stopped, turned, and gave the four players a smile.

  “You’re all dead,” he said, his words sounding terrible yet at the same time as mild as a verse from the Apocalypse recited by a child; after this he vanished into the light beyond the door.

  Leonardo caught up with him in the middle of the square, and for a while they walked side by side in silence. The boy, calm and indifferent, barely lifted his feet from the ground. Leonardo occasionally turned to make sure they were not being followed. He was conscious of a pulse in his temples, and his feet were cold.

  They passed a building on whose façade an ivy leaf had once been drawn so accurately that it still looked real from a distance, and several shoddily built apartment buildings, after which the road passed fields and clumps of hazel. Leonardo looked at the boy; there were drops of sweat among the few soft black whiskers on his upper lip. He remembered his name was Adrian and that he had always known this.

  “Once at school they made us read one of your books,” Adrian said.

  Leonardo had no intention of getting involved in a discussion about his work. His stomach was in turmoil, and all he wanted was to get home to his bathroom.

  Even so he asked, “Which book?”

  “The one about the dog.”

  Around the corner they could see the gate. And among the rows of vines the straw hats of the grape pickers.

  He wondered if he should tell Lupu what had happened. And whether he would do this for the good of the boy or only in the secret hope of having him punished.

  Adrian kicked a stone into the dead grass at the edge of the asphalt.

  “Wha
t’s the use of a book like that these days?” he said.

  “Books are always useless,” Leonardo said to close the subject, “even when what’s happening now isn’t happening.”

  The boy sighed and Leonardo believed he had given him something to think about but soon noticed they were no longer together and turned. Adrian had stopped and blood was pouring from his nose down his chin and soaking his shirt.

  “Lift your right arm,” Leonardo said, searching in his pocket for a handkerchief.

  The boy gave a broad smile, his perfect teeth stained with blood.

  “I really believe you won’t survive,” Adrian said, and leaped away into the hazel grove at the side of the road.

  The store caught fire that night and burned completely in less than an hour, giving off huge spirals of gray smoke.

  Leonardo had stayed up late in the book room and once in bed had not been able to get to sleep. At two o’clock he became aware of variations in the light between the shutters on his window. At first he thought it was the moon, but when the glare began dancing and turned a magnificent shade of ocher, he ran from his room, his throat tight with bitter foreboding.

  On the veranda, he was assailed by cold smoky air; the flames lighting up the yard like daytime had already eaten the left side of the building. Lupu and the others, lined up at the edge of the vineyard, were watching the blaze without moving. He counted them; all were there. Their faces were entirely calm, as if what was burning was not the beds where they would have woken the next morning if the fire had not consumed them.

  “Anyone hurt?” he asked, walking toward them.

  Lupu shook his head. The little child was sleeping on his mother’s shoulder. On the ground were the few bags they had managed to bring out.

  “We realized in time,” he said, still staring at the building.

  Like the other men he had nothing on but his underpants. The women, on the other hand, were fully dressed. Only the daughter was weeping, tears pouring down her sunburned cheeks like drops of brass.

  Leonardo had never been so close to a fire before. Contrasting with the moving light, smoke and heat was an extraordinary silence. The fierce flames were stretching toward the rafters of the roof like the fingers of a rock climber reaching for a higher hold. The almost imperceptible sound of the flames was reminiscent of teeth being ground in moments of extreme effort. He wondered if the flames might attack the house, but seeing how calm the others were and judging that they must know the ways of fire better than he did, he stopped worrying about it.

  When the glass in the windows shattered, everyone took a step back and the little child raised his head: he glanced at the vineyard where the light was projecting the long shadows of his family, then buried his face in his mother’s shoulder again and closed his eyes. Columns of black smoke were issuing from the windows of the store: the plastic baskets used for the harvest were burning.

  “Tonight you’ll sleep in the house,” Leonardo said. “Tomorrow we’ll sort things out.”

  Lupu looked at him without expression.

  “We’re leaving,” he said.

  Then Leonardo read in his eyes something that must have been clear to everyone from the start and had nothing to do with the question he did not ask himself.

  “They poured gasoline under the door,” Lupu said. “Luckily my brother was on guard, or we’d all be dead.”

  In that moment Leonardo understood the edgy expression in their eyes the day they came into his courtyard. Their eyes had been saying, “This place is not safe, and the reason it isn’t safe is that now there is nowhere we can feel safe any longer.” This animal instinct had led Lupu to set up turns of guard and had allowed him to save his family. Leonardo, in his pajamas with their slender vertical stripes, was fully aware of his own inadequacy. Part of the roof collapsed raising thousands of sparks that lifted gently into the sky where they were gradually extinguished.

  “I’ll make some coffee,” Leonardo said. “Come inside.”

  He put the large coffeepot on the gas, then sat down at the kitchen table and studied his own hands against the wooden surface. No one came in or went to the veranda. When the coffee was ready, he poured it into a dozen cups without counting if there were too many and carried them out on a painted wooden tray. Lupu and his family were still standing where he had left them. They had all covered themselves with something, leaving only Adrian without shoes.

  They acknowledged the coffee with an inclination of the head and drank it. The store was now burning peacefully.

  “Are you sure you want to leave tonight?” Leonardo asked.

  “Best for you too.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Back to the mountains.”

  Leonardo went back into the house. Bauschan was sleeping on his rug in the studio and had not noticed anything.

  “You really are my dog,” he said, then opened a drawer in the desk. Inside was a lot less than he should have paid for the four days’ work planned and much more than what was due for the two they had done. He put the banknotes in the pocket of his pajama jacket and closed the door behind him to stop the dog from following.

  Lupu and the others had loaded the cars with the little they had saved from the fire and were waiting at the back. The upper floor of the store had collapsed and the flames had regained a bit of strength, but the darkness was reclaiming space and everything they did or said was now happening almost entirely in the dark.

  He handed Lupu the money and they shook hands, then the cars processed out of the courtyard to the subdued sound of crushed gravel.

  Left on his own, Leonardo went back into the house, urinated, and put Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello on the stereo before going out again to sit on the veranda steps with the dog in his arms. For a while Bauschan licked his right thumb, then dozed off. By now the burning store was crackling quietly and the air was filled with a good smell of resin and hot earth. It was a smell that made Leonardo think of Humanism and a baker’s window facing a lane with the light on all night.

  They stayed like this until dawn, when the building that had once been a store and lodging for guests appeared in the weak new daylight like an empty skull with thin threads of anthracite smoke emerging from it. Then the dog, followed by Leonardo, got up and went into the house, both of them exhausted, as if they had just had a long lesson from a master.

  The first to hear the news had been the teaching faculty, then their families and the literary world, and only after that the newspapers and the students.

  Leonardo had been one of the last it had reached among the lecturers, before the rest of his family. The telephone rang at six in the evening, and the level voice of the rector at the other end of the line begged him, despite the unusual hour, to come as quickly as possible to the university since only he would be able to throw any light on an unpleasant event that had occurred.

  The meeting had taken a couple of hours while a dozen of the most senior and influential teachers in the faculty had gone in and out of the office. No one had claimed to take seriously what was written in the letter that had accompanied the video and the photographs, but no one had asked Leonardo to vouch for the truth of those images either, still less the reasons for his relations with the girl.

  The next day he had stayed home: his lecture canceled because of sickness, the rector had suggested. Leonardo spent the morning in the studio with his computer turned off, listening to Alessandra on the telephone in the next room discussing her monthly schedule of exhibition reviews with the arts magazines she worked for, until finally at lunch, over a salad of shrimp and avocado, he had decided to face up to what had happened.

  At first Alessandra had shown no reaction, suspecting it was some kind of game, but, becoming aware of Leonardo’s pallor and trembling lips, had asked her husband to tell her frankly whether he had really had sex with that piece of trash and to tell her what the video and photographic material actually showed.

  Leonardo had very calmly t
old her the whole story, and Alessandra, equally calmly, had shut herself in her study for a couple of hours to reflect. Then a storm of insults and the hurling of objects had been unleashed, accompanied in the evening by the defacement of all his books in the lower part of the bookshelves.

  Humiliated and impotent, Leonardo had witnessed this crescendo of violence against his books, condemned as “false intellectual shit,” then had retired to sleep in his daughter’s little bed while she, in view of the situation, had spent the night at her grandparents’ home.

  The next day, from nine in the morning, when the video and photographs had been accessible on the Internet to anyone capable of keying in the three code words, his home telephone had never stopped ringing, and the shouting of Alessandra, Alessandra’s mother, and Alessandra’s father had alternated and been superimposed on one another until Leonardo decided to go away for a few days while the storm blew over, to an anonymous hotel outside the city where in fact he remained for the next seven months.

  The first person he heard from, once the story had appeared in the press, was not one of the two or three friends he imagined he had among his fellow writers, but a university colleague of about fifty, a stalwart figure of mediocre ability, with whom he had never had any contact apart from exchanging the odd word at meetings.

  For this reason he had been suspicious of the man’s suggestion that they meet for coffee; he had been put on his guard by his publisher and by many requests from both quality and other newspapers for a well-paid interview, in which he would have been able to put his own version of the facts. Yet the oppressive sense of loneliness he felt during those days had overcome every fear, persuading him to accept this meeting, which had been organized in a bar next to one of the city’s minor railway stations, opposite an open space that the Council had tried to improve by building an enormous fountain that terrified children and depressed the old by reminding them of the war.