The Last Man Standing

by Davide Longo

  Alessandra spread her hands on the table. In addition to her wedding ring, she was wearing several rings set with small stones, none of which Leonardo recognized.

  “Would you like something to drink?” he asked.

  “A glass of water would be great, thanks.”

  He went to the sink, filled two glasses from the tap, and returned to the table.

  “I want to go look for Riccardo,” Alessandra said, “and in the meantime I’d like the children to stay with you. Riccardo’s mother is very old and I have no one else; most of our friends are abroad. If I don’t find him within a week, I’ll come back and get the kids. We have a pass for Switzerland. The last thing Riccardo sent us.”

  Leonardo wiped a drop of water that was running down the outside of his glass.

  “Tell me about Lucia,” he said.

  Alessandra stared at him expressionlessly.

  “What exactly do you want to know?”

  Leonardo smiled. His back was still hurting.

  “Does she get along well with her friends, what subjects does she like best, has she thought yet what she might like to study at university?”

  Alessandra tucked some hair behind her ear. She must have had it dyed blonde, but now it was returning to its natural brown. Her eyelids were vibrating with tiny electric shocks entirely unrelated to tears.

  “In September,” she said, “in front of your daughter’s school, they hanged a Pakistani couple, a husband and wife, who had worked for a family we knew. Our friends had been found dead two days earlier and it seems the Pakistanis had been seized in revenge. They were left hanging for a week, in the hope of discouraging other criminals. But it didn’t work like that. The assaults continued. Gangs of stray kids, goodness knows from where. No one can say how many there are of them. They do horrible things then vanish, and no one knows where they’ve gone until they come back, they or others like them.”

  Alessandra touched the water in her glass and massaged a temple with her wet fingers. Her lips were marked with small cracks.

  “All people can think of is getting out. They abandon everything they can’t get into their cars, including old people and animals. I know what I’m saying is hard to believe, but I have no reason to tell you lies. I just want to find Riccardo and take the children away. The only reason I haven’t already gone is that once I’ve left the country they won’t let me back in.”

  A shuffling sound distracted them. Turning, they saw Bauschan staring at them from the door. They heard a car door opening in the yard. Alessandra jumped to her feet, made her way around the dog, and went out onto the veranda. Her black crew-neck sweater perfectly matched the gray sky. She was also wearing a pair of claret-colored pants. Her head stood proudly on the long neck she had inherited from her horse-riding ancestors, but he noticed her breasts were lower than before.

  “Get back in the car, Alberto.”

  “But there’s a dog!”

  “I know, but get back in the car.”

  “I want to touch it.”

  “Later, now get back in the car. I’ll tell you when you can come out.”

  “But I’m thirsty!”

  “There’s a bottle of water in the bag. Tell Lucia to give it to you. I’m coming in a minute.”

  Leonardo heard the door shut again. Alessandra stepped over Bauschan as if he were nothing more than a pair of slippers someone had left on the floor, and sat down again.

  “OK if I smoke?” she asked.

  Leonardo grabbed a saucer from the dresser. Alessandra took a pack of Marlboro and a lighter from her bag. Bauschan followed their movements with apprehension. Alessandra lit up and blew smoke from the side of her mouth. Before turning back to Leonardo, she stared for some time at the volume of Lorca’s poems next to a plate of boiled zucchini on the dresser.

  “Alberto’s not an easy child,” she said. “He’s suffered during this last year from the absence of his father, but I’ve talked to him and he’s old enough to understand. And Lucia knows how to deal with him, she’ll take care of that.”

  Leonardo understood from the way her fingers were working with a fragment of ash that had fallen on the table, that no matter what happened she was determined to be somewhere else before dark.

  “Has Lucia ever asked about me?” he asked.

  Alessandra quickly raised the cigarette to her lips.

  “There was a time, during her first year in upper school, when she asked me a lot of questions. Maybe she’d found an old newspaper or someone had talked about it at school. I told her what had happened without hiding anything. Since then she hasn’t asked. I know that she’s found your books in the library and read them, but she has never asked to see you or talk to you.”

  Leonardo fixed his eyes on a crumb on the table.

  One September more than twenty years before he and Alessandra had gone to the sea together.

  They had known each other for two weeks and had caught a midmorning train, lunched in a restaurant at the port, then walked as far as the town boundary. The sun was sinking, but the day was still open and luminous. Alessandra had suggested going for a swim, but he had excused himself because he had no bathing suit and had sat with his hands on his knees, watching the slow movements of her arms rising and falling in the water, raising weak, soundless splashes of spray. During that half hour, he had had a chance to measure his own inadequacy compared to this woman who had traveled, worked in Germany, and known the daring, cultivated and ambitious men whose names frequently came up in their conversations.

  Seeing her emerge from the water in her one-piece, her skin suntanned and ribs prominent under the close-fitting cloth, he had experienced a fierce urge to possess her, a primitive need to make her body his property. An entirely amoral egoism.

  They had spent that first night in a small hotel out of sight of the sea, methodically exploring each other’s bodies. By morning Leonardo had known that Alessandra’s sacrum stuck out in an altogether unusual way and that her right breast was smaller and more sensitive than the left, though he did not have the experience to judge whether the fact that her clitoris stiffened and relaxed with almost mathematical regularity, like the breathing of a tiny lung, was a special quality in her or a trait common to most women.

  Alessandra crushed her cigarette against the saucer. There had been a time when, far from annoying her, the processes of Leonardo’s mind had seemed to her to have the seductive power of a closed box. But that time was past.

  “I must have an answer,” she said.

  Leonardo moved his glass in a little circle.

  PART TWO

  November was a thoroughly wet month, lashed by a cold wind that deposited white sand on the windowsills. Something more typical of summer.

  Great flocks of birds traced patterns with changing contours all day from north to west in the windy sky. Their passage was noticeable even at night, like an endlessly moving curtain in a dark room.

  Halfway through the month several handwritten notices appeared, summoning residents to the elementary school gym on the evening of the twenty-second. They were signed by the deputy mayor and the only remaining member of the Council.

  On the evening of the meeting, two hundred people gathered in the building. Some had brought greetings with them or permission to vote by proxy from relatives who had not felt like coming out, but even so the general impression was one of great distress; a year earlier the village had had more than a thousand inhabitants.

  The most striking thing was the gray, discouraged faces of those who gathered in the hall. Each person’s despair seemed to reflect that of the others, and soon a timid initial buzz of conversation was succeeded by a deafening silence. The deputy mayor took the chair and, using an amplifying system borrowed from the local tourist office, read out the agenda.

  First there was the problem of gasoline, medications, and heating. Discussing this did not take long, because no one knew anything that had not already been common knowledge for some time: all they could
do was confirm that there was no gas left and that medication was only obtainable from the hospitals, which would only help the most pressing cases. As for heating, as things were at present there was no point in hoping for a supply of fuel oil or methane. Anyone with a wood-burning stove would be able to face the winter calmly, and those without had permission to take wood-burning ranges and stoves from abandoned homes. The deputy mayor, a short man whose remaining side hair was long enough to have been combed not just once over his bald head but back again as well, stated that the regulation requiring a chimney at least a meter high for the discharge of smoke was suspended, and anyone could arrange a chimney pipe in any way he liked.

  The second item on the agenda dealt with the presence of outsiders in the area.

  Many had seen strangers in the forest or on the riverbank and smoke rising every day from the hills as evidence of the increasing numbers of people camping there. Then there was the theft of fruit from orchards and the danger that the intruders, whether outsiders or not, might become so numerous and bold as to approach inhabited areas. Someone mentioned what had happened in A., where the supermarkets had been taken by assault, and in V., where inmates had escaped from the prison. Definite information was supplemented by rumors, inferences, and fears. It was decided that several volunteers would patrol the district the next morning and drive away anyone who had no good reason for being there. Two squads were formed, each of about a dozen men, mostly hunters with rifles. A third squad would stay in the village to protect it, since neither the local police nor the carabinieri were any longer in a position to do so.

  But the most controversial item on the agenda was the last one, the change of hour from daylight-saving summer time to standard time. With both radio and television off the air, no one could be sure that this had actually happened, and in some neighboring communities the clocks had not been put back. When the shouting began, the parish priest, Don Piero, who had been silent until then, spoke up in favor of standard time and stated that if anyone decided otherwise he would stop the mechanism that regulated the church clock.

  When the meeting broke up, a few groups continued the discussion for several minutes in the unlit square, until faint but chilly rain dispersed even the most heated disputants.

  Leonardo and Elio waited for the square to empty, and then they walked as far as the belvedere and looked down at the plain beneath: few lights were moving on the road, and they belonged to freight escorted by the National Guard. The long line of cars had disappeared a few days after the frontier was closed.

  “We’ll be leaving in a few days,” Elio said. “Gabri’s sister has gotten us passes. We’ll pay whatever we have to. It seems some people in the mountain crossing points have been waiting for days even though all their documents are in order.”

  Two shadows passed in the street: a couple who lived beyond the gas station. The woman turned and saw them but offered no greeting. When they passed under the solitary street lamp their breath formed a fluorescent halo. It made Leonardo think of the soul.

  “You and the children could come with us,” Elio said when the couple were some distance away. “It’s going to become more and more difficult to get away.”

  Leonardo nodded, then he remarked that by spring things would be better.

  Elio lit a cigarette. His father had been a heavy smoker, but he himself hardly smoked at all. He drew on his cigarette a few times in silence. Only three lighted windows could be seen anywhere near; the rest were all dark or barred.

  “In the Frontier Guard,” he said, “we were divided into two squads. One to control the frontier, the other to operate a few kilometers further on in the valley.”

  He stopped as if searching with his tongue for some small object caught between his teeth. The rain was lightly touching the umbrella over their heads.

  “When unauthorized groups showed up, the first squad would demand payment to let them through, and if they had no money they would ask if they were prepared to lend their women for an hour or two. If they refused, they were sent back and if they agreed, they were let through. Then the other squad would intercept them further down, pack them into a truck and take them back over the border. The squads switched places once a week. I always wanted to stay in the valley. One day, while we were loading people on the truck, a man who had paid started shooting. That’s how I got a bullet in my lung.”

  Leonardo studied his friend’s profile, and then he went back to watching the plain: a sea on which few lights were moving. Now that there were no vehicles passing it was hard to believe there had ever been a road there at all.

  “Have you nothing to say?”

  Leonardo placed a hand on the parapet.

  “When you’re young you can do fine things or terrible things. Either can easily happen.”

  Elio closed his lips around his filter.

  “They’ll make us pay for everything we’ve done to them,” he said.

  Four people passed through the square sheltering under two jackets and an umbrella. One was Don Piero. The jackets vanished into a doorway in the square. The umbrella accompanied Don Piero as far as the sacristy, and then it went on alone.

  “Last month I was nearly lynched by a gang of boys,” Leonardo said.

  Elio looked at him.

  “Why?”

  Leonardo shook his head. All that existed for him at that moment were the square, the church, the bell tower, the houses, and a wet street leading nowhere.

  “Perhaps we went wrong much sooner than we think,” he said.

  Elio took two more pulls at his cigarette and then threw it over the parapet; it drew a brief glowing arc, landed, and went out. With the hand not holding the umbrella he searched his jacket pocket and pulled out a bunch of keys.

  “In the store you’ll find some tools and kerosene and two gas stoves, though the cylinders are finished. Take anything you can use.”

  Leonardo pocketed the keys.

  “I’ll leave you a can of gas, too. But don’t let it stay there too long; I wouldn’t like it to disappear. Here’s the address of our cousins in Marseilles. The telephone number, too.”

  Leonardo put the slip of paper in his pocket with the keys. The church clock struck one. The light in one window went out and the night crept forward a few meters, stopping at the first rows of vines. Beyond that point there could have been anything.

  “I’ll be going now,” Elio said.

  “Say hi to Gabri for me.”

  “Shall I leave you the umbrella?”

  “I’ve got my hat, thanks.”

  “Take care then.”

  “You too.”

  On the road home Leonardo noticed the rain getting heavier. He began walking faster. The night was closed, leaving no crack for escape, and no smell was rising from the asphalt. Rounding the last bend, he recognized the lighted window of his kitchen. That had not happened since he was a child.

  “Papa?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have I woken you?”

  “No, just resting my eyes a bit.”

  “Have you finished your book?”

  “Nearly. It’s excellent.”

  “Do you really mean that?”

  “Yes, I really think it is. What have you been doing?”

  “Translating a bit of Latin, but I need a walk now. Would you like to come?”

  “Alberto?”

  “He’s in his room. Shall I ask him?”

  “Yes. See what he says.”

  He heard the door slide back and Lucia’s footsteps moving through the house. The sky was a ragged white, and puffs of mist were floating over the forest, just touching the tops of the trees. He stretched his legs, trying to shake off the sluggishness that had come over him immediately after lunch. A bird was still singing in the clump of acacias behind the storehouse. He had always admired writers who understood flying creatures and trees, not to mention those who were capable of writing knowledgeably about trails of animal droppings, but he had never managed to master
such knowledge himself, and for his own books he had trusted the series Know Your Plants, Know Your Herbs, and Know Your Animals. The last one was divided into three volumes and was dedicated to large mammals, small mammals, and insects, which in the end turned out not to be animals at all. It had been enough for most of his readers to think of him as a wise man profoundly symbiotic with nature.

  He heard the door behind him open, then close. Lucia passed him and went to lean against one of the roof supports.

  “Did you tell him he can stop and play at the river?” Leonardo asked her.

  “Yes, but he’d rather stay in his room with his game.”

  They gazed at the river, swollen by the rain of the last few weeks. It was flowing slowly toward the valley, carrying on its brown waters large branches and stains of scum. The unknown bird had stopped singing either because it was tired or because it was satisfied.

  “Did I like having a bath when I was little?” Lucia asked.

  Leonardo looked at her back: under her cream-colored top it formed a perfect triangle, divided into two exactly equal halves by her long tail of hair. Her grandmother, Leonardo’s mother, had had the same shining black hair and clear skin. It was not unusual in those hills, and someone said it was a result of the Arab invasions. Lucia nearly always kept her hair gathered into a ponytail by a red rubber band. The only times Leonardo had ever seen it loose was when she had washed it and was sitting by the stove to let it dry. As she did so, she read a novel written a few years before by an American folk musician who had been a baseball player and a tireless traveler. Someone had called him the heir of Bob Dylan just as the young Bob Dylan had been the heir of Woody Guthrie, and several coincidences made it clear this was no meaningless idea.

  Bob Dylan as a boy had gone to see Guthrie in the sanatorium during the last days of his life and had sung his own songs to him, and in the same way the young Isaiah Jones had been to Bob’s house several times in the months before Dylan’s death. Many claimed those meetings had ensured the passing on of the great popular American narrative message. This had struck Leonardo at the time, and he had written about it in a daily paper. He had admitted in his article that what had most attracted him in Isaiah’s songs, as in Dylan’s and earlier in Guthrie’s, had been a sense of wonder he did not understand but intuited. Like seeing a perfect naked body through frosted glass. A vision full of promise for the future. When he listened to their songs he understood how the first readers of the Bible must have felt, when there was a kingdom to be conquered and still the chance of spending long nights forging the swords for the battles ahead. The songs of those three gave hope.