The Last Man Standing

by Davide Longo

  While they were waiting for him, Fausto Conterno, who had worked as school caretaker for twenty-five years, suggested using the little room next to the gym as a cell: it had a window with iron bars and a door that could be locked from the outside. It was the nearest thing the village had to a prison, apart from the secret parts of the ancient castle, which no one dared to suggest, so the two men were taken to this lumber room and shut up there amid gymnastics mattresses and soccer balls.

  When Don Piero arrived it was past two, and he was furious to find Pietro Viglietta guarding the door alone with nothing but his rifle and bandolier. Pietro explained that when they had not seen Don Piero coming, the others had gone to lunch and would be back at four o’clock. The priest, calming down, asked Pietro to explain what had happened; Pietro, who had not been on the expedition because of his bad hip, passed on what he had been told. Don Piero asked if any water had been left with the two men. Fausto said he thought so.

  At four the party reassembled in the main hall of the school, some twenty meters from the cell.

  Assuming it was certain that the two men had been responsible for thefts from the unprotected orchards and houses, the villagers were now faced with the problem of deciding what to do. They could not hold a trial without any lawyers or a judge or at least a representative of the Council. The three lawyers with homes in the district had all gone abroad, the deputy mayor had also gone, and none of those present had any wish to assume any such responsibility. Nor did anyone want to go to A. to pass the problem on to the police or the magistrates’ court; even if there still were offices capable of taking on such things, they must be up to their eyebrows in similar problems. Even worse was the fact that it was impossible to communicate with the prisoners and find out who they were, where they had come from, and whether there were others like them in the district. They were certainly not Romanians or Slavs or even Africans, but apart from this no one had the faintest idea of their origin. At this point someone thought of Leonardo.

  When he heard the car come into the courtyard Leonardo jumped out of his armchair hoping it might be Alessandra, but when he opened the door the light of a torch shone straight into his eyes.

  “I’m alone here!” he protested, terrified.

  The three men confronting him restricted themselves to explaining why they had come. As soon as he recognized Norina’s husband, Leonardo calmed down.

  “Someone must stay with the children,” he said.

  The shortest of the men said not to worry, he would do that.

  So Leonardo said, “Please come in,” and after going to tell Lucia he would be away for half an hour, he put on his raincoat and left.

  When he came into the hall the twenty or so men who by this time had been there for six hours looked at him as though Leonardo was not exactly what they had had in mind. Even though the central heating was off, the air was warm and fragrant.

  “We’ve tried French,” the pharmacist said, “but it was no good.”

  He was the only one with his rifle on his shoulder. The rest had propped their weapons against the wall under the blackboard. The prisoners were sitting on two children’s chairs on the other side of the room. The voices of women waiting for the outcome of the interrogation could be heard from the entrance hall.

  Leonardo spoke to the men in English, then German, and, finally, his very basic Russian, but the two continued to stare at their own feet. The older man could have been about thirty; the younger one not much more than twenty. They had black curly hair, which had been given an auburn gloss by a combination of dust and humidity. One could easily imagine them landing from a Phoenician ship that had been on the high seas for months, or descending from a mountain range perpetually covered with snow. Their eyes were vigilant yet expressionless, like the eyes of goats.

  “Would someone please get an atlas from the library?” Leonardo said.

  While they waited, time seemed suspended. The rain continued dripping silently on the windowsills. Further off, the roofs of a few houses could be seen, also a lamppost, and the tower of a church deconsecrated many years previously. When Fausto came back with the atlas, Leonardo opened it in front of the two outsiders. The older man looked at a map covering a double page, then at Leonardo, then back at the map and pointed to an area south of Russia.

  “Where are they from?” someone asked.

  “Azerbaijan.” Leonardo said.

  The two men did not react in any way to the name of the country. The elder rearranged his hands on his knees. The younger never moved at all. They were wearing winter pants, in one case a women’s pair.

  “How long has it been?” Leonardo asked them.

  The two men looked at Leonardo; they had not understood. Leonardo pointed to his watch, which was still on his wrist even though its battery was dead. The elder lifted two fingers.

  “Two years?”

  “Perhaps he means two months,” someone said.

  “Two years?” Leonardo persisted.

  The man shook his head as if to say either he did not know or did not understand or it was not important. At that point Leonardo noticed the younger man was weeping, shedding great tears that slithered down his cheeks and fell to the floor. He wept, Leonardo thought, in a very feminine way, musical and full of dignity. The elder man, perhaps his relative or a person who was in some way responsible for him, touched his knee to encourage him to stop. There could have been ten years between them, but the skin of the younger man was very smooth and his teeth perfect, whereas the weathered face of the elder had creases that shifted when he opened his mouth, but were all bitter. He was wearing a red waistcoat over a green sweater. The other had only a roll-neck sweater whose sleeves were too long; and a wool cap hanging out of his pants pocket.

  “Why did you come here?” the pharmacist asked.

  The man slowly passed a hand over the atlas as if sweeping crumbs away from his own country and toward Europe.

  “What does that mean?” Don Piero asked.

  “I don’t know,” Leonardo said. “Perhaps they were forced to move.”

  At a quarter past ten the two were taken back to the room with the soccer balls. Leonardo asked if they had had anything to eat and everyone looked at each other in silence. A man went into the hallway where the women were waiting, and before anyone could ask anything, told his wife to talk to the other women and arrange something to eat for them.

  “But what do they eat?” Leonardo heard the woman ask. The man returned, shut the door, and went back to sit where he had been before. At this point there was an exchange of views on what should be done. Someone suggested taking the two men away and letting them go on the understanding they must not set foot in the district again, but it was explained to him that there could be no guarantee that they would do what they were told. They might just as well be given one of the abandoned houses and a piece of land to cultivate to stop them from thieving. But if news of this got about, it might attract other strays to the area.

  When the clock struck eleven, Leonardo, who had expressed no opinion and had not even been asked for one, said he must go home. The others, too, agreed they were all too tired to reach a decision: for the moment the two men must stay in the little room, and over the next few days there would be time to decide calmly what should be done with them. But by now it was clear to everyone that the only solution would be to expel them from the district.

  The destiny of the two men changed course on the last day of the month, when Cesare Gallo was found on his back on the floor of his sitting room with his head smashed in. The chemist said that he must already have been dead three or four days, since his blood had been completely absorbed by the parquet and his body, despite the cold, had begun to decompose. Jewelry, money, and clothes had disappeared from the house, and the corpse had been stripped of its boots. The killers had come on foot, and, after killing Gallo, had searched the house and eaten in the basement dining room. The mechanical bull was stained with blood, a sign that they had set
it going for a while. The footprints suggested two or three people.

  Because of the body’s condition, the funeral was held the same evening, and next morning the two outsiders were shot against the wall of the handball court.

  Three men volunteered for the firing squad, and three others were chosen by lot from the twenty-five who had voted for the death sentence. The assembly had contained thirty members, none of them women, and Leonardo took no part in it. Execution by firing squad was chosen because no one had any experience in preparing a noose, and hanging could have caused problems. It was reported that the assembly had proposed loading two of the rifles with blanks so that everyone could think it might not have been him to fire the fatal shots, but no one in the village had any blank cartridges so the suggestion came to nothing.

  Leonardo heard the shots from his book room and stayed staring for a long time at the same page without thinking of the book or of what had just happened only a kilometer away. When he went back into the house he found Lucia sitting on the sofa. She was wearing a sweat suit and looked as if she was listening intently to music, but the stereo was not on.

  “Something ugly has happened in the village, hasn’t it?” she asked, watching him slipping off his jacket.

  “Yes, very ugly.”

  “Like what happened to the Pakistanis where we were?”

  “Something like that.”

  Lucia pulled her knees up to her chest, freeing half the sofa. Leonardo, on his way to the table, hesitated and then sat down. He touched the palm of his right hand with a finger, as if looking for a spot where he had hidden something under his skin.

  “What did you tell Alberto?”

  “That they’re hunting wild boars.”

  “Did he believe you?”

  “I think so. He wanted to know how much a wild boar weighs and how you go about skinning it.”

  Lucia stretched her legs and put her feet in his lap. Leonardo took them in his hands. It seemed to him the first such beautiful thing he had done for many years.

  As Christmas approached it got colder and the earth froze. In the morning the sky would be clear, but in the afternoon slow clouds without distinct outlines would be drawn down from the north by the dusk. By nightfall they would have taken over the sky. This raised the temperature a few degrees, making it possible to sit on the veranda and watch a great, unbroken black cloth descend beyond the fence. During the night, though, no wind could be felt; the clouds would disappear and by morning the ground would be covered with frost. The sky, before the sun had fully risen, would reflect this pure white as flocks of large birds headed south.

  Leonardo would be the first to wake. Putting on his slippers he would take Bauschan as far as the edge of the vineyard and bend to study the tiny crystals that looked as if they had been set there by an army of watchmakers. While the dog raised his leg against the fence, Leonardo thought of cathedrals, illuminated books, and other products of limitless and patient intelligence, asking himself whether anyone would ever again be able to devote himself to such laborious but inessential work. There had been a time when he had felt himself to be one of those who believed in art for art’s sake. Only such people would ever understand such things: a simple piece of wood cannot know why nails and hairpins leap toward a magnet.

  When Bauschan had finished his patrol they would go back into the house and Leonardo would return to the book he had fallen asleep over the evening before. He would be able to read for a good two hours or so before Lucia emerged from her room. It was good that she and Alberto both slept late at this time when there was nothing special to do. Sometimes they managed to get Alberto to the river before lunch, where he would play with pieces of wood carried on the flooding river, throwing them back into the icy water in the hope that Bauschan would retrieve them. But the dog would not listen to the boy and never came nearer to him than a meter or so, as if by some form of intuition or foresight.

  Alberto was tall for his age, but even so his head seemed exceptionally large.

  His face was pale and covered with small freckles, and, like his gray adult eyes, was in no sense naïve. His whole personality seemed constructed around his eyes, as if to protect and mask them. His auburn hair had grown in the weeks since he had arrived and was now down to his shoulders. He had long bones, to which his flesh seemed to stick like paper, and it was easy to guess that he would be a tall man. But at the moment his walk and his hands were awkward and clumsy.

  Lucia often threatened to leave him on his own and take away his video game if he didn’t come with them to the little church. Alberto said he did not care and that he would either stay where he was or go home. Leonardo stood aside to let them argue it out. The thrust and parry would last about ten minutes; a conflict whose rules, controls, and counterbalances were well tested. Usually Lucia had the best of it and Alberto would follow them along the lane in resentful silence.

  When they got to the church, Leonardo and Lucia would lean against the low wall and watch the hills disappearing all around while Alberto would wander among the graves in the little cemetery. When it was time to go they would usually find him staring at the tombs of those who had died in Russia. Leonardo had told him about that interminable retreat in the snow and how so many had died of cold and hunger, while Alberto, impressed by the size of the massacre, constantly demanded more details. It was the only time he would ever approach Leonardo; otherwise he kept himself to himself and avoided close contact even with his sister. He had never once had a bath since his arrival. Sometimes the other two heard him running the water and apparently having a shower, but they both doubted it was really happening. There was a shadow around his neck and his hair had become dark with dirt. He always wore the same clothes and boots. Despite the fact that Alessandra had left two suitcases full of suits, socks, shoes, shampoo, bubble bath, bathrobes, slippers, tubes of toothpaste, soap, and a leather briefcase that Leonardo had not seen again, but which presumably contained their permits and some money.

  They would spend the rest of the day at home. Sometimes Leonardo would go out to look for firewood, or to exchange a few words with Adele and buy some honey from her. At such times he would leave the children on their own but never for more than an hour.

  Once a week he would go into the village to buy bread, a couple of small cans of food, and some pasta and tomato sauce. Apart from milk and cheese this was all that was available; meat had become very expensive and fish could not be found at all, even frozen. The only shops still open were Norina’s grocery store and the bar. The pharmacist had moved all his medicine to his home, where he was available to customers every morning between ten and midday. The proprietors of the shoe shop and the hairdresser had done the same. The village streets were fragrant with the smell of burned wood and even though the dustcart no longer operated, the garbage cans were empty. Cars were hardly ever heard and the only voices came from the church during services or from the bar, where the circle of regulars had grown since hardly anyone now had any work, agricultural or otherwise. Conversations tended to be brief and nearly always ended in silences full of questions. Only ersatz coffee was now served; the real thing had run out. And despite the fact that it was nearly Christmas, no one had put up decorations.

  For Christmas Eve they asked Adele and Sebastiano to come over.

  They arrived with five eggs, a pan, a basket of vegetables, and a large parcel. The table had been laid with care and a half candle was burning in the middle of it.

  While waiting for the rabbit and potatoes to heat up on the stove, they dipped the raw vegetables in the last of the olive oil. From now on they would have to make do with other edible oils. As they ate, Adele told a story from when she was a girl, of a hornbeam growing near their house that her father had wanted cut down to make room for a shed for the tractor. One evening while she was feeding the chickens, the tree had told her it was ready to go, but only if moved to a precise point that it indicated. That evening Adele explained this to her father but he told her t
hat the next day the builders would come, the tree would be cut down, and the shed for the tractor would be built. That was all there was to it.

  But the following morning her father seemed less sure of himself. At breakfast he looked exhausted, as if he had had no sleep.

  “I had a bad dream last night,” he told his daughter.

  Adele had then interpreted the dream for him in detail as if she had dreamed it herself, and her father had lowered his eyes in shame because it was not the first time he had put his daughter’s talent to the test. When the builders arrived, Adele showed them the place they must move the tree to, and without asking too many questions they got to work. That very night, with the leaves of the tree rustling outside the window, Adele’s father had dreamed of a blackbird whistling a tune and the next morning, beside his cup, he found a black feather that his daughter had left for him before going to work.

  Several times, Leonardo surprised Alberto and Sebastiano staring solemnly at each other while Adele was speaking, as if something had happened between them that the others were not aware of.

  After dinner, Adele made a zabaione that turned out rather bitter because she had to use Fernet rather than Marsala, but they ate it all the same, and then unwrapped the presents.

  Leonardo gave Lucia an edition of the Odyssey that had been printed in Florence in 1716. For Alberto his first thought had been a book by Salgàri, then, thinking he would not have much use for it, he had added a small box of tools with a little tube of glue for woodwork, pincers, hammer, pliers, nails, some oakum for trimming, and two batteries found in Elio’s shop. The idea was that Alberto could use this to build something. He gave Adele a book of gems of Islamic wisdom given to him many years before by a friend who translated from Arabic. Adele gave three knitted scarfs and balsamic drops for coughs and sinusitis and to discourage lice. Sebastiano gave no presents but got a cap from Leonardo, which turned out to be rather too tight. Lucia gave Leonardo a collection of ten poems written in her own hand and bound in a firm cardboard cover cut from a box of detergent.