The Last Man Standing

by Davide Longo

  After another tour of the house, he took a piece of paper, wrote on it where they would now be living, and fastened it to the door with a piece of wire he had found among the ashes of the burned-out store building.

  They spent the next day washing, mending, and storing what they had saved. Lucia looked after the clothes, putting them in the washing machine and setting them to dry on the rack before the wood-fired cooking stove. Leonardo sorted out the little food they had rescued and went out to buy more with the money that had happened to be in his pocket when they had gone out for their walk. Alberto took charge of dishes, matches, detergents, and other utensils.

  The activity did them good and no one referred all day to what had happened. At lunch they ate pasta with margarine and, for supper, polenta and cheese. Leonardo, who had been wondering whether to hold Alberto to account for his aggressive behavior, finding him more cooperative than usual decided to let it go and treat the whole episode as no more than an attack of nerves. In any case his testicles were hardly hurting any longer and the same could be said for his nose so long as he did not try to blow it.

  The only person he told about the incident was Norina, the proprietor of the grocery. She showed no surprise; rather that they should think themselves lucky that they had not been there when the house was raided unlike poor Cesare Gallo, and that it had been irresponsible of Leonardo to keep those kids isolated. Since before Christmas not even the armed patrol had gone out, and everyone had moved to abandoned houses in the center, where they could feel safer. Outsiders, vagabonds, and refugees had taken over the hills and nothing could be done about it any longer. Better to concentrate on defending their homes and shops. Norina knew this because her husband, a former National Guard officer, was responsible for organizing the local guard-duty roster. Two years earlier, when the frontier problem had reached dramatic proportions, he had asked to be recalled to the military despite being more than sixty years of age, but the ministry had simply rejected him with a letter of thanks.

  Passing Leonardo a bag of cauliflower across the counter, Norina asked him if he had a gun.

  “No,” Leonardo said, “we have no guns.”

  “If you’d like one, I think I could arrange it.”

  “Thanks, but I think I’d rather not.”

  Norina took his money and put the banknotes into the cash register.

  “Pay attention to a woman who has never had the advantage of education,” Norina said, pushing his change across the counter. “Please get a gun. It won’t be a waste of money.”

  That evening, playing about with the radio, they hit on a station broadcasting fairly recent Italian pop songs interspersed with commercials for furniture manufacturers and department stores that had probably long since gone bankrupt or been plundered. The songs and recorded voices sounded mocking in light of the present situation, but they stopped to listen all the same. Lucia had heated a huge pot of water and taken it into the bathroom to wash her long black hair. Now she was sitting in front of the stove with wet hair down to her shoulders as she listened to those voices from what seemed an unbelievably distant past. Leonardo, also listening, felt an agonizing pang of nostalgia for those superstores, furrier’s shops, and beauticians he had never been to, which had once even opened on Sunday mornings. Some of his writing and teaching colleagues had always been ready to rant furiously against those temples of consumerism while others preferred to see them as phenomena to be monitored, analyzed, and classified. Leonardo had never inclined to either view because he had never held opinions about the matter. On the occasions when he had set foot in any of these places he had never really felt at ease, but the same could be said of his visits to the opera. But he had noticed that no one coming out of any such place was likely to have noticed what its ceiling was like.

  “Papa?”

  “Yes?”

  “Did they take all the money Mamma left for us?”

  “Not all of it.”

  “How much is left?”

  “What I had in my pocket. A bit less than a hundred lire.”

  “That’s not much.”

  “No. You’re right.”

  “And the rest of it?”

  “Was in the desk drawer.”

  “Not a great place to hide it.”

  “I agree.”

  The radio played a song in which a man and a woman took turns describing what they could see from their window. They lived in neighboring apartments in the same building but reached by different staircases, so they had never met. They were both looking for love, but were divided by a wall seventeen centimeters thick. The title of the song was “The Seventeen-Centimeter Wall.” It was not very well written, but to Leonardo the idea behind it was attractive. Thinking of the building the two must have lived in, he imagined a concrete parallelepiped shape, like the home of the protagonist in some film Kieślowski had shot for Polish television.

  He got up and poured water into a small pan that had been draining in the sink.

  “Herb tea?”

  Lucia shook her head. Leonardo placed the pan on the wood stove and a few drops of water from its wet base ran sizzling toward the edge of the hot surface.

  “You should have something hot before going to bed. Do you good.”

  The girl touched a small fragment of bread on the table with her finger. It was rye bread, dark enough to blend in with the doodles on the oilcloth. She turned it around and pushed it away. Her hair was nearly dry.

  “We have to leave,” she said. “If we stay here something nasty will happen to us.”

  Leonardo took a cup and dropped in an herbal teabag that had already been used more than once. The small jar of honey Adele had given them was half empty. He let a few drops slip into the cup and put the top back on the jar.

  “We have enough money to last a few months,” he said, sitting down, “and things are bound to be better in the spring.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” the girl said sharply. “Nothing will be better at all.”

  Bauschan half opened one eye and looked at them as they faced each other across the table. The stove crackled.

  “I’m sorry,” Lucia said.

  “It’s all right.”

  “No, really, I didn’t mean that.”

  Leonardo smiled to show it was not important. He lifted the cup to his lips and took two small sips.

  “We don’t have enough gasoline to get to Switzerland,” he said.

  “We can buy some.”

  “We don’t have enough money for that.”

  Lucia took the little piece of bread on another circuit, bringing it back to the place where she had first found it.

  “There was some money with the permits too. I hid it and they didn’t find it.”

  Leonardo watched the steam rising from the big green mug in his hands. It must have been the mug Elio’s young son drank his milk from in the mornings. On it was the logo of a popular amusement park; until recently you could get there and back in a day.

  “Are you angry?” Lucia said.

  “Why should I be?”

  “Maybe I’ve said something to make you cross.”

  Leonardo shook his head. “You’ve been really clever.”

  Lucia crushed the fragment of black bread against the table, dividing it into three bits of different sizes. Two months of housework had strengthened her shoulders and little veins had appeared on the backs of her hands.

  “Papa?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’d like to ask you something.”

  “Go on.”

  “You won’t be angry?”

  “No.”

  Lucia shifted all her hair to her right shoulder. It was soft and shiny.

  “When that girl denounced you, why didn’t you defend yourself? Why didn’t you tell people she’d set the whole thing up to blackmail you? Then maybe you and Mamma would have stayed together.”

  Leonardo looked away from his daughter’s black eyes. Outside the window the snow had begun falling
again.

  “I didn’t want her to suffer.”

  “Who?”

  “The girl.”

  Lucia looked at him as one might look at something whose very existence one doubts even though one has it before one’s eyes, then she looked down at the divided fragment of black bread, and wept. Leonardo watched her for a long time and noticed that she did not dry her tears. But when she had stopped weeping, the black of her eyes was very pure, like a bucketful of petroleum that could have mirrored the sky.

  “Feeling better now?” Leonardo said.

  She nodded, pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, and blew her nose.

  “I’ve got to have some sanitary napkins,” she said. “In a day or two I’m going to need them.”

  Achille Conterno was buried on the morning of the last day of the year. He had been ninety-four years old and lived alone in a house five hundred meters from the square, but because of the diabetes that afflicted his feet, he had not been out for months. His son and daughter had left at the end of the summer, but he had refused to go with them. They had asked some cousins to look after him, but these people had never been seen in the village.

  The person who found Conterno had been Gregorio of the public weights and measures office. Suspicious of the lack of smoke from his chimney, he had gone to pay Conterno a visit and found the door locked. After calling him and getting no answer, Gregorio had gone to find a jimmy, and when he forced the door together with Felice Gallo and Mariano Occelli, they found Achille lying under the covers on his bed with his eyes closed and his cap on his head, exactly as he must have fallen asleep a couple of nights before. The three decided he must have died of cold. In fact there was not a trace of furniture in the rooms and even the matchboard wainscoting had been stripped off and burned in the stove; all that was left was an old table too tough to be broken into pieces.

  The service was short. The church had not been heated for many months and everyone was numb with cold, forcing them to keep shifting their weight from one leg to the other. In his homily, Don Piero reminded them that in these difficult times everyone must gather around the church as a center both spiritual and physical, giving help as well as expecting to receive it. He also noted that soon the last batteries for the church clock would be used up, and that without the clock in the tower everyone would be plunged like wild beasts and dumb animals into a world of approximate time divisible only into day and night. Most people were aware of a hidden agenda in his sermon but no one felt like trying to figure out what, and for the moment even Don Piero seemed to prefer to pass over the details.

  Four men lifted the coffin and carried it down the nave to Mariano’s pick-up truck, which was waiting on the church forecourt, and then a good half of the fifty-three mourners Leonardo had counted in the church made their way to the cemetery.

  Mariano’s vehicle was the only one in the village big enough to carry a coffin. It had already been used for Cesare Gallo’s burial and also for removing the bodies of the two outsiders to the forest, where they had been buried in a place known only to the four men who dug the grave. When Leonardo looked at it he was reminded of the hearse in Ottavio’s yard and remembered that before leaving Ottavio had repainted it as best he could and had loaded it up with his property. Leonardo had not seen him since the beginning of November when he had come to say he was going, and to leave him a Toma cheese and some eggs. He had also asked Leonardo that day if he would like to buy one of his cows, but when Leonardo politely declined, he said it didn’t matter because two had died and he had slaughtered two more, and he was discussing terms with a dairy for the others. Before leaving he shook Leonardo’s hand and told him his daughter really was pregnant, and that things were back to normal with his wife, so Leonardo shouldn’t worry about the planes.

  At the cemetery Don Piero pronounced a final blessing over the body and the sexton began to seal the tomb. A light dusting of snow had begun to fall again and the village was barely visible through the low mist.

  As the mourners began to disperse, Leonardo decided on Elvira Rocca, a tiny woman of about forty with short hair, with whom he had never exchanged a word. All he knew of her was that she lived with her ancient mother and had taught chemistry at secondary school in A.

  He followed her to the lane where she lived and approached her when she was about to put her key in the lock of her gate. Suddenly aware someone was behind her, she jumped, dropping her bunch of keys in the snow. For a moment they stared at each other without moving, as if awaiting the arrival of a third person to explain the situation; then the woman bent down and picked up her keys. When she stood up again she curved her lips in a tentative smile. The large eyes in her small face were a Carthusian gray. Her nose was neither hooked nor bent, but somehow irregular, and her short hair was sticking out from under her cap in a girlish way.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Good morning,” Leonardo replied. “I need to have a word with you.”

  “Would you mind if we went in? We’ve already been exposed to so much cold.”

  As she opened the door, Leonardo looked at her little green shoes, which had a bit of leather sticking out of them. They were like a travel souvenir or a present from a friend who had been abroad. Her heavy red jacket entirely hid the shape of her body.

  They crossed a yard that contained nothing but an empty dog basket and went into the house by a glass door. The room they came into was warm and carefully furnished with a desk, a stove, a sofa, and some books on a low table. On the wall was a list of the elements that had probably been printed early in the twentieth century. There were two windows and a stair leading up to the next floor from the corner on the right. There was a smell of recently cut firewood and medicine. The total effect was restful.

  “Make yourself at home,” Elvira said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She disappeared up the stairs. Leonardo heard her footsteps cross the ceiling, stop, and cross again more quietly. He moved a chair up to the table and sat down, unbuttoning his jacket but keeping it on and pushing his wet cap into his pocket so as not to mess up the room. There were four books by Thomas Bernhard on the table.

  Strange, he thought.

  He had known two other women who read Thomas Bernhard. One had been married to the publisher of nearly all his books, and the other was the agent who represented his novels on the American market. They had been of different ages, one married and one single, one an early-morning whiskey drinker and the other abstemious, but they had been very similar. Both liked to wear waistcoats winter and summer and both loved cold but not lonely places. They were both attractive, but in a way very different from most attractive women. They did not make a man think of sex and sheets or a mountain chalet surrounded by snow, but rather of a strip of leather and a freshly painted wall into which no one would dare to hammer a nail. Neither had the slightest vocation for maternity, and no one would have ever dared entrust them with a child even for a few minutes. Both found tea poisonous and held the muscles of their necks in a constant state of tension, but they slept very well and to a late hour.

  Considering their professions it was hardly surprising that both often talked of books, and when they did the conversation would turn to Thomas Bernhard. Leonardo’s impression when he first met Danielle, years after he first came to know Kate, was that both women had first read Bernhard at a time in their lives when they were looking for a reason to hate the world. Yet they were too intelligent to hate at random: they needed a plan, a rule, some way of avoiding the risk of missing something they should detest. Bernhard spared nothing. There had been a time when Leonardo had read him eagerly, just as one might marvel from a safe distance at a huge vortex produced by marine currents. For the two women it had been different; they had dived into the vortex and allowed it to throw them around so long as it suited them. He had often heard one or the other make an innocuous comment on a journalist, on the color of a fitted carpet or on food made with soy, only to develop it into a long and deeply th
oughtful monologue against journalism as a profession, fitted carpets as a choice of furnishing, or healthy food in general.

  He had only seen them together once, when he had been awarded a prize in Argentina, followed by a celebratory dinner at the embassy. The two women sniffed each other out among the two hundred guests and spent the whole evening deep in conversation against a background of gloomy tapestry, grabbing a succession of martinis and nonalcoholic fruit juices, respectively, all delivered by waiters in topaz-colored livery. Seeing the two together against that eighteenth-century background had made Leonardo think of two halberds.

  “Here I am,” Elvira said, coming down the stairs.

  She had changed into a hand-knitted wool sweater. Without a hat her face looked longer, her nose less prominent. Her short hair had been combed with a part.

  “Would you like some tea?”

  “Thank you, but I shall only take up a few minutes of your time.”

  “How strange you should come here today of all days. I’ve so often seen you in the village and wanted to talk to you about your books.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Elvira sat down at the end of the table.

  “I imagined your coming back here must have been some sort of voluntary exile, and that you wouldn’t want to talk about your earlier life.”

  Leonardo looked at the covers of the books on the table. They were very early editions with images of the Viennese Secessionists on them. It was warm in the room, but the stove seemed to have gone out and the open fire had not been lit.

  “Why did you say ‘today of all days’?” he asked.

  “In what sense?”

  “You said it was strange that I came here today of all days.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “I think so.”

  Elvira shrugged.

  “Maybe I was referring to the fact that I can’t even offer you coffee, and that once we could have said things like ‘I’ve been to T. to see this exhibition or to hear that concert’ while now we can’t. Are you sure you won’t have some tea? I’d be happy to make it.”