The Last Man Standing

by Davide Longo

  The two tall young men with him had submachine guns on their shoulders. They were not Italian but not outsiders, either. As soon as he saw this, Leonardo remembered that the man’s wife had been employed at the French embassy, and he felt as if he were hearing one of the more cacophonous passages in Debussy.

  Poli told his men to unload the provisions from the van and pour a couple of cans of diesel into the generator, then leaning back against the door of his Land Rover, he pulled a notepad from his pocket. A line of about ten people had formed in front of him.

  Calmly, and without lifting his eyes from the pad, he made a note of what each person wanted, took their money, and put paper and pencil back in his jacket pocket. Only when he had done this did he light the Toscano cigar already in the corner of his mouth and look up at the stars. By now only Leonardo and Barbero were still before him.

  “Signor Chiri arrived here today with his two children and would like to stay for a few days.”

  The man contemplated Leonardo’s bedraggled appearance.

  “How old are the children?”

  “Seventeen and ten,” Leonardo said.

  “That’ll be one thousand five hundred a day. Have you got the money?”

  Leonardo nodded.

  “You pay at least three days in advance. No one-night stands.”

  Leonardo pulled out two banknotes. The man took them and gave him five hundred in change.

  “Do you need clothes?”

  “I could do with a pair of pants and a sweater.”

  “I’ll bring them tomorrow. That’ll be another five hundred.”

  Leonardo gave him back the banknote.

  “Interested in permits? Fifty thousand each, but I could try and get a ‘certificate of travel in the company of a parent’ for one of the children.”

  “I’m afraid your charges are too high for us.”

  The man took the cigar out of his mouth and spat something onto the ground.

  “How are things going with our permits?” Barbero asked.

  “A couple of rubber stamps still needed. A matter of days.”

  The man’s face was like a lump of turf cut by a spade. On his feet were strange moccasins with leather tassels.

  “Signor Barbero will tell you how things work here,” he said. “I have to go now, I’ve got a long way to go.”

  “Of course,” the doctor agreed.

  When the internal light came on in the car, Leonardo noticed clothes thrown untidily on the seat and a small road map. The man started the engine and swerved sharply around the open space and onto the unpaved driveway leading to the fields, leaving behind the van in which the two armed men had come. They were nowhere to be seen; they may have still been filling the generator or have taken up sentry duty over the warehouse. The air was still and clear, with thousands of stars. Hearing a rattle of pans from inside the building, Leonardo missed the two nights he had spent in the silence and solitude of the countryside. He had never felt any fear. The rear lights of the Land Rover turned the powdery snow red as its big wheels disappeared into the distance.

  “I must thank you,” said Barbero.

  “What for?”

  “For not saying you met us on the railway.”

  “I don’t think I understand.”

  “We’re not supposed to go so far from the warehouse. We were enjoying a little elopement today, if we can call it that. Community life can be inconvenient and every so often a couple needs a little privacy. I think you will understand.”

  “That seems reasonable to me.”

  “Good, I have a small flask of cognac. How about we share a drop?”

  “I would happily, but I’m a teetotaler.”

  The man went on staring at the point where he believed Leonardo’s eyes to be. A strip of light escaped from under the warehouse door.

  “It’ll do for another occasion then,” he said, “but now we’d better go in. I wouldn’t like the guards to mistake us for intruders.”

  The next morning they had their rations of bread, margarine, and tepid tea at one of the two tables in the day room.

  Waking late, they had found most of the guests in front of the baths waiting to use the hot water. The Barberos had been among the first to use the facilities and had then gone for a walk around the building in the cold air to greet the morning.

  When they came in, Signora Barbero said good morning to Leonardo and kissed the children on the head. Barbero, sitting down beside them, asked them if they had slept well. Leonardo said he had been disturbed by the baby crying, and Barbero assured him it was merely colic, common enough in males of that age, and one had to be patient. Leonardo took advantage of the occasion to ask him about the problem with Alberto’s eyes. Without examining the boy, the doctor diagnosed conjunctivitis. An antibiotic would have solved the problem in a couple of days, but with none available, the best solution would be chamomile compresses.

  Alberto accepted this diagnosis with utter indifference. His eyes seemed to have lost the cold ferocity Leonardo had seen flash in them and were now observing everything with apathy. It was not even necessary to insist on a shower. He washed on his own without complaining that the water was only tepid, after which he and Lucia, but not Leonardo, changed their clothes, and all three sat close to the central-heating radiators to dry their hair.

  Lunch was frugal: pasta with chickpeas and boiled onions. The smell, the metal plates, and the large pots and pans the food was cooked in gave them the impression of being in a resolutely Franciscan monastic settlement. Leonardo went out to give Bauschan an onion and a little pasta taken from his own ration. The dog devoured it in an instant. A minute later the Barberos joined them for a walk around the outside of the warehouse. It was a clear, windy day, though not limpid like the day before, and dark clouds from the Alps threatened bad weather.

  “It’s the thirteenth of January today,” Signora Barbero said.

  In the afternoon Leonardo slept for a couple of hours, and then he went to find Signor Rovitti. This man, introduced to him by Barbero the evening before, looked after the keys to the electricity generator, the heating panel, and the food store. Leonardo found him snoring on his pallet, but no sooner did the man hear him approach than he opened hare-like eyes.

  For a while they discussed subjects of which Leonardo knew nothing: how to insulate large buildings of this kind, how to manage food resources, and the importance of regular timetables. Rovitti was one of those men who like to show off knowledge others do not have. Barbero had told him that in his younger days he had been the head of a private school, while his wife had managed a fashionable tennis club by the Po that had counted professional soccer players, industrialists, and female television celebrities among its members. Finally Leonardo asked him if he could possibly have a chamomile teabag. Rovitti said there were none in the food store, but he could order some from Poli that evening. And if necessary, given the confidence, even friendship, he boasted with Poli, he would remember to put in a good word for Leonardo.

  Leonardo thanked Rovitti and went for a stroll around the warehouse. He took care not to tread on the many objects by the beds. There were no wardrobes or cupboards, and everyone had arranged their possessions under and around their beds as best they could. Some were asleep, some reading, and some playing cards, but they all seemed to be keeping conversation to a minimum, as if afraid of reading something embarrassing or shameful in the looks or words of others.

  At about seven, Poli came back with the men who were to guard them. One was a young man whose shaven head he had noticed the day before, while the other was a very tall man of about forty with a thick neck and a tattoo on the back of his right hand.

  Leonardo joined the line in front of the Land Rover and was given the clothes he had asked for. The jeans were padded and warm, but the sweater was threadbare and shapeless. He asked if next time they could have chamomile teabags. The answer was yes. He paid and went back into the warehouse, where he put on his clean clothes. Lucia said
they looked good on him.

  Supper was potatoes and cheese, and once the tables had been cleared, some people started playing bridge. The match went on for two hours during which neither the players nor those watching said a word. At eleven Signor Rovitti announced lights out in five minutes, and everyone retired to bed.

  Leonardo was woken in the middle of the night by the sound of footsteps. He assumed someone was going to the bathroom, but in the weak moonlight filtering through the skylights he saw two male figures circulating among the beds. He recognized the guards and thought they must be looking for something to steal, but they stopped beside a pallet and woke the person sleeping there. It was a woman, and she got to her feet without saying anything and moved toward the exit escorted by the two men. Leonardo heard the door slide on its rail and close again. Someone coughed somewhere in the warehouse.

  Leonardo got out of bed and put on his shoes. Bauschan raised his head, but Leonardo quietly told him not to follow and the dog obeyed.

  Outside there was no more than a very slender sickle of moon, but the sky was clear and the snow reflected what light there was. There was no trace of the clouds he had seen in the afternoon or of the wind that had brought them.

  He moved stealthily toward the van parked a few meters from the warehouse, but there was no one in the driver’s seat, and even when he put his ear to it he could hear no sound from the interior. He walked on along the wall with the intention of going the entire way around the building. He did not know exactly what he was doing or why. The countryside was peaceful and still, so much so that he could hear his footsteps squeaking on the snow, a sound at once reassuring but worrying. He felt like a bird that knows it must break the shell of the egg that has been its only home, even though it has no wish to do so.

  Walking along one side of the shed, he heard a noise from around the next corner. A mechanical sound, like something rubbing or scraping. Putting his head around the corner, he saw them.

  The woman was on her feet, leaning with her hands on a pile of railway ties stacked against the wall, her pants around her ankles. The older guard, his pants around his knees, was penetrating her from behind. The young baldheaded one was sitting on a tie watching the scene and smoking, his own gun and his colleague’s beside him.

  Leonardo felt cold in the pit of his stomach and wished he had never left the warehouse.

  The man extracted his penis, which appeared enormous and livid in the shadows, and tried to insert it higher up, but the woman pulled away. He placed a hand on her chest to pull her toward him, but she twisted away, saying no. Then the young bald man got up, calmly took out a knife with a blade no longer than his index finger, and slowly drew it across the woman’s cheek. She screamed and put her hands over her face, and in doing so she lost her balance and fell against the ties.

  The older guard continued to stand there in the night, his large penis pointing at the woman like a grotesque inquisitorial finger, while the one with the knife waited a moment, perhaps to give the woman time to feel the cut and the blood running warm through her fingers, then he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her to her feet. While the other sodomized her, the young one held the knife to her throat, but with his gaze on the countryside, as if nothing interested him except the steepling mountains far away and the livid blue painted on them by the moon.

  Leonardo felt weak in every part of his body and wanted to fall on his knees and call out a familiar name, but he did none of this.

  When the older guard had finished, the young one handed over the knife and took his turn. Leonardo drew back, and walking as if on pieces of broken glass, reached the door and went inside.

  Back in bed, he listened to his heart beating at a crazy rate, wishing he could have been dead or crippled rather than proving himself incapable of stopping what he had just seen. He desperately wanted to wake Lucia and hold her close to himself, or at least to watch her sleeping, but felt unworthy of it. He was sure the shame would be with him forever, night and day, and with the same intensity, because he would never be able to stifle it or sleep again.

  When he woke in the morning his heartbeat was normal, but he felt great acidity in his stomach and realized that during the night a little urine had escaped him. He had no change of underpants, but waited his turn for the bathroom and washed carefully. During breakfast he kept his eyes on his cup. Lucia and Alberto were discussing Alberto’s claim that his eyes were feeling better and that he would no longer need the compresses; an irritatingly strident note had returned to his voice.

  The woman came in when everyone else had left the table. She could not have been much more than thirty and had long, smoky-blond hair. She had covered the wound on her face by tying a handkerchief around her head like someone with toothache. She sat down cautiously and with reddened eyes studied the crockery and cutlery on the table, the bread, and the margarine, but she had trouble concentrating on anything for more than a moment. In contrast, her hands when she poured tea into her cup were firm and steady. Unlike Leonardo’s hands when she asked him to pass the sugar.

  “But why?”

  “Because I think it’s best.”

  “So you’ve already said, but why?”

  “We’ll have to go in a few days anyway. Better to keep the money. We may need it.”

  “But we have nowhere to go.”

  “We can go home.”

  “But it’s not our home. And anyway, how long will it take us to get there? And we haven’t even got any food.”

  “I’ve had a word with Barbero. They’ll sell us a little of their own supplies.”

  “When did you speak to him?”

  “After breakfast.”

  “So you made up your mind before talking to me!”

  Leonardo looked at the bottom of the basin Lucia was leaning against. The bathroom had seemed to him the only place private enough for this inevitable discussion. Bauschan watched with his head around the door. He knew he must not come in.

  “Please trust me when I say it’s best for us to leave at once.”

  “No, not unless you tell me why you’ve changed your mind.”

  Lucia’s blue sweater neatly fit the outline of her shoulders and small breasts. She could have been an actress in a French film. Leonardo gave her a long look. He was afraid he could not find the words to tell her what he had seen the previous night, but nonetheless he did manage it, though in a partial and hesitant manner. Lucia listened in silence. As he went on her mouth took on an increasingly bitter twist, but her eyes never left his.

  “You’ll never let anything like that happen to me, will you?” she said when he finished.

  They packed the suitcase in a hurry and collected their things. They told Alberto they could not stay another night because their money was finished; he sat on his bed and followed their preparations without moving, after which Leonardo secretly got Lucia to pass him a banknote or two and went to join the Barberos outside the building.

  When he told them they were about to leave, the woman said she was very sorry because she had grown so fond of the children. Leonardo explained the children wanted to get home because their mother could be there waiting for them, and Signor Barbero offered to sell them something to eat on the journey “at the same price they themselves had paid for it.” Leonardo accepted his offer and followed him into the warehouse, while his wife went to say good-bye to the children.

  “Last night I saw a rape,” he said while Signor Barbero was extracting from under his bed the case in which he and his wife kept their canned food and biscuits.

  The man looked at him with the half smile of someone who has not understood.

  “That’s not possible,” he said, but something not quite frank distorted his mouth.

  “Do things like that happen often?” Leonardo asked him.

  Barbero looked down at the provisions, chose two cans of tuna and a packet of chickpeas and put them on the floor together with a box of grissini.

  “We can’t give you more th
an this, I’m afraid,” he said. “We’ll need the rest for our journey to France.”

  Leonardo stared at him. The vein pulsing below his temple was the only evidence that he was alive. Otherwise he face was waxen, his eyelids motionless.

  “Do you really believe anyone who leaves this place ever gets to France?”

  The man continued to stare at the contents of the suitcase. His lips were pressed hard against his teeth. Leonardo took the cans and packets and thrust them into the pockets of his jacket. He stood up and Barbero did the same.

  “Will five hundred lire do?”

  “More than enough.” Barbero took the banknote.

  When they were about a hundred meters from the warehouse Leonardo and Lucia turned; Alberto, ahead of them, walked on. There stood the gray warehouse, dominating the flat white nothingness. The sun of the last few days had melted the snow on its corrugated iron roof. Only Signora Barbero was watching them.

  “What’ll happen to that woman from last night?” Lucia said.

  Before leaving, Leonardo had gone to the bed where the woman was resting.

  “I saw what happened,” he said in a low voice. “If you like you can come with us.”

  She merely shook her head, hiding her face in the pillow. The man sleeping in the next bed could have been her husband.

  “Never mind,” Leonardo had said.

  Signora Barbero raised her hand for one last good-bye, and then she turned and went into the warehouse. Leonardo and Lucia turned their backs on the building and resumed their walk. Twenty meters ahead, Alberto and Bauschan looked extraordinarily tall against the flat horizon of the rice fields. Leonardo’s feet felt wet and he noticed one side of his right shoe was coming unstitched. He transferred the suitcase to his other hand and tried to avoid the patches of snow between the railway lines. Many thoughts were passing through his mind. Thoughts of death, unworthiness, courage, and how far one could change one’s own nature. Not thoughts that could bring him any relief, but he knew he must think them through. Nevertheless in one small corner of his mind there was room for the small pleasure of being alone again with the children and Bauschan and of walking in the silence of a land that had never been walked on before. He tried to hang the portrait of his life on that fragile nail, a life that had never before seemed so miserable and inept.