by Davide Longo
The cripple tossed a coin in the air, caught it, and covered it with the palm of his other hand.
“Choose,” he said.
The white-haired man stared at the knife and the hourglass, his head shaken by small jerks that seemed to mean no. Rain was still cutting across the circle of light from the bonfire. Apart from the flickering flames and slowly rising spirals of gray smoke, the whole world seemed to be holding its breath. The tattooed man wiped his forehead to stop the blood still running into his eyes.
“Tails,” he said, in a voice that seemed to come from the far end of a long corridor.
The cripple lifted his hand.
“Heads it is.” He put the coin back in his pocket, turned over the hourglass, and, taking his pistol from his belt, pointed it at the head of the tattooed man, who looked at the other prisoner.
“Can you do it?” the tattooed man asked in a firm voice.
The white-haired man’s eyes were fixed on the knife in the middle of the table while tears continued to fall freely down his badly shaved cheeks.
“Stop crying and look at me.”
The man looked up for an instant, and then he dropped his eyes to the table again. His curved back was racked by sobs.
“Look at me and tell me you will do it.”
“One minute!” the cripple announced.
The tattooed man wiped blood from his eyes with his forearm. He looked at the white head of the other who was staring at his hands abandoned on his knees. A thread of mucus was running down his chin to his stomach.
“Do you want to live, or will they be doing you a favor by killing you?”
The old man shook his head.
“Thirty seconds!” the cripple said.
“All you have to do is cut off one finger. Can’t you do that?”
“Twenty seconds!” the cripple said, cocking his pistol.
“Can’t you do it?” shouted the younger man.
The old man looked up as if, Leonardo thought, in final farewell, like someone saying good-bye to his country or to a woman he knows he will never see again.
“Ten seconds!”
The younger man grabbed the knife and lopped off his own little finger.
The young people exploded in applause.
Putting down the knife, the man looked at his finger lying on the Formica table top. A small pool of blood had already formed around his hand.
“You fool,” he said, looking at the man with white hair.
The cripple picked up the bloodstained knife, wiped it on his trousers, placed it in front of the older man, and turned over the hourglass. Leonardo closed his eyes.
It was already well into the night when they took the tattooed man to the cage. They opened the door and he walked in. Then for a while he stood beside the bars, watching the young people dancing and passing the body of the man with white hair over their heads, like the corpse of an ancient rock idol. Then, when they threw the body on the fire, he went to sit down against the wooden wall, at the exact point where Salomon had huddled when he first came into the cage.
Leonardo watched from the other side of the wagon. The man’s face was thin and lined and his cheekbones prominent, but the general impression he made was still one of compact solidity. In the shifting light of the bonfire his eyes were like wrought iron.
“A doctor will come and treat you,” Leonardo said.
The man did not move. He was sitting with his arms around his knees. The wound where his finger had been was bleeding profusely. A red stain had already formed on the floor.
“Have you played this game too?”
“No,” Leonardo said.
The man swallowed.
“Why are they keeping you here then?”
“To dance.”
“They make you dance?”
Leonardo said nothing. The man seemed to be smiling.
“Was that man your friend?”
“No. I found him hiding in a cellar a few days ago. I should never have taken him with me.”
“Where were you heading?”
“For the coast. They say there are fortified villages there where you can live. All you have to do is pass the quarantine. But we stopped at that house. There was a stove, and we’d found some sunflower seeds. It was a mistake.”
They stopped to listen to the music as it spread over the bodies, the cars, the trucks, the coach, the trailer, the flight of steps, and the facade of the building picked out by the flames from the darkness. Apart from these things, the world was black and inscrutable.
“Where are you from?”
“R.”
“Did you walk from R.?”
The man did not admit it, but Leonardo understood this to have been the case.
“How is it down there?”
“Same as here. Plus deserters from the National Guard who shoot at anything that moves. I had a bicycle, some blankets, a water can, food; they took all of it. On the Apennines I ran into an army camp. They had tanks, trucks, armor, everything, all unable to move. No fuel. They hadn’t been able to communicate with their HQ for months. Every day one or other of the soldiers disappeared, taking his weapons with him.”
Leonardo saw Salomon standing still, a few paces from the bonfire. He was looking at the body of the man with white hair, by now reduced to a blackened puppet. About thirty youngsters were still dancing around the flames; the others had gone to bed. A cold rain was still falling. He looked back at the man with him, who seemed to have dozed off.
“I could tear off a piece of tank top to bind up your finger. You’re losing a lot of blood.”
Without opening his eyes, the man shook his head.
“More to the point, have you got any water?” he said.
“No, but at first light the doctor will bring you some.”
“Who’s the doctor?”
“Someone who got captured like us. I think he must have played the game and is now free to come and go. Maybe you’ll be able to join the tribe in a few days too.”
The man laughed, then coughed, spitting out a black clot. His legs were lying in a dark pool of blood. For Leonardo, the smell of his blood blended with the smell of the body burning on the bonfire and the smell of David sleeping behind him.
“What were you? A teacher? The director of a museum? A journalist?” the man asked.
“I used to teach literature in a university.”
The man laughed again, then wiped his face with his bloody hand.
“After everything they’ve done to you, you should grab the first one who comes anywhere near this cage and strangle him with your own hands. Instead of just sitting there trembling with fear. Don’t you agree that madman must be the Antichrist? The incarnation of evil? He didn’t even have the courage to watch while we were cutting off our fingers. He’s a bastard.”
Leonardo contemplated his own bruised, cold, and blackened feet. When he looked up again the man was dead.
At dawn, taking care not to dirty his shoes, the doctor approached the body and placed a hand on his neck. His wounds were dry. The great patch of blood had reached the middle of the wagon, where it vanished down a wide crack between the floorboards.
“He was a hemophiliac,” the doctor said.
“There’s nothing you can do?”
“Nothing.”
The procession started out again, leaving behind the ashes of the bonfire, which still contained the visible remains of the man with white hair. They continued all day along narrow roads between woods and fields marked by snow, passing ruined houses, a farmers’ union building, and a couple of shops that had already been looted. When several youngsters came to the wagon and Leonardo told them the man was dead, they just threw a couple of stones at the body to see if it would move, then went away. The jolting of the wagon had made the man’s body fall on its side in an entirely unnatural position. Leonardo got to his feet, grasped it under the armpits and dragged it to a clean part of the floor. Then he used a little of his water ration to wash
the face. He closed the eyes. Doing this comforted him, like digging Adele’s grave. Maybe this is my vocation: burying the dead, he thought. Then with his finger he traced the man’s tattoo marks: the skin was hard, cold, and smooth, like a Nordic warrior killed in battle, Leonardo thought, or an apocalyptic Old Testament prophet ready to be placed on a pyre of fragrant wood and burned in the middle of the desert. The man’s badly shaved beard looked like gold dust.
It began snowing, but before the snow could settle on the asphalt, two youths with pimpled faces came into the cage, pulled the corpse out, and threw it down at the side of the road. The man’s left foot remained visible above the edge of the ditch, and Leonardo continued to stare at it until it was too far away and everything was absorbed in the whiteness precipitating from the sky.
They spent a few days in a large industrial building waiting for the roads to become usable again; the snowfall had not been heavy, but it was so cold it formed a firm crust the sun could not penetrate.
That evening Leonardo was taken to the fire and, without being forced to, danced to amuse the tribe. Lucia, sitting beside Richard on a sofa, followed his clumsy movements with her mouth half open and her eyes expressionless, and when Richard gave the order for Leonardo to be returned to the cage, she got up and let the man take her back into the trailer, where a light stayed on all night.
The youths resumed hunting, catching mainly hares, dogs, and small wild animals. It was a district of sparse woodland and occasional vineyards; the plain could not be far away. One night Leonardo heard a plane pass overhead. The youths put out what was left of the fire and kept still with their eyes on the ceiling of the building. Then, as the sound of the twin-engine plane disappeared in the distance, they started dancing again but did not relight the fire.
Leaving the warehouse, they found themselves on roads in the foothills searching deserted villages, where they found nothing but a can of motor oil, some bottles of wine, and black potatoes that had spent all winter in the earth. Then, one evening, Leonardo saw three church towers rising in the distance above the considerable expanse of a town with a square castle in the middle.
The next day, they kept to the foothills and skirted around the inhabited area; Richard must have been afraid of something since the youths carried their weapons all day and no one went near the villas they passed. Nightfall found them on a muddy track between fields marked by irrigation ditches and the occasional farm. The sky had been heavy and leaden all day.
Hearing the sound of motors, Leonardo got to his feet in time to see four cars traveling slowly down a parallel road not more than two hundred meters away. As soon as the youths saw the cars, they leaped into the field separating the two tracks and, gun in hand, started running toward the cars. The lead car increased its speed but the others stopped. Eight men got out, all armed with rifles, and immediately dropped to their knees ready to fire. At this the youths, though more numerous, slowed down and stopped.
For a few seconds the two groups studied each other. The field was dark brown and it had just started raining again. The last of the light was falling obliquely from behind the mountains and painting everything an identical violet.
Richard, who had come out of the trailer, called the cripple. The man listened to what his boss had to say, and then he put down his pistol on the hood of one of the cars and began walking toward the men on the other side of the field, who still had their guns trained on the boys. One of them, seeing him approach unarmed with his hands up, slung his rifle over his shoulder and came to meet him. His uniform was reminiscent of the National Guard, but by now it was too dark for Leonardo to see clearly.
The cripple and the other man met in the middle of the field and talked for several minutes without ever raising their hands from their bodies, after which the man turned toward his own people and shouted something that reminded Leonardo of a dog’s bark.
Then two of the soldiers made a woman get out of one of the cars.
All Leonardo could see at that distance was that she was very fat and had a red sweater. They pushed her into the field, where she slipped on the wet ground and fell. Getting back to her feet, she cleaned her pants with altogether incongruous care before moving toward the cripple and the man in the uniform, who were waiting some fifty yards farther ahead. When the group reached them, the cripple turned toward Richard, who nodded. The cripple signed to the woman to follow him and headed for the trailer with the youths.
Walking in the other direction, the man in uniform rejoined his own people on the road. Leonardo saw him get into one of the cars, and then the cars moved off and finally disappeared behind a group of houses blackened by smoke.
The woman was extraordinarily fat. As she crossed the swamp, her buttocks bounced in her tight wet pants, and her enormous breasts hung against her belly, like a cuttlefish with its mass of flesh centered on a single bone. The youths escorting her paid her no attention. They seemed afraid the soldiers might return and, from time to time, cast a wary eye on the group of houses where the cars had vanished.
When they got to the road two boys helped the woman over the ditch. Her black hair had once been bobbed, and she had slightly elongated eyes. Otherwise the lines of her face were coarse and unfinished, though entirely feminine. An insensitive man would have dismissed her as fat and ugly, but a closer look would have made it clear that the first adjective in no way implied the second. Watching her pass close to the cage, Leonardo noticed she had small hands and she was wearing light bowling shoes.
After they had helped her into the coach, the youths went back to their own vehicles and the procession get under way again. Leonardo could hear the engine of the coach getting into gear and the heavy wheels of the wagon groaning under the cage floor. He looked at David. The elephant’s melancholy eyes were fixed on the field where the exchange had taken place.
“I don’t think this woman can take Lucia’s place,” Leonardo said, then he crouched on the branches the elephant had stripped clean the day before, and wept.
They traveled all night. It was the first time they had done so, and Leonardo noticed that only the trucks, the coach, and the Land Rover had their lights on; there was no fuel for the other vehicles, which were all being towed. For this reason their progress had become slower and slower; a man walking quickly would have been able to overtake them without difficulty.
They stopped at dawn in the yard of a large abandoned farmstead. As soon as the bonfire had been lit, the cripple distributed a little canned food, and several dogs that had been killed the day before were skinned and prepared to be cooked. Half the farm’s roof had fallen in, but one part of the building seemed to be in good shape. Still, no one took the trouble to explore. The boys sat around the farmyard strangely silent, showing no interest whatsoever in the fat woman who, tied to one of the roof supports, was watching her new masters with inexplicable serenity.
For a few days now it had been as if some minor melancholy had sometimes disturbed the tribe and made them uneasy. Their nights of partying had become increasingly short and fierce, and when Richard was out of sight in the trailer, brawls constantly broke out. The cripple watched without intervening, but these quarrels would last only a few minutes and end for no apparent reason as suddenly as they had begun. Apart from meat, which was never in short supply, their food was running out. There was no more beer, only wine.
Now when Richard came out of his trailer, some of the young people still ran to surround him, but for the first time about half of them stayed under their covers, their eyes on the flames. It was not raining, but the night had made everything damp and a sterile sun hinted at another day without warmth.
Showing no disappointment in those who were absent, Richard blessed those who were there and talked to them. Leonardo was sure his mind must be working on this new state of affairs and that he was capable of doing this without his face showing any emotion at all. In fact, Richard soon told Enrico to free the captured woman and take her to the wagon for “union.” Thi
s order created a ferment of excitement that quickly spread to those who had been keeping to themselves. While the cripple guided the woman to the big wagon and introduced her into the cage, the youngsters gathered around with their faces glued to the bars.
“Look, dancer!” Richard announced in a loud voice for everyone to hear. “We’ve found you a girlfriend so you can have some fun.”
The youngsters continued to make excited noises. Leonardo looked at Richard; he was smiling as serenely as usual, but Leonardo could read something in his expression that inspired contempt rather than fear.
“We’re waiting, dancer,” Richard sneered.
The woman, standing inside the cage door, was watching Leonardo calmly.
He guessed she must be someone who, all her life, had been used to remaining calm in situations that tended to bring the worst out of other people. But there was no sense of her holding anything back; rather, her calmness seemed to take the form of acceptance. The beauty so absent from her body seemed concentrated in the Asian slant of her eyes.
“Enrico,” Richard said, “please be so good as to give our dancer a little encouragement.”
The cripple took his pistol from his belt and fired into the wall just above David’s head. The elephant trumpeted and began tramping nervously around the cage. Leonardo leaped to his feet and he and the woman both pressed themselves against the bars to avoid being crushed. But David soon calmed down. He timidly approached the woman, and his trunk gently explored her hair, arm, and belly. She closed her eyes and let him touch her; face to face they were the same height. When David returned mournfully to his corner, she opened her eyes again and pushed her hair back from her forehead.
“Screw her!” someone shouted.
A stone thudded against Leonardo’s chest with the dead sound of a stick striking an empty barrel. He dropped to his knees, conscious of his heart beating under the hand he pressed against his chest.
