The Last Man Standing (19 page)

After the ring road at C., they entered the main highway. On their right they passed the old foundry, which had been closed for fifty years already and was now merging perfectly with its surroundings. Alberto, sitting at the back, was gazing at the countryside and ignoring Bauschan curled up at his side.

“Stop!” Alberto shouted suddenly.

“Why?” Lucia said.

“A sheep!”

“Oh, shut up,” Lucia said. “We’ve only just started.”

“You shut up! We must stop, I said.”

Leonardo pulled over, and before the car had completely stopped the boy opened the door and got out. By the time Leonardo and Lucia followed, he and Bauschan had already rushed off, leaving a trail of footprints. The sheep was standing alone in the middle of a field, about a hundred meters from the road. Leonardo studied it from a distance to make sure it was real, then looked back at the main road disappearing toward the city. The city had once been his home and it was a long time since he had seen it, but looking toward it now he felt nothing.

“No one seems to be around,” Lucia said.

Leonardo looked at his daughter, smiled, and nodded. The evening before, he had heard her weeping in her room. When he had come back from the garage, where he had been using new tape to fix the sheet of nylon that served as a car window, the girl was asleep. On her bedside table was a photograph of her mother and a notice for the door to say they had left for Basel and the Ritch family.

“Best not stray too far from the car,” Leonardo said.

Lucia looked right and left as if about to cross a busy road, then jumped over the small ditch and went into the field. Leonardo followed.

In fact, it was not a sheep but a longhaired nanny goat, tied to an irrigation pipe by a cord about three or four meters long. The animal must have been there for some time because she had marked out a neat circle in the snow. Bauschan, stopping outside the circle, contemplated her with a thoughtful air. Alberto had already tried to approach her, but though showing no signs of fear, she kept moving with little jerks to keep out of his reach.

“Why have they tied her up here?” Lucia asked.

Leonardo studied the animal’s black, brown, and white coat. Her long beard looked like tow and her black eyes reflected the fluorescence of the snow. Behind her neck, right under her horns, she had been bitten by some animal, perhaps a small or elderly dog not strong enough to overcome her. Leonardo looked around; the shape of a farm could be seen in the distance. He calculated that it was much further from the farm to them than from them to the car. The surrounding plain, if you excluded the ditch by the road and a line of stumpy and graceless mulberry trees, offered no hiding place.

“We could set her free,” Lucia said.

“What are you talking about?!” Alberto exclaimed.

“You want to leave her tied up here? There isn’t even any grass for her.”

Alberto made a lunge for the goat, which leaped sideways and bleated. Alberto slipped and fell on the mud but immediately got up again, wiping his hands on his trousers. His shirt looked like a sort of short skirt under his jeans jacket.

“We’ve got to kill her,” he said.

Leonardo and Lucia looked at him. There was something adult and cruel in his face.

“Is that supposed to be a joke?” Lucia said.

Alberto held his sister’s gaze.

“We’ll kill her and cook her, like Indians.”

“What Indians?”

“Hunters in the forest.”

“There are no forests here, and we have other things to eat.”

“I don’t want to eat other things, I want the sheep.”

“But if we can’t even catch her . . .”

“You must help me, we can catch her together.”

“And then?”

“We’ll kill her.”

“Who’ll kill her?”

“Leonardo!”

Leonardo looked at the boy who was staring at him with his upper lip slightly raised. It was the first time he had ever heard Alberto say his name, and it seemed a word full of angles.

“I’m not capable of killing her,” he admitted.

“Not with your hands.”

“Then how?” Lucia asked.

“With a knife.”

“We don’t have a knife.”

“Then we hit her on the head with a stone.”

Lucia took a couple of steps toward her brother.

“You can’t be serious!”

“I could do it, I’m not a bit scared.”

Lucia pushed the boy aside and went toward the pipe where the cord was tied, but before she could get there Alberto flung a handful of earth at her.

“What’s that you’ve thrown at me?”

“Shit!”

“Stop it, or I’ll slap you.”

“Bitch! Black bitch!”

Lucia slapped him. For a few seconds everything was suspended, as if they were at the bottom of a swimming pool filled with formalin. Even the goat stood still and watched with a slightly lowered head, apparently distracted by other thoughts. Then Alberto started running toward the car and after a few steps fell to the ground, thrashing about with his arms and legs.

They ran to him. Lucia knelt down and tried to hold him still and received a kick on the breast that knocked the breath out of her, but she finally managed to calm him, holding him close for several minutes. He was struggling for breath, his face marked with mud. He was not weeping. Leonardo, standing over him, became aware of a warm smell of urine and realized he had pissed himself.

“Come on, we’ll get in the car now,” Lucia said.

The boy allowed himself to be helped up and walked toward the car with his sister.

Leonardo and Bauschan, left behind, looked back at the she-goat. She was exploring the ground with her snout. She could probably tell the field had once been sown with
granoturco
or maize and hoped to find traces of a cob or two under the mud.

People think it’s a plant the Turks brought us, Leonard mused as he tried to untie the knot restricting the animal, but the name is simply the result of linguistic confusion. In fact
granoturco
reached us from the Americas, where the English called it “turkey wheat,” i.e., grain suitable for turkeys to eat, but assonance caused the term to be translated into Italian as
grano di Turchia
, “grain from Turkey.”

This reflection occupied him for the five minutes he needed to untie the tangle of wet cord, then, fingers numb with cold, he returned to the car.

Alberto was stretched on the rear seat; he had changed his trousers and seemed to be asleep. Before starting the car, Leonardo looked once more at the goat; she was exactly where he had left her and seemed to be gazing at the gray sky above the mountains as if waiting for a signal. Her leash was hanging loosely from her neck, like a permanent umbilical cord linking her to the earth.

They filled the car at a service station on the bypass.

Even though there were only two cars in the line, this operation took more than an hour. The cars had to wait in a parking area at the side of the enclosure until a siren and an announcement by a man with a megaphone stationed on top of a small tower called them to the gate.

When it was their turn, the gate opened and they drove into a narrow space closed on three sides. Then the gate shut behind them and the man on the tower ordered them to get out of the car, place their money on the hood, open both hood and trunk, and move back several paces.

Lucia gave Leonardo the banknotes; the man checked them through a telescope, then told the children to stay where they were. Lucia and Alberto put on their jackets. Once they reached an area marked by four yellow stripes, a second gate opened and the Polar was allowed through.

The sum that Leonardo had to pay to fill the tank up would have been enough, a few years before, to buy a low-powered car, but it was obvious that in the last few months the money must have lost a great deal of its value. The man who served Leonardo had a pistol in a shoulder holster. Despite the fact that the right side of his face was missing, his look was alert and sharp. Even the men on the tower were armed. One pointed his rifle at Leonardo, while his colleague with the megaphone controlled the children in the narrow enclosed space.

Behind the corrugated iron hut, where the man operated the pump, Leonardo could see a full clothes line and behind that two toy cars and a plastic tractor. A family business, he thought.

“We’re on our way to Switzerland,” he said. “Have you any information that may be useful for us?”

The man looked as if he had been asked for details of his sexual habits.

“No one knows anything,” he answered.

Ten minutes later they were back on the bypass. They drove alongside several cars, but all eventually exited to the city and when they reached the entrance to the
autostrada
they found themselves alone again. The barriers to the tollbooths were open and there were several empty cars at the side of the road. One was a spray-painted Audi and Leonardo saw a body in it when he slowed down.

After a couple of kilometers he pulled over. It must have been about two o’clock, but no one had a watch that still worked.

“Let’s have something to eat,” he said.

Lucia divided the cheese in three and Alberto, who normally bolted down everything as quickly as he could, began chewing with exasperating slowness. He seemed to be having trouble keeping his eyes open. On the other hand, Lucia seemed completely calm. The crackers were stale and insipid, but the cheese had a strong flavor. When they had finished eating, they went off one by one to urinate behind a container with German words on it; then they resumed their journey.

They covered about eighty kilometers without seeing a human soul up to the exit to N., after which a barrier blocked the road and Leonardo was forced to slow down.

“What’s going on?” Lucia asked.

“Just a checkpoint, don’t worry.”

Behind the barrier were three men in the uniform of the National Guard. Two of them were armed. When the Polar stopped, the tallest man approached, in an air force pilot’s helmet. Leonardo had to open the door because the nylon “window” was opaque.

“All get out, please,” said the soldier.

He had several days of beard growth and yellow stains on his uniform.

“Our papers are in order.”

“All get out, please,” the man repeated.

While the man in the helmet opened the trunk and rummaged about inside the car, Leonardo, Bauschan, and the children formed up on a white line and were guarded by the second man, who looked about thirty and had a large tommy gun on his shoulder and his eyes fixed on the asphalt. A cigarette rolled from maize paper was hanging from his chapped lips. The third man, hardly more than a boy, had stayed behind the barrier. He had no hat or helmet, and his hair was a dazzling blond.

“Have you any money with you?” the man in the helmet asked after he had finished searching the car.

“Not much, we’ve just filled up with gasoline.”

“Bring it out.”

Leonardo took out his wallet and asked Lucia for the permits. She held them out to him and he passed them to the guard. Meanwhile the young boy had moved the barrier and had gone to sit in the rear seat of the Polar. He was not armed.

“I have to take these children to Switzerland,” Leonardo said. “Their relatives are waiting for them.”

The man stuck the money into the pocket of his camouflage jacket and dropped the wallet and permits on the ground.

“Have the kids got anything?”

“No,” Lucia said.

“If they have, they must give it to me,” the man said, still addressing Leonardo; then he pointed the barrel of his gun at Bauschan. “If not, I’ll start with the dog.”

There was no anger or resentment in his words, even if he clearly must have experienced both in equal measure in the past. But his eyes were now like parched earth where grass had difficulty growing. Two large veins ran below his temples.

When Leonardo touched Lucia’s shoulder, she pushed a hand inside her trousers and pulled out a roll of banknotes. The man added them to the rest of the money in his pocket. His reddened eyes softened for a moment, perhaps remembering something, but quickly returned to their earlier blankness.

“We need your car,” he said in the same expressionless tone he had used from the start.

Leonardo told him the keys were in the ignition.

Without another glance the men got into the car and started the engine. The man in the helmet said something to the one with the tommy gun, probably that it was an old car without automatic gears.

Leonardo took advantage of this by walking up to the Polar and knocking on the window with his knuckles.

“What do you want?” the man with the tommy gun said. His eyes were an intense cinematic blue, but his teeth were those of a man from the Middle Ages.

“I’d like to ask a favor.”

The man suddenly grabbed Leonardo by the ear and pulled it, simultaneously raising the window. When the glass hit Leonardo’s neck, the man let go of his ear and smiled. Leonardo could smell alcohol on his breath.

“We haven’t raped your daughter or killed your son. That’s what you can expect these days, you know.” Leonardo tried to nod but the edge of the window made it impossible. Behind him, Bauschan let out little yelps of distress.

“Please,” Leonardo mumbled.

The man in the driver’s seat signed to the other to lower the window. Released from the pressure, Leonardo put a hand to his throat and gave a long sigh but stood his ground.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You must be stupid. What do you want?”

“There are things in the trunk of no use to you but very precious to us.”

The two men looked at each other and then back at Leonardo, who nodded as if to confirm his own words. The man in the helmet half turned to the boy behind him.

“Check what the bastard takes,” he said.

The boy got out and tried to open the trunk but failed. Leonardo asked if he could do it and the boy moved aside.

“It’s defective,” Leonardo apologized, raising the door of the trunk and showing the boy the bag with Lucia’s sanitary napkins. The boy nodded that he could keep it.

“Can I take the clothes too?”

“Can he take the clothes?” the boy asked his colleagues.