The Last Man Standing (23 page)

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 than 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.

PART THREE

I found this exercise book three days ago and took it because I’ve recently developed a habit of collecting everything I find. My priority is food, clothes, and anything to make our lives easier and safer. But sometimes I happen to go into a home and see a sofa, a chair in good condition, or a picture or a set of handpainted plates with cockerels in rustic style, and my first impulse is always to keep these objects. This is impossible, besides being pointless and dangerous, but when I leave them behind I feel real regret, as if they always belonged to me and I’ve been forced to abandon them.

As I was saying, I found this exercise book three days ago. My first thought was to give it to Lucia or Alberto or use its pages to light the fire. I wasn’t thinking of writing. Or perhaps I was. The fact is that, when it happened, I was confused and frightened because of what had taken me to that house, which is to say my shoes.

Recently I tried to repair them with Scotch tape, but they had become so worn out that they were coming open all around and my right foot was at risk of frostbite. They were not suitable for the long walks we are forced to make. I’ve calculated that during the last week we’ve covered almost thirty kilometers a day.

We keep well away from towns and paved roads. We know well enough that they are best for finding food, shelter, and perhaps some means of transport, but past experiences have made us mistrustful. It is the children who are most afraid. So we walk on cart tracks and over fields, in the snow, and along railway lines. My shoes haven’t stood the strain. A friendly woman warned me to find stronger ones, but I didn’t listen. I thought things would work out differently.

That is why, after a night spent in a hut in the forest three days ago, I left the children in a small clearing and took the dog with me into a village we had been able to see since the previous evening. The day before we ran across two cars parked in front of an abbey. As we approached, we saw a large bird inside one car and it began beating its wings against the windows. There were three bodies inside the car. They had been there a long time, but it was easy to see that they were a young couple and a small child. Lucia ran away in terror. When I caught up with her she was pale and trembling, and I thought she must have a fever because she was so hot. It was the first time I had seen her out of control in that way. Meanwhile Alberto had opened the door and the bird, perhaps a blackbird, had flown away. While I was hugging Lucia I saw him take a battery from the dashboard. I shouted at him not to touch anything. He obeyed, but as if he hadn’t heard me and it had been his own decision. I don’t know who or what may have been in the other car. We hurried away, almost running.

Next morning, the village seemed completely deserted; the closed houses showing no sign of having been raided, as if the people had simply gone away before anything happened. This was not necessarily a good sign, so I told the children to wait for me in the clearing.

When I reached the square I looked for an open door, and not finding one I forced one that had seemed more fragile than the others, using an iron bar I’d collected a few days earlier in a railway depot. Even now it’s in my jacket pocket. It’s the nearest thing to a weapon I’ve ever had. It makes me feel secure, though I know I could never bring myself to use it against anyone.

The place seemed to have been the home of an elderly woman, or of two elderly women, because there were two single beds in the same room. There was a bath with two handles and in the bathroom cupboard medicine for diabetes. The house had not been trashed, but everything else had been removed. Bauschan sniffed at a basket where a cat may have slept. I called him and we went to look for another door.

It is extraordinary how easy it can be to pull off a break-in, even for someone weakened by hunger, exhaustion, and with little aptitude for manual action, like me. This is one of the few resources I’ve managed to discover in myself at this time. A discovery that gives me little comfort compared to the irremediable losses that every day brings.

I found what I was looking for in an apartment on the second floor of a newly redecorated block. The man sitting in the armchair looked as if he had dozed off while contemplating a wall papered with photographs, postcards, and small maps.

The only dead bodies I had seen before last summer were those of my father, an old aunt, a Latin scholar, and my mother. Only in the last case was I present at the moment of death. My mother had been a practical woman, composed and not much inclined to frivolity, yet her exit had taken place with the lightness of fresh air replacing stale in a well-aired room. My impression as I watched her last breath, and the immobility that followed, was one of delicate inevitability. Something like the closing or opening of a flower. The darker feeling that came over me beside her lifeless body had been one of nostalgia; I believed no one would ever love me unconditionally again. I would never again be able to make someone happy with so little effort. What a pity. The bodies I have seen recently affect me quite differently. Their lives have not slipped away but have been snatched from them. Not like a child’s milk tooth, that after dangling for days drops out to make room for its successor, but like healthy teeth needlessly ripped out with cold forceps and no anesthetic. I can’t get used to seeing these bodies, and I am always disturbed by them.

For this reason I immediately looked away from that man sitting in his armchair studying the opposite wall. The small maps traced the stages of many itineraries, probably journeys he had made with the young woman featured in the photographs. The maps were recent ones, with the surrounding countries shaded gray and neither their borders nor their cities marked.

I looked at the man. He was short and fat, with a thick black mustache and a large mole under his left eye. When I approached, the mole flew away and I realized it must have been a fly.

Apart from its pallor, there was nothing unseemly about his face. The bullet had entered his temple cleanly. The hand holding the pistol had fallen back on the arm of the chair, while his other hand was decently covering his genitals. Only one earpiece of his glasses had slipped off.

I carefully took off his right shoe and measured it against my own: size 9 ½. I put it back on him and I went to look for a more robust pair. Some hiking boots in the lumber room fit me. There was also a camping stove, a sleeping bag, water bottles, a backpack, and fishing equipment. I took the backpack and filled it with whatever I thought might come in handy, and then I went to look for food.

The larder contained flour for making polenta, freeze-dried soup, some bars of muesli, and powdered milk: more than we had eaten for a week. I gulped down one muesli bar and gave another to Bauschan, who had not eaten since the previous day.

In the bedroom a dozen exercise books with hard covers were piled on a desk. The man had used them meticulously to record means of transport, times of departure, alterations of travel plans, and places visited. He had also stuck in vouchers, air and rail tickets, and photographs featuring the young woman from the living room wall with an open, friendly smile.

It was not easy to imagine the two meeting and beginning a relationship.

She looked like a woman open to new things, who needed a certain dose of unconventional romance. He, until he met her, must have been a man who had happily survived the usual time of life for passion unscathed. Someone who had probably found in his work, and his love of fishing, ample justification for his existence, just as I had been satisfied with books, teaching, and parenthood. But we had both made an error of judgment, and this realization had at first seemed a miracle. Though in the long run, in different ways, we had both paid for it.

I was rummaging in his drawers when I found the unused exercise book I am now writing in. Without a second thought I shoved it in the backpack together with some underpants and socks and left the house.

Writing had once been my profession, in the sense that I had been technically defined as a novelist, but that was now closed behind a solid wall in the distant past. What had first gotten me started had probably been the need to create a world on my own modest scale, a world of relationships, meetings, public gardens, shops, memories, gestures, and feelings that I could inhabit without feeling inadequate, just as I did in the real world. “Stories of courage always come from the basest part of ourselves, poetry and profundity from the most arid part,” in the words of an elderly writer I happened to meet early in my career. I know now it was his way of putting me on my guard against the path I was beginning to follow.

Now for eight years, apart from several unanswered letters, I have not written a single line, but that hasn’t stopped me still living in a world of books, both my own and those written by others—continuing to cut myself off from life.

Now death, fear, cold, hunger, and the children I am responsible for have forced me to return to real life, and the world I have found waiting for me is far more ferocious and degenerate than the one I ran away from. How did we come to this? Did the evil germinate in our hearts or have we been the victims of infection? And in either case, how can the germs have fallen on such fertile ground? I can’t offer a single word of explanation. I simply wasn’t there.

Days earlier we had left a warehouse where we had been well received; a place that at first had seemed safe but had soon shown itself quite otherwise, and after a day’s walk we had reached the outskirts of T. We decided to circle the town to the east rather than the west. I had been convinced of this by the sky, always clear in the east but blotted out by large gray clouds to the west.

Passing some hills, we ran into a pack of dogs. The setting sun perfectly outlined their shapes on some high ground. At first I took them for horses, they were so still and solemn. We were walking into the wind so they had not yet scented us.

Lucia and Alberto slowly began to retreat. Even Bauschan stopped. Whereas I continued down the cart track, my eyes fixed on those animals so sharply silhouetted against the indigo of dusk. A moment later, as if responding to a trumpet call, the dogs turned their heads toward me and, starting from a gentle trot, rushed down the hillside at full speed. The pack dodged the trees and reformed like drops of water attracted to its own substance.

Magnificent, I thought.

Only then did I notice Lucia was calling my name. I turned. The children and Bauschan were about fifty meters behind me. They had reached the gate to a farm. Only then did I understand and start running.

Thanks to a wooden ladder, we were able to climb up to what had once been a hayloft. A few seconds later, the dogs entered the farmyard and stopped, panting, to look at us. They showed neither disappointment nor ferocity, but it was clear that if it hadn’t been for the ladder they would have torn us to pieces.

The children threw a few tiles in an attempt to drive them away, but the dogs merely moved to avoid being hit. After a while a few crouched down. Others went to drink from a pool of melting snow. Two copulated.

We ate supper with our legs hanging down and the dogs watching us. It was very cold, but with hay around it would have been dangerous to light a fire. Bauschan stared at his fellow creatures and whimpered. He knew we were trapped.

“Go away, you shits!” Alberto shouted, but all I could think was that they were perfectly adapted for what they had been created to do. And to me that made them piercingly beautiful.

During the night, listening to Lucia shivering with cold beside me, I realized I was utterly unsuited to the task entrusted to me, and I wept. When we woke in the morning, the dogs had completely vanished.

As I write this, Sebastiano is watching me from the sofa with Bauschan stretched out at his feet, stroking him as if polishing a violin. He’s a tall man with a long, thin face. I have been familiar with this house for many years, it is where I used to come for massages from his mother.

When we arrived this morning we found Sebastiano in the kitchen, his cowhide over his shoulders and his suitcase packed. I don’t know how long he had been there. He certainly didn’t seem surprised to see us.

I greeted him, then asked him who had reduced the village to such a state and where everyone had gone. He didn’t answer. Then I asked him where Adele was.

He gave me a serious look, as if the answer must be utterly obvious. Then he took me to the room where her body was stretched on the couch, sewn into a sheet as used to be the custom in these parts. When I asked for an explanation, he pointed to a note on the bedside table. It had been written by Adele.

This afternoon I was digging her grave under the hornbeam when it began to rain. It was like a summer storm, so much water came pelting down. Sebastiano helped me carry the body to the foot of the tree, then he went in and he and the children watched from the window as I filled in the hole. I had never before even dug a trench, yet it seemed as natural to me as accepting a plateful of food from a neighbor and giving back the empty plate the next day washed and clean. While I shoveled that earth so heavy with rain, I thought a lot about my mother.

Then we all rested for an hour or two and dined in silence on soup and cheese.

Now the children are sleeping in Adele’s double bed, and soon Sebastiano will go up to his room. I shall stretch out by the stove on the sofa, with Bauschan on a towel I’ve laid out for him nearby. Tomorrow we have to get everything ready for our journey. It’s unbelievable how long it takes to make preparations when you have nothing. Tomorrow morning I shall go into the village. I must find a small map and some eye drops for Alberto.