The Last Man Standing (30 page)

He began waving his arms, leaping, and gyrating. A mad exaltation filled him, and the pain in his feet faded.

He closed his eyes and danced faster, more frenetically, then opened them again and saw Richard’s light but penetrating expression, which brought back familiar dreams from his childhood of warriors with matted hair and women huddling in caves. Nightmares involving dogs, bones, cold, and bodies burned on high flaming pyres in faraway villages. Recurrent visions from which he woke terrified and certain there would never be a place in the world for him.

In his mind he passed down a corridor opening onto rooms with no floors. If he had gone through one of those doors, he would never have been able to get back and his body would have been degraded to a shell capable only of killing and violating and, in the end, opening his own veins with a shard of flint and waiting for death with his eyes turned up to the moon.

In some hidden corner where it had been hidden for goodness knows how long, the memory came back to him of a spring morning many years ago. He and Lucia had woken late, as often happened on Saturdays, and had breakfast at the kitchen table, listening to a radio program Lucia did not entirely understand and that Leonardo only loved for the voice of the female host. Then they had washed and started to get ready to go out. When Leonardo had laid out Lucia’s clothes ready for her on the sofa, the little girl had taken off her pajamas, pulled on her pants, and begun to leap about on the bed, calling out that she was like Tarzan, Mowgli, and Jesus.

“Jesus too?” Leonardo had asked.

“Jesus died with torn pants, didn’t you know that?”

He remembered that while Lucia had finished getting dressed he had listened to the sound of cars on the wet road and realized he had now come really close to the secret, no matter how close he may have been before. He must preserve that perception, he told himself. Not the perception of what he himself was but of what that child had been, what she was now, and what she would become.

He recalled his mind to the present. She turned to look at him with the eyes of a dog that has escaped to run free along the safety barrier of the
autostrada
but has finally agreed to return and come back. He was aware of this because he felt new pain in his feet and humiliation for what he was doing. The youngsters were whistling, cheering, and throwing pinecones and bits of wood at him. Then Richard raised a hand and all was silent, except the music, which continued to vibrate against the immobility of the bodies and the natural world around them.

Leonardo took a step forward and felt cold concrete refresh his blistered feet. The wind had dropped. An elongated cloud was fleeing to the east leaving the moon behind, like a reptile that has laid her egg and wants to be far away when it hatches.

Richard stood up, and taking Lucia by the hand helped her to her feet. She was tiny beside him, as if small enough to fit into the palm of his hand.

“We are grateful to you, dancer,” he said. “Now you can go back to your cage.”

Panting, his mouth parched although full of saliva, Leonardo looked at him. There had not been the slightest note of derision in the man’s voice. He turned and hobbled through the surrounding silence to the wagon. No one followed to make sure he went to the cage. He climbed the stepladder, entered, and closed the door. David was watching him in profile.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

He sat down with his back to the partying in the arena. The shouts and the music, the smell of meat, and the crackling of branches thrown on the fire reached him; then he realized the smell of meat was coming from himself. He looked out at the night before him, so inexorable and ancient, and wept tears quite different from the tears he would have once wept.

After that evening, the young people started coming to see the cage where David and Leonardo spent their days. Only Richard could give the order to open it, but that did not stop them from goading Leonardo to dance or prevent them from throwing stones and food at him through the bars. When he saw them coming, he would crouch in a corner or hide behind David, trying to make himself invisible. Sometimes, having tried to provoke him with sticks and stones in the useless hope of getting him to react, the kids would stay there to study him in silence as though Leonardo were the unusual creature and not the elephant, for whom they seemed to feel little or no curiosity. As soon as they were bored, they would go away and Leonardo would be able to emerge from his hideaway to collect the food. It usually turned out to be something his teeth could not cope with: bones, such as the skull of a hare or a badger, or the paws of a wild boar or fallow deer, but sometimes he was lucky and found an onion, some potato peel, or a rabbit skin he could chew for its fat before laying it out to dry.

One night, while he was asleep, they threw a live trout at him. When the youngsters stopped laughing and went back to dance, he watched the fish struggling on the floor, opening and shutting its gills, until he was sure it was dead; he then spent a long time rubbing it on the bars to remove its scales before eating it.

His feet hardly hurt him at all which, according to the doctor who had treated them again and bound them up, was not a good sign. In fact, an extremely hard, black calloused crust had formed under the soles, which allowed him to move about the cage as if in rubber-soled shoes and to cross easily from the side he used as a toilet to the side where he ate and slept beside David.

During the days they spent on the hillside and those passed in a new encampment some thirty kilometers into the valley, Leonardo was able to assemble a more detailed picture of the tribe whose jester he had become. Most of the young people were between fifteen and thirty years old, leaving aside the cripple who was evidently Richard’s trusted right-hand man, and there seemed no hierarchy in the group. All the males had equal access to weapons, drugs, and alcohol, while the females were excluded from the distribution of weapons and never left the camp. There were no fixed relationships, and the females coupled with anyone without preference or exclusion. This could happen in public or in the cars or coach at any time of the day or night. The group of children that Alberto had joined was held in high esteem, especially by Richard, and Leonardo never saw anyone mistreat them or make fun of them. They were involved in the partying and were given alcohol and drugs, but when the older males went out to hunt, they stayed in camp with the girls. One of the youths who had captured them, the dark thickset one, busied himself with skinning the animals after hanging them from a hook that stuck out of the cab of one of the smaller vans. Then the skin and entrails were thrown away and the rest of the animal was impaled on a stake to cook by the fire. A small fiberglass cistern had been installed on another truck for water. This was kept at a certain level by a pump that drew from the river running beside the road or from the streams that carried quantities of water down the hillsides. Even so, Leonardo never saw any of the youngsters drinking from the cistern or using water to wash in. Their only form of bodily care concerned their hair and eyebrows, which the boys shaved every two or three days. Some of the young people had longer hair than others and wore rings and earrings or had metal pins in their ears or other parts of their faces, but this seemed to be a matter for individual choice. The only things that clearly identified members of the tribe were their shaved eyebrows and the colored markings on their cheeks and foreheads. There were no uniforms; they all dressed as they liked and sometimes the boys returned wearing garments they must have found while out plundering. None of them had anywhere to keep their clothes. What they had taken was either left lying around or thrown on the fire, and despite the severity of the weather no one possessed a jacket or any heavy clothing.

The scraps of conversation Leonardo could catch above the thumping beat of the music were nearly always connected with challenges, squabbles, songs, or direct invitations to sex. Their vocabulary was basic, approximate, and stuffed with expletives. Even so, it revealed presence of mind and alertness. It would not be accurate to say they lacked intelligence, but it was as if the electricity had left some parts of their brains to concentrate on areas related to aggressiveness and the pure pursuit of pleasure. There was no distinction for them between wanting to do something and actually doing it; the inconvenient processes of thought had dissolved to make way for untrammeled need.

Leonardo noticed they were incapable of feeling remorse or regret for anything they did, or of remembering what had happened the day before or wondering what would happen the next day. He even began to doubt whether or not they could remember anything of their past or of other people who had once been close to them or of the places they had come from.

Richard seemed to be their only law. Every evening when the hunters laid out their haul of dead animals and knick-knacks on the cloth, he would emerge from his trailer and walk among the young people, talking to them like a father, confessor, or servant.

As the days passed, Leonardo noticed that Richard was beginning to look increasingly disappointed when it was time to examine the booty. On one occasion he went back into the trailer without imparting his usual benediction or handing the cripple the urn with the drug in it. This caused an icy silence to fall over the tribe, and once he was out of sight the youngsters stared in astonishment at the door that had swallowed him up. This made it clear to Leonardo that what Richard really wanted from the raids was not the sort of food and trinkets the boys regularly brought back but gasoline, women, and other prisoners, and he decided that until the boys found him a new girl, Lucia would be safe from the fate of the woman with the shaved head.

The evening the drug was withheld, a brawl broke out and one youth was wounded in the stomach by a knife. The dancing continued but someone went for the doctor, who examined the boy, spread a sheet on the ground, and stitched the wound by the flickering light of the bonfire. It looked to Leonardo as though the boy was weeping during the operation.

That night he asked the doctor where he had been captured.

“Near M.”

“You were living there?”

“No, I was on my way to Austria.”

“With your family?”

“My wife and daughter were already dead. I was on my own.”

The man continued going back and forth to the thicket where he was cutting branches for David.

“Where do they come from?” Leonardo asked.

“Who?”

“These kids.”

“When I first saw them they were wearing swimsuits; I think they must be from the Adriatic coast.”

“And now? Where are we going?”

“Why are you asking these questions?”

“Don’t you want to know yourself?”

“I know where I stand. I won the finger-cutting. I have my place in the group, no one will hurt me. Also, I’m a doctor, and they need a doctor.”

Leonardo looked at the man, with the yellow light of the last flames of the bonfire dancing on him; as always his face was expressionless, yet infinitely sad.

“What’s the finger-cutting?”

The doctor walked off. It seemed to Leonardo that he was away for hours, but it was only a few minutes later when he came back and the morning light had grown no brighter. He threw a last handful of twigs into the cage, then looked at Leonardo.

“I could give you an injection. You won’t feel a thing and tomorrow they’ll find you dead.”

Leonardo shook his head.

“I can’t leave Lucia.”

“Then keep dancing and try to stay alive. There’s nothing else for you.”

“What do you know about Richard?”

“You’re asking meaningless questions.”

“Who was he before he started this madness? That I want to know.”

“You’re not in a position to want anything. You’re full of resentment, drawing conclusions from what you see. But what you’re seeing and judging is only a facade, a necessary evil. Richard is above all this. Respect him. He’s bringing up his children far better than you would have been able to. You would have made them into victims destined for suffering and nothing more. I know because I did the same. Just now they are being tested by fire; they’ll get burned, but it’ll make them stronger. I used to not believe it either, but there’s a logic in it all, a new logic. Your son has understood it, children understand much more quickly than we do. Richard has read this in him, which is why he wants to keep him close. The only person for you to worry about is yourself. It’s not easy for people like you and me to change our skin. We are too old and too firmly locked into what we used to think was right.”

Leonardo shook his head, dismissing these words.

“I’d like you to speak to Alberto and tell him to come to me.”

“Why not call him yourself?”

“I have, but he pretends not to hear.”

“He won’t come, even if I ask him.”

“But ask him all the same.”

“He’ll only come if Richard tells him to.”

“Then tell Richard I’d like to speak to Alberto.”

“No one speaks to Richard unless Richard himself wants it.”

Leonardo leaned back against the bars and looked at David. Since they had started sharing the cage, he had never seen the elephant angry or showing any sign of impatience.

“Do you ever speak to the kids?”

“No.”

“If I’m the only person you can speak to, why is it so difficult for you to do it?”

“Your questions are out of place. They come from a concept of the world that no longer exists. Though being a writer, you must have gotten used to imagining other worlds. That’s what this is.”

“I’m trying to understand what sort of world it is.”

“Understanding belongs to the old world. I also studied and had a home, profession, and family. That wasn’t very long ago, but it no longer makes sense to think about it. These things don’t mean anything anymore. There’s nothing to be said and still less to understand.”

Leonardo nodded.

“Why are we always on the move? What are they looking for?”

The doctor put his hands on the edge of the cage, the left hand with three fingers missing hidden under the other. The stakes facing Leonardo were stuck with black sculptures of desiccated flesh.