The Last Man Standing (39 page)

“The woman who was with us has gone,” he said. “Her family is not far away, and she wants to join them.”

Salomon looked at the muddy bandage that Leonardo had not yet changed and the scratches on his right hand, lowered his eyes and said nothing. Lucia went on staring at the stove, chewing a potato left over from the night before.

In the afternoon, while they were busy in the cellar, Salomon and Leonardo heard music from the road. They ran to the beeches at the edge of the field and, hiding in the bushes behind the great trees, they watched the familiar procession pass on the main road. The Land Rover was leading, followed by a car they had not seen before, and the coach, towed by a tractor. Most of the youngsters were lying on the roof of the coach or on an agricultural trailer that had been attached to it. The cripple, sitting on the hood of the first car, was wearing a bizarre piece of headgear and inspecting the road ahead. He was holding a pike on the end of which Leonardo recognized Richard’s head, blond hair waving in the wind like a ragged flag.

When the music faded in the distance, Leonardo and Salomon went back to the cellar where they had been struggling with the snare for a couple of hours already, trying to replace its old spring with another one taken from a sofa.

“What was the name of the lady who went away this morning?” Salomon asked.

Leonardo realized that Salomon had not recognized Richard’s head.

“Silvia,” he said. “Now let’s try again.”

He grasped the cord that he had attached to one end of the spring while Salomon tried to fasten a hook to the snap mechanism connected to the framework.

“It’s gone in!” Salomon said at one point.

Leonardo opened his eyes, which he had closed with the effort he was making.

“Good.”

The child placed the trap carefully on the floor. He studied it for a long time: it looked like the jaws of a fish, but also like a great dried flower.

“Will the lady be able to find her family?” he asked.

“Yes,” Leonardo said, not feeling he was telling a lie.

That evening, when the boy was asleep, he went down the stairs to the room where Lucia was. Placing the lamp on the windowsill, he sat down at the foot of the bed. Lucia was staring at the ceiling, a slight smile on her lips. She was still wearing the red dress and had not washed since they arrived.

Leonardo slipped off her shoes, took her little feet in his lap, and began massaging them with his remaining hand. She went on gazing at the ceiling as if her feet belonged to someone else.

“I’ll do this every evening,” he told her, “for as long as I live.”

He stopped talking and massaging her feet because it was dawn. Then he put out the light and, by the feeble light of daybreak, climbed the stairs to bed. Salomon was asleep, but some dream must have disturbed him because his mouth was twisted in a grimace and his hair, usually so neat, was in disorder. Using his fingers as a comb, Leonardo tidied the boy’s hair; then he lay down beside him and shut his eyes.

PART FIVE

With the coming of May they reached the hills from where they planned to begin their descent to the sea.

It was a clear evening and the sky was bright in the east, as if the sun setting behind the mountains was already about to appear on the other side of the world.

For twenty days now they had been trudging through the woods, avoiding roads, villages, and even hamlets with only a few houses. When Leonardo noticed the youngsters were tired, he got them to climb onto David’s back. The elephant accepted this burden without protest and proceeded at a slow, solemn pace. Circe, bringing up the rear, was saddled with two large panniers they had constructed from wicker baskets. These contained blankets, clothes, knives, the lamp, tools, and a little food collected before they left, including a pumpkin, some nuts, a handful of flour, a bottle of wine, and two onions. Along the way they had found the bodies of a woman and a man in a hut and the carcasses of cattle devoured by dogs, deer, wild boars, and other game, but no one they could exchange a word with.

One morning they saw from a distance an old man running on the road and disappearing into a factory building, but neither Leonardo nor Salomon wanted to go and find out who he was and whether there might be anyone else there.

A little before dusk Leonardo would decide where they would spend the night, and after lighting the fire would go out and set the snare.

“We’ll reach the sea tomorrow, won’t we?” Salomon would ask while they waited for the rabbit or hare caught the previous night to cook on the flames.

“Not quite yet.”

“But it can’t be very far now?”

“No, not far.”

They would eat in silence, Lucia and the child with a good appetite and Leonardo less hungrily; then he and Salomon would sew the animal’s skin together with other skins from which they were making a cover. If the day had been wet and the skin was not dry enough, they would stretch it out by the fire and postpone their work until the next day. While he was sewing, the boy’s eyes would sometimes close so that he pricked himself with the wire they used for a needle, but he would refuse to go to sleep until the job was finished. When he put the cover down he would go and greet David and Circe, who would be browsing in the circle of light cast by the fire; the elephant polishing off newly sprouting leaves while the donkey concentrated on young grass. Salomon would stroke them and thank them for carrying him when he was tired, then he would go back to the fire, say goodnight to Lucia without ever looking her in the eyes, and lie down under his cover.

While they chatted before going to sleep, the boy would talk about his father and mother and other people he cannot have known. Leonardo would listen without interrupting because he knew true things were spoken in those words, and he would stroke his head until he fell asleep, then get up and go to Lucia.

Sometimes the girl would be staring up at the immense vault heavy with stars above them, and sometimes she would be asleep. Leonardo would take her feet in his lap and caress them lovingly, talking to her about her childhood, places they had visited and things they had loved doing together, but never about things that had frightened them. David and Circe, attracted by his voice, would come near and listen spellbound, their round black eyes reflecting the fire.

Lucia would breathe softly, her expression never changing: even in sleep her body seemed wrapped in a shroud of stillness and distance.

By the time Leonardo lay down it would be nearly day and the air chilly, but even without covers he would quickly fall asleep and not feel the cold.

He would walk all day in bare feet, eating and drinking very little, sleeping two hours a night, defecating when he woke in the morning and urinating three times a day, yet he would never have claimed to be hungry, tired, cold, or tormented by any great physical need. The months spent in the cage had toughened his body, paring him down to the essential; his arms bundles of nerves with prominent veins and his leg muscles like sheaths of leather. His eyes, half hidden behind a curtain of hair and beard, shone sea-green. The skin of his face was brown and wrinkled. The scar of his amputation had healed well and looked as if his hand had been not so much cut off as reabsorbed into his arm.

In the morning, by the time the young people woke, he would have already milked the donkey and retrieved whatever had been caught in the snare. Often a rabbit or hare was attracted by the potato bait, but once he was surprised to find a badger and another time a fox. The animals were nearly always dead and if they weren’t Leonardo would finish them off with a stick and take them to the camp, where Salomon would tie them to a branch to skin and gut them. When Leonardo had told the child that this must be his job since with only one hand he could not do it himself, Salomon had been reluctant, but as the days passed he had proved an able and meticulous butcher.

When they had cleaned the animal, they would go back to the water and wash their hands, arms, face, and feet, drying themselves on a large beach towel they had found. Lucia would wait for them by the fire. She showed no fear of being left alone and when they were on the march she would sometimes disappear into the woods, Leonardo imagined to attend to her physical needs, reappearing at the exact point where they had stopped to wait for her. With time the red dress got torn and one of the flat shoes she wore began coming apart, but she seemed to have no interest in the change of clothing Leonardo had brought for her.

“Will we see the sea today?” Salomon asked. The airy valley below them was of such a dazzling green as to force them to look away. These were the first steps they had taken downhill in a long time.

“A few days more.”

“How many?”

Leonardo looked toward the far hillside where the wind turbines were revolving silently. This time he had decided to take a route to the south, where the map had shown an ancient series of military trenches that, as he hoped, had turned out to be overgrown with brambles and impassable for cars.

“Three,” he said.

Late in the afternoon they saw the roofs of a village beneath them and the ruins of a castle high above it. All that was left of the castle was a shell of walls covered with ivy, but the village looked to be in good condition if deserted.

Leonardo sat down on a stone and studied the castle for a few minutes, with Salomon crouching at his side. Lucia stood behind them. David and Circe, as always when they stopped, went off to eat. Nearby, a sorb tree blown down during the winter was still putting out toothed oval leaves.

“Do we absolutely have to go there?” the boy said.

“No, we don’t have to,” Leonardo said.

“Then why do you want to?”

“I don’t know.”

The hot sun was piercing the roof of leaves above them and marking out patches on the surrounding grass. Leonardo was thinking about a man he had never seen or known but who he knew to have lived in one of those houses. He could smell his clothes. For days he had been having similar visions and clearly remembering everything he had read or heard in the past. Even so, his mind was light and free, as if his immense archive of stories could fit into a suitcase in an empty house.

“Can we come too?” Salomon asked.

“Better not. I’ll be back soon.”

He went down to the village through the woods, reaching the backs of the first houses: tall, narrow stone structures in the Ligurian style but solidly built in the way that things are in the mountains.

He found an alley and walked down it as far as the main lane, which was no wider than his extended arms and paved with round cobbles. The shutters of the houses were closed, their doors ajar or wide open to empty rooms. After some fifty meters the main street opened into a space with a fountain, a small play area for children, and the terrace of a bar. A cat dozing on a low stone wall was the only living creature to be seen. Up a flight of steps was the church.

Leonardo went in. There were no pews or fittings. High up, a great wooden crucifix was watching over the empty aisles like someone casting a final glance over his home before closing the door and leaving for a new life elsewhere.

Leaving the church, he wandered through the village until he found the house. Access was by a set of stone steps, but the door was hidden by a vine that had spread over the whole garden. Above it a Japanese persimmon extended its branches, and in front were olive trees and what had been a terraced kitchen garden but had now been taken over by wild boars.

First he came into a small room with a high ceiling and then the kitchen. The house had been built vertically with small rooms one above another linked by steep stairways up to the top floor, which from the outside looked like a small turret covered with ivy. There was no trace of the man who had lived there, or of the woman Leonardo knew to have shared most of his life: no garment, book, or furniture, only the great cloths and sheets of paper on which the man had traced designs in ash, anticipating what the world would become.

In the space under a roof that must have been his studio, Leonardo found jars of burned earth, sand, and dust, each with a small label written in pencil. Also fragments of wood smoothed by the sea and strangely formed stones. He picked up one of the stones; it was gray, interlaced with white circles of a different mineral, and as he held it he could feel the man’s warm, bony hand in his palm. He could see him, small and white-haired, moving through the rooms in a pullover and bending for hours over his artwork of ashes, the work of a man who knew that all things begin in poverty. Leonardo spoke to him.

By the time he left the garden of the house, the sun had lost its heat. He climbed back up the main lane to the square, but before reaching it he heard singing and stopped. A cheerful song sung by a woman.

He followed the music to the door it was coming from and found himself in a bare kitchen with a table laid for three. From the stairs leading to the floor above came two female voices, one responding to the other. They were singing in old French.

He climbed the stairs and even before he reached the top step, met the eyes of three women sitting together in the middle of a room. All the furniture, consisting of a sofa, sideboard, wardrobe, and double bed, had been moved to one side as though someone had tilted the floor to make it slide, while the other walls were hung with carpets giving it a peaceful and Arab feeling.

The women stared at Leonardo for a moment without interrupting their song, then turned around to face the window beyond which the sun was sinking and tingeing the colors of the valley with yellow. The thin woman in the middle was about fifty and her black dress would not have looked out of place under a raincoat on some suburban street in Amsterdam or Paris. Her mulatto face was beautiful, even if tired and bloodless, sparse hair framing it like a veil. The other two were younger but infinitely more resigned. All three must have lost something; in fact, their eyes clashed with the frivolity of their song, clearly intended to raise a smile. The mulatto woman was conducting, raising and lowering her hands from her knees. When the song ended she got up and walked toward Leonardo.

“Did you like that?”

“Very much.”

She was just as tall and slim as he remembered her.

“You really mean that?”

“I do.”

The woman returned to the others, complimented them, and took her leave of them, making an appointment for the next day. Then she went back to Leonardo.

“It’s such a lovely day,” she said. “Shall we sit outside for a while?”

Leonardo followed her into the street and toward the bar. There were still two tables and a few chairs on the terrace. They chose two that still had unbroken seats and sat down, facing the hillside behind which the sun would set. The door of the bar at the back had been smashed and one could imagine excrement and screwed-up waste paper inside on the floor. Small skulls could be seen in the shadows. On the other hand, the terrace was clean and full of light. From the acacias came a good smell and the buzzing of wasps.

“Have you ever been here before?” the woman asked.

Leonardo remembered her face surrounded by curly hair, of which hardly any now remained.

“No,” he said.

She looked at the terraces rising above the houses and the two lanes, one coming out behind a swing and the other beside the church. A notice said
GO SLOW, CHILDREN STILL PLAY IN THE STREET HERE
.

“I first saw this place thirty years ago. I’d come to Europe as a backing singer for Leonard Cohen and the day after a gig in Nice a lighting technician brought me here on his motorbike. I was twenty-five then, and I thought sooner or later I’d come to live in this village, especially if I had a child.”

“I often came to your concerts.”

“Mine or Leonard’s?”

“Yours.”

“I read your books. Do you remember the lecture on Bolaño you gave in the theater in Nantes? I came to hear it and nearly asked your agent how I could meet you.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I thought if you came to one of my performances you would never have done that.”

“But how did you recognize me?”

“Do you think you’ve changed much?”

“Yes.”

“Quite wrong, I knew who you were at once. But how did you recognize me? I’ve lost all my hair.”

“I knew your voice. What was that song I was listening to?”

“Provençal, very old, great fun. It’s about a bailiff who tells his wife he’s being tormented by a mosquito buzzing in his stomach. She sends him to the doctor at Cavaillon. The doctor agrees it’s a mosquito and suggests a natural remedy: the frog is the sworn enemy of the mosquito so all the man has to do is to eat a live frog to hunt it down. The bailiff does this because he’s afraid of what people will say if they hear the mosquito buzzing, and after a few days the buzzing does indeed stop, but now he can’t sleep because of the frog croaking. So his wife sends him back to the doctor, who this time makes him eat a live pike because the pike is the sworn enemy of the frog. Returning home, the bailiff is happy because the croaking stops, but now the pike is turning his stomach upside down. Then his wife says there’s no point in going to the doctor again because the sworn enemy of the pike is the fisherman, so all her husband needs to do is to lower a hook and line into his stomach. The bailiff agrees and his wife is able to lead him around the village by the hook and line for days. The last verse reveals that she is the lover of the doctor at Cavaillon and had sewn the mosquito into the border of her husband’s pants.”