The Last Man Standing (8 page)

“Have you heard what happened yesterday?”

Adele nodded, and the little oval she wore around her neck with the portrait of her husband moved against her wrinkled chest. When Leonardo was a boy, the man had toured the Langhe district in a small truck selling viticultural products. He was of Ligurian origin, and it was said he had been a billiard player when young, good enough to compete in serious championships, but in his free time doing the rounds of the fairs to relieve the farmhands in the bars of the money they had earned working with animals.

Adele first met him at the railway station in Genoa. She was just back from South America, where she had been living for six months with a shaman, and the man had been in Viareggio and reached third place in the national championships.

Before she agreed to marry him she had made quite clear what he already knew, that championships were fine but fleecing people at fairs must stop. In any case, cheating people out of their money involves constant traveling; you cannot do it to the local people where you live. The men, blinded by pride, may allow themselves to be milked for years, but sooner or later their women will find a way of getting their own back on you.

He was a man known for good sense and discretion and would not have wanted to argue. Leonardo had once seen him dominating the billiard table in the bar, but when a stranger challenged him he had handed the cue to someone else, saying his wife was waiting for him at home.

“Do you think I ought to do something?” Leonardo asked Adele.

“What would you like to do?”

“Go and talk to the people who started the fire.”

Adele went on working on Leonardo’s thin feet. Her hands were barely warm, like ashes disturbed hours after a fire has gone out.

“Last year Laica had six puppies, but the next day there were only five. Bitches sometimes notice one of the little ones is too weak and eat it to make sure there’s enough milk for the others.”

Leonardo locked his hands behind his head and looked up at the flowered lampshade, noticing the black shapes of dead flies inside the ridged glass bowl. One was much longer than the others: a huge wasp.

“Is that a metaphor?” he asked.

“Don’t use words like that with me. You being a professor doesn’t interest me in the least. You don’t even know how to light a fire without matches.”

Leonardo let his head fall back and dozed off. He was awoken by the cracking of his own feet as the woman squeezed them between her hands. He had no idea how much time had passed.

“There,” Adele said.

Leonardo got off the bed and slipped on his sandals. Adele looked at the notebook where she had divided the pages in two columns.

“You’ve already paid,” she said “Last time I hadn’t any change to give you.”

They went back to the kitchen where the pan on the stove was spreading a good smell of boiled vegetables and rosemary. Beyond the misted windows there was little light, but he could make out a pile of firewood and the white of the birches that formed a crown around the courtyard.

“Is Sebastiano at home?” Leonardo asked.

Adele took a piece of cheese wrapped in parchment paper from the refrigerator and put it on the table.

“He’s upstairs. Tell him supper’s ready.”

Leonardo climbed the stairs and went along the corridor that led to two bedrooms and the bathroom. Sebastiano’s door was closed. Leonardo knocked and looked around the door. The room was tidy with nothing but a single bed, a wardrobe with two doors, a writing desk, and a bookcase. On the walls were a crucifix and a poster of Machu Picchu. Sebastiano was standing by the window. Leonardo knew that the night before he must have seen the glare of the fire.

“No one was hurt,” he said.

Sebastiano turned, showing his hollow cheeks and humped nose. He was ten years younger than Leonardo, but a bald head surrounded by thin hair made him look older. An African totem pole in a sweat suit.

“I need a hand with the grape harvest,” Leonardo said. “Can you help me?”

Sebastiano nodded, parting his lips to show extra-large teeth.

“Thanks,” Leonardo said. “Your mother’s waiting. See you tomorrow then.”

As he closed the door, Sebastiano turned back to the window. Leonardo went downstairs and back into the kitchen. Adele had served the soup.

“Will you stay?” she said.

“Thanks, but I’m tired. I think I’ll read a bit and go to bed.”

“You should always go to bed early and get up early. But you sleep too much, walk too little, and are always reading. If you were a man who works with his hands it would be all right, but people like you need to do a lot of walking.”

“I could always become someone who works with his hands,” said Leonardo, smiling.

“You’re too old now to be any different. And you’ve done too much studying.”

The courtyard was dark and there was a faint smell of fruit in the air. Leonardo went to the bicycle, which he had leaned against a wall. Adele watched from the doorway.

“When the time comes, you should take Sebastiano with you,” she said.

Leonardo put down the leg he had raised to mount the saddle.

“When the time comes for what?”

“When the time comes to go.”

“But I’ve no intention of going anywhere,” he smiled.

Adele touched first one eye and then the other to indicate either exhaustion or far-sightedness. On her cheeks was a complicated pattern of wrinkles and veins.

“But that’s what you should do all the same.”

Leonardo accidentally touched his bicycle bell and its trill spread through the courtyard. The surrounding silence was so complete it seemed the sound would radiate away to infinity without meeting an obstacle. He felt a great need for his own armchair, with a cup of coffee in his hand and a book on his knee.

“Ever since he was a child Sebastiano has talked in his sleep,” his mother said. “I often go into his room to listen. He talks to people who are no longer alive and others who are yet to come. Take him with you, he’ll be useful to you.”

Sebastiano could be heard coming down the stairs. He passed behind Adele.

“You’re right to finish harvesting the grapes,” the woman said, looking up at the sky where a modest moon was shining.

“It’s not good to let grapes rot. A sign people are going mad. Like not combing your hair or washing yourself. People sometimes come to me with dirty feet and when they realize it they apologize by saying ‘No wonder with what’s happening!’ But your feet are always clean. You haven’t gone mad yet.”

Suddenly the geese began honking for no reason and Adele shut them up with a cry Leonardo had heard Mongolian shepherds use to make dromedaries run, and then she dismissed him and went back into the house.

Leaving the yard, Leonardo cycled down the pathway as far as the road and once on the asphalt started in the opposite direction to the village. After ten meters or so he braked sharply and, laying the bicycle on the ground, took a few quick steps into the field by the road, opened his fly, and released a powerful jet of urine. It was the effect the massage had on him.

Going back to the bicycle he noticed something among the lights on the plain that was full of life yet at the same time deeply saddening.

A great fire burning under the nearest hills was sending up an enormous column of smoke. It must have involved a whole group of houses or a large factory because the flames were coming from such a wide base.

Seven years earlier, on the same day and at about the same hour, he had been sitting at the desk in his study about to read an essay on
The Outsider
by Camus written by a student named Clara Carpigli; at that moment all he could have said of her was that she was a young woman with fair skin and raven-black hair who used to sit near the front at his lectures. It was the last piece of work he planned to correct before going into the dining room where Alessandra was waiting with their supper.

At the end of the essay a piece of paper was clipped to the page with three lines on it written in ink between inverted commas.

Starting from that moment, delicate glances, a couple of notes, and a coffee, gradually transformed Clara Carpigli into a face, a way of walking, an increased heartbeat, and an expectation. He knew well that many of his teaching and writing colleagues were in the habit of making the most of their status as
maestri
with dinners, weekends, and nights with women students or lecturers, but though he never moralized, he had always liked to think of himself as different.

Then a month later he left home for an out-of-town restaurant where a girl twenty years his junior was waiting for him with no legitimate reason for meeting him anywhere other than in the lecture rooms of the university.

Three days later, by midday, the grapes had been harvested.

Elio drove the tractor he had borrowed from his uncle into the yard, loaded with the final baskets, and they went into the house for a bite to eat. Leonardo had avoided the village since the night of the fire and there was nothing left in the larder except pasta and cans, but Gabri had given her husband a pan to heat up containing vegetables, anchovies, and breadcrumbs.

They sat down at the table and began devouring the food in big spoonfuls while Bauschan watched from the corner where he was lying, half closing his eyes from time to time like an employer not quite trusting his workforce.

Elio was wearing shorts and a shirt marked with one or two stains of varnish, while Sebastiano was in a mechanic’s overall that must have belonged to his father. His hands, after three days of work, were white and unmarked. The weather was mild and the sky covered with flat, inconsistent clouds hinting at the blue behind them.

As they ate, Elio told the story of a man from a nearby village where Leonardo had never been. This man, known to all by the name of Nino Prun, lived in an isolated ruin and several years earlier had bought himself a coffin that he kept in his bedroom. Apart from this eccentricity and a somewhat shabby style of dressing, everyone knew him to be mild, celibate, and reserved.

Two weeks earlier Nino Prun had gone down to the priest’s housekeeper to arrange for the curate to call on him the following day. Although the woman knew that the man had never been a churchgoer, she passed on the message and the next day the priest climbed up to the man’s house in hopes of a late repentance. Instead he had found Nino Prun in his coffin, stiff, washed, combed, and dressed for burial. All the priest had to do was administer benediction and order the lid to be nailed down. The man had left his few belongings on the dresser in two supermarket bags, one marked with the name of a prostitute from C., who by then had no longer worked for a number of years, and the other with the name of the Association of Alpine Mountaineers.

They talked of this and other things just as in earlier years when Elio’s shop had been full of customers, and when it was possible to see people in trains and on benches with one of Leonardo’s books in their hands. Sebastiano shifted his eyes from one to the other as he followed the conversation, but it was as if his silence were concealing thoughts unrelated to what was happening around him. A medieval Japanese poet might have described his figure as combining the strength of a centuries-old tree with the ephemeral wonder of a chrysalis.

“We could try Gallo,” Elio said as they put the dirty plates in the sink.

They lay resting on the veranda floor for half an hour and then loaded the filled baskets on the trailer and set off for the village. Elio took the driving seat while Leonardo and Sebastiano made room for themselves among the baskets. The air was tepid as the light faded and the smell of the grapes caused them a slight dizziness. Bauschan watched the passing countryside from his owner’s arms. Leonardo wished he could travel like this forever.

“Guido, if only you and Lapo and I,”
he quoted in a murmur,
“could be enchanted and put into a ship with the winds carrying us across the sea to your heart’s content and mine, so that neither destiny nor any other bad weather could impede us, but that on the contrary, united by a common desire, we would feel an ever-increasing need to keep together.”

They passed the carabinieri station. The windows were barred, and crocuses and wild spinach were growing from the steps. It was a year now since the men had been either diverted to the National Guard or transferred to a larger base. The nearest of these was at A., but no one was in a position to say whether there were any carabinieri there anymore, since the Land Rover that used to come every two days and park in the village square was no longer showing up.

When the road divided, they took the route that climbed the hill in gentle curves. The vineyard was at the top of the knoll with its entrance marked by a great red iron gate without any surrounding fence; all around it the vines sloped away like waves in a geometrical sea, to far-off churches and towers still lit by the sun. A clock in the village struck five.

Elio drove the tractor straight into the courtyard. The two-story house, neat as a biscuit, had its laboratory and cellar in an annex. The balconies on the upper floor were luxuriant with geraniums, and apart from some fifty or so cardboard boxes piled in the yard, everything seemed in perfect order.

Elio switched off the motor and headed with Leonardo for the portico, where Cesare Gallo was sitting on a white leather sofa; Sebastiano and the dog stayed in the trailer. Gallo was wearing leather boots and over his shirt collar was one of those leather ties that a hundred years earlier herdsmen on the other side of the world used to put on in honor of the Sunday sermon. Everyone in the district knew that in his basement dining room he kept one of those mechanical bulls that used to be found at fairs.

“Do you want me to laugh?” he said, even before the two men reached the steps. “We only picked our own because the thought of the harvest rotting away broke my heart.”

Elio and Leonardo looked at the yellowing boxes in the middle of the yard: five years earlier they would have been full of bottles that would have been quite inadequate to satisfy constant orders from Russia and the East. A swarm of swifts was circling the yard even though it was not the right season for them.