The Last Man Standing (17 page)

“And you?”

“I used to spend most of my time reading; now I’ve left my books in an old cellar where the mice will eat them and I don’t give a damn. I suppose that means I’m worried.”

The woman smiled.

“Maybe,” she said. “Still, I think I’ve guessed why you’ve come.”

Leonardo pushed back his hair, which had begun sticking to his forehead as it dried.

“Really?”

“Yes. Come with me.”

There was a door under the stairs that Leonardo had not noticed. The woman walked straight through it while he had to bend low. Strip lights came on revealing a garage with a small blue car in it. It was very clean and almost new. There was also an old wardrobe and a couple of shelves on the wall with a neat collection of jam jars and vegetables preserved in oil.

Elvira took a green package out of the wardrobe. It was one of many such packages, carefully stacked to make full use of the interior.

“Maybe not quite what your daughter has in mind, but in an emergency they’ll do.”

Leonardo looked at the package: large sanitary underpants for adults.

“Take as many as you like. For years the health authority supplied us with a packet a week.”

“Won’t your mother need them?”

“My mother will die today,” the woman said, “or at the very latest tomorrow.”

Leonardo noticed how light the package was in his hands.

“I’m so sorry. I’ve disturbed you at a bad time.”

Elvira shook her head. She seemed incapable of looking solemn for long.

“My mother’s been ill for a very long time,” she said. “There used to be a drug that helped her, but now it can’t be found. We said good-bye ages ago, before she fell into a coma. I’ll get you a bag to put the packets in.”

Leonardo, left on his own, looked at the shiny, well-kept car. He could hear piano music from the living room. Elvira came back with two large plastic bags. They managed to get three packs into each bag.

“Is that Glenn Gould?” Leonardo asked.

“Yes,” the woman answered. “Do you like it?”

“Very much.”

“It seemed to me that the
Variations
would be the right music to play while rereading Bernhard. My mother loves them too.”

Elvira had thrust her hands into the pockets of her pants, which were velvet and stuck closely to her thighs and buttocks, revealing the musculature of a walker. She had high breasts.

“I’ll be leaving now,” Leonardo said, embarrassed by what he was noticing.

In the courtyard they stopped in front of the gate that opened on to the lane. Leonardo put on his cap. The falling snow was very light, but he could feel it touch his cheeks. Elvira was in a sweater. The heavy sky could hardly hide the luminosity of midday.

“Thank you so much,” Leonardo said, “and again, excuse me for coming at such a time.”

Elvira shook her head.

“I’m glad you came. Now we know each other, we’ll be able to meet for a chat sometimes.”

“Yes.”

Before he went into Elio’s house, Leonardo stopped to look at the backdrop of houses covered in white snow around the square. The silent, motionless village seemed beautiful in a way that only seems possible for things that have nothing to do with humankind.

In the evening, when he was sure the children were asleep, Leonardo went into the lumber room and took the box of letters out of his suitcase.

He spent half an hour sorting them according to the dates on their postmarks. Those he had mailed before the trial were missing, evidently because the lawyers had advised Clara to keep them as evidence to be produced in court. Even so, those returned to him from the first year were more than a hundred. One every three days. During the second year they had diminished to seventy or so, and in the last few years to not much more than twenty.

When he had finished doing this he put a log in the stove and boiled some water. He drank his herb tea leaning against the window. The new year had arrived, but he had heard no celebrations nor seen any movement in the village: only two people crossing the square with a saucepan at dinnertime. He had completely given up his plan to go and see Adele. The children had gone to bed early. Alberto had not gone out at all since they moved to the new house while Lucia limited herself to accompanying him on the short walks he took to attend to Bauschan’s needs.

Leonardo looked at the letters spread over the table. The idea of reading them again had never previously occurred to him, but since leaving Elvira’s house he had thought of nothing else.

He remembered a film he had seen many years before when he was a member of a jury at a festival. It had told the story of a widow who kept the urn containing her husband’s ashes on her living room table, the same place as where she sat and read, watched television, chattered with her women friends, or made love with the elderly gardener. One day, for no particular reason, she had been seized by the idea of opening the urn and looking inside. She realized there was something not quite right in this idea and for the whole hour and a half of the film was torn between her urge to open the urn and the obscure inhibitions that held her back. In the end, giving in to temptation, she discovered that her grandchildren had long been using the urn as somewhere to hide the aniseed lollipops she gave them every Sunday.

The film director who headed the jury, ignoring Leonardo’s positive vote, had dismissed the film as “slight.” The winning entry had been a Spanish film about a seventeen-year-old drug pusher who, to escape some loan sharks, flees to Tierra del Fuego, where he climbs a mountain and starts a small ranch in the middle of nowhere. He marries a woman older than himself with only one leg and decides to import a couple of yaks from Nepal. To pay for his journey to go and fetch them he mortgages the ranch and bets the parish priest of a nearby village that he can succeed in bringing two such animals all that way, keep them alive, and, above all, get them to reproduce. In the end the boy wins. Throughout the film Leonardo had asked himself how anyone could live for years in Tierra del Fuego and then walk on the glaciers of Nepal in one single pair of sneakers.

By the time he put the last envelope back in the box the church clock had just struck four. He went into the bathroom and spent a long time in the silence of the night on the toilet without managing to defecate, which is what he had thought he wanted to do. He was ashamed and surprised. He had always scoffed at other people’s faith, both faith in reason and faith in the hereafter, and then like all the faithful had gone for years to the same place to recite the same litany to a God who did not want to listen to him or even hear him out. Boredom was what he had experienced rereading those letters. The same boredom as he felt faced with the genealogies of Old Testament prophets, or people who mistake persistence for devotion and blindness for perseverance.

When he came out of the bathroom, the dog looked at him as if to ask if he was feeling well.

“Let’s go out,” Leonardo told him. “A little fresh air will do us both good.”

They walked around the square. Under the moon the open space looked like a new sheet, and both were afraid of soiling it. The sky, furrowed with great storm clouds, bore no relation to the season.

A figure appeared at the corner of the square. Leonardo recognized Adele’s walk and called the dog to stop his barking. The woman approached, cutting across the whiteness of the square. When she was near, Bauschan ran to sniff her feet, which always smelled of chickens, dog, and camphor. Her cheeks were red with cold and she wiped a drip off her nose with her sleeve.

“I like coming into the village at night,” she said with such simplicity that Leonardo found nothing strange in it.

For a while they talked of the cold and about one of Adele’s hens that was laying eggs with brown yolks. When she had exhausted these topics, she asked Leonardo if he was tired or sleepy. Leonardo said no.

“Good,” Adele said, “because I’ve got important things to say to you that I won’t be able to repeat.”

Leonardo kept his gaze on her calm eyes.

“You must get strong shoes and warm clothes for yourself and the children, because you’re going to have to do a lot of walking and it’s going to be very cold.”

Leonardo looked at the surface of the snow, which the night frost had turned to crystal. A bird bigger than a sparrow, but smaller than a dove, was sitting on a cable above them. The bulk of the church rose above the roofs, both imposing and somehow ephemeral.

“As soon as the roads are clear I’m taking them to Switzerland.”

Adele shook her head.

“Get yourself good shoes, you won’t get far with the ones you’re wearing now. And watch that boy.”

Leonardo realized his hands were numb with cold. He put them in his pockets.

“Why should I watch him?”

Under the high black clouds Adele looked like a small talisman carved in wood.

“Because there’s evil in him.”

He dreamed he was climbing the stairs to his old apartment. Not his home with Alessandra, but where he had lived as a student, in the mansard roof of a building without an elevator; an apartment complex from the 1970s overlooking the river and a factory that made laboratory instruments.

Even so, as he climbed the stairs, he had known it was Alessandra and Lucia he would find at home waiting for him. In fact, in his bag he had a present for the little girl who would be four the next day: a book in Dutch. He had bought it in Nijmegen, where he had gone for a conference on Dostoevsky and where he had skated on a frozen river that linked seven towns that participated in a competition. This contest was eagerly awaited all year long, as used to be the case with the Palio of Siena and the Pamplona bull run. He also seemed to have spent several nights with a blond woman with a thin body and big buttocks, but he could not be certain this had happened even though he could smell her sex when he sniffed his fingers, a scent unpleasant yet also attractive, like a shirt spread out to dry in a lightless place. None of this bothered him; that evening, after putting the child to bed, he would talk to Alessandra. For some days she would refuse to make love, but that would be an entirely reasonable price for casting light on the matter, and he would pay it.

The stairwell was cold and badly lit, but he knew every step of the way and was not at all disturbed by the fact that he had already been climbing for several hours. Rather, he felt rested and free from anxiety, entirely confident that he would very soon arrive at the entrance to his home, a door like all the others, with no name on the bell, no umbrella stand, and no doormat. An anonymous door facing the landing, identical to the hundreds of others he had already passed, but he would recognize it.

For this reason he was not disturbed by the cold air rising from below and bringing with it small dried leaves, or by the man he could see behind a bathroom window on each landing. As he passed the window, the man, busy shaving or engaged in some sort of irremediable action, would turn and fix infinitely tired eyes on him. Leonardo knew that he was shaving with his left hand because he had just come back from a war in which he had lost both his right hand and a childhood friend. He had himself buried his friend, digging the grave with his only remaining hand. He had dug it at the foot of a hill from where his friend would have been able to see a group of log cabins around a mill. Then Leonardo climbed on and forgot everything until he reached the next landing, where a man shaving with his left hand was waiting for him behind a bathroom window. Hearing him climbing the stairs the man turned and looked at him with infinitely tired eyes. Every time Leonardo looked away to continue climbing the stairs it occurred to him that there was nothing about the man that reminded him of his own father, though it was almost certainly him.

He was awoken by Lucia calling from the kitchen.

“What is it?” he asked without pushing back the bedclothes.

She did not answer. He dressed in a hurry and, without putting on his socks, came out into the corridor.

“What is it?” he said again, entering the kitchen.

“They’ve gone into the grocery shop.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Four of them.”

He went to join Lucia at the window. The snow on the square was opaque and still. It must have been nearly noon. The only signs of life were a few smoking chimneys.

“Are they local people?” he said.

Lucia shook her head. She was staring at the square like a child watching a dying animal, afraid to bat an eyelid for fear of missing the secret of the moment of death. Leonardo raised a hand to smooth his hair, but a shot rang out, stopping him abruptly. Nothing moved in the square.

They heard a second shot, then a third, causing the window to vibrate a few centimeters from their noses with a sound like a fly trapped between the pages of a book. Then four figures hurried from the shop and headed for the road leading out of the village from the far side of the square. They were in heavy jackets and hats, but Leonardo could tell from her walk that one was a woman. They were carrying shopping bags.

By the time Norina’s husband came out on the balcony they had reached the middle of the square. Wearing blue overalls, he watched them struggle through the snow for a few seconds then, as casually as if taking a comb from his pocket to tidy his hair, he raised his rifle and fired.

The first man collapsed face down on top of the bag he had been hugging to his chest. The woman, behind him, tripped over his legs and fell. As she struggled back to her feet, another shot hurled her back a couple of meters. Her hat fell off and long red hair spread like a handkerchief around her face.

Of the two remaining men, one kept running but the other stopped beside the woman. He did not bend over her or pick up any of the things strewn on the ground but just gazed intently at her. When he had enough he put down the bags he had been carrying in both hands and slowly turned back toward the shop. After a few steps he took a pistol from his jacket pocket and began firing at the balcony where Norina’s husband was reloading his rifle. Leonardo saw a spark as one of the bullets hit the rail, but Norina’s husband took no notice. When he had finished reloading, he closed the rifle, pointed it at the man, who was by now some twenty meters away, and fired. The man’s head exploded like a pumpkin hit by a stick and was scattered about, forming a colored semicircle on the snow. His body continued to stand for a moment as if unable to believe what had happened, then it doubled over at the pelvis and fell, burying its neck in the snow. Anyone arriving at that moment would have thought they were in the presence of a penitent who was required by some ritual to spend part of the day meditating with his head buried in snow.