The Last Man Standing (35 page)

“My daughter’s in the trailer,” he told the woman.

She looked at the bald girl huddled against the rear wheel of one of the cars. The girl had walked all day and night without stopping. The remains of her dress barely covered her meager buttocks and her breasts.

“When they find a new girl,” Leonardo said, “this is what’ll happen to Lucia.”

The woman continued to stare at the bald girl; several children were trying to push pieces of wood down the front of her dress. All she did in an attempt to discourage them was to wave her hand.

“It won’t happen to your daughter,” the woman said.

The doctor came back with the water. He put one bucket in the middle of the wagon and took the other to David. Leonardo and the woman began to drink by cupping their hands, then she asked the doctor if he could get them some blankets. The man took the bucket emptied by the elephant and went away.

Once they were alone the woman wanted to drink some more, but Leonardo said it was better to keep some water for the next day. She asked if the elephant would drink it in the night. Leonardo reassured her that he would not. The woman went to urinate in the corner; then sat down with her legs crossed. As night fell, a cold, sharp wind shook the junipers beside the yard. Leonardo studied the dark clouds approaching from the east. During the night, or at the latest the next day, it would snow.

“It’s nearly the end of February,” the woman said.

For a couple of hours they watched the young people dancing, pairing off, and stripping the shutters from the house to keep the fire going. Leonardo read a new fury in their actions that worried him and forced him every so often to look away.

The eyes of the woman, on the other hand, showed no trace of despair or resentment. Her broad, irregular face seemed stretched as if she had long been taking in everything she had seen. Leonardo noticed two black hairs sprouting from a mole under her chin.

“What did you do in the world?” he asked her.

“I was a midwife.”

As soon as the cripple saw Richard and Lucia emerge from the trailer, he jumped down from the roof of the van where he had spent the whole evening and went to meet them, climbing over the young people sitting on the ground.

“Your daughter’s very beautiful,” the woman said.

Leonardo watched Lucia walk as far as the bonfire and sit down on the sofa Richard had ordered to be unloaded from the truck.

He stood up.

“Now I have to go,” he said.

“Evelina?”

“Yes.”

“Are you asleep?”

“No.”

“Will you do something for me?”

“If I can.”

“I’d like you to tell me how I am.”

“In what sense?”

“Tell me what my face and body are like.”

“It’s a bit dark at the moment.”

“Tell me what you saw when it was light.”

“Where shall I start?”

“With my face.”

“OK, it’s thin and hollow and where there’s no beard it’s been affected by the cold. You have a scar on your forehead and a smaller one on your cheekbone. I think you have some teeth missing, I don’t know how many, and your eyes are a very beautiful dark green. But the whites of your eyes are a bit yellow, perhaps from what you eat. Your nose is bent, I can’t remember whether to the left or the right. You have long gray hair that has grown into sort of tails. Your beard’s dark gray, with occasional white hairs. I don’t know what else to say.”

“That’s great. And my body?”

“Tall, with long legs and a very stiff back. When you were lying on me I could tell you weren’t heavy for a man of your height. I could also tell your shoulder has been bound up, and when you walk you hold it higher than the other. One very beautiful thing about you is your hands. In my work I have always paid a lot of attention to hands and I can tell you that yours, even if they are not in good condition now, are extremely shapely. But the first thing I noticed was your feet. At first I thought they were wrapped in rags, but when I realized they were naked I wanted to cry. When you were dancing I wondered how you could possibly do it.”

“Fear’s the only thing that keeps me going.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Now tell me about my smell.”

“Do you think it’s unpleasant?”

“It must be, I haven’t washed for weeks.”

“When we are alone for a long time without anyone touching us, our smell reverts to what it was when we were born. Rather like a piece of cardboard soaked in milk. It’s not disagreeable. I often came across it in the delivery room, but it was my husband who first drew my attention to it. I’d like to talk to you about him, it’s so long since I had anyone I could do that with.”

“Was he a doctor?”

“A historian of the Enlightenment. When we met he was teaching at the University of Antwerp. He had come to the hospital to see his daughter, who had just given birth. She lived abroad, too, in her case in England, but her water broke two months early while she was at a conference of antiques dealers. Gianni arrived the next day from Germany. He was a very small man of nearly seventy; I was forty at the time. He wanted to speak to me about the birth; we talked briefly in front of the coffee machine, not more than a few minutes. Apart from his politeness, nothing particularly impressed me about that frail man with thick hair. As for me, with my physique, I didn’t think any man could be attracted to me, not even one so much older.

“But a week later a letter addressed to me arrived at the hospital. Just a few lines about a boat trip he’d made the previous Sunday with a university colleague and the man’s wife. I didn’t know whether to answer or what to say. I didn’t write back. A week later a second letter came telling me about a curious event that happened in the last century to the architect who built the Antwerp concert hall. I wondered what on earth this university professor could want from me; he was not young or good-looking, but certainly he was in a position to interest more attractive women. I was confused. I had never been in a serious relationship, only been pestered by a couple of men who were sexually excited by my obesity. This had made me pessimistic and diffident. I thought he must be another of these, but when I showed his letters to a woman friend she said she didn’t think so.

“So I sent him a postcard. He answered, and for a year we wrote to each other once or twice a week. He never suggested meeting, even though he had been divorced many years before and was living alone in a house near the university.

“He had a very sober way of writing, simple and straightforward but filled with constant surprise. He avoided difficult words but didn’t use the simple ones he preferred in quite the same way as most other people. He wrote in tiny capitals, in the kind of writing one might expect from the first person from an uneducated family to have a chance of higher education. And in fact that’s how it was: his father and mother had run a grocery shop in the Lomellina district.

“I bought myself a little chest with three drawers and kept his letters in it beside my bed. I kept a sheet of paper in the kitchen with the titles of the books he talked to me about so I could buy them in the bookstore. One day, talking to a hospital colleague, I realized that a whole day had passed without me thinking once about my unattractive appearance. That evening I wrote to Gianni and said I’d like to meet him. Are you asleep, Leonardo?”

“No. I’m listening. Where did you meet?”

“In Saarbrücken, a little German town near the French border. I don’t know why he chose that place, it wasn’t my idea. More than a year had passed since our first meeting. I imagined us sitting in a café and walking beside the river while we talked about ourselves in the way one would expect in an affectionate relationship between a man who had outlived his physical needs and a woman who had long believed her personal appearance could never encourage any. An alliance of deficient people. But what happened was that we had tea in silence in the station bar, and then we went to one of the two rooms he’d reserved in a small local guest house and spent two days there making love in every imaginable way.

“In the months that followed we went back to writing to each other without ever mentioning what had happened in that bedroom. His letters were light and full of affection but never hinted that he’d like to see me again or do any of the things we had done together again. Then, in April, a few lines arrived in which he asked me to marry him. I answered with a postcard, and three months later we met in front of the registrar. It was our third meeting, and in the meantime I’d arranged to buy us a house and he had applied for his pension.

“In the five years we lived together he continued to talk to me with the same loving kindness and care for my body, as though it was always new to him. This was how he saw everything around him: it was as if he was born again every morning and as if when he put on his pajamas each evening he was dressing for his grave. His steps on the stairs coming down to breakfast would be like those of a boy at the threshold of life. This filled me with joy and an infinite sense of security and desire to have him inside me always.”

When Evelina stopped talking, Leonardo listened to the sounds the night should have produced but they had been trapped by the cold in a compact block of silence. The wind passed silently over the bodies of the young people lying in the farmyard and made the embers of the bonfire glow. Apart from those vermilion fragments of light, and the echo of the woman’s words, the world was a cold shadow with no tomorrow.

“What happened to your husband?”

He had the impression she shrugged her shoulders.

“The kids who captured us realized at once that it would be a bore having to drag him along with them. For several months he’d been having problems with his hip. So they tied him to the kitchen table and threw it into the river near our house. I think they did this because one of them had seen it done in a film. As the current carried him away, Gianni stared up at the sky with the same amazement that he had felt for everything. It was a beautiful sunny day. You’ll think me morbid, but as I watched him drifting away all I could think of was lying naked in bed with him again.”

Leonardo rested his cheek against David’s rough flank and looked at the point in the darkness where he knew the trailer to be. The wind had something minimal and cold in it. Beyond the bars it was perhaps starting to snow but beyond the bars was enormously far away. Great quantities of air and food were moving around inside David’s belly.

“I would like to know which is worse,” Evelina said. “To be raped a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run a Bulgar gauntlet, to be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fé, to row in a galley, to experience finally all the miseries we all have endured, or simply to stay here with nothing to do?”

They were silent for a while, then he heard her get up, drink from the bucket, and sit down again.

“Do you know the whole thing by heart?” Leonardo asked.

“Only that bit. It has always made me laugh when the old woman talks like that after all they’ve been through. Gianni was crazy about Voltaire. He used to say
Candide
was the cruelest thing ever written by anyone while laughing.”

One of the boys in the farmyard got to his feet and walked a few steps, then they heard the dull thud of his body hitting the concrete.

“Do you think we’ll die?” he asked her.

Evelina scratched her leg.

“Something like that.”

A week passed during, which it snowed for at least an hour or two every night.

The procession, coming in sight of the town, had veered to the east and begun skirting the approach to the valleys. Leonardo asked Evelina where her home had been, and she pointed to the white mountain hovering above the town and named a small village clinging to its foot.

At night the snow turned the countryside and the roofs of the buildings along the road white, while by day a milky sky presided over the silent progress of the procession. From time to time, the youths would stick rifles out of the windows to shoot at the deer, dogs, and white hares that populated the areas where they parked, then would run and retrieve the carcasses and throw them onto the truck without the procession stopping. Along the main road they passed abandoned cars and empty heavy goods vehicles as well as houses, but the only tracks in the new snow were those they made themselves. The days were getting longer, but the cold still made their breath visible and gripped their hands in its bite.

During the daytime Leonardo and Evelina would cuddle together, stupefied by the rocking of the wagon. The shots would wake Leonardo from dreams in which he was talking to animals and being nourished by their milk. Evelina, in contrast, dreamed about beds too high for her to climb on to. In the evening, the tribe would camp in buildings that had once hosted car dealers and furniture showrooms and gut the animals captured during the day and cook them around the fire. When Leonardo was not called out to dance, he would stay in the cage with Evelina and David. They spent the nights talking, pressed up against the elephant, until the doctor brought them their food at dawn. Mostly they discussed places they had visited in the past and familiar events, but there was always a moment when they remembered that the places they were talking about did not exist anymore and that the people whose faces and actions they were trying to describe were dead. Then they would interrupt themselves and lie in each other’s arms listening in the silence to their own breathing, which deafened them like the squeaking of a bicycle on a dark road.

Two boys had managed to retrieve a can of diesel from the tank of an old combine harvester; but even so, by now the only vehicles still capable of moving under their own steam were the van and the coach. Nearly all the cars had been abandoned, and the young people collected in the coach. Their empty eyes peered out through the windows at the mountains on one side and the desolate and apparently endless plain on the other.

Leonardo felt he could detect for the first time a belief in the young people’s faces that there might be a tomorrow, and that if this was so it was something they could lose. This perception must have seemed to them like an object just dug up from under the ground, something to turn over in their hands in an attempt to understand what it was and who had buried it and why. The effort seemed to make them very tired.