The Last Man Standing (4 page)

Leonardo contemplated his books, which he had missed constantly, almost physically, during the four days he had been away, and then he lit the little standard lamp and sat down in the armchair. Twenty minutes later he had finished the story of Felicité for the umpteenth time and carefully replaced the book on the shelf reserved for the French nineteenth century.

He woke about ten, and realizing the time, he ran into the kitchen where he found Bauschan collapsed on the carpet. He’s dead, he told himself, but when he touched the puppy and called him by name, he raised his muzzle toward the warm breath of Leonardo’s mouth. Then Leonardo noticed traces of feces in the room and realized that the dog had been exploring during the night. So, after washing the animal’s pus-encrusted eyes and giving him a little more milk from the glove, he took him around the house.

As he did so he became convinced the best place for the dog at night would be the studio. This square, empty room had nothing in it that could be destroyed. It contained only an office chair and a coarse wooden table under its big window.

It had been an attempt to reproduce the conditions in which he used to write in his studio in T., a pied-à-terre off an internal yard in one of the city’s main squares, where he had never wanted a telephone or doorbell or even his name on the door. But this project had been shipwrecked and the romance interrupted by the tumultuous events that had overturned his existence, and he had never gotten beyond the line he was writing when the telephone rang and the massacre started.

He looked at the little white portable typewriter abandoned in the dust on the table. It had been a present from Alessandra so he could write on trains and in hotels. He had punched out two novels on those keys, expending many hours of his life on them at a time when writing was indispensable to him for defining himself to himself and to others. Then suddenly his writing had vanished, just as stadiums and competitions and training and sponsors can vanish from the life of an athlete when he inadvertently severs his Achilles tendon by stepping on a piece of glass while playing on the beach with his six-year-old son. This was exactly how writing had disappeared from his life, and it had become a different life; and all this only a few years before his publisher went bankrupt and the newspapers and magazines he used to write for closed down and reading became something comparable to the final extravagant request of a condemned man.

“The room’s very well lit,” he told the puppy. “When you open your eyes you’ll see for yourself.”

Leonardo washed his ears carefully in the shower and examined and disinfected the wound on his chest. Its lively pink color reassured him and, since the pain of his sciatica had subsided, he decided to ride his bike into the village. He searched for a shirt with a large pocket and a lightweight scarf to go around his neck, and then he put on the linen trousers he had folded on the chair and went out.

The distance from house to village could easily be covered even by a cyclist as unfit as he was. The dog, his head sticking out of the pocket, enjoyed the fresh breeze downhill and hung his head on the uphill parts as if helping to pedal. When he reached the first houses, Leonardo left the asphalted road for an unpaved track that cut through a luxuriant hazel grove, ending in the yard of a large, neglected but busy farm.

“Ottavio!” he called.

Two very dirty and mischievous-looking sheepdogs emerged barking from the back of the farmhouse. Leonardo offered them a friendly hand, but they kept their distance and continued to bark.

“Who’s there?” someone shouted from the cowshed.

“Leonardo.”

The dogs for some reason went quiet and moved off, going to lie down in the shadow of a tractor. The yard was a mess, with sacks of animal feed, buckets, and agricultural implements all over the place. Under cover in one corner was what might have been an ancient station wagon or hearse. Leonardo was studying it when Ottavio emerged from the cowshed.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Ottavio wiped his hands on his trousers.

“A hearse.”

“Yours?”

“Of course, do you think I clutter up my yard with other people’s stuff?”

It was covered by two old sheets sewn together. On its small roof was the pointed shape of a cross.

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Not much you can do with things of that kind.”

“Then why did you buy it?”

“The funeral director at D. has moved to France. He’d been in debt to my mother for as long as I can remember so he paid up with what he had. He was an honest man; he could have left without a word. What’s that in your pocket?”

Leonardo looked down; the dog had turned around and all that could be seen was the end of his tail sticking out of the pocket. Leonardo extracted him carefully and showed him to Ottavio.

“How old would you say he is?”

“Ten days,” Ottavio said, after a cursory examination. “Maybe crossed with something useful for herding cows. Do you want to keep him?”

Leonardo looked at the dog, who seemed to be struggling to open his eyes.

“I think I do. Can you sell me any milk?”

Ottavio stared, his face red and sweat in the hair around his ears.

“Have you come here on purpose to annoy me?”

“How do you mean?”

They went into the cowshed past the immobile haunches of some twenty cows, about ten animals on each side, then passing through a metal door found themselves in a room tiled to the ceiling, in which a fan was stirring air charged with disinfectant. Ottavio took off his outdoor shoes and Leonardo did the same, placing his sandals in a small wardrobe. Both put on colored clog-like rubber shoes. There were two large zinc vats in the room, and shelves with cheeses of various sizes. Ottavio uncovered one of the vats. It was full of a yellowish liquid with what looked like thin metallic plates floating on the surface, and it smelled like shoemaker’s glue.

“What’s this?” Leonardo said.

“This morning’s milk.”

Leonardo stepped back from the overpowering smell. Ottavio closed the vat and went to a window facing the back of the farm, which Leonardo knew to be where he kept his heifers and orchard. Ottavio parked his elbows on the windowsill and contemplated his property.

“Do you hear the planes going over at night?”

“Sometimes,” Leonardo said. In fact, being a heavy sleeper, he had heard nothing at all. It had always been like that. Once he slept for five hours in an armchair at the Lisbon airport, missing all the flights that could have taken him home. Returning to his hotel he had gotten in touch with Alessandra, who had no difficulty in believing him, and then he went to bed to watch a bit of television but without being able to keep his eyes open to the end of the film.

“When the planes go over, the cows play this trick on me. A few months ago it was only now and then, but now for a whole week I’ve had to throw away all the milk. The big producers add powdered milk, but I don’t want that on my conscience. I don’t even give this stuff to the pigs.”

Seen from behind, Ottavio was a short, stocky figure with no sharp edges; veins bulging on his arms even when he was not lifting anything heavy. He was five years older than Leonardo but looked five years younger.

“Can you trust a married man?” Ottavio said.

Leonardo said yes and thought of Elio. Ottavio nodded.

“Then just ask him about women’s periods. My daughter hasn’t had one for two months but can’t be pregnant. And my wife, who hadn’t had a period for years, has started getting them again.”

Leonardo looked at the ascetic white of the tiles. Someone was singing a song somewhere accompanied by the regular beat of something like an old pedal sewing machine.

“I think,” Ottavio said, pausing to add emphasis to what he was about to say, “that those planes are dropping something; something to calm us all down, because if not we’re all going to go mad.”

They went out into the yard where a light wind from the mountains stirred scraps of straw and blew hair about. The two dogs watched them closely from under a bench by the wall. As he mounted his bicycle, Leonardo could feel the puppy’s hot urine running down his chest to his trouser belt. He pretended it was nothing.

“They’ve seen those two in the woods again,” Ottavio said, “and they’ve also found a fire and the bones of a goat.”

Leonardo swept his hair back from his brow.

“Must be campers,” he smiled.

But Ottavio fixed Leonardo’s pale greenish eyes.

“It’s not the time for that kind of crap, Leonardo, can’t you see how the wind’s blowing?”

Leonardo looked down at his foot on the pedal. A nail had gone black where the old woman, sitting down at his table in the hotel, had accidentally placed the leg of her chair on it.

“Have you done anything for the dog’s eyes?” Ottavio said.

Leonardo looked straight at him.

“What can be done?”

Ottavio shrugged.

“If you want my opinion, wash them with his own pee; he won’t like it, but if you don’t he’ll never open them again, because they’re full of parasites.”

At Norina’s grocery shop he bought some canned tuna, a couple of dairy products, some sardines, two packets of rusks, jam, and a box of pasta, then he got the baker to give him a French loaf and some
baci di dama
biscuits. There were no customers in either shop and the proprietors simply served him, took his money, and called him professor when they said good-bye.

On the other hand the woman at the pharmacy, one of those waiting for oil, asked him how his journey had been as soon as she saw him come in. Leonardo said it had been fine and asked if he could have some cotton balls and sterile gauze. Before he left the woman complimented him on the dog and remarked that they would meet again in the evening when the oil was distributed. Leonardo said Elio would see to everything.

As he made his way to the bar pushing his bicycle, he remembered a painting by Balthus of a young girl who could have been the pharmacist when she was young and the way she had not yet lost her adolescent confidence in the sensual gesture of raising her arms and doing her hair. It was said that nearly all women born with that quality lost it when they grew up, while those who had it later in life had nearly always picked it up along the way, not having originally possessed it. This to him seemed to reward hard work rather than talent, something that hardly ever happened in nature, and the thought generated a surge of good humor in him.

Pulling his shirt out of his trousers and checking that the smell of the dog’s urine was not too powerful, he went into the bar.

“Our professor!”

The postman was leaning against the ice cream freezer with another man who did not live in the village but was there to see his ailing mother. They were in the corner of the shop where it had once been possible to leaf through a national daily or local weekly and sports magazines. Now the fridge was silent and back issues of a hunting magazine were stacked on it. Danilo, the proprietor, and three other men were sitting around a table playing cards.

“Good morning,” Leonardo said.

None of the four looked up from the cards to answer his greeting.

Leonardo went to the bar and stood at an angle to it, so as to be able to keep an eye on the bicycle, which he had left outside with his shopping bags slung from its handlebars. The postman whispered something to the man beside him who smiled, revealing very irregular teeth: he was dressed for fishing and a thick white beard under his chin linked his ears by the longest possible route. The postman, in contrast, had a freshly shaven face; he was separated from his wife, and it was several months now since he had given up explaining to people why letters were not reaching them or were arriving weeks late. In any case, the explanations he offered came from a ministerial circular, which, as everyone knew, meant that they had only a limited connection with truth.

Danilo slammed down his last card, then got up and went behind the bar, and without Leonardo saying anything made him a cappuccino without froth. When it was ready he put it down on the bar and, giving an expressionless glance at the dog’s snout sticking out of Leonardo’s pocket, went back to his cards. His companions had totaled the score and dealt the cards for the next hand. All four looked contrite, as if only playing to punish themselves.

“But I think,” the man with the postman said, “they must be found. We have to know what they look like and find out what they plan to do.”

Leonardo looked down at Bauschan’s smooth head. A fly had settled on one of the dog’s ears; he smiled and blew it away.

“I’d like to know what the professor thinks,” the postman said.

Leonardo looked at him. In the first months after his return, the postman had come every morning to deliver letters from the lawyer, the court, the publisher, and readers offering either support or expressing disappointment at what had happened, but with the passing of time the only letters that kept arriving were written in his own hand and returned by the woman to whom he had sent them. A correspondence that made sure Leonardo and the postman still met roughly once a week.

“About what?” Leonardo said.

“We know you’re just back from a trip. You must have some idea about what’s going on.”

“The professor has other things to think about,” said one of those at the table. “Unlike the rest of us.”

No one laughed, but the men near the fridge exchanged glances with the card players. Leonardo took a sip of coffee and wiped his lips with a napkin from the dispenser.

“I saw nothing unusual,” he said.

The postman drank from the glass of white wine he had on the freezer.

“You must have been lucky,” he said smiling. “To listen to this group it seems they’re everywhere.”

An alarm went off. Danilo pressed a button on his big wristwatch and the alarm stopped, then he went to the counter and used a remote control to switch on the television in the corner of the room. The other players had already put down their cards and turned their chairs to face the screen. After the music introducing the broadcast, a woman newsreader with an expensive hairdo commented on images of an encampment in the middle of a forest with shacks of cardboard and sheet metal hidden in luxuriant vegetation. The camera showed men in uniform circulating among these rudimentary shelters with their camp beds and improvised pallets, blankets, gas cookers, and other objects.