The Last Man Standing (10 page)

“I’m twenty-seven, but that’s neither here nor there. May I give you some advice?”

“Please do.”

“Don’t count on the money still in your account.”

Leonardo placed a hand on the marble counter and realized it was not cold.

“Thank you very much. Thanks to your sincerity I think I have an exact picture of the situation.”

“So far as is possible,” the young man added placidly.

“So far as is possible,” Leonardo agreed.

Leaving the bank, he walked through the town in no particular direction.

He spoke to a policeman, a priest who was painting a side door to the church, and a woman selling household objects from an improvised stall. He learned that the little gasoline still available was reserved for security, hospitals, and the local services, while medication could only be obtained from the hospital and a couple of authorized pharmacies, with the available drugs all requiring prescriptions, which only doctors were allowed to issue for the most serious emergencies. As for cigarettes, the woman said he would have no problem finding these in the district around the racetrack.

On his way back to the car, he saw a group of teenagers standing in front of a bar. Some had shiny quilted jackets and others tank tops or T-shirts with slogans in large letters, but all were wearing shades, tight-fitting trousers, and white sneakers and were talking in loud voices, their bodies nervous with unpredictable energy.

He crossed the road. Sitting on the steps of the bar were two girls in heavy makeup, who seemed to be waiting for some sort of response before deciding for whom they were destined. As they waited, they seemed entirely at ease.

Hearing a whistle, Leonardo decided the boys were trying to attract the attention of the dog, but immediately afterward the first insults reached him. He quickened his pace without turning around. He still had about twenty meters to go to the end of the block, where he would turn the corner and be out of their sight.

As he calculated the distance something small and hard hit him on the neck. For a moment he was stunned, but he kept going. Other coins struck the wall beside him and fell to the pavement; the dog, attracted by the noise, stopped abruptly and snapped his lead. Leonardo hurriedly bent to pick him up, but on straightening up again was hit by a fierce pain in his back.

He struggled on, double over and with tears in his eyes, terrified that at any moment a hand might grab hold of his jacket. His loud breathing drowned out every other sound, and he became aware that a thread of dribble was running from the right of his mouth.

Rounding the corner he still felt unsafe, and he made his way to the next corner where a small group was waiting in front of a large door. He passed them without looking up and rounded another corner and then leaned on a wall to catch his breath. Very soon he felt his legs give way, and he collapsed. He stayed like this for several minutes and saw the feet of two men pass him. Neither stopped to see how he was. Bauschan stared at him in despair, now and then licking his lips.

“It’s nothing,” he said to reassure the dog.

But it took him an hour to reach the square where he had parked the car.

When he got there the clock was striking one. He slaked his thirst at a small fountain in a little public garden where a woman was sleeping on a park bench.

He sat in the car and mopped the sweat gluing his hair to his forehead. After a few minutes his breathing steadied and the pain in his back became less intense. He gingerly took off his jacket: his sweat-soaked shirt had turned a light grayish-blue, but he had nothing to change into. Bauschan watched him, wagging his tail from the seat beside him.

“Home now,” he told the dog, then remembered the cigarettes. He did not feel like waiting for the shops to open again for the afternoon, or walking about in the hope of picking up more information, so he decided to drive around the area the woman had recommended, only stopping if he noticed a shop was still open. It was a district that had grown up at the end of the last century around the old motor-racing circuit: streets of detached houses and modest blocks of apartments for the middle class, a superstore, a bank, and a health center with a sauna and swimming pool.

The last time Leonardo had been there, six months before, the health center was already closed and the superstore had been transformed into a depository for scrap metal, but the houses still looked attractive with well-kept gardens, windows decorated with vases of flowers, and brightly polished brass doorbells. Everything had given an impression of serenity and quiet living.

As he approached, he began to be aware of the coming and going of people walking and cycling at the edge of the road, all carrying a wide variety of objects. A kilometer further, the first stalls appeared, and the throng of buyers and sellers grew until the road was completely blocked. Leonardo drove into a field that must once have been used for soccer, where hundreds of cars had been parked randomly. He left Bauschan in the car, the leash was broken and he was afraid of losing him in the confusion.

He moved through the mob with tiny steps because of the pain in his back. People were pushing and shoving as they struggled to get a look at stalls displaying clothes, furniture, electrical goods, lamps, alcoholic drinks in bottles, plates, tablecloths, curtains, sanitary appliances, and every kind of household goods.

At the beginning of their relationship, Alessandra had sometimes dragged him to villages and small towns where dealers in used goods and simple ransackers of cellars and attics displayed their merchandise, amusing themselves by haggling and claiming emotional links with horrible paintings and ancient chamber pots of every description. But what Leonardo saw now was quite different. Many of the sellers looked as if they were trying to make a little money by offloading things they would not be able to take away with them. The bargaining was fast and ferocious and colored the proceedings with a dismal air of misfortune and speculation.

In front of the racetrack gates were several armed guards who seemed to be neither from the police or the National Guard but from some sort of private militia specially created for the occasion. They were distinguishable by their orange caps and badges.

He crossed in front of their arrogant gaze and, passing through a tunnel, came out on tiers of steps. A huge crowd was circulating among tables displaying merchandise, producing the same indistinct buzz or hum as a swarm of insects.

Dizziness forced him to lean against a wall and, like a drowning man, he grabbed the nearest arm. The man jerked himself free and began moving away then changed his mind and turned back. Leonardo apologized.

“I’m looking for cigarettes,” he said.

The man smiled, showing a gold tooth.

Half an hour later Leonardo was driving toward the hills, the town now behind him. On the rear seat were four cartons of cigarettes for which he had paid more than two hundred lire, an excessive price even allowing for the fact that they were foreign, possibly Turkish; they were undoubtedly remainders stored long past their sell-by date, but he believed the village’s smokers would welcome them just the same.

He left the cigarettes with Elio, telling his friend to sell them at whatever price he could get; it would be enough if he could get back what he had spent on them. Elio, noticing he was having difficulty with the steps, asked him what had happened. Leonardo said he had strained a muscle getting out of the car and needed to lie down for a bit.

When he got home he found his most recent letter, mailed a month earlier, had been accurately returned to sender, evidence that for some bizarre reason the postal system was still working, at least in his case. Somehow the familiar disappointment comforted him and his backache seemed less painful.

As he prepared Bauschan’s lunch, he hummed Brahms’s song “
Gestillte Sehnsucht”
and then, while the dog ate, collapsed on the sofa and closed his eyes.

When he woke up it was dark. He had no idea of the time but looked neither at the watch on his wrist nor the clock on the wall. He simply stared at the night through the glass door of the veranda, a fragment of sky in which two very bright stars were shining, and wept for at least a quarter of an hour.

He remembered the last time he had wept like this, eight years before.

His relationship with Clara had been going on for several months, but they had never slept together. Leonardo had not felt like taking her with him on his trips to attend conferences and give lectures, and when he was in the city, family demands prevented him being away at night. On this particular occasion, Alessandra had gone to Paris to review an exhibition by an American artist who constructed perpetual-motion machines out of refuse, and Lucia had been excused school for two days to go with her.

That evening, after dining in Clara’s little apartment, they had gone to bed and Clara had made sure he came on her stomach. Then they had examined the shape of the pool of semen on her belly and invented resemblances as one does with the shapes of clouds. Then she had taken a pen from the bedside table and asked him to draw its outline on her before she went to the bathroom. He continued to lie there gazing at the large rose on the ceiling, meditating on the gift of love this young woman was presenting him with. Then, aware of being in the presence of some form of perfection, he had wept, the way an old man can weep when he recognizes in a child a turn of speech or gesture that had been his own in his youth.

Leaving the bathroom, Clara had come back to lie down naked beside him, her belly still marked by the ballpoint pen.

“Shall we always do it?” she had asked.

Leonardo had said yes.

The next time he had been on the point of tears had been seven months later, when the polaroid photographs of the drawings had been shown in court by Clara’s lawyer as evidence of the deviant sexual practices to which the well-known writer and university lecturer had subjected the young woman, with the threat of interrupting her career at the university as well as her doctoral degree.

Leonardo got to his feet and moved slowly toward the bathroom. The sight of himself in the mirror disturbed him.

There seemed to be new wrinkles around his eyes, and his cheeks had sagged to reveal sharp cheekbones. His body was drying up; soon he would be nothing but a husk, an old man in a world where speed and determination were necessary.

Why had he not faced those boys? He should have stopped and told them off. They were nothing but badly reared children, and he was a man of fifty who could have been their father.

In the gentle middle-class world he had inhabited until a few months before, his timidity had always been mistaken for moderation; the mediocre music his instrument played joining with others in an uninspired orchestra, but now everything was changing and there would no longer be any melody for him to harmonize with.

He rubbed painkilling cream into his back and dried his hair; the weather had changed and he was afraid that the cold air might bring on a migraine; then he put on his pajamas and went to bed.

Just before he fell asleep he felt for the first time that he was beginning to understand the true dreadfulness of what was happening. It was the beginning of a new age, a naked age that seemed likely to last and whose key word would be “without,” just as the key word of the previous age had been “with.”

But even the black glue paralyzing his thoughts could not keep him awake.

On the first Thursday in November a car came into the courtyard, and after making a slow half-moon on the gravel, stopped with its hood toward the way out.

Leonardo was sitting in one of the armchairs on the veranda with a fleece over his knees. He lowered the book he was reading and watched the woman who got out of the car as though she were merely a couple of hours late, whereas in fact he had not seen his wife for six years.

Alessandra walked toward him. She was slim and looked hardly any older, yet many things about her, starting with her hairdo, spoke of a woman who had made radical alterations to her scale of personal values. For all Leonardo knew this could have happened as soon as they separated, or only yesterday. But the decisive air with which she climbed the steps and stopped a few paces from him made it clear that this would not be a subject for discussion.

“
Ciao
, Leonardo.”

Leonardo got up and took a step toward her but stopped, hampered by the cover, which had slipped down between his feet. In the car were a girl, and a boy of about ten. The pair were watching them through the blue-tinted windshield. It was a high-powered car and extremely elegant. But its hubcaps had been taken off, as had its front grill and mirrors.

Leonardo looked at the girl and her long smooth hair.

“Is that Lucia?” he asked.

As he spoke he realized he had not pronounced her name for many years. The little girl he had taken to the movies and the puppet theater and spent the hottest summer months with in a little house in the Ligurian hinterland, the two of them alone, making up stories in rhyme, going for long walks in the morning and bathing only after four.

“Yes,” Alessandra said. “But first I need to talk to you. Can we come in?”

Leonardo made his way to the kitchen, where everything smelled of smoke. The tanker that usually passed in October to fill the cistern with methane gas had not come and, in any case, Leonardo no longer had the money to pay for it. So he had pulled an old stove out of the cellar and collected some firewood in the forest. His first attempts to light it had been pathetic, but for a few days now he had been able to heat at least this part of the house.

They sat down facing each other at the table.

“Do you have a dog?” she said, noticing the bowls under the sink.

“A puppy.”

She moved her hands on the table as if drawing something that would help her say what she had come to say. Thinking it might require summing up many years in a few words, Leonardo kept silent.

“I remarried four years ago.”

“I didn’t know.”

She said that was just how it was.