The Last Man Standing (15 page)

Leonardo prostrated himself on the floor like a beggar about to start his day’s work.

His testicles were throbbing and pain was spreading through his whole body. Even his buttocks had gone rigid, perhaps from some sort of muscular contraction, and he could not breathe because his whole body seemed to have petrified around the pain. His first breath was like the first breath taken after birth and he imagined it must have been taken with equal desperation. He studied his slightly trembling hands. Like the hands of a pianist told that from now on every piano will be destroyed and he will need his hands to extract all his food from fields that until then had simply been somewhere to walk while thinking out a more subtle interpretation of a prelude by Chopin.

No living creature had ever before deliberately hit him to cause pain; he had never fought as a child and his parents had never slapped him to punish him. Now, at fifty-three, he had been called to account and found wanting.

He could hear Lucia in the kitchen telling Bauschan not to do something, and then her footsteps came in his direction. When Leonardo tried to stand he was stopped by a sharp pain in his testicles.

“Are you looking for something?” Lucia said.

Without turning he moved a few of the pieces of paper on the floor. A drop of blood fell on one.

“Something I wrote.”

“Would you like me to help you?”

“No. Stay with Alberto.”

“They’ve taken his electronic game.”

Leonardo nodded without looking up from the floor.

“Wait outside, both of you. Take Bauschan with you.”

There was no sound of the girl’s shoes moving. Leonardo began rummaging among his papers again. Blood was pouring from his nose and he realized his eyes were full of tears.

“Papa?” said the girl after a little.

“Yes.”

“They’ve taken all the sanitary napkins.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll find some more.”

“But it’s difficult!”

“We’ll find some, I promise, now please go away. I’m trying to do a bit of tidying.”

Leonardo heard her footsteps move into the living room. When he was certain he was alone he took his handkerchief from his pocket and blotted his nose. The box of letters was by the wall. Some had been opened, perhaps in search of money, and then torn up, but most seemed intact. He collected them and put them back in the box together with the torn pieces, then picked the box up and carried it into the kitchen. His nose had stopped bleeding and the pain in his testicles seemed to have dulled and spread into his belly. He could hear the children’s voices in the yard trying to keep the dog outside.

He put the box of letters down on the sofa and took a brush, dustpan, and trash bags from beside the sink. He decided to start with the bathroom.

The fragments of plaster had come from the wall above the toilet. The intruders must have been attracted by a loose tile and, suspecting a secret hiding place, had smashed a few more to uncover it. Finding nothing, they had perhaps defecated in the bathtub out of sheer spite. They had certainly taken razor blades, scissors, the electric shaver, shampoos, the hairdryer, toothpaste, and medicine. Perhaps even more, but with such a mess it was difficult to say.

Leonardo opened the window, swept up the rubble and broken glass from the floor, cleaned the bathtub, and put everything in a plastic bag.

When the bag was full he realized it was too heavy to be lifted without tearing and tried pulling it along the floor, but the pieces of broken glass in the corridor ripped it and its contents came out, getting mixed up with the rest of the filth.

He stood for a minute staring at the part of the kitchen cut off by the door, then turned abruptly and went into the bedroom. Near the upended bedside table he found the keys he was looking for. He picked them up and put them in his pocket.

Hearing the glass door open, Lucia and Alberto turned and Bauschan lifted his head. When Alberto met Leonardo’s eyes he looked away.

“I’ve put a suitcase on the table,” Leonardo said. “Take what you need for the night and put it inside. We’ll come back for the rest tomorrow.”

“Where are we going?” Lucia asked.

“To Elio’s house.”

While the children were getting ready, Leonardo went to his book room. The door had been forced. He went inside with Bauschan and turned on the light. Now that the bookcases had been overturned the room seemed bigger. There was a strong smell of gasoline in the air.

He walked up to the mountain of fallen books in the middle of the room. He had once seen a similar installation in a major museum in New York, though the pile had been crowned with a wax Moses that had an enormous wick coming out of his head.

The jerry can Elio had left for him was lying empty in a corner. Gasoline had been poured over the books, but for some reason the pile had not been set on fire. He told himself he would never know why, and this seemed more seriously disturbing than anything else.

When he closed the door and left the room he knew he would never go in there again. He had eight books under his arm. He could have taken more, but he decided eight was right.

Snow was falling outside when they woke the next morning, and after breakfast with some chamomile Elio’s wife had left in a cupboard, they waited, each in a different room, for the snow to stop so they could go back and collect what had been left in the other house. Lucia had taken over the double bedroom, Alberto the child’s room, and Leonardo the sofa in the kitchen. From the window he could see large, slow snowflakes drifting obliquely down into the square. On the roofs opposite the snow was now as thick as a dictionary. The few passersby on their way to the grocery store would look up at the lighted windows. When they did this Leonardo waved to them. The only sound in the house was the crackling of wood on the kitchen stove.

At midday, as it was still snowing, Leonardo put the chains on the Polar and they drove out of the village. The driver’s side window had been smashed by the thieves, but Leonardo had patched it with an opaque sheet of nylon.

When they got to the house, Leonardo told the children to look especially for food, medicine, and clothes; they would be able to come back for the rest later. To save Alberto from having to go into the rooms with excrement and blood, Leonardo set him to collecting what could still be eaten from the kitchen. The boy made no comment but got to work.

There was no longer any bad smell in the bedroom and studio after a night with the windows open, but the rooms seemed contaminated by something obscurely connected with excess. When he went into them, Leonardo felt dazed, as though just waking from a dream in which he had done something contrary to his usual moral code. The whiteness and orderliness of the countryside outside the windows was confusing. Bauschan, as though aware of Leonardo’s bewilderment, kept close to him.

When the trunk of the Polar was full they went back to Elio’s house, having listed the things they had not found: the computer, the stereo, eggs, biscuits, pasta, vegetable oil, many of the medicines, sheets and blankets, gloves, and scarves. Alberto did not mention his video game and Lucia said nothing about the sanitary napkins. Leonardo made no reference to money.

They entered the storeroom from the back and took only a few minutes to unload what had taken nearly two hours to collect, since Lucia suggested it might be better if they stayed there long enough to sort the stuff out. Leonardo realized she did not want to go back to the house again and said it was a good idea to divide the jobs that needed doing. By the time he went back into the yard the snow had stopped. He decided to take a short walk. The white blanket was soft and dry, the river below him a line of Indian ink.

He walked for half an hour without any particular purpose or in any particular direction. Bauschan stayed a meter or two ahead, diving into the snow and occasionally raising his eyes not to the sky but toward something immediately above the hills. The light seemed to be coming to them through heavy air and appeared exhausted on arrival. There’s a mournful beauty in all this, Leonardo thought, a beauty he should make friends with, since from now on no other friend would be possible.

After another tour of the house, he took a piece of paper, wrote on it where they would now be living, and fastened it to the door with a piece of wire he had found among the ashes of the burned-out store building.

They spent the next day washing, mending, and storing what they had saved. Lucia looked after the clothes, putting them in the washing machine and setting them to dry on the rack before the wood-fired cooking stove. Leonardo sorted out the little food they had rescued and went out to buy more with the money that had happened to be in his pocket when they had gone out for their walk. Alberto took charge of dishes, matches, detergents, and other utensils.

The activity did them good and no one referred all day to what had happened. At lunch they ate pasta with margarine and, for supper, polenta and cheese. Leonardo, who had been wondering whether to hold Alberto to account for his aggressive behavior, finding him more cooperative than usual decided to let it go and treat the whole episode as no more than an attack of nerves. In any case his testicles were hardly hurting any longer and the same could be said for his nose so long as he did not try to blow it.

The only person he told about the incident was Norina, the proprietor of the grocery. She showed no surprise; rather that they should think themselves lucky that they had not been there when the house was raided unlike poor Cesare Gallo, and that it had been irresponsible of Leonardo to keep those kids isolated. Since before Christmas not even the armed patrol had gone out, and everyone had moved to abandoned houses in the center, where they could feel safer. Outsiders, vagabonds, and refugees had taken over the hills and nothing could be done about it any longer. Better to concentrate on defending their homes and shops. Norina knew this because her husband, a former National Guard officer, was responsible for organizing the local guard-duty roster. Two years earlier, when the frontier problem had reached dramatic proportions, he had asked to be recalled to the military despite being more than sixty years of age, but the ministry had simply rejected him with a letter of thanks.

Passing Leonardo a bag of cauliflower across the counter, Norina asked him if he had a gun.

“No,” Leonardo said, “we have no guns.”

“If you’d like one, I think I could arrange it.”

“Thanks, but I think I’d rather not.”

Norina took his money and put the banknotes into the cash register.

“Pay attention to a woman who has never had the advantage of education,” Norina said, pushing his change across the counter. “Please get a gun. It won’t be a waste of money.”

That evening, playing about with the radio, they hit on a station broadcasting fairly recent Italian pop songs interspersed with commercials for furniture manufacturers and department stores that had probably long since gone bankrupt or been plundered. The songs and recorded voices sounded mocking in light of the present situation, but they stopped to listen all the same. Lucia had heated a huge pot of water and taken it into the bathroom to wash her long black hair. Now she was sitting in front of the stove with wet hair down to her shoulders as she listened to those voices from what seemed an unbelievably distant past. Leonardo, also listening, felt an agonizing pang of nostalgia for those superstores, furrier’s shops, and beauticians he had never been to, which had once even opened on Sunday mornings. Some of his writing and teaching colleagues had always been ready to rant furiously against those temples of consumerism while others preferred to see them as phenomena to be monitored, analyzed, and classified. Leonardo had never inclined to either view because he had never held opinions about the matter. On the occasions when he had set foot in any of these places he had never really felt at ease, but the same could be said of his visits to the opera. But he had noticed that no one coming out of any such place was likely to have noticed what its ceiling was like.

“Papa?”

“Yes?”

“Did they take all the money Mamma left for us?”

“Not all of it.”

“How much is left?”

“What I had in my pocket. A bit less than a hundred lire.”

“That’s not much.”

“No. You’re right.”

“And the rest of it?”

“Was in the desk drawer.”

“Not a great place to hide it.”

“I agree.”

The radio played a song in which a man and a woman took turns describing what they could see from their window. They lived in neighboring apartments in the same building but reached by different staircases, so they had never met. They were both looking for love, but were divided by a wall seventeen centimeters thick. The title of the song was “The Seventeen-Centimeter Wall.” It was not very well written, but to Leonardo the idea behind it was attractive. Thinking of the building the two must have lived in, he imagined a concrete parallelepiped shape, like the home of the protagonist in some film
Kieślowski
had shot for Polish television.

He got up and poured water into a small pan that had been draining in the sink.

“Herb tea?”

Lucia shook her head. Leonardo placed the pan on the wood stove and a few drops of water from its wet base ran sizzling toward the edge of the hot surface.

“You should have something hot before going to bed. Do you good.”

The girl touched a small fragment of bread on the table with her finger. It was rye bread, dark enough to blend in with the doodles on the oilcloth. She turned it around and pushed it away. Her hair was nearly dry.

“We have to leave,” she said. “If we stay here something nasty will happen to us.”

Leonardo took a cup and dropped in an herbal teabag that had already been used more than once. The small jar of honey Adele had given them was half empty. He let a few drops slip into the cup and put the top back on the jar.

“We have enough money to last a few months,” he said, sitting down, “and things are bound to be better in the spring.”

“Don’t be stupid,” the girl said sharply. “Nothing will be better at all.”