The Last Man Standing (3 page)

He smiled at the swarm of lights and the beauty of several fires burning on a hillside to the east. The dog’s breathing had relaxed and the heat of its body through his shirt was warming his chest; it had the smell of things that are new to the world and still have no name. Like the smell of a birthing room or a cellar where cheeses ripen. Or a paper mill. A smell of transition.

“I won’t give you a name,” he said, stroking the puppy’s head with his finger.

When he arrived in the square, the church clock was striking eight.

He opened the door of the hardware shop. Elio looked up from a newspaper he must have salvaged from some packaging. The last newspaper had reached the village four months before. Leonardo went to the counter and put down the two cans he had brought in. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief.

“Only one more in the car,” he said.

Elio neither nodded nor shook his head. He and Leonardo were distant cousins, but their friendship had nothing to do with blood or books or with other passions that can link men, like hunting, the mountains, and sport. It was seven years now since Leonardo had come back to the village but he was still a city man, while Elio belonged as much to the hills as any man could. He spoke the dialect, he knew what was going on, he had tried the women, and played in the Sunday soccer matches against other villages. In the days when there were still summer tourists, he had spent long periods sitting with the other local twenty-year-old boys on the low wall that bordered the square, studying the German and Dutch girls at a distance before taking them in the evening to the vineyards, to the river, and up into the highest hills from where he had convinced them they would be able to look at the sea. When he was called up for the National Guard, he had done the usual thing and given a big party, then he disappeared for three days without anyone knowing where he was. He had served two years at the frontier until, in the winter of ’25, he had been hit by the bullet that now saved him from being called up again. As soon as he was discharged he took over the hardware business from his father and married the woman who had been his fiancée since he was nineteen: a woman with strong thighs and few frills; a type more likely to bore him than break his heart.

“What shall I say about the missing oil?” Elio said.

Leonardo raised his shoulders.

“Tell them it was stolen from me. That’s what actually happened. Tomorrow I’ll bring the money for you to give back.”

Elio fixed him with his calm eyes. He was not yet forty, of a reflective temperament, and Leonardo’s only friend.

“What’s happening out there in the world?”

Leonardo put his handkerchief back into his pocket. The mud had dried on his trousers in a dragon-shaped pattern.

“Yesterday some soldiers stopped me before L.; they told me to go back the way I’d come and sleep in the car because the road was closed until the next day to let a convoy of armored vehicles through.”

“Were the soldiers from OSRAM or from the Guard?”

“OSRAM.”

“Then there was no convoy: they were just sweeping up. According to the television most of them have stopped coming, but a few groups have managed to get through.”

Leonardo looked around the shop. Most of the shelves were empty, and despite Elio’s efforts to make what little was left go a long way, one had an impression of well-concealed desolation. A passerby unaware of the situation would have imagined the shop had been hit by floods, or that the proprietor had liquidity problems and was on the verge of going out of business.

“I’ve checked the vineyard for you over the last few days,” said Elio. “If it doesn’t rain, you should be able to harvest the grapes in a couple of weeks.”

“Good.”

“How do you plan to do it?”

“How do I plan to do what?”

“Harvest the grapes.”

Leonardo brushed hair from his brow with a gesture he had used since childhood.

“Lupu and his people,” he said. “As usual.”

“You think they’ll come?”

“I’m sure they will.”

Elio shook one of the cans and watched its contents move around until they settled again, and then he looked out at the square, where two silhouettes were passing silently under the only functioning street lamp.

“Even if they do come you’ll be wrong to make them work.”

“What do you mean, ‘wrong’?” Leonardo said with a smile.

Elio lifted his handsome shoulders.

“It’s two years now since anyone has brought in outsiders for harvesting, and those who were linked in one way or another to local firms have not been reemployed.”

“Lupu and his family have permits, and they all came in before the borders were closed.”

“Permits or no permits, it may have been all right last time around, but this year there’s bound to be some problem.”

Leonardo propped his long, slender pianist’s hands on the counter. He had never played the piano, but several women had told him he had the right hands for it. Only one woman had ever said he had “a writer’s hands.” A girl he had met on the train to Nice. When they got out at the station they had shaken hands, and he never saw her again. But that had happened long before he had married Alessandra. After his marriage he had never allowed any woman to come close enough to him to comment on his hands. Apart from Clara, that is, and such a thing would certainly never have occurred to her.

Suddenly he felt very tired. There was a pain in his leg: sciatica.

“Let’s not discuss that now,” he said. “We’re tired. Just come and get the other can, because I want to show you something.”

They went out into the fresh night air. The village was sleeping peacefully; like a child with an ugly scar on one cheek, who has fallen asleep pressing the scarred side against the pillow. The window of the hardware store, bright with metal tools, was like a Nativity scene. Leonardo opened the door of the Polar and the internal light revealed the dog huddled on the seat. It was sleeping quietly, revived by the fresh air or the little water Leonardo had finally succeeded in getting it to lick from his cupped hand.

“Did you find it or was it given to you?” Elio asked.

“Found it.”

Elio, short-haired and with an aquiline nose, looked at the dog as one might look at a car damaged in an accident that will either need work to make it roadworthy or have to be scrapped. Leonardo said he had tried to get it to eat some cheese but without success.

“There are always Luca’s baby bottles,” Elio said. “But if Gabri finds out you’re using them for a dog . . .”

He considered the problem, drumming his fingers on the roof of the Polar. The sound rang out clearly all over the square and up the narrow streets leading to the upper part of the village, the castle and the stars shining above it.

“I’ll give you a rubber glove,” he said. “You can fill it with milk and make a hole with a needle at the end of one finger.”

“When they stole my she-goat and I had to feed her kids, it worked. It won’t cost you anything to try.”

“All right,” Leonardo said.

The dog was sleeping with its back turned away from them, showing the pink skin of its stomach. It had a few light-colored hairs, wet with urine, around the point of its penis. One of its eyes had begun weeping again.

“I’ve heard there are packs of dogs on the plain that attack people,” Elio said. “I hope he’s not from one of those.”

“We traveled together a good few hours and he hasn’t attacked me yet,” Leonardo said with a smile.

Elio shifted his weight to the other foot.

Leonardo’s home was a modest little farmhouse but on the better side of the hill and secluded. His father had died when he was six and his mother, to make ends meet, had sold the half facing the village to a surgeon from T.

During his years as a university student, when he came home to see his mother on weekends, Leonardo often traveled with the surgeon’s family, who liked to escape the city in search of a little tranquillity in the hills. The wife, many years younger than her husband, was an intelligent woman who wore high-necked sweaters over her enormous breasts. They had two sons: one was born prematurely and suffered from dyslexia, while the other was a brilliant chess player. When the surgeon was killed in a road accident, his wife no longer felt like making the journey to the house and telephoned Leonardo’s mother to tell her so. Both had wept at great length. Two weeks later the wife had sent a moving company to take away their furniture, and from then on that part of the house stayed empty and unsold.

Leonardo parked the car under the lime tree, hoisted his duffel onto his shoulder and carefully lifted the still-sleeping dog. On the veranda floor were two letters; no surprise and he did not bother to pick them up. The fridge was empty apart from a small amount of milk left in a glass bottle; he sniffed the milk, and finding it acceptable, poured it, before doing anything else, into the glove, pierced the point of the little finger with a needle, and put it to the puppy’s lips. But the animal ignored it.

Leonardo sat on the sofa for a while, one hand on the puppy’s hot body, wondering whether rescuing the dog had been wishful thinking. An irrational gesture that had put him at risk and in the end would benefit neither of them.

He undressed in the bathroom, put his clothes into the washing machine, and looked in the mirror. On his pale chest he had a deep red mark he must have acquired while crawling into the tunnel. He shuddered at the thought of what he had done and for a moment thought he could smell the nauseating stench of the dead puppy and its mother on himself.

Without waiting for the water to warm up, he got into the shower and roughly scrubbed his body and hair, reflecting, as he had not done for some time, that everything leads to ruin and that in his case this had happened to him in utter solitude. He felt extremely tired, but even more empty and discouraged.

When he was dry, he put on some periwinkle-blue underpants and went back to the sofa, where the dog was sleeping in the same position as he had been left. The kitchen was equipped in a functional manner. None of the furniture had belonged to his family: he had never cared for
arte povera
, and when he moved away he had sold everything to a junk dealer. He had then bought himself furniture in African teak, basic and without any fancy design. He had added plates, glasses, and other necessary kitchen equipment from the catalog of a department store and had everything delivered.

At the time he had attributed his choice to his haste to get organized and to the disorder of the time, but when he thought about it he soon convinced himself he would have done the same anyway. Throughout his life the objects he worked with, chose, and gathered around himself had always been a matter of indifference to him.

He found some crackers in the cupboard and sat down at the table to eat them by the light of the small neon tube above the cooker. The house he had been living in for the last seven years was one that, in the days when architectural magazines still existed, would have been worth photographing. He had had a large window put in facing the vineyard and the veranda where he could sit and enjoy the sunset behind the chain of mountains that closed the horizon like a zipper. On the western side of the house was a strip of meadow, and on the other side of the courtyard was an outhouse, its ground floor kept as a storage area and its upper floor reconditioned to accommodate a dozen people.

Leonardo finished the crackers and continued to gaze at the night through the great window.

Maybe better warm, he thought.

He heated the milk for a few seconds in a small pan, then poured it into the glove again. When he approached the dog with it, he moved his eyes behind closed lids, nothing more. When Leonardo squirted a little milk on his muzzle the puppy instinctively licked himself. Leonardo repeated the action until the dog realized where the milk was coming from and timidly began to suck the rubber finger. In the end they both stretched out exhausted, side by side on the sofa. The clock showed eleven-twenty.

“Bauschan,” Leonardo said.

Bauschan was the dog protagonist of a story by Thomas Mann, a story Leonardo could only vaguely remember but which had taught him that familiarity can develop between a man and his dog; something he had never experienced himself, having never had an animal of his own.

“Beddy-byes now,” Leonardo said, placing the dog on the carpet to prevent him from falling in the night.

The air on the veranda was chilly. Leonardo picked the two letters up from the floor and glanced at them long enough to recognize the “return to sender” stamp before going back into the house to his bedroom, where he opened the wardrobe and took a box with colored stripes from under his jackets. Lifting the lid, he slid the two letters in on top of the others, which were now almost filling the box to the top. Taking off his bathrobe, he pulled on a pair of white linen trousers and matching shirt then went back into the bathroom to comb his hair in front of the mirror. He cleaned and filed his nails, took the book he had started reading that morning from his bag, and went out.

He walked around the house to the west side, which had two small windows on the second floor and an arched door. He opened the door with a key he had taken from a nail before leaving the house and went in.

When he was a child this room had been home to a dozen casks: his father and his grandfather had known every virtue and defect of each cask at least as well as they knew the individual combination of courage, patience, and malice in each of their children.

His family had been wine producers for many generations, but in his last years his father had given up the work, selling the grapes to some local wine grower. Nevertheless the casks had remained in place until, seven years before, Leonardo had sold them together with the rest of the furnishings of the house. Then he had filled the space, about ten meters by four, with bookshelves he had had custom-made and fixed to the walls by a carpenter. Apart from thousands of books there was nothing but an armchair and a standard lamp on a carpet in the middle of the room. The floor was exactly as Leonardo had found it: earth trodden down so hard that you could not even scratch it with a pointed object.