The Last Man Standing (38 page)

“Very hungry.”

Leonardo woke the doctor and together they went down into the field where he showed the doctor how to milk Circe, then they went back and warmed the pot of milk on the stove. The house had been uninhabited for many years, but it was in good shape and despite the fact that others had been there before them, some dishes and cutlery had survived; also a table, a kitchen range, three beds with mattresses and blankets, a sofa, a wardrobe with men’s clothes in it, and a cellar containing a lot of tools. Leonardo and the doctor inspected the house from top to bottom without finding anything to eat, but in the attic they found some firewood and a few bales of hay that would be useful for the animals.

The doctor told Leonardo to sit down, and he began unwrapping his bandage.

“Don’t rest it on the table,” he said when the wound was revealed. Leonardo studied the dark flesh and white bone. His arm felt cold, light, and incomplete, but it was not painful. It just felt as though the limb was filling with air and sooner or later would fly away, detaching itself from his body.

“What’s that?”

The doctor was spreading on the wound a yellow cream from a jar.

“An ointment I’ve made from tobacco. Very basic, but it’ll prevent infection. The best I can do.”

The doctor went to wash his hands at the sink; then he sat down to bind up the stump.

“You’ll have to dress it morning and evening. This is the only bandage I’ve got so try to keep it clean. If it does get dirty, you can make another by cutting up a piece of clothing or a towel, but make sure it’s cotton and that you boil it before use. If there’s no infection, your temperature should return to normal in a couple of days and the wound will begin to heal.”

Leonardo looked out the window. He could see the river and part of the bottom of the valley. The sun, beating all morning on the road, had revealed a few patches of asphalt.

“Do you really want to go back to them?”

The doctor looked at him as though the question was entirely meaningless.

“You only have one hand and no weapons,” he said, knotting the bandage. “The child and the girls can only get in your way. If you’re lucky, someone will kill you all; failing that, you’ll die of hunger.”

The milk began hissing. Leonardo got up and took the pot off the stove using an old towel with a printed picture of Mickey Mouse dressed as a chef, and poured the milk into some containers he had found. There were two cups and a glass, and two metal containers intended for salt and coffee. He offered one to the doctor, who accepted it and put it on the table.

“I don’t care what you think of me,” he said.

Leonardo stared at him for a moment, his eyes calm and lacking in resentment; then he took one of the containers out to the balcony. When he got back to collect the rest and take them to the girls, the man had vanished.

Before dark Leonardo and Salomon checked the houses in the village, gleaning a local map, a parka, some sunflower seeds, a pencil, a little seed oil, a piece of soap, a pack of cards, an old snare, and a handful of sowing potatoes.

On their return, they found the stove had gone out; the house was dark and the girls were asleep in the bed behind the wooden partition. Leonardo and Salomon went down to the cellar, where Leonardo showed the boy how to make an oil lamp using an empty drinks bottle, a piece of rag, and the oil they had found. The boy followed the instructions carefully without getting impatient even when he had difficulty rolling the wick in the right way, and he was finally able to watch the lamp with pride as it lit the low ceiling of the room. Leonardo pocketed the lighter the doctor had left with the ointment.

“Now I feel calm.”

“Why?”

“Because I know when I ask you to do something I can’t do myself, you’ll do it well.”

Salomon looked down. Leonardo placed his hand on the boy’s head. His fair hair was smooth and shone like new grass. His blue eyes collected light, absorbing something from inside himself and releasing it again very slowly.

“I have to ask you one more favor.”

The child looked up.

“Let’s keep to ourselves what we saw in that house.”

“You mean the skeletons?”

“Yes, better not tell the girls about that.”

“I only cried out because it was such a surprise.”

“I know, but it would frighten them.”

Salomon stared at the flame.

“What happened to those people?”

Leonardo had found tufts of hair; the man and woman had died of hunger or cold, and dogs and wolves must have found some way of getting into the house.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but best keep it to ourselves.”

“I’d already decided not to say anything.”

“I can believe that.”

Salomon looked at the refrigerator and the washing machine against the wall. Apart from a pile of planks thrown down in the middle of the room, the cellar was in perfect order. There was a well-stocked tool shelf, a rack for garden tools, and a workbench with a vice and grindstone for working with metals. When he had come in there that morning and seen that equipment and the planks, he had imagined someone dreaming of an imminent flood and seized by the urge to build a barge. Someone who after buying the wood had suddenly become less confident about trusting his dreams.

“I wish Lucia and the other lady would say something,” Salomon said.

Leonardo slid his hand down his face.

“Sometimes people are happier keeping silent.”

“But they will talk in the end, won’t they?”

“It may take time. We must be patient, OK?”

“OK. Will they be happy we found the potatoes?”

“Yes, they’ll be very happy about that.”

They lit the stove and put a pan of water on to boil, then they prepared one of the beds in the upstairs room and left the door open for the heat to rise and warm it. They washed plates and cutlery and cleaned the surface of the dresser; then they put everything they had found on it, which at the moment was their whole fortune.

When the potatoes had boiled, Leonardo went into the bedroom next door and touched the bald woman’s shoulder to wake her. She opened her eyes at once, as if she had only been pretending to be asleep. She looked serious, attentive, and confident, with no trace of the terrified girl Leonardo had led out of the hotel by the hand.

“We’ve found something to eat,” Leonardo said, then interrupted himself and looked at Lucia, who was fast asleep, with her mouth half open and one hand under her cheek. Her breathing was calm and regular.

“Let her sleep,” the woman said. “That’s what she needs at the moment.”

They sat down at the table and the woman peeled the potatoes. She had on a man’s sweater they had found in the wardrobe and a pair of pants rolled above her ankles, but Leonardo noticed that she had not taken off the torn and dirty dress in which she had come. She told them her name was Silvia and asked Salomon his name. The child told her; then they ate in silence.

Salomon occasionally looked at the rope marks on the woman’s wrists and the cold sores on her face. He seemed less impressed by the way her hair had grown back in tufts over her shaved head. Their meal only took a few minutes, and they left two potatoes on a plate for Lucia when she woke up.

“Do you know what I’d like now?” the woman said.

Leonardo shook his head. She smiled, her teeth shaded by an opaque film.

“Some coffee.”

They sat in silence, watching the flame of the lamp bending toward the empty side of the table in the draft from the door. From time to time Salomon closed his eyes and his chin fell on his chest.

“Go to bed now,” Leonardo told him.

The child looked at the stairs; then started playing with a piece of potato peel, shaping it so that it looked like a whale. Leonardo wrapped the base of the lamp in the towel and offered it to Salomon.

“You take it,” he said. “I’ll blow it out when I come up.”

Salomon said goodnight and climbed the stairs to the upper floor. The light he was taking away surrounded him like a cloak. Left in the dark, Leonardo went to open the door of the stove; the fire inside cast light on the walls. He began clearing the table, carrying the plates one at a time to the sink.

“No, I’ll do that,” the woman said, getting up. “You sit down, we haven’t done much to help you today.”

She rinsed the plates and glasses in the sink, then she poured a little of the water used for boiling the potatoes into the two cups and sat down again. Anyone walking in at that moment would have seen a man with thick gray hair and a woman with a badly shaved head sitting facing one another by the weak light of the fire with two cups in front of them, as if about to embark on an existential conversation. But on closer inspection, he would have seen that the man’s face was deeply scarred and that the woman’s hands were damaged and incapable of keeping still for more than a few seconds at a time.

“How old is your daughter?”

“Seventeen.”

The woman stared at her cup.

“Now I’m going to tell you something you might think rather impersonal and insensitive, but it’s the only way I can be useful to you. Would you like to hear it?”

Leonardo nodded.

“I worked as a psychologist with an international organization and traveled in a war zone where rape was used as a weapon for ethnic cleansing. My job was to convince the women to report the rapes and to help organize assistance for them. So I know what I’m talking about.”

The woman took a sip of hot water and put the cup down over a small mark on the table.

“Lucia’s in a state of shock. It often happens to girls who suffer violence, especially if they are young and their ordeal goes on for a long time. The fact that she doesn’t speak or react to external stimuli is part of the picture, but don’t be misled into thinking she isn’t feeling anything: there is certain to be enormous anger inside her. She feels responsible in some way for what has happened to her and hates herself for not having been able to extract herself from it. She has suffered very deep humiliation.”

Leonardo met her eyes without moving a muscle in his face.

“It may take a long time before she emerges from the shell inside which she has closed herself, and it’s even possible she may never emerge from it, or not entirely. All you can do is keep close to her without trying to hurry things on. Act as if you are waiting for her to return from a journey and in the meantime are looking after her home for her. Talk to her, even if she seems not to listen. Touch her hands and feet but not any other part of her body and never hug her however much you want to, because that could make her feel imprisoned. It could even make her unconsciously superimpose you on the image of that man. In any case, it’s likely she can remember little or nothing of what you have been to her and done for her in the past. You mustn’t feel hurt by that; it’s only a defense mechanism. I know you love her very much and that you will know how to do what is right for her.”

“How old are you?”

“Twice your daughter’s age.”

“Have you anyone yourself?”

“No, not any longer.”

Leonardo looked out of the window; the moon had turned the trees to stone.

“We’ll wait until the snow melts, then make for the coast. You could come too.”

The woman got up and put another piece of wood in the stove and then filled a pan with water at the sink and placed it on the hot cast-iron cooking surface.

“Now we’ll have a little warm water to wash in tomorrow morning,” she said.

Leonardo realized his thoughts would stop functioning long before dawn and that there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“Until tomorrow, then,” the woman said.

“Until tomorrow.”

When she withdrew to the other room, Leonardo went to take a little hay to Circe and David, and he talked to them for a long time about what he was afraid might happen.

The elephant and the donkey gave him their full attention, chewing great handfuls of dried grass. A full moon lit the valley and in the silence of the night Leonardo sensed life quivering under the snow as the earth softened and opened.

He urinated.

Then he went up to the bedroom, extinguished the lamp Salomon had placed on the floor well clear of the bed, and lay down beside the little boy who was wheezing lightly like a sleeping rodent. In the dark he felt Salomon’s forehead; it was warm with exhaustion, but he had no fever. On the other hand Leonardo felt himself to be burning hot. He closed his eyes but tried to stay awake so as not to miss any sounds from the floor below.

A few minutes, or perhaps a few hours later, he was awoken by hearing steps. He made his way downstairs without lighting the lamp, but the kitchen was empty and silent. Nor was there any sound from the room where Lucia and Silvia were. He went back to bed and slept.

When he woke again it was light. The room had a small window that was reflected in a mirror on the wall, making it look as if two suns were rising from opposite points of the compass.

Salomon was sleeping curled against him. It was the first time for a very long time that he had smelled a good smell, and he lay staring at the cloudless sky and the outline of the mountains beyond the faded curtains, reflecting that the scent, the color, and the shape were all one. When he delicately extracted his arm from beneath the child’s head he realized it was completely numb from the shoulder down, so he massaged it until he could feel the blood beginning to circulate again and his wound starting to throb inside the bandage. Only then did he get up and head for the stairs.

The first thing he saw when he got down was that the pan was no longer on the stove.

He found it in the bathroom with the woman’s dress and pants. He could smell the cake of soap, which was still on the basin. He picked up the clothes, threw them into the stove, lit it, and went out.

It did not take him long to find her. She had chosen an out-of-the-way spot that Leonardo was certain to find. A solitary holm oak in the middle of a pasture.

By the time Lucia and Salomon woke, Leonardo had already milked Circe.

The child and the girl sat at the table sipping milk from steaming cups. Leonardo rubbed his nails on a sponge at the sink, trying to clean them of earth. Then he joined the others at the table.