The Last Man Standing (43 page)

“There was the kind of silence that makes your hair stand on end while we were lowering the cages, but as soon as we opened them the inferno would begin again. They would form bands and divide the island between them, but once the weak, the old, and the puppies had been torn to pieces, they would return to fighting among themselves. There was a great deal we could learn from them, if one could face watching them.
Homo homini lupus
. What happened afterward proved my point. I wish I could have been wrong, but I wasn’t.

“The last to survive was a large white dog from the Maremma district. He went around for days trying to find a lair full of puppies, but there was nothing left on the island. And no more cages would be arriving, because the few dogs left on the coast had fled inland. Then he began to howl. When I went out onto the balcony at night I could see his white shape on the highest point of the island where the old tower was. It was like a kind of singing. Begging for a mate so he could impregnate her and then rip her to pieces. Then he stopped and I realized he must be dead.”

Leonardo looked at the island basking in the fluorescent light rising from the east. Like everywhere else where the ferocity of life had been revealed, it seemed unrelated to the rest of the world. He turned to the old man.

“What’s your name?”

“Clemente.”

“Why did you come looking for me?”

The old man smiled a toothless smile, then took the full glass Leonardo was still holding in his fingers from him, emptied it on the sand and filled it again with the coffee he had been keeping warm in the pan on the ashes.

“We know you are a guardian of stories,” he said, holding out the glass to Leonardo. “We’d like to be able to listen to them.”

In August the days got shorter. In the morning the sky was nearly always clear, but in the afternoon cumulonimbus clouds, as black as great anvils, would bring long and quiet storms in from the sea, which left the world magnificently clean and silent.

Sebastiano had made a Chinese chess set, and while they waited for the rain to stop, he and Salomon would play, moving the pieces according to rules they had tacitly agreed between themselves. Leonardo would sit under a little awning they had built from a piece of Plexiglas and two posts and they would watch Circe and David enjoying the freshness brought by the squalls.

Sometimes, looking down, he noticed he had the palm of his hand turned up, as if holding an invisible book. That made him aware of a small absence, but so slight that he could cure it by moving his hand over Lucia’s belly while she sat beside him with her feet up. Her eyes were fixed on the distance where, Leonardo imagined, she must have spent the long months of her absence and which still guarded her words. It had to be a place where there was no fear and no past and future, because Lucia had come home with her eyes filled with the kind of melancholy that belongs to exiles, the old, and gamblers. Sometimes Bauschan would follow her gaze to the horizon as though he thought she was watching something there, but there were no ships or lights or even land to be seen. Then he would whine with disappointment and Leonardo would take his hand from Lucia’s stomach and caress the dog’s head to reassure him that everything was as it should be.

If in the afternoon the sky did not threaten rain they would take the boat to the beach.

David’s weight had made their journeys longer, but they had added two more oars in the bows so Leonardo and Salomon could help Sebastiano.

When they reached the shore they would hide the boat and climb the path to the bend in the river. There was nothing left on the island for Circe and David to eat, so the elephant would spend the afternoon devouring leaves above the river, while the donkey browsed on grass growing in the shade.

Lucia would bathe in her pool and, further down, Leonardo, Sebastiano, and the boy would wash with a piece of soap, then lie on the rocks to get dry in the gentle afternoon sun. All except Lucia had cut their hair using the blade of a knife.

Anyone seeing them on their way back down to the beach would have imagined them penitent acolytes of some ancient earthly faith that had reverted to ritual ablutions and hair clipping. Salomon usually sat on David and sang songs he made up himself about diving and catching crabs and fish, but which also involved having a bicycle and going to school.

Some days Leonardo stayed behind and watched the boat set out on its way back to the island. Left on his own, he would build a bonfire from the dead bushes that lined the main road; then he would sit on the rocks and wait.

Soon the first lights would appear below the citadel, winding down like a fluorescent serpent toward the sea.

When the men and women got to the beach it would already be night. They would gather in silence around Leonardo, extinguish their lanterns, and sit in silent expectation. The fire would endow their deprived faces with an unqualified beauty and transform their necklaces of tinplate and shells into precious jewels. Most of them had no idea when the stories they were listening to had been written or who had written them, but they intuited, like animals predicting the coming of a storm or an earthquake, that there was mystery in Leonardo’s words, and that the mystery was life pure and simple.

When after an hour or two Leonardo fell silent, at first they would not move, searching in the air for a final echo of his words, then they would slowly get up, thank him with a nod, and take the path back to the citadel. They would leave presents on the sand: baskets of fruit, handkerchiefs, bread, a cigarette lighter, a pen, some rouge, a notepad, a shoelace, a little glass horse, coins, or a cloth made by hand from raw wool. Leonardo would collect everything that could be of use in a bag and then put out the fire and wait for Sebastiano to come with the boat to pick him up.

When he lay down on his bed Salomon was still awake.

“What are those people like?”

“How do you mean?”

“Are they good people?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why tell them stories?”

“I don’t even know the answer to that.”

The child was silent.

“But we’re not going to stay here, are we?”

“Soon it’ll be cold and we won’t have anything to eat.”

“We can set the snare the way we did before, and we have fishing lines too. And the chicken they’ve given us.”

“We’ll see, Salomon. Now go to sleep.”

Salomon stroked Bauschan, who was lying on the floor between the beds.

“Leonardo?”

“Yes.”

“Are there children up in the fort too?”

“Yes, certainly there are.”

“But older or younger than me?”

“Of all ages, I think.”

“Maybe one day I can go and see them?”

“Of course you can.”

“Even if we don’t go and live there?”

“Even if we stay living here.”

The child turned on his back and looked up at the ceiling.

“What is it?” Leonardo said, noticing he was still scratching his legs.

“I’m not sleepy.”

Leonardo put his hand on the child’s cheek.

“You won’t die until I’m much older, will you?”

“Very much older. Now let’s get some sleep.”

It was halfway through September when Leonardo and Sebastiano went back to the service station where they had found the drums they had used as extra floats for the boat.

During the intervening two months someone had been to the site and many of the utensils from the workshop had vanished, together with a pile of tires and the generator Leonardo had thought too heavy to move. Whoever had taken it must have had access to a horse and cart, which was a sign that people in some inland village were getting themselves organized.

They scraped the floor of the workshop with a spatula to retrieve another canful of oil for the lamp and used a ladle tied to a pole to sound out the bottom of a cistern, something they had not had tools for on their previous visit. They found a body in it, someone who had probably fallen in and been suffocated by the fumes. Pushing it aside with the pole, they managed to fill three bottles with a sticky substance similar to gasoline from the bottom. If they used this sparingly it would light them at night all winter. Then they loaded the donkey with two large rolls of linoleum to help to waterproof the roof and started back.

It was evening when they reached the island. Salomon was waiting on the jetty eager to know at once what they had found. Leonardo showed him the oil and the gas and handed him a little bag of colored chalks he had found under the seat of an old Opel still propped on a ramp in the workshop. Even if there was hardly anything left of the chalks, the boy was very grateful for them.

“Where’s Lucia?” Leonardo asked; she would normally have been sitting on the veranda at that time.

“In her room,” Salomon said. “She hasn’t been out all day.”

Leonardo left the bottles on the beach and hurried to the house. Lucia was lying on her bed, her face and chest covered with sweat. She was holding her belly in her hands, breathing with short regular breaths. Her face was calm and concentrated, and her eyes were fixed on the ceiling as if what she must do had been written there by all the women who had lived on earth before her.

“She’s not ill, is she?” Salomon asked, putting his head around the door.

“Everything’s normal,” Leonardo said. “Go and call Sebastiano.”

While the boy ran to the beach, Leonardo reached under the bed for a large wooden box once intended for quality whisky or cognac, and where for the last few months he had been storing towels and sheets to protect them from dust; then he helped Lucia up, took off the cover stained by the breaking of her waters, spread a clean sheet on the bed, and made her lie down again. She grasped his hand. There was a light in her eyes that seemed to come from some far-off depths, which were filled with the same simplicity as when a flower is ready to break through the earth. Leonardo gave her a smile; she smiled back, her lips tense with effort. Another part of her had returned from that distant land. Sebastiano’s footsteps were at the door.

“Please put on some water to boil,” Leonardo said without turning around.

Sebastiano went away.

“Salomon, come here,” Leonardo said.

The boy took a few steps into the room.

“Sit down and hold her hand.”

The child sat on the edge of the bed and took Lucia’s hand. She was now taking longer breaths.

“Where are you going?” Salomon asked Leonardo.

“To the next room, I’ll be back in a minute.”

In the kitchen, Leonardo asked Sebastiano to wash his right hand for him with soap and clean his nails; then asked Sebastiano to wash his own hands in the same way, because he was going to be needed.

When he got back to Salomon, the boy was exactly where he had left him.

“Now go and take Bauschan with you,” he said. “When I need you, I’ll call you.” Then he sat down beside Lucia and waited.

The little girl was born in the middle of the night and cried the moment she came from her mother’s body. Sebastiano, who had been sitting to one side holding the lantern, helped Leonardo clean the baby and wrap her in a towel; then they passed her to Lucia who hugged her against her full breasts.

“Please go and call Salomon,” Leonardo said.

Darkness took over when Sebastiano left the room with the lantern, and the baby stopped crying. Leonardo listened to the breathing of mother and child. There was no mystery, he realized. Just time and the human beings who pass through time.

The boy returned with Sebastiano and they approached the bed together.

“Would you like to do something very, very important?” Leonardo said.

“Yes,” Salomon answered.

Uncovering the baby, Leonardo took the umbilical cord in his fingers and formed a small loop in it. Sebastiano handed Salomon the knife.

“Put it in here,” Leonardo said.

“Like this?”

“Yes, that’s right. Now cut.”

The child did as he was told and cut the cord, then he lifted the knife in the air. Leonardo took it from him and gave it back to Sebastiano.

“You’ve done a great job.”

“I didn’t hurt her, did I?”

“No. Now go to bed. Sebastiano will go with you.”

An hour later, after Lucia had fallen asleep, Leonardo, who had kept awake until that moment, picked up the baby and took her out of the room. Salomon was lying asleep on the animal skin in the kitchen while Sebastiano, sitting at the table, was filling the last page of the exercise book in his oblique writing. He got up and offered the lamp to Leonardo, who shook his head to show he did not need it.

He climbed to the highest point of the island where the euphorbia was beginning to put out new leaves with the approach of autumn.

When he reached the ruins of the old tower, he sat down on the pile of stones and looked across to the moonlit coast. The air was warm and there was a faint hiss crossing the night, like the overtones of a note sounded centuries ago but still vibrating in a closed room.

Leonardo unwrapped the baby and lifted her on his only hand toward the moon. For an instant she seemed to levitate weightlessly. Then he pulled her back close to him and kissed her forehead; she smelled of newly kneaded dough.

When they got back Lucia was awake. She laid the baby at her side, and by the weak light from the window, watched her agitate her tiny hands until she found the warmth of the breast.

“Papa?” Lucia called when Leonardo had already reached the door.

He turned.

“Is this the world?”

“Yes, my sweet, this is the world.”

In the morning, at first light, two boats left the mainland bringing presents to the island.

DAVIDE LONGO
was born in Carmognola in the province of Torino. In addition to novels he writes books for children, short stories, and articles, and his texts have been adapted for musical and theatrical productions. He lives in Turin, where he works as a teacher.

SILVESTER MAZZARELLA
is a distinguished translator of Italian and Swedish literature.