Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

“I’ll be frank with you, professor,” the woman confessed in a low voice. “We’ve had no contact with head office for a week and no couriers have come.”

“Are you trying to tell me you don’t think any more money will get here?”

The woman moved her mouth without speaking; her eyes shone as she shook her head.

“I know it’s not your problem, but I haven’t been paid myself for three months.”

Under the vertical light waiting for him outside the building, Leonardo was seized by consternation. What should he do? That morning he had woken refreshed and unexpectedly vigorous and, before going down into the village, had worked for a couple of hours, ignoring the sharp twinges of pain running through his arms and legs. Now that energy was a distant memory: he felt exhausted and soaked with sweat.

At the post office he handed in his letter, slipping it under the glass window as lazily as the assistant took it and put it in the receptacle for outward post, then he returned to the square. The sky was a cloudless white; the sun covered the village without producing any shadows. The buildings, the two trees in the square, and the metal octagon of the old newsstand seemed insubstantial objects with no density. Everything seemed about to evaporate.

It was then that he saw the teenage boy materialize from a side street. With his short black hair and pointed chin he was heading for the bar with studied indifference, wearing the same clothes as in the vineyard, though he had rolled up his shirtsleeves to reveal a tattoo on his right shoulder.

Leonardo told himself that Lupu would never have dreamed of sending him to the village and decided his presence there was not a good sign. He raised an arm to attract his attention, but at that moment the boy turned his head to take a quick look at his reflection in the windows of the bar, and a second later he was inside.

When Leonardo followed, he found the boy standing in the middle of the main room watching the four men playing cards at the only table. Making up the game that morning with Danilo, the postman, and the man with the beard was an insurance agent who had once been the local pallapugno champion and the owner of a tobacconist’s shop.

“Got any cigarettes?” the boy asked.

None of the players lifted their eyes from their cards. The boy took a couple of paces toward them and stopped a meter or so away.

“I’d like some cigarettes,” he repeated in a calm, firm voice.

Danilo looked up.

“We don’t sell cigarettes,” he said.

“So what’s them over there then?” the boy asked, indicating a dozen packs on the shelf behind the counter.

Once in a London theater Leonardo had seen a show with a young actor who was famous on television. Every evening he attracted an audience of adoring girls who would have liked him as their boyfriend, as well as ladies of a certain age who would have liked him as their son or lover. In order to prove he was not just a petty small-screen celebrity, the actor had chosen an extremely complicated script and was applying himself to his performance in a spirit of frank self-denial. So much so that when in the third act his jacket was supposed to have vanished from its clothes hanger, but unfortunately was in fact still there for the whole audience to see, he had turned to the clothes hanger and the supposedly blind and pregnant actress who was playing the part of his woman, and asked her, as if the words were part of the script: “Where’s my jacket? Who’s taken my jacket?”

Since the blind woman was not supposed to be able to see the jacket, the actress had swallowed her cue, hoping for assistance from the actor who, far from helping her, had headed with great strides for the clothes hanger and, running his hands around the jacket without touching it said, “But I left it just here.” At that point Leonardo had heard a woman behind him whisper to the friend beside her: “What a love! He’s going blind too!”

Danilo played the four of hearts. The man with the beard took it with the six and then turned to the boy.

“You heard what he told you?”

The boy smiled and Leonardo realized that, young though he was, he was in perfect control of the situation.

He also understood that what was happening in that room was the result of fear, but he himself had grown so far from his former self that he hid his awareness. He knew he was the only one among those present to have this feeling and he felt as humiliated by it as he had on every other occasion. What was paralyzing his legs and constricting his throat was exactly what he felt when watching a climber clinging by his fingers to a rock face or listening to how a man had thrown away all his possessions on a mere whim. Acts he could have easily proved to be pointless and stupid, as he had during a symposium on the extreme that he had taken part in once in Oslo, but even so such things had always filled him with a profound sense of inferiority.

It was a truth that he had painfully been forced to acknowledge for some time, at least to himself: that the creative force in life was extravagance rather than tightfistedness, gambling rather than calculation, and that every true creative act was born of risk taking, without which nothing better than sterile repetition was ever possible. History and the march of civilization had been a long and successful attempt to reassure the meek and cowardly, constantly disguising in new clothes a terrible hypocritical reasoning in favor of logic, morality, and beauty. He with his profession, his books, his long slender body devoid of malice, was merely the ultimate development of this trend, like a fussy piece of lace worked with great skill for the sole purpose of lying covered with dust and compliments on some aunt’s bedside table.

He noticed the card players were staring at him.

“The boy’s working for me,” he said, trying to smile.

Danilo stared at him. He was young and bald and it was said he had many lovers in the district though not actually in the village, because this was a pact his wife had extracted from him after they had quarreled for years.

“If you must bring these people here,” Danilo said, “keep them at your own place.”

Leonardo nodded, afraid he would not be able to control his voice if he spoke.

“Let’s go,” he said to the boy, who stuck his hands in his pockets, apparently entirely at ease.

“You’d best listen and keep out of the way,” the insurance man said.

“Let’s go now, please,” repeated Leonardo.

The boy took a few steps toward the door then stopped, turned, and gave the four players a smile.

“You’re all dead,” he said, his words sounding terrible yet at the same time as mild as a verse from the Apocalypse recited by a child; after this he vanished into the light beyond the door.

Leonardo caught up with him in the middle of the square, and for a while they walked side by side in silence. The boy, calm and indifferent, barely lifted his feet from the ground. Leonardo occasionally turned to make sure they were not being followed. He was conscious of a pulse in his temples, and his feet were cold.

They passed a building on whose façade an ivy leaf had once been drawn so accurately that it still looked real from a distance, and several shoddily built apartment buildings, after which the road passed fields and clumps of hazel. Leonardo looked at the boy; there were drops of sweat among the few soft black whiskers on his upper lip. He remembered his name was Adrian and that he had always known this.

“Once at school they made us read one of your books,” Adrian said.

Leonardo had no intention of getting involved in a discussion about his work. His stomach was in turmoil, and all he wanted was to get home to his bathroom.