Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

Even so he asked, “Which book?”

“The one about the dog.”

Around the corner they could see the gate. And among the rows of vines the straw hats of the grape pickers.

He wondered if he should tell Lupu what had happened. And whether he would do this for the good of the boy or only in the secret hope of having him punished.

Adrian kicked a stone into the dead grass at the edge of the asphalt.

“What’s the use of a book like that these days?” he said.

“Books are always useless,” Leonardo said to close the subject, “even when what’s happening now isn’t happening.”

The boy sighed and Leonardo believed he had given him something to think about but soon noticed they were no longer together and turned. Adrian had stopped and blood was pouring from his nose down his chin and soaking his shirt.

“Lift your right arm,” Leonardo said, searching in his pocket for a handkerchief.

The boy gave a broad smile, his perfect teeth stained with blood.

“I really believe you won’t survive,” Adrian said, and leaped away into the hazel grove at the side of the road.

The store caught fire that night and burned completely in less than an hour, giving off huge spirals of gray smoke.

Leonardo had stayed up late in the book room and once in bed had not been able to get to sleep. At two o’clock he became aware of variations in the light between the shutters on his window. At first he thought it was the moon, but when the glare began dancing and turned a magnificent shade of ocher, he ran from his room, his throat tight with bitter foreboding.

On the veranda, he was assailed by cold smoky air; the flames lighting up the yard like daytime had already eaten the left side of the building. Lupu and the others, lined up at the edge of the vineyard, were watching the blaze without moving. He counted them; all were there. Their faces were entirely calm, as if what was burning was not the beds where they would have woken the next morning if the fire had not consumed them.

“Anyone hurt?” he asked, walking toward them.

Lupu shook his head. The little child was sleeping on his mother’s shoulder. On the ground were the few bags they had managed to bring out.

“We realized in time,” he said, still staring at the building.

Like the other men he had nothing on but his underpants. The women, on the other hand, were fully dressed. Only the daughter was weeping, tears pouring down her sunburned cheeks like drops of brass.

Leonardo had never been so close to a fire before. Contrasting with the moving light, smoke and heat was an extraordinary silence. The fierce flames were stretching toward the rafters of the roof like the fingers of a rock climber reaching for a higher hold. The almost imperceptible sound of the flames was reminiscent of teeth being ground in moments of extreme effort. He wondered if the flames might attack the house, but seeing how calm the others were and judging that they must know the ways of fire better than he did, he stopped worrying about it.

When the glass in the windows shattered, everyone took a step back and the little child raised his head: he glanced at the vineyard where the light was projecting the long shadows of his family, then buried his face in his mother’s shoulder again and closed his eyes. Columns of black smoke were issuing from the windows of the store: the plastic baskets used for the harvest were burning.

“Tonight you’ll sleep in the house,” Leonardo said. “Tomorrow we’ll sort things out.”

Lupu looked at him without expression.

“We’re leaving,” he said.

Then Leonardo read in his eyes something that must have been clear to everyone from the start and had nothing to do with the question he did not ask himself.

“They poured gasoline under the door,” Lupu said. “Luckily my brother was on guard, or we’d all be dead.”

In that moment Leonardo understood the edgy expression in their eyes the day they came into his courtyard. Their eyes had been saying, “This place is not safe, and the reason it isn’t safe is that now there is nowhere we can feel safe any longer.” This animal instinct had led Lupu to set up turns of guard and had allowed him to save his family. Leonardo, in his pajamas with their slender vertical stripes, was fully aware of his own inadequacy. Part of the roof collapsed raising thousands of sparks that lifted gently into the sky where they were gradually extinguished.

“I’ll make some coffee,” Leonardo said. “Come inside.”

He put the large coffeepot on the gas, then sat down at the kitchen table and studied his own hands against the wooden surface. No one came in or went to the veranda. When the coffee was ready, he poured it into a dozen cups without counting if there were too many and carried them out on a painted wooden tray. Lupu and his family were still standing where he had left them. They had all covered themselves with something, leaving only Adrian without shoes.

They acknowledged the coffee with an inclination of the head and drank it. The store was now burning peacefully.

“Are you sure you want to leave tonight?” Leonardo asked.

“Best for you too.”

“Where will you go?”

“Back to the mountains.”

Leonardo went back into the house. Bauschan was sleeping on his rug in the studio and had not noticed anything.

“You really are my dog,” he said, then opened a drawer in the desk. Inside was a lot less than he should have paid for the four days’ work planned and much more than what was due for the two they had done. He put the banknotes in the pocket of his pajama jacket and closed the door behind him to stop the dog from following.

Lupu and the others had loaded the cars with the little they had saved from the fire and were waiting at the back. The upper floor of the store had collapsed and the flames had regained a bit of strength, but the darkness was reclaiming space and everything they did or said was now happening almost entirely in the dark.

He handed Lupu the money and they shook hands, then the cars processed out of the courtyard to the subdued sound of crushed gravel.

Left on his own, Leonardo went back into the house, urinated, and put Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello on the stereo before going out again to sit on the veranda steps with the dog in his arms. For a while Bauschan licked his right thumb, then dozed off. By now the burning store was crackling quietly and the air was filled with a good smell of resin and hot earth. It was a smell that made Leonardo think of Humanism and a baker’s window facing a lane with the light on all night.

They stayed like this until dawn, when the building that had once been a store and lodging for guests appeared in the weak new daylight like an empty skull with thin threads of anthracite smoke emerging from it. Then the dog, followed by Leonardo, got up and went into the house, both of them exhausted, as if they had just had a long lesson from a master.

The first to hear the news had been the teaching faculty, then their families and the literary world, and only after that the newspapers and the students.

Leonardo had been one of the last it had reached among the lecturers, before the rest of his family. The telephone rang at six in the evening, and the level voice of the rector at the other end of the line begged him, despite the unusual hour, to come as quickly as possible to the university since only he would be able to throw any light on an unpleasant event that had occurred.

The meeting had taken a couple of hours while a dozen of the most senior and influential teachers in the faculty had gone in and out of the office. No one had claimed to take seriously what was written in the letter that had accompanied the video and the photographs, but no one had asked Leonardo to vouch for the truth of those images either, still less the reasons for his relations with the girl.