Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

The next day he had stayed home: his lecture canceled because of sickness, the rector had suggested. Leonardo spent the morning in the studio with his computer turned off, listening to Alessandra on the telephone in the next room discussing her monthly schedule of exhibition reviews with the arts magazines she worked for, until finally at lunch, over a salad of shrimp and avocado, he had decided to face up to what had happened.

At first Alessandra had shown no reaction, suspecting it was some kind of game, but, becoming aware of Leonardo’s pallor and trembling lips, had asked her husband to tell her frankly whether he had really had sex with that piece of trash and to tell her what the video and photographic material actually showed.

Leonardo had very calmly told her the whole story, and Alessandra, equally calmly, had shut herself in her study for a couple of hours to reflect. Then a storm of insults and the hurling of objects had been unleashed, accompanied in the evening by the defacement of all his books in the lower part of the bookshelves.

Humiliated and impotent, Leonardo had witnessed this crescendo of violence against his books, condemned as “false intellectual shit,” then had retired to sleep in his daughter’s little bed while she, in view of the situation, had spent the night at her grandparents’ home.

The next day, from nine in the morning, when the video and photographs had been accessible on the Internet to anyone capable of keying in the three code words, his home telephone had never stopped ringing, and the shouting of Alessandra, Alessandra’s mother, and Alessandra’s father had alternated and been superimposed on one another until Leonardo decided to go away for a few days while the storm blew over, to an anonymous hotel outside the city where in fact he remained for the next seven months.

The first person he heard from, once the story had appeared in the press, was not one of the two or three friends he imagined he had among his fellow writers, but a university colleague of about fifty, a stalwart figure of mediocre ability, with whom he had never had any contact apart from exchanging the odd word at meetings.

For this reason he had been suspicious of the man’s suggestion that they meet for coffee; he had been put on his guard by his publisher and by many requests from both quality and other newspapers for a well-paid interview, in which he would have been able to put his own version of the facts. Yet the oppressive sense of loneliness he felt during those days had overcome every fear, persuading him to accept this meeting, which had been organized in a bar next to one of the city’s minor railway stations, opposite an open space that the Council had tried to improve by building an enormous fountain that terrified children and depressed the old by reminding them of the war.

Renato, a sociology lecturer, was waiting at a little corner table well away from the window. With his short hair, broad swimmer’s shoulders, and his tanned face despite it being autumn, the man was the very image of health and hunger for life. He looked like one of those winged lions on the end of banisters in apartment buildings where no expense has been spared on the marble. They shook hands, sat down, and ordered freshly squeezed orange juice and barley coffee.

“You and I are both people of superior intelligence,” Renato had started, “So I’m sure you won’t mind if I skip the ‘I’m so sorry’ and ‘I can imagine how you must be feeling.’”

Leonardo nodded in the most macho way his lanky figure allowed him.

“I’m not here only for myself,” Renato went on, “but on behalf of many of your colleagues, most of whom, I must say at once, will not have the courage to support you in public, but share my esteem for you and believe that what has happened cannot be other than the logical consequence of things.”

Leonardo waited, but the man seemed to have nothing more to add.

“What things?” he felt forced to ask.

The man smiled, like an experienced skipper warned by a radio station of bad weather at sea.

“Most of the girl students,” he said, “are sluts and use their bodies to try to get what they want, and then they yell rape if for some reason they can’t have it. As though any man who cares for culture must be a eunuch! A castrated man stuck behind the lecturer’s desk to entertain a gaggle of female idiots showing themselves off for their own amusement, in the certain knowledge that the teacher wouldn’t know what to do with them if he had them.”

Leonardo studied his coffee: it had delicate verdigris reflections, striking if entirely inappropriate, and tasted like boiled cabbage. He had never drunk barley coffee before, but then he had never spent three nights in a row without sleeping either.

“I’m grateful for your moral support,” he started, “but—”

“Our support is unconditional,” Renato interrupted, a fragment of orange hanging from his lip making him look even more deeply committed. “And we’ll bring pressure within the university to have this business set aside. The fact that you are also a writer doesn’t make things any easier, but many of us have passed the same way and could tell you that what in the morning may seem to have been a storm almost always turns out by evening to have been nothing more than a gentle breeze. But I would advise you not to try to extricate yourself just by fencing with a mere foil. You must reply with the same weapons used to attack you. You don’t know it yet, but you have much more to lose than to gain. The sooner you make that clear, the sooner you will be able to take a milder view of things.”

Leonardo realized the pointlessness of any attempt at explanation. Taking his silence for tacit agreement, the man placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Here’s my cell phone number,” he had said, “give me a call.”

Leonardo took the card he offered. The man got up.

“I won’t hide it from you, but I always thought you were probably a bit of a wimp. A man with lots of brain, but not much in the balls department. I have to admit I was wrong. You even deceived me.” Then he squeezed Leonardo’s hand, paid the bill, and left, offering Leonardo a final smile from the other side of the window.

Leonardo had never seen or heard of him again, but a year later, by which time he had already lost his job at the university and any chance of seeing his daughter again, he had noticed his name in the pages of a daily paper to which Renato had begun contributing a column, commenting and explaining the ins and outs of current affairs.

Six months later the daily closed down. By that time Leonardo had moved to M. and heard nothing more, good or bad, about Renato or any other of his former university colleagues.

He spent the afternoon sitting on the veranda staring at the rows of vines on which the grapes had started to wither, the air full of the constant buzzing of bees attracted to the ruins of the store by the smell of cooked grapes.

The hot weather continued and the vegetation on the far side of the river took on a ferocious yellow hue. Clouds above the mountains hinted at autumn, but for the time being the wind confined them to France.

It was already evening when Elio came into the yard on his bicycle and stopped short of the steps. He was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and blue striped trousers. His folded jacket was clipped to the pannier rack. Drumming his fingers on the handlebars as if describing the scene in Morse code, he stared at the pile of blackened rubble.

“Well, look at that,” he said.

Leonardo picked up his glass from the African wood table and drank a mouthful of water. It tasted good. At the time he had decided to move to M. the excellence of the water had come first in the list of advantages he had looked forward to. This list had been one of the last ideas suggested by his psychiatrist. In fact, after a month of telephone calls, the man had told him he could do nothing more for him unless he came to the office by car. Leonardo had promised to think about it but had done nothing. So, from one day to the next, what he had thought of as an essential lifeline had been cut off. And this had been the second point on his list.