Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

“Would you give me a hand to finish the grape harvest?”

Elio looked at him as one might look at someone on the bridge of a ship heading to a place from which he was unlikely to return.

“You must be joking.”

Leonardo shook his head.

“If you don’t, in a few days the grapes will have to be thrown away.”

Bauschan came out onto the veranda and sat down beside Leonardo. He had a slipper in his mouth, but his serious eyes were fixed on Elio. Apart from a shambling gait and huge paws, there was almost nothing left of the puppy with the round stomach he had once been; he seemed more like the miniature version of an adult dog.

“Even if we did harvest the grapes, what could we do with them?” Elio said. “The wine growers haven’t even harvested their own.”

Leonardo drank more water. Far off, beyond the river, he thought he could see movement amid the yellow stubble. It turned out to be two men carrying jerry cans down to the waterside. The sky was clear, but the heat made the atmosphere transparent.

“Maybe I can give them to the cooperative,” he said.

“Do you think they’ll be getting orders anymore?” Elio snorted. “Most of the wine used to be exported to northern Europe and America. Have you noticed it’s been nearly a year since the last truck passed on the main road?”

Leonardo went back to contemplating the point where the hill met the river. The two men had stopped on the bank; one was filling a container, while the other was watching the road that touched the edge of the river two hundred meters lower down before regaining height with a couple of sharp bends.

“Anyway, if you could spare a couple of afternoons to give me a hand I’d be grateful,” he said.

Elio set the bicycle on its stand and took a few steps toward the veranda. Leonardo heard him go into the house, take a glass, fill it with water, drink, rinse it, and put it back in its place. When he came back out he placed his hands on the back of the empty chair.

“The people who started the fire were not the ones you think,” he said.

Leonardo watched the men on the other side of the river carry their containers across the last open stretch of field and disappear into the forest.

“Who was it then?” he said.

Elio put his hands in his pockets.

“The schools are still shut and the boys are hanging out all day with nothing to do. The other day four or five of them had a few words with that young man who was staying with you.”

Leonardo rubbed one of Bauschan’s ears between his fingers. It was like silk. The sun was sinking and the shadow of the blackened walls of the store was reaching the edge of the veranda. Elio returned his hands to the back of the wooden chair and studied them, as if he suspected they might have changed color while in his pockets.

“Gabri’s in touch with her sister in Marseilles. She says they’re going to close the frontier, and these may be the last good days for crossing it. I’d like her to take the children, but she doesn’t want to go alone.”

Bauschan barked twice at the hazel grove near the house and a few seconds later a stocky shape emerged from the thicket. The wild boar looked fearlessly at them, then it grunted and three striped piglets came through the opening it had made.

The little family filed past the veranda at a gentle trot and disappeared behind the remains of the store. When they had gone, Bauschan sniffed the scent of forest in the air and lifted his head to see what the two men might have to say about it.

“There seems to be some gasoline at C.,” Elio said. “Shall I get you some too?”

Leonardo shook his head. The sun had half disappeared behind the mountains; the sky was turning red and a few clouds that looked like ginned cotton were appearing in the east. The buzzing of the bees had stopped.

Adele’s house was neither a farmhouse nor a modern home but one of the few buildings built in the seventies of the last century, when the hills were about to become a pilgrimage destination for tourists from the Nordic countries and America.

Coming into the yard, Leonardo was greeted by cries from the geese in the poultry pen. There were three of them, one male and two female, and they usually scratched around freely, hurling themselves at anyone who ventured on their territory. After their most recent ambush, the postman had started leaving the mail in the fork of a pear tree a few meters from the gate.

Hearing the noise of the geese, Adele came out of the house, her hair thrown roughly back, as if she had just been walking against the wind on a pier in Normandy. She was wearing a flowered dress under her apron and her legs were enclosed in brown tights. Her shoulders were those of a woman who had done a lot of swimming in her youth, but she had the hips and legs of an elderly peasant woman. On her feet were a pair of flip-flops.

“ Ciao , Adele. Do you have time for a treatment?”

“Time’s the only thing I do have,” the woman answered.

The kitchen was cool and full of cheap furniture. On the mantelpiece several vases with medicinal herbs were lined up and a yellow clock was ticking on the wall. The walls badly needed a coat of whitewash, but the total effect of the atmosphere was somehow restful. The table was set for two.

“We can do it another day,” Leonardo said. “It’s nearly dinnertime, I forgot.”

Adele dropped a leek into the pan boiling on the stove, then rinsed her hands.

“If it hadn’t suited me I’d have said no,” she said, drying her hands on her apron.

They went into the room where she kept her massage bed. Leonardo took off his sandals and lay down.

It was a small room with walls of a gentle yellow. No posters, pictures, shelves, or books, just a small table holding a jar of ointment, a wristwatch, and a notebook.

Adele sat down on the stool, took a little ointment from the jar, and began working it with her thumbs into the soles of Leonardo’s feet. She did this for about ten minutes without a word from either of them. Her fingers moved quickly as if running over a pattern they knew well but that sometimes needed to be explored with careful precision. Through the only window Leonardo watched the donkey grazing in the field behind the house.

“Have you heard what happened yesterday?”

Adele nodded, and the little oval she wore around her neck with the portrait of her husband moved against her wrinkled chest. When Leonardo was a boy, the man had toured the Langhe district in a small truck selling viticultural products. He was of Ligurian origin, and it was said he had been a billiard player when young, good enough to compete in serious championships, but in his free time doing the rounds of the fairs to relieve the farmhands in the bars of the money they had earned working with animals.

Adele first met him at the railway station in Genoa. She was just back from South America, where she had been living for six months with a shaman, and the man had been in Viareggio and reached third place in the national championships.

Before she agreed to marry him she had made quite clear what he already knew, that championships were fine but fleecing people at fairs must stop. In any case, cheating people out of their money involves constant traveling; you cannot do it to the local people where you live. The men, blinded by pride, may allow themselves to be milked for years, but sooner or later their women will find a way of getting their own back on you.

He was a man known for good sense and discretion and would not have wanted to argue. Leonardo had once seen him dominating the billiard table in the bar, but when a stranger challenged him he had handed the cue to someone else, saying his wife was waiting for him at home.

“Do you think I ought to do something?” Leonardo asked Adele.