Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

“What would you like to do?”

“Go and talk to the people who started the fire.”

Adele went on working on Leonardo’s thin feet. Her hands were barely warm, like ashes disturbed hours after a fire has gone out.

“Last year Laica had six puppies, but the next day there were only five. Bitches sometimes notice one of the little ones is too weak and eat it to make sure there’s enough milk for the others.”

Leonardo locked his hands behind his head and looked up at the flowered lampshade, noticing the black shapes of dead flies inside the ridged glass bowl. One was much longer than the others: a huge wasp.

“Is that a metaphor?” he asked.

“Don’t use words like that with me. You being a professor doesn’t interest me in the least. You don’t even know how to light a fire without matches.”

Leonardo let his head fall back and dozed off. He was awoken by the cracking of his own feet as the woman squeezed them between her hands. He had no idea how much time had passed.

“There,” Adele said.

Leonardo got off the bed and slipped on his sandals. Adele looked at the notebook where she had divided the pages in two columns.

“You’ve already paid,” she said “Last time I hadn’t any change to give you.”

They went back to the kitchen where the pan on the stove was spreading a good smell of boiled vegetables and rosemary. Beyond the misted windows there was little light, but he could make out a pile of firewood and the white of the birches that formed a crown around the courtyard.

“Is Sebastiano at home?” Leonardo asked.

Adele took a piece of cheese wrapped in parchment paper from the refrigerator and put it on the table.

“He’s upstairs. Tell him supper’s ready.”

Leonardo climbed the stairs and went along the corridor that led to two bedrooms and the bathroom. Sebastiano’s door was closed. Leonardo knocked and looked around the door. The room was tidy with nothing but a single bed, a wardrobe with two doors, a writing desk, and a bookcase. On the walls were a crucifix and a poster of Machu Picchu. Sebastiano was standing by the window. Leonardo knew that the night before he must have seen the glare of the fire.

“No one was hurt,” he said.

Sebastiano turned, showing his hollow cheeks and humped nose. He was ten years younger than Leonardo, but a bald head surrounded by thin hair made him look older. An African totem pole in a sweat suit.

“I need a hand with the grape harvest,” Leonardo said. “Can you help me?”

Sebastiano nodded, parting his lips to show extra-large teeth.

“Thanks,” Leonardo said. “Your mother’s waiting. See you tomorrow then.”

As he closed the door, Sebastiano turned back to the window. Leonardo went downstairs and back into the kitchen. Adele had served the soup.

“Will you stay?” she said.

“Thanks, but I’m tired. I think I’ll read a bit and go to bed.”

“You should always go to bed early and get up early. But you sleep too much, walk too little, and are always reading. If you were a man who works with his hands it would be all right, but people like you need to do a lot of walking.”

“I could always become someone who works with his hands,” said Leonardo, smiling.

“You’re too old now to be any different. And you’ve done too much studying.”

The courtyard was dark and there was a faint smell of fruit in the air. Leonardo went to the bicycle, which he had leaned against a wall. Adele watched from the doorway.

“When the time comes, you should take Sebastiano with you,” she said.

Leonardo put down the leg he had raised to mount the saddle.

“When the time comes for what?”

“When the time comes to go.”

“But I’ve no intention of going anywhere,” he smiled.

Adele touched first one eye and then the other to indicate either exhaustion or far-sightedness. On her cheeks was a complicated pattern of wrinkles and veins.

“But that’s what you should do all the same.”

Leonardo accidentally touched his bicycle bell and its trill spread through the courtyard. The surrounding silence was so complete it seemed the sound would radiate away to infinity without meeting an obstacle. He felt a great need for his own armchair, with a cup of coffee in his hand and a book on his knee.

“Ever since he was a child Sebastiano has talked in his sleep,” his mother said. “I often go into his room to listen. He talks to people who are no longer alive and others who are yet to come. Take him with you, he’ll be useful to you.”

Sebastiano could be heard coming down the stairs. He passed behind Adele.

“You’re right to finish harvesting the grapes,” the woman said, looking up at the sky where a modest moon was shining.

“It’s not good to let grapes rot. A sign people are going mad. Like not combing your hair or washing yourself. People sometimes come to me with dirty feet and when they realize it they apologize by saying ‘No wonder with what’s happening!’ But your feet are always clean. You haven’t gone mad yet.”

Suddenly the geese began honking for no reason and Adele shut them up with a cry Leonardo had heard Mongolian shepherds use to make dromedaries run, and then she dismissed him and went back into the house.

Leaving the yard, Leonardo cycled down the pathway as far as the road and once on the asphalt started in the opposite direction to the village. After ten meters or so he braked sharply and, laying the bicycle on the ground, took a few quick steps into the field by the road, opened his fly, and released a powerful jet of urine. It was the effect the massage had on him.

Going back to the bicycle he noticed something among the lights on the plain that was full of life yet at the same time deeply saddening.

A great fire burning under the nearest hills was sending up an enormous column of smoke. It must have involved a whole group of houses or a large factory because the flames were coming from such a wide base.

Seven years earlier, on the same day and at about the same hour, he had been sitting at the desk in his study about to read an essay on The Outsider by Camus written by a student named Clara Carpigli; at that moment all he could have said of her was that she was a young woman with fair skin and raven-black hair who used to sit near the front at his lectures. It was the last piece of work he planned to correct before going into the dining room where Alessandra was waiting with their supper.

At the end of the essay a piece of paper was clipped to the page with three lines on it written in ink between inverted commas.

Starting from that moment, delicate glances, a couple of notes, and a coffee, gradually transformed Clara Carpigli into a face, a way of walking, an increased heartbeat, and an expectation. He knew well that many of his teaching and writing colleagues were in the habit of making the most of their status as maestri with dinners, weekends, and nights with women students or lecturers, but though he never moralized, he had always liked to think of himself as different.

Then a month later he left home for an out-of-town restaurant where a girl twenty years his junior was waiting for him with no legitimate reason for meeting him anywhere other than in the lecture rooms of the university.

Three days later, by midday, the grapes had been harvested.

Elio drove the tractor he had borrowed from his uncle into the yard, loaded with the final baskets, and they went into the house for a bite to eat. Leonardo had avoided the village since the night of the fire and there was nothing left in the larder except pasta and cans, but Gabri had given her husband a pan to heat up containing vegetables, anchovies, and breadcrumbs.

They sat down at the table and began devouring the food in big spoonfuls while Bauschan watched from the corner where he was lying, half closing his eyes from time to time like an employer not quite trusting his workforce.