Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

Things gradually changed the closer he got to the town. It seemed as if everything had suddenly grown old: shop signs, warehouses, supermarkets, even the road signs: everything seemed faded and cold. The gas pumps looked like archaeological relics, and the trucks and car transporters cluttering up the open spaces were like tanks from some ancient war waiting to be overgrown with ivy and rust away.

He felt better when he saw several people walking along the station approach with shopping bags, pushchairs, and overnight bags. Bauschan watched the coming and going of the town without much interest and from time to time yawned with boredom.

They parked in the central square and Leonardo took from his pocket a rudimentary leash he had made the evening before from a piece of cord, a clip, and a piece of Scotch tape. Bauschan accepted this philosophically and walked without testing the fragility of the noose. The shops were open, but few of the passersby showed any interest in what was left in their windows. The tables outside the bars on the main street were empty.

The bank was on the ground floor of a building from the Fascist era, originally an agricultural cooperative and later a school. The entrance was protected by a National Guardsman with a submachine gun, bulletproof vest, and helmet. The young man demanded to see his papers and read the details into his transistor radio, asking Leonardo to be patient for a few minutes while his identity was established. The man’s cranium was like a crudely hewn block of marble.

Once approved, Leonardo was allowed inside, where another soldier, who was smaller in size, checked his documents again.

“Go ahead,” he said when he had finished.

The young cashier at the window was thorough. Leonardo still had just over ten thousand lire in his account and, as was made clear to him on a circular with an annexed table, customers were permitted to withdraw in cash up to between 10 and 20 percent of their total deposit, depending on its size. The rest would be available at a monthly rate, but in order to state this the young man looked away from Leonardo and fixed his gaze on the pen tied by a little chain to the marble surface of the counter.

Leonardo established that the sum in his account allowed him to take out 13 percent of his deposit and, while the young man was counting out the one thousand three hundred lire, Leonardo asked him for the latest news of gasoline, medications, and cigarettes.

The young man could not have been older than twenty-five.

“We are not qualified to give such information,” he answered.

Leonardo studied his red hair and the freckles that covered most of his face. He could easily have been one of the children forced to thieve in the muddy streets of London by the crafty Fagin.

“I understand,” he said.

The boy asked him to sign a piece of paper, which he placed on a pile reaching from the floor up to his elbow, and then gave him a serious look.

“After a theater reading two years ago,” he said, “you autographed a copy of The Roses Near the Fence for me. You won’t remember, but I told you about a novel I was writing. You shook my hand and told me to keep at it.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t remember. And did you keep at it?”

The boy looked across at the girls moving between desks cluttered with papers and large registers on the other side of the great hall. For the first time, he seemed aware of his surroundings.

“No.”

“You’re very young, you can easily begin writing again.”

The bank clerk shook his head.

“I’m twenty-seven, but that’s neither here nor there. May I give you some advice?”

“Please do.”

“Don’t count on the money still in your account.”

Leonardo placed a hand on the marble counter and realized it was not cold.

“Thank you very much. Thanks to your sincerity I think I have an exact picture of the situation.”

“So far as is possible,” the young man added placidly.

“So far as is possible,” Leonardo agreed.

Leaving the bank, he walked through the town in no particular direction.

He spoke to a policeman, a priest who was painting a side door to the church, and a woman selling household objects from an improvised stall. He learned that the little gasoline still available was reserved for security, hospitals, and the local services, while medication could only be obtained from the hospital and a couple of authorized pharmacies, with the available drugs all requiring prescriptions, which only doctors were allowed to issue for the most serious emergencies. As for cigarettes, the woman said he would have no problem finding these in the district around the racetrack.

On his way back to the car, he saw a group of teenagers standing in front of a bar. Some had shiny quilted jackets and others tank tops or T-shirts with slogans in large letters, but all were wearing shades, tight-fitting trousers, and white sneakers and were talking in loud voices, their bodies nervous with unpredictable energy.

He crossed the road. Sitting on the steps of the bar were two girls in heavy makeup, who seemed to be waiting for some sort of response before deciding for whom they were destined. As they waited, they seemed entirely at ease.

Hearing a whistle, Leonardo decided the boys were trying to attract the attention of the dog, but immediately afterward the first insults reached him. He quickened his pace without turning around. He still had about twenty meters to go to the end of the block, where he would turn the corner and be out of their sight.

As he calculated the distance something small and hard hit him on the neck. For a moment he was stunned, but he kept going. Other coins struck the wall beside him and fell to the pavement; the dog, attracted by the noise, stopped abruptly and snapped his lead. Leonardo hurriedly bent to pick him up, but on straightening up again was hit by a fierce pain in his back.

He struggled on, double over and with tears in his eyes, terrified that at any moment a hand might grab hold of his jacket. His loud breathing drowned out every other sound, and he became aware that a thread of dribble was running from the right of his mouth.

Rounding the corner he still felt unsafe, and he made his way to the next corner where a small group was waiting in front of a large door. He passed them without looking up and rounded another corner and then leaned on a wall to catch his breath. Very soon he felt his legs give way, and he collapsed. He stayed like this for several minutes and saw the feet of two men pass him. Neither stopped to see how he was. Bauschan stared at him in despair, now and then licking his lips.

“It’s nothing,” he said to reassure the dog.

But it took him an hour to reach the square where he had parked the car.

When he got there the clock was striking one. He slaked his thirst at a small fountain in a little public garden where a woman was sleeping on a park bench.

He sat in the car and mopped the sweat gluing his hair to his forehead. After a few minutes his breathing steadied and the pain in his back became less intense. He gingerly took off his jacket: his sweat-soaked shirt had turned a light grayish-blue, but he had nothing to change into. Bauschan watched him, wagging his tail from the seat beside him.

“Home now,” he told the dog, then remembered the cigarettes. He did not feel like waiting for the shops to open again for the afternoon, or walking about in the hope of picking up more information, so he decided to drive around the area the woman had recommended, only stopping if he noticed a shop was still open. It was a district that had grown up at the end of the last century around the old motor-racing circuit: streets of detached houses and modest blocks of apartments for the middle class, a superstore, a bank, and a health center with a sauna and swimming pool.