Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

The last time Leonardo had been there, six months before, the health center was already closed and the superstore had been transformed into a depository for scrap metal, but the houses still looked attractive with well-kept gardens, windows decorated with vases of flowers, and brightly polished brass doorbells. Everything had given an impression of serenity and quiet living.

As he approached, he began to be aware of the coming and going of people walking and cycling at the edge of the road, all carrying a wide variety of objects. A kilometer further, the first stalls appeared, and the throng of buyers and sellers grew until the road was completely blocked. Leonardo drove into a field that must once have been used for soccer, where hundreds of cars had been parked randomly. He left Bauschan in the car, the leash was broken and he was afraid of losing him in the confusion.

He moved through the mob with tiny steps because of the pain in his back. People were pushing and shoving as they struggled to get a look at stalls displaying clothes, furniture, electrical goods, lamps, alcoholic drinks in bottles, plates, tablecloths, curtains, sanitary appliances, and every kind of household goods.

At the beginning of their relationship, Alessandra had sometimes dragged him to villages and small towns where dealers in used goods and simple ransackers of cellars and attics displayed their merchandise, amusing themselves by haggling and claiming emotional links with horrible paintings and ancient chamber pots of every description. But what Leonardo saw now was quite different. Many of the sellers looked as if they were trying to make a little money by offloading things they would not be able to take away with them. The bargaining was fast and ferocious and colored the proceedings with a dismal air of misfortune and speculation.

In front of the racetrack gates were several armed guards who seemed to be neither from the police or the National Guard but from some sort of private militia specially created for the occasion. They were distinguishable by their orange caps and badges.

He crossed in front of their arrogant gaze and, passing through a tunnel, came out on tiers of steps. A huge crowd was circulating among tables displaying merchandise, producing the same indistinct buzz or hum as a swarm of insects.

Dizziness forced him to lean against a wall and, like a drowning man, he grabbed the nearest arm. The man jerked himself free and began moving away then changed his mind and turned back. Leonardo apologized.

“I’m looking for cigarettes,” he said.

The man smiled, showing a gold tooth.

Half an hour later Leonardo was driving toward the hills, the town now behind him. On the rear seat were four cartons of cigarettes for which he had paid more than two hundred lire, an excessive price even allowing for the fact that they were foreign, possibly Turkish; they were undoubtedly remainders stored long past their sell-by date, but he believed the village’s smokers would welcome them just the same.

He left the cigarettes with Elio, telling his friend to sell them at whatever price he could get; it would be enough if he could get back what he had spent on them. Elio, noticing he was having difficulty with the steps, asked him what had happened. Leonardo said he had strained a muscle getting out of the car and needed to lie down for a bit.

When he got home he found his most recent letter, mailed a month earlier, had been accurately returned to sender, evidence that for some bizarre reason the postal system was still working, at least in his case. Somehow the familiar disappointment comforted him and his backache seemed less painful.

As he prepared Bauschan’s lunch, he hummed Brahms’s song “ Gestillte Sehnsucht” and then, while the dog ate, collapsed on the sofa and closed his eyes.

When he woke up it was dark. He had no idea of the time but looked neither at the watch on his wrist nor the clock on the wall. He simply stared at the night through the glass door of the veranda, a fragment of sky in which two very bright stars were shining, and wept for at least a quarter of an hour.

He remembered the last time he had wept like this, eight years before.

His relationship with Clara had been going on for several months, but they had never slept together. Leonardo had not felt like taking her with him on his trips to attend conferences and give lectures, and when he was in the city, family demands prevented him being away at night. On this particular occasion, Alessandra had gone to Paris to review an exhibition by an American artist who constructed perpetual-motion machines out of refuse, and Lucia had been excused school for two days to go with her.

That evening, after dining in Clara’s little apartment, they had gone to bed and Clara had made sure he came on her stomach. Then they had examined the shape of the pool of semen on her belly and invented resemblances as one does with the shapes of clouds. Then she had taken a pen from the bedside table and asked him to draw its outline on her before she went to the bathroom. He continued to lie there gazing at the large rose on the ceiling, meditating on the gift of love this young woman was presenting him with. Then, aware of being in the presence of some form of perfection, he had wept, the way an old man can weep when he recognizes in a child a turn of speech or gesture that had been his own in his youth.

Leaving the bathroom, Clara had come back to lie down naked beside him, her belly still marked by the ballpoint pen.

“Shall we always do it?” she had asked.

Leonardo had said yes.

The next time he had been on the point of tears had been seven months later, when the polaroid photographs of the drawings had been shown in court by Clara’s lawyer as evidence of the deviant sexual practices to which the well-known writer and university lecturer had subjected the young woman, with the threat of interrupting her career at the university as well as her doctoral degree.

Leonardo got to his feet and moved slowly toward the bathroom. The sight of himself in the mirror disturbed him.

There seemed to be new wrinkles around his eyes, and his cheeks had sagged to reveal sharp cheekbones. His body was drying up; soon he would be nothing but a husk, an old man in a world where speed and determination were necessary.

Why had he not faced those boys? He should have stopped and told them off. They were nothing but badly reared children, and he was a man of fifty who could have been their father.

In the gentle middle-class world he had inhabited until a few months before, his timidity had always been mistaken for moderation; the mediocre music his instrument played joining with others in an uninspired orchestra, but now everything was changing and there would no longer be any melody for him to harmonize with.

He rubbed painkilling cream into his back and dried his hair; the weather had changed and he was afraid that the cold air might bring on a migraine; then he put on his pajamas and went to bed.

Just before he fell asleep he felt for the first time that he was beginning to understand the true dreadfulness of what was happening. It was the beginning of a new age, a naked age that seemed likely to last and whose key word would be “without,” just as the key word of the previous age had been “with.”

But even the black glue paralyzing his thoughts could not keep him awake.

On the first Thursday in November a car came into the courtyard, and after making a slow half-moon on the gravel, stopped with its hood toward the way out.

Leonardo was sitting in one of the armchairs on the veranda with a fleece over his knees. He lowered the book he was reading and watched the woman who got out of the car as though she were merely a couple of hours late, whereas in fact he had not seen his wife for six years.