Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

Leonardo thought about it.

“How long would they take to get here?”

“We use a private security firm and they don’t much like to be called out. Once we had to wait two days.”

Leonardo looked at his own hands pressing on the desk: they were long, thin, and emaciated. The man continued to stare at him.

“Maybe you only had three cans and are making a mistake,” he said.

Looking up, Leonardo saw the boy’s back disappearing through the door he had come in by.

“I’m glad we were able to sort out this misunderstanding,” the man said, lowering his bald head over the counter. “You’ll find breakfast in the dining room.”

The room Leonardo entered had been divided by a plasterboard partition, from the far side of which kitchen and laundry noises could be heard.

The old lady Leonardo had met on the stairs was sitting at the table nearest to the door, while a fat man of about forty breakfasted by the window. He was apparently a commercial traveler, with two black cases leaning against either side of his chair. On a round table in the middle of the room were a pot, two Thermoses, some bread, a few cups, a rectangular block of margarine, and a bowl of jam of unappetizing color. A clock on the wall showed ten past eight. No staff could be seen.

Leonardo poured himself a cup of coffee and took it to one of the three free tables. He put his bag down and took a sip: real coffee diluted with carob.

It reminded him of a conference on the circularity of Tolstoy’s writing many years before in Madrid, and the dinner that had followed at a restaurant whose unmarked entrance had seemed like the way in to an ordinary block of flats. The chairman had been forced to spend the whole evening dealing with invective hurled by his wife against enemies of bullfighting. Most of those present must have been used to the woman’s heavy drinking and aggressive defense of this spectacle outlawed only a few months earlier by the government, and they seemed not to be bothered by it. Then, at the end of the evening, with the restaurant nearly empty, a young woman probably a student in the company of some lecturer whose more or less official mistress she was had sung a song she had written in which she maintained that love was nothing more than a means to an end. None of those present had either the strength or enough reverse experience to contradict her. The coffee they had then drunk, each imprisoned in his or her own guilty silence, had been like the coffee he had before him now, except that at that time you could still find decent coffee everywhere.

As he lifted the cup to his lips again Leonardo became aware that the old lady was looking at him. He nodded to her, but she continued to stare without responding. Her sparse hair had been built up into a gauze-like structure through which light weakly filtered from the skylight. Her fingers were covered with jewels and everything in her appearance seemed calculated and tense in some way about which it might almost have been blasphemous to speculate.

Leonardo took a book from one of the side pockets of his duffel bag and leafed through it until he found the story he was looking for.

It was a story he had read many times since the age of twenty-two, and for which he had always felt unconditional love. Both in moments of utter despair or fierce hope the story had always adapted itself to his mood, revealing itself for what it was: a perfect piece of design. He had always advised his students to read it, both those with literary ambitions and those who imagined that a man in his position must be able to offer them useful pearls of practical wisdom. Many years had passed since the last time anyone had expected any such thing from him, but if it ever happened again, now or in years to come, he was certain that his answer would have been the same: A Simple Heart , he would have said.

When he had finished reading Flaubert’s description of Madame Aubain, for whom Felicité was so ably performing her duty, he took another mouthful of coffee and it tasted better. The sun had come out in the courtyard and through the window he could see it reflected from the car windscreens. The incident of the oil can seemed remote and thus of little significance.

“I’ll be home by this evening,” he told himself.

Raising his eyes for a moment as he turned back to his book, he met those of the old lady, who had silently approached him.

“Please sit down,” he said, removing his duffel from the free chair.

The woman skirted the short side of the table and sat down. The skin between the few deep creases on her face seemed strangely young and taut. She had carefully outlined her lips with deep scarlet.

“I’m sure no one has recognized you,” the lady said.

Leonardo shut his book. The woman nodded severely.

“I couldn’t fail to. You’ve been one of the great delusions of my life.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I was so naïve. I spent years in the arts and should have realized better than anyone the huge gulf between the artist and the shabbiness of the man.”

Leonardo took a mouthful of coffee.

“What was your own field in the arts?”

The woman checked the architecture of her hair with her left hand.

“Opera. I was a contralto.”

Leonardo complimented her. The man at the other table was watching them; his heavy hands restless, the rest of his body motionless. Leonardo imagined he must be having ignoble thoughts.

“May I ask you a question?” the woman said.

“Please do.”

“After what happened, did you continue writing?”

“No, I stopped.”

The woman screwed up her eyes, as if reliving one of many memories.

“I could not sing for nearly two years when my daughter was born because of her health problems. I nearly went mad. And I don’t say this out of empathy with you. The situation I found myself in was very different from yours. I had done nothing wrong.”

Leonardo finished his coffee.

“Then you started again?”

“Of course,” the woman exclaimed. “One engagement after another. Not many contraltos can boast of singing until the age of fifty-two, but I had a voice other women could only dream of. I was on stage two days after I lost my son. Have you any idea what it means to lose a son and two days later find yourself singing Rigoletto in front of a thousand people?”

The fat man got up from his table and passed them on his way out.

“Good-bye,” the woman said.

“Good-bye,” he answered.

Leonardo followed the man with his eyes as far as the door. Rembrandt without the beard, he thought.

“An arms dealer,” the woman said. “Stays here two nights a month.”

Leonardo would have liked more coffee.

“Do you come here often?” he asked.

“I’ve been living here for a year. If that’s not often, I don’t know what is.”

The sound of the commercial traveler’s car attracted their eyes to the window. He maneuvered his luxury off-road vehicle and went out through the gate, which was being held open by the man from reception. The two acknowledged each other, and then the bald man closed the gate and padlocked it, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and slowly walked back.

“His car’s bulletproof,” the woman said. “That’s why he’s able to come and go as he pleases.”

Leonardo nodded and removed some perhaps nonexistent speck from his shoulder.

“Where did you live before you came here?” he asked.

“In P.,” the woman said. “But when this business with the outsiders started, my daughter persuaded me to move in with her. After a few months my son-in-law was called up for the National Guard and my daughter decided it would be safer to move to Switzerland. So I told her to go and find a house, then come back for me. She knew this place and brought me here so I’d be all right in the meantime.”