Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

Leonardo fixed his eyes on a crumb on the table.

One September more than twenty years before he and Alessandra had gone to the sea together.

They had known each other for two weeks and had caught a midmorning train, lunched in a restaurant at the port, then walked as far as the town boundary. The sun was sinking, but the day was still open and luminous. Alessandra had suggested going for a swim, but he had excused himself because he had no bathing suit and had sat with his hands on his knees, watching the slow movements of her arms rising and falling in the water, raising weak, soundless splashes of spray. During that half hour, he had had a chance to measure his own inadequacy compared to this woman who had traveled, worked in Germany, and known the daring, cultivated and ambitious men whose names frequently came up in their conversations.

Seeing her emerge from the water in her one-piece, her skin suntanned and ribs prominent under the close-fitting cloth, he had experienced a fierce urge to possess her, a primitive need to make her body his property. An entirely amoral egoism.

They had spent that first night in a small hotel out of sight of the sea, methodically exploring each other’s bodies. By morning Leonardo had known that Alessandra’s sacrum stuck out in an altogether unusual way and that her right breast was smaller and more sensitive than the left, though he did not have the experience to judge whether the fact that her clitoris stiffened and relaxed with almost mathematical regularity, like the breathing of a tiny lung, was a special quality in her or a trait common to most women.

Alessandra crushed her cigarette against the saucer. There had been a time when, far from annoying her, the processes of Leonardo’s mind had seemed to her to have the seductive power of a closed box. But that time was past.

“I must have an answer,” she said.

Leonardo moved his glass in a little circle.

November was a thoroughly wet month, lashed by a cold wind that deposited white sand on the windowsills. Something more typical of summer.

Great flocks of birds traced patterns with changing contours all day from north to west in the windy sky. Their passage was noticeable even at night, like an endlessly moving curtain in a dark room.

Halfway through the month several handwritten notices appeared, summoning residents to the elementary school gym on the evening of the twenty-second. They were signed by the deputy mayor and the only remaining member of the Council.

On the evening of the meeting, two hundred people gathered in the building. Some had brought greetings with them or permission to vote by proxy from relatives who had not felt like coming out, but even so the general impression was one of great distress; a year earlier the village had had more than a thousand inhabitants.

The most striking thing was the gray, discouraged faces of those who gathered in the hall. Each person’s despair seemed to reflect that of the others, and soon a timid initial buzz of conversation was succeeded by a deafening silence. The deputy mayor took the chair and, using an amplifying system borrowed from the local tourist office, read out the agenda.

First there was the problem of gasoline, medications, and heating. Discussing this did not take long, because no one knew anything that had not already been common knowledge for some time: all they could do was confirm that there was no gas left and that medication was only obtainable from the hospitals, which would only help the most pressing cases. As for heating, as things were at present there was no point in hoping for a supply of fuel oil or methane. Anyone with a wood-burning stove would be able to face the winter calmly, and those without had permission to take wood-burning ranges and stoves from abandoned homes. The deputy mayor, a short man whose remaining side hair was long enough to have been combed not just once over his bald head but back again as well, stated that the regulation requiring a chimney at least a meter high for the discharge of smoke was suspended, and anyone could arrange a chimney pipe in any way he liked.

The second item on the agenda dealt with the presence of outsiders in the area.

Many had seen strangers in the forest or on the riverbank and smoke rising every day from the hills as evidence of the increasing numbers of people camping there. Then there was the theft of fruit from orchards and the danger that the intruders, whether outsiders or not, might become so numerous and bold as to approach inhabited areas. Someone mentioned what had happened in A., where the supermarkets had been taken by assault, and in V., where inmates had escaped from the prison. Definite information was supplemented by rumors, inferences, and fears. It was decided that several volunteers would patrol the district the next morning and drive away anyone who had no good reason for being there. Two squads were formed, each of about a dozen men, mostly hunters with rifles. A third squad would stay in the village to protect it, since neither the local police nor the carabinieri were any longer in a position to do so.

But the most controversial item on the agenda was the last one, the change of hour from daylight-saving summer time to standard time. With both radio and television off the air, no one could be sure that this had actually happened, and in some neighboring communities the clocks had not been put back. When the shouting began, the parish priest, Don Piero, who had been silent until then, spoke up in favor of standard time and stated that if anyone decided otherwise he would stop the mechanism that regulated the church clock.

When the meeting broke up, a few groups continued the discussion for several minutes in the unlit square, until faint but chilly rain dispersed even the most heated disputants.

Leonardo and Elio waited for the square to empty, and then they walked as far as the belvedere and looked down at the plain beneath: few lights were moving on the road, and they belonged to freight escorted by the National Guard. The long line of cars had disappeared a few days after the frontier was closed.

“We’ll be leaving in a few days,” Elio said. “Gabri’s sister has gotten us passes. We’ll pay whatever we have to. It seems some people in the mountain crossing points have been waiting for days even though all their documents are in order.”

Two shadows passed in the street: a couple who lived beyond the gas station. The woman turned and saw them but offered no greeting. When they passed under the solitary street lamp their breath formed a fluorescent halo. It made Leonardo think of the soul.

“You and the children could come with us,” Elio said when the couple were some distance away. “It’s going to become more and more difficult to get away.”

Leonardo nodded, then he remarked that by spring things would be better.

Elio lit a cigarette. His father had been a heavy smoker, but he himself hardly smoked at all. He drew on his cigarette a few times in silence. Only three lighted windows could be seen anywhere near; the rest were all dark or barred.

“In the Frontier Guard,” he said, “we were divided into two squads. One to control the frontier, the other to operate a few kilometers further on in the valley.”

He stopped as if searching with his tongue for some small object caught between his teeth. The rain was lightly touching the umbrella over their heads.

“When unauthorized groups showed up, the first squad would demand payment to let them through, and if they had no money they would ask if they were prepared to lend their women for an hour or two. If they refused, they were sent back and if they agreed, they were let through. Then the other squad would intercept them further down, pack them into a truck and take them back over the border. The squads switched places once a week. I always wanted to stay in the valley. One day, while we were loading people on the truck, a man who had paid started shooting. That’s how I got a bullet in my lung.”