Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

Though he had not heard Lucia speak for seven long years, he had immediately recognized her language, while the boy remained an indecipherable hieroglyph. An idiom invented by goodness knows who to express goodness knows what. A box closed from the inside.

In a dream the night before, Leonardo had found himself in the middle of a desolate expanse with no vegetation, sitting in front of a man with strange marks on his skin. The countryside around them was flat, without mountains or trees, or even a church tower or the outline of a building; there was no dust or stones or fragments of anything that could ever have existed: the earth was an immense expanse of solidified amber. Eventually the man opened his hand to show a little object unlike anything Leonardo had ever seen before or that he had ever heard anyone speak of. Then after saying a single word the man let himself slip to the ground, turning into burned paper, which was immediately blown away by the wind. Leonardo was left alone with the little object in his hand and that one incomprehensible word to define it, and small marks began appearing on his skin.

Feeling cold, he went to put another log on the fire to make the flames climb the chimney again, and then he closed the door of the stove. Going back to the sofa, he stroked Bauschan between the ears, and the dog rolled onto his back to show where he wanted to be scratched. Leonardo obliged. Ever since he had given his bedroom to the children, the dog had taken to spending the night with him in the living room, curled up beside the stove. He had been of a mild and meditative nature from the start. His eyes were like blue steel buttons on a shabby military tunic.

“Here I am,” Lucia said.

They made some herbal tea and sat down at the table.

Leonardo talked for twenty minutes without any interruption from Lucia and by the time he had finished the tea was cold.

He drank it all the same, in small sips, while Lucia contemplated the night beyond the veranda, her face expressing a subtle disappointment, as if she had just discovered that the heavy backpack she had been carrying for so long was only half full of food but otherwise contained nothing but rocks and useless knick-knacks she could have gotten rid of long ago.

“Mamma won’t be coming back, will she?”

Leonardo stopped lifting his cup to his lips and put it back down on the table.

“I’m sure she will come back,” he said.

Lucia went on looking out at the darkness beyond the window. She had a small beauty spot above her lip and an extremely graceful neck.

“She said one week and now four have passed.”

“Sometimes you have to stay where you’re safe. I’m sure that’s what she must be doing. As soon as things settle down a bit, she’ll be back on the road.”

Lucia looked at her cup, identical to her father’s but yellow.

“I must tell you something I haven’t told you before,” she said.

“You don’t have to.”

“Yes I do. Mamma said I must.”

Leonardo waited in silence. Lucia looked up, pale and serious.

“She said if she didn’t come back in two weeks, to give our permits to you and tell you to take us to Switzerland.”

Leonardo touched his shoe. He had an idea the laces had come loose, but that was not so.

“Even so, I think it’s better we wait for her here,” he said. “With the money she left we can buy all we need. The important thing is to keep warm and not get ill.”

Lucia looked down at her cup again. A fly that had been walking on the middle of the table flew away.

“Mamma told me you talk like this.”

“Like what?”

She raised a shoulder.

“Like everything’s always fine. She said she couldn’t stand it.”

The two men were caught a few days later in an isolated house on the main road not far from the village.

The proprietors, a couple with a three-year-old son, he a central-heating and plumbing engineer and she a nurse, had left at the beginning of September with the idea of getting to Marseilles and taking a flight to Canada, where they had relatives. The house, hidden behind a line of acacias and an ancient elm, was no sooner empty than it was raided by thieves who had first removed everything of any possible value and subsequently what was utterly worthless, too.

If they had resisted the temptation to light a fire, in all probability the two men would have been able to stay there for weeks, perhaps even for months, without anyone noticing. But the cold and the absence of cars on the road must have convinced them that the risk of detection was minimal. Then Giampaolo Sobrero, on his way to R. on his Ape three-wheeler to barter a cylinder of gas for a kerosene stove, noticed smoke from the chimney.

Returning to the village, he told his friend Massimo Torchio and they went together to the bar where the men whose job it was to watch over inhabited properties were warming themselves. They all agreed something had to be done, but not knowing who or what they would find in the house, they decided to wait for the patrol. This had already been in action for a couple of weeks with meager results; all they had been able to find was a shelter made from branches and scraps of nylon behind a wall of tufa rock. There had been footprints, excrement, and rabbit bones around it, but nothing to suggest the shelter was still in use.

When the squads came back, it was getting dark, and it was decided to put the expedition off until the next day. They took advantage of the wait to sum up their view of the situation: in the last few weeks rabbits, firewood, and poultry had been disappearing from the more isolated farmsteads, and Vigio from the Marchesa farm had lost a calf. Giovanni Alessandria’s eldest daughter claimed she had been followed by a man on her way back from the orchard. She had not been able to see his face clearly, but he was an outsider and had run off only when she reached the first houses and called out in a loud voice for someone to come out. Everyone knew Rita was not a woman to be easily scared and still less to invent stories. She had had a boyfriend from Luxembourg who had gotten up to all kinds of tricks, but eventually she had gotten out of the relationship with her house and cellar intact and her head held high, while he ended up as a door-to-door salesman for a big frozen-food chain on the Côte d’Azur.

The next morning some twenty men armed with hunting rifles took the road for R. When they reached the house indicated by Sobrero, they surrounded it. No smoke was coming from the chimney, but there was a strong smell of firewood and burned hides.

The director of the local tourist office, Vincenzo Maina, yelled out for the occupants to surrender and come out with their hands up, but there was no sign from the house. Norina’s husband then fired his rifle twice into the wall, dislodging a piece of plaster the size and shape of a cello. As the fragments fell they raised a little cloud of blue dust immediately dampened by the drizzle and a few crows took off from the roof. A few moments later a shutter on the second floor squeaked and a hand emerged waving a shirt the color of sugarcane.

The two men were forced to kneel in the middle of the courtyard while the leader of the patrol searched the house. The rooms were empty and the furniture had been broken up and burned, as had the upholstery and parquet. The only room with its floor intact was one on the second floor where they had rigged up a cast-iron stove and a couple of mattresses. By the wall were bags of fruit and vegetables, a can of water, and a suitcase full of clothes, among them a fur and a coat. Three rabbit skins had been stretched out on a line to dry.

Once the search was over the outsiders were interrogated: Where are you from? Why did you go into the house? Don’t you know you shouldn’t trespass? Where did you get your vegetables, fruit, and clothes? Did you steal a calf from Vigio at the Marchesa farm?