Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

“You’ve got to do something!” Alberto said.

Leonardo merely held Bauschan close and kept his eyes fixed on the house. Alberto, a few centimeters away, stared at his pale, thin, well-shaved face.

“Let’s go and call someone,” he said, pulling Leonardo by the jacket.

“No!” Leonardo said. “Let’s wait for them to go.”

“But they’ve taken over the house!”

“Shut up!” Lucia said.

By the time the door opened again the church clock had long since struck four and the sun had set behind the mountains. A flat, almost rosy haze had shut off the sky to the north. Two men and the woman brought out bags and suitcases. The older man was wearing Leonardo’s camelhair coat and leather gloves. His hair was an unnatural gray as though ash had fallen on his head. The plump young woman at his side was in a T-shirt. Under her arm was Lucia’s vanity case and a bag containing a packet of biscuits and a bottle of wine. The younger man, the one in the biker jacket, was carrying the stereo. They went around to the back of the house. Leonardo and the children heard the sound of an approaching engine and a few seconds later a gray car slipped through the gate and disappeared behind the mulberry trees skirting the road.

They stayed kneeling in the mud for another minute or two, then Leonardo released Bauschan. The dog moved a few meters away and urinated at length, at the same time giving Leonardo an afflicted look as if unsure whether he had passed whatever test he had been set.

“Bravo, Bauschan,” Leonardo said to reassure him.

Every drawer in the kitchen had been pulled out and turned over on the floor. Leonardo moved toward the table where the intruders had left a pan covered with tomato sauce, a bottle of coffee liqueur, and a few eggshells; then he turned toward Lucia, who had stayed close to the door. He stared at the plates, cutlery and CDs strewn across the floor amid flour and detergents.

“Let’s tidy up a bit,” he said to her.

She said nothing but wept in silence. Leaning against the doorway, her face at a slight angle, she was like a seventeenth-century Madonna with skin as impalpable as moonlight yet enthralling the viewer’s gaze. Behind her, Alberto was holding back Bauschan so he would not cut his paws on the broken glass.

Going down the corridor, Leonardo glanced into the bathroom: among the bottles and containers emptied at random he thought he could also see plaster rubble, but did not go in to check. In the bedroom there was a suffocating smell of urine, and the clothes the raiders had not taken away were lying slashed and piled up in a corner in a many-colored mountain someone must have pissed on.

“What would they have done if we’d been here?” Lucia asked, looking into the room.

Leonardo noticed the bedcover was stained with blood. Not a large patch with sharp contours, but more as if something had been rubbed against it. He said nothing but opened the window and then went to Lucia and gave her a hug.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll sort it out.”

They were careful not to tread on the small eighteenth-century maps lying on the corridor floor among fragments of frame and glass. In the kitchen Bauschan was licking something. Leonardo lifted the dog’s head to check what it was but realizing it was peanut butter, let him continue. Alberto was neither there nor on the veranda.

Leonardo found him in the studio with his hands behind his back. He was looking through the window, toward the vineyard and hillside, now indistinguishable in the dusk.

“All OK?” he asked.

Alberto went on staring at whatever he was looking at. There was a terrible stench in the room. Someone had defecated on the desk and scattered Leonardo’s collection of letters over the floor. The walls were stained with the bloody imprints of hands that had taken on the color of the brickwork.

The woman was menstruating, Leonardo thought, and she must have coupled with one man in the bed and with the other here against the wall.

Such thoughts slipping so easily into his mind frightened him. A year ago such stains would have made him think of Basquiat’s paintings or the caves of Lascaux. A year ago such an image of entwined bodies would never have sprung so vividly and realistically into his mind. And he would never have thought of words like “menstruation” and “coupled” to describe it. Perhaps this was what barbarism was, he thought: a new vocabulary gradually taking over with new images. The first word was the Trojan horse. Which polluted the well and reproduced itself. Sickness. Cholera.

He looked at Alberto and gave him a smile.

“Let’s go out,” he said.

The boy took a few paces toward the door as if to do so but instead stepped up to Leonardo and unleashed a punch at the base of his stomach.

Leonardo doubled over in pain and Alberto punched him again, this time on the nose and in the left eye. During the few seconds this took neither of them uttered a sound, then Alberto left the room.

Leonardo prostrated himself on the floor like a beggar about to start his day’s work.

His testicles were throbbing and pain was spreading through his whole body. Even his buttocks had gone rigid, perhaps from some sort of muscular contraction, and he could not breathe because his whole body seemed to have petrified around the pain. His first breath was like the first breath taken after birth and he imagined it must have been taken with equal desperation. He studied his slightly trembling hands. Like the hands of a pianist told that from now on every piano will be destroyed and he will need his hands to extract all his food from fields that until then had simply been somewhere to walk while thinking out a more subtle interpretation of a prelude by Chopin.

No living creature had ever before deliberately hit him to cause pain; he had never fought as a child and his parents had never slapped him to punish him. Now, at fifty-three, he had been called to account and found wanting.

He could hear Lucia in the kitchen telling Bauschan not to do something, and then her footsteps came in his direction. When Leonardo tried to stand he was stopped by a sharp pain in his testicles.

“Are you looking for something?” Lucia said.

Without turning he moved a few of the pieces of paper on the floor. A drop of blood fell on one.

“Something I wrote.”

“Would you like me to help you?”

“No. Stay with Alberto.”

“They’ve taken his electronic game.”

Leonardo nodded without looking up from the floor.

“Wait outside, both of you. Take Bauschan with you.”

There was no sound of the girl’s shoes moving. Leonardo began rummaging among his papers again. Blood was pouring from his nose and he realized his eyes were full of tears.

“Papa?” said the girl after a little.

“Yes.”

“They’ve taken all the sanitary napkins.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll find some more.”

“But it’s difficult!”

“We’ll find some, I promise, now please go away. I’m trying to do a bit of tidying.”

Leonardo heard her footsteps move into the living room. When he was certain he was alone he took his handkerchief from his pocket and blotted his nose. The box of letters was by the wall. Some had been opened, perhaps in search of money, and then torn up, but most seemed intact. He collected them and put them back in the box together with the torn pieces, then picked the box up and carried it into the kitchen. His nose had stopped bleeding and the pain in his testicles seemed to have dulled and spread into his belly. He could hear the children’s voices in the yard trying to keep the dog outside.

He put the box of letters down on the sofa and took a brush, dustpan, and trash bags from beside the sink. He decided to start with the bathroom.