Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

“If you’d like one, I think I could arrange it.”

“Thanks, but I think I’d rather not.”

Norina took his money and put the banknotes into the cash register.

“Pay attention to a woman who has never had the advantage of education,” Norina said, pushing his change across the counter. “Please get a gun. It won’t be a waste of money.”

That evening, playing about with the radio, they hit on a station broadcasting fairly recent Italian pop songs interspersed with commercials for furniture manufacturers and department stores that had probably long since gone bankrupt or been plundered. The songs and recorded voices sounded mocking in light of the present situation, but they stopped to listen all the same. Lucia had heated a huge pot of water and taken it into the bathroom to wash her long black hair. Now she was sitting in front of the stove with wet hair down to her shoulders as she listened to those voices from what seemed an unbelievably distant past. Leonardo, also listening, felt an agonizing pang of nostalgia for those superstores, furrier’s shops, and beauticians he had never been to, which had once even opened on Sunday mornings. Some of his writing and teaching colleagues had always been ready to rant furiously against those temples of consumerism while others preferred to see them as phenomena to be monitored, analyzed, and classified. Leonardo had never inclined to either view because he had never held opinions about the matter. On the occasions when he had set foot in any of these places he had never really felt at ease, but the same could be said of his visits to the opera. But he had noticed that no one coming out of any such place was likely to have noticed what its ceiling was like.

“Papa?”

“Yes?”

“Did they take all the money Mamma left for us?”

“Not all of it.”

“How much is left?”

“What I had in my pocket. A bit less than a hundred lire.”

“That’s not much.”

“No. You’re right.”

“And the rest of it?”

“Was in the desk drawer.”

“Not a great place to hide it.”

“I agree.”

The radio played a song in which a man and a woman took turns describing what they could see from their window. They lived in neighboring apartments in the same building but reached by different staircases, so they had never met. They were both looking for love, but were divided by a wall seventeen centimeters thick. The title of the song was “The Seventeen-Centimeter Wall.” It was not very well written, but to Leonardo the idea behind it was attractive. Thinking of the building the two must have lived in, he imagined a concrete parallelepiped shape, like the home of the protagonist in some film Kieślowski had shot for Polish television.

He got up and poured water into a small pan that had been draining in the sink.

“Herb tea?”

Lucia shook her head. Leonardo placed the pan on the wood stove and a few drops of water from its wet base ran sizzling toward the edge of the hot surface.

“You should have something hot before going to bed. Do you good.”

The girl touched a small fragment of bread on the table with her finger. It was rye bread, dark enough to blend in with the doodles on the oilcloth. She turned it around and pushed it away. Her hair was nearly dry.

“We have to leave,” she said. “If we stay here something nasty will happen to us.”

Leonardo took a cup and dropped in an herbal teabag that had already been used more than once. The small jar of honey Adele had given them was half empty. He let a few drops slip into the cup and put the top back on the jar.

“We have enough money to last a few months,” he said, sitting down, “and things are bound to be better in the spring.”

“Don’t be stupid,” the girl said sharply. “Nothing will be better at all.”

Bauschan half opened one eye and looked at them as they faced each other across the table. The stove crackled.

“I’m sorry,” Lucia said.

“It’s all right.”

“No, really, I didn’t mean that.”

Leonardo smiled to show it was not important. He lifted the cup to his lips and took two small sips.

“We don’t have enough gasoline to get to Switzerland,” he said.

“We can buy some.”

“We don’t have enough money for that.”

Lucia took the little piece of bread on another circuit, bringing it back to the place where she had first found it.

“There was some money with the permits too. I hid it and they didn’t find it.”

Leonardo watched the steam rising from the big green mug in his hands. It must have been the mug Elio’s young son drank his milk from in the mornings. On it was the logo of a popular amusement park; until recently you could get there and back in a day.

“Are you angry?” Lucia said.

“Why should I be?”

“Maybe I’ve said something to make you cross.”

Leonardo shook his head. “You’ve been really clever.”

Lucia crushed the fragment of black bread against the table, dividing it into three bits of different sizes. Two months of housework had strengthened her shoulders and little veins had appeared on the backs of her hands.

“Papa?”

“Yes?”

“I’d like to ask you something.”

“Go on.”

“You won’t be angry?”

“No.”

Lucia shifted all her hair to her right shoulder. It was soft and shiny.

“When that girl denounced you, why didn’t you defend yourself? Why didn’t you tell people she’d set the whole thing up to blackmail you? Then maybe you and Mamma would have stayed together.”

Leonardo looked away from his daughter’s black eyes. Outside the window the snow had begun falling again.

“I didn’t want her to suffer.”

“Who?”

“The girl.”

Lucia looked at him as one might look at something whose very existence one doubts even though one has it before one’s eyes, then she looked down at the divided fragment of black bread, and wept. Leonardo watched her for a long time and noticed that she did not dry her tears. But when she had stopped weeping, the black of her eyes was very pure, like a bucketful of petroleum that could have mirrored the sky.

“Feeling better now?” Leonardo said.

She nodded, pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, and blew her nose.

“I’ve got to have some sanitary napkins,” she said. “In a day or two I’m going to need them.”

Achille Conterno was buried on the morning of the last day of the year. He had been ninety-four years old and lived alone in a house five hundred meters from the square, but because of the diabetes that afflicted his feet, he had not been out for months. His son and daughter had left at the end of the summer, but he had refused to go with them. They had asked some cousins to look after him, but these people had never been seen in the village.

The person who found Conterno had been Gregorio of the public weights and measures office. Suspicious of the lack of smoke from his chimney, he had gone to pay Conterno a visit and found the door locked. After calling him and getting no answer, Gregorio had gone to find a jimmy, and when he forced the door together with Felice Gallo and Mariano Occelli, they found Achille lying under the covers on his bed with his eyes closed and his cap on his head, exactly as he must have fallen asleep a couple of nights before. The three decided he must have died of cold. In fact there was not a trace of furniture in the rooms and even the matchboard wainscoting had been stripped off and burned in the stove; all that was left was an old table too tough to be broken into pieces.

The service was short. The church had not been heated for many months and everyone was numb with cold, forcing them to keep shifting their weight from one leg to the other. In his homily, Don Piero reminded them that in these difficult times everyone must gather around the church as a center both spiritual and physical, giving help as well as expecting to receive it. He also noted that soon the last batteries for the church clock would be used up, and that without the clock in the tower everyone would be plunged like wild beasts and dumb animals into a world of approximate time divisible only into day and night. Most people were aware of a hidden agenda in his sermon but no one felt like trying to figure out what, and for the moment even Don Piero seemed to prefer to pass over the details.