Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

“Thank you, but I must get home soon.”

Elvira looked at the clock on the wall. It had stopped. She smiled and waved a hand in the air as if to say “I’m always making that mistake.” She touched one of the books on the table.

“I expect you like Bernhard,” she said.

“I do.”

She picked up the book and looked at the misty countryside on the cover.

“It’s like watching a volcano erupt, don’t you think? It can be a wonderful sight, but it all depends how near you are to it.”

Leonardo nodded. Elvira put the book down on top of the others and smiled.

“I’m wasting your time with my chatter. I think there was something you wanted to say to me?”

Leonardo shook his head.

“Just something to do with my daughter. Two weeks ago our house was burglarized. My daughter’s sixteen and…”

“There’s a boy there with you too, isn’t there?”

“Yes, my ex-wife’s stepson. His name’s Alberto.”

“And your daughter’s?”

“Lucia.”

“Such a lovely name. So luminous.”

Leonardo nodded and opened his mouth to resume his prepared speech, then stopped. On the wall behind the woman, at the point where the stovepipe entered the chimney, a small brass ring had been fixed to seal the opening. Most people would have been satisfied with silicon or stucco, but this woman had thought of something more precise and attractive, a little piece of work wrought with devoted attention that must have taken some time to create. The ring had been fixed in place with care, avoiding rough incisions or dents. Leonardo was sure Elvira had done it because everything in the room was as simple and exactly appropriate as she was herself.

“My wife left the children here,” he said. “She should have been back within a week, but by now two months have passed.”

The woman looked at him closely with peaceful eyes. She had three small moles on her face, but if he had closed his eyes Leonardo would not have been able to say exactly where they were.

“The children must be worried,” she said.

“Extremely.”

“And you?”

“I used to spend most of my time reading; now I’ve left my books in an old cellar where the mice will eat them and I don’t give a damn. I suppose that means I’m worried.”

The woman smiled.

“Maybe,” she said. “Still, I think I’ve guessed why you’ve come.”

Leonardo pushed back his hair, which had begun sticking to his forehead as it dried.

“Really?”

“Yes. Come with me.”

There was a door under the stairs that Leonardo had not noticed. The woman walked straight through it while he had to bend low. Strip lights came on revealing a garage with a small blue car in it. It was very clean and almost new. There was also an old wardrobe and a couple of shelves on the wall with a neat collection of jam jars and vegetables preserved in oil.

Elvira took a green package out of the wardrobe. It was one of many such packages, carefully stacked to make full use of the interior.

“Maybe not quite what your daughter has in mind, but in an emergency they’ll do.”

Leonardo looked at the package: large sanitary underpants for adults.

“Take as many as you like. For years the health authority supplied us with a packet a week.”

“Won’t your mother need them?”

“My mother will die today,” the woman said, “or at the very latest tomorrow.”

Leonardo noticed how light the package was in his hands.

“I’m so sorry. I’ve disturbed you at a bad time.”

Elvira shook her head. She seemed incapable of looking solemn for long.

“My mother’s been ill for a very long time,” she said. “There used to be a drug that helped her, but now it can’t be found. We said good-bye ages ago, before she fell into a coma. I’ll get you a bag to put the packets in.”

Leonardo, left on his own, looked at the shiny, well-kept car. He could hear piano music from the living room. Elvira came back with two large plastic bags. They managed to get three packs into each bag.

“Is that Glenn Gould?” Leonardo asked.

“Yes,” the woman answered. “Do you like it?”

“Very much.”

“It seemed to me that the Variations would be the right music to play while rereading Bernhard. My mother loves them too.”

Elvira had thrust her hands into the pockets of her pants, which were velvet and stuck closely to her thighs and buttocks, revealing the musculature of a walker. She had high breasts.

“I’ll be leaving now,” Leonardo said, embarrassed by what he was noticing.

In the courtyard they stopped in front of the gate that opened on to the lane. Leonardo put on his cap. The falling snow was very light, but he could feel it touch his cheeks. Elvira was in a sweater. The heavy sky could hardly hide the luminosity of midday.

“Thank you so much,” Leonardo said, “and again, excuse me for coming at such a time.”

Elvira shook her head.

“I’m glad you came. Now we know each other, we’ll be able to meet for a chat sometimes.”

“Yes.”

Before he went into Elio’s house, Leonardo stopped to look at the backdrop of houses covered in white snow around the square. The silent, motionless village seemed beautiful in a way that only seems possible for things that have nothing to do with humankind.

In the evening, when he was sure the children were asleep, Leonardo went into the lumber room and took the box of letters out of his suitcase.

He spent half an hour sorting them according to the dates on their postmarks. Those he had mailed before the trial were missing, evidently because the lawyers had advised Clara to keep them as evidence to be produced in court. Even so, those returned to him from the first year were more than a hundred. One every three days. During the second year they had diminished to seventy or so, and in the last few years to not much more than twenty.

When he had finished doing this he put a log in the stove and boiled some water. He drank his herb tea leaning against the window. The new year had arrived, but he had heard no celebrations nor seen any movement in the village: only two people crossing the square with a saucepan at dinnertime. He had completely given up his plan to go and see Adele. The children had gone to bed early. Alberto had not gone out at all since they moved to the new house while Lucia limited herself to accompanying him on the short walks he took to attend to Bauschan’s needs.

Leonardo looked at the letters spread over the table. The idea of reading them again had never previously occurred to him, but since leaving Elvira’s house he had thought of nothing else.

He remembered a film he had seen many years before when he was a member of a jury at a festival. It had told the story of a widow who kept the urn containing her husband’s ashes on her living room table, the same place as where she sat and read, watched television, chattered with her women friends, or made love with the elderly gardener. One day, for no particular reason, she had been seized by the idea of opening the urn and looking inside. She realized there was something not quite right in this idea and for the whole hour and a half of the film was torn between her urge to open the urn and the obscure inhibitions that held her back. In the end, giving in to temptation, she discovered that her grandchildren had long been using the urn as somewhere to hide the aniseed lollipops she gave them every Sunday.

The film director who headed the jury, ignoring Leonardo’s positive vote, had dismissed the film as “slight.” The winning entry had been a Spanish film about a seventeen-year-old drug pusher who, to escape some loan sharks, flees to Tierra del Fuego, where he climbs a mountain and starts a small ranch in the middle of nowhere. He marries a woman older than himself with only one leg and decides to import a couple of yaks from Nepal. To pay for his journey to go and fetch them he mortgages the ranch and bets the parish priest of a nearby village that he can succeed in bringing two such animals all that way, keep them alive, and, above all, get them to reproduce. In the end the boy wins. Throughout the film Leonardo had asked himself how anyone could live for years in Tierra del Fuego and then walk on the glaciers of Nepal in one single pair of sneakers.