Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

They covered about eighty kilometers without seeing a human soul up to the exit to N., after which a barrier blocked the road and Leonardo was forced to slow down.

“What’s going on?” Lucia asked.

“Just a checkpoint, don’t worry.”

Behind the barrier were three men in the uniform of the National Guard. Two of them were armed. When the Polar stopped, the tallest man approached, in an air force pilot’s helmet. Leonardo had to open the door because the nylon “window” was opaque.

“All get out, please,” said the soldier.

He had several days of beard growth and yellow stains on his uniform.

“Our papers are in order.”

“All get out, please,” the man repeated.

While the man in the helmet opened the trunk and rummaged about inside the car, Leonardo, Bauschan, and the children formed up on a white line and were guarded by the second man, who looked about thirty and had a large tommy gun on his shoulder and his eyes fixed on the asphalt. A cigarette rolled from maize paper was hanging from his chapped lips. The third man, hardly more than a boy, had stayed behind the barrier. He had no hat or helmet, and his hair was a dazzling blond.

“Have you any money with you?” the man in the helmet asked after he had finished searching the car.

“Not much, we’ve just filled up with gasoline.”

“Bring it out.”

Leonardo took out his wallet and asked Lucia for the permits. She held them out to him and he passed them to the guard. Meanwhile the young boy had moved the barrier and had gone to sit in the rear seat of the Polar. He was not armed.

“I have to take these children to Switzerland,” Leonardo said. “Their relatives are waiting for them.”

The man stuck the money into the pocket of his camouflage jacket and dropped the wallet and permits on the ground.

“Have the kids got anything?”

“No,” Lucia said.

“If they have, they must give it to me,” the man said, still addressing Leonardo; then he pointed the barrel of his gun at Bauschan. “If not, I’ll start with the dog.”

There was no anger or resentment in his words, even if he clearly must have experienced both in equal measure in the past. But his eyes were now like parched earth where grass had difficulty growing. Two large veins ran below his temples.

When Leonardo touched Lucia’s shoulder, she pushed a hand inside her trousers and pulled out a roll of banknotes. The man added them to the rest of the money in his pocket. His reddened eyes softened for a moment, perhaps remembering something, but quickly returned to their earlier blankness.

“We need your car,” he said in the same expressionless tone he had used from the start.

Leonardo told him the keys were in the ignition.

Without another glance the men got into the car and started the engine. The man in the helmet said something to the one with the tommy gun, probably that it was an old car without automatic gears.

Leonardo took advantage of this by walking up to the Polar and knocking on the window with his knuckles.

“What do you want?” the man with the tommy gun said. His eyes were an intense cinematic blue, but his teeth were those of a man from the Middle Ages.

“I’d like to ask a favor.”

The man suddenly grabbed Leonardo by the ear and pulled it, simultaneously raising the window. When the glass hit Leonardo’s neck, the man let go of his ear and smiled. Leonardo could smell alcohol on his breath.

“We haven’t raped your daughter or killed your son. That’s what you can expect these days, you know.” Leonardo tried to nod but the edge of the window made it impossible. Behind him, Bauschan let out little yelps of distress.

“Please,” Leonardo mumbled.

The man in the driver’s seat signed to the other to lower the window. Released from the pressure, Leonardo put a hand to his throat and gave a long sigh but stood his ground.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You must be stupid. What do you want?”

“There are things in the trunk of no use to you but very precious to us.”

The two men looked at each other and then back at Leonardo, who nodded as if to confirm his own words. The man in the helmet half turned to the boy behind him.

“Check what the bastard takes,” he said.

The boy got out and tried to open the trunk but failed. Leonardo asked if he could do it and the boy moved aside.

“It’s defective,” Leonardo apologized, raising the door of the trunk and showing the boy the bag with Lucia’s sanitary napkins. The boy nodded that he could keep it.

“Can I take the clothes too?”

“Can he take the clothes?” the boy asked his colleagues.

“Only those for the children.”

Leonardo took the children’s suitcase, then removed the box of letters from his own case and opened it to show what was inside.

“Keep them.”

“I’m sure you’ll be able to use the food.”

The boy said yes without asking the others.

“That leaves the jackets.”

The boy took them from the back seat and gave them to Leonardo, closed the trunk, and was about to get back into the car but stopped. His face, despite his frozen nose now reduced to a black lump, still had gentle Teutonic features. The skin of his cheeks was peeling under his faint trace of beard.

“At the border they shoot at everyone,” he said.

Leonardo smiled.

“We have our permits.”

The boy shook his head and was about to say something more, but one of the others called him by name: “Victor.”

Shortly afterward the car vanished at the point where the gray of the autostrada met the more luminous gray of the sky. Leonardo looked at the children. Lucia was crying. Alberto had crossed his hands on his chest and was staring at the permits being blown open by the wind on the wet tarmac.

“Put these on,” he said, holding out their jackets to them. “We’ll make it.”

They walked until evening along the autostrada toward T. in the hope of a lift, but in three hours or so only two cars passed. The first had only one person in it but didn’t stop; the second, a white delivery van with blackened windows, slowed down and pulled up about fifty meters further on. Two men got out and beckoned to them.

“No, Papa,” Lucia said.

The two men continued to indicate that they should come nearer. One, very fat, had a cowboy hat on his head. The other, taller, was in fur with black gloves.

“I don’t like them, Papa. Let’s not go.”

Leonardo raised an arm to indicate they had changed their minds, but one of the two, the one in the hat, started toward them. It only took them a second to vault over the safety barrier and start running across the snow-covered field beside the autostrada , with their bags and the suitcase banging against their legs. They did not stop until they were sure the man was not following. Turning, they saw the van put on its lights and move forward again. A moment later it had vanished.

They spent the night in a nearby ruin, a house abandoned long ago when none of what had happened since was even imaginable. Maybe for this reason the desolation of this building was of a very different quality from the one they had most recently been concerned with: it had more the atmosphere of an ancient Roman temple, and the children were happy to go in without making a fuss.

It had wooden floors and a falling tree had broken through the roof and its branches reached into a couple of the rooms. But they had left their matches in the car and had nothing to light a fire with, so they ate three sweets from the pocket of Alberto’s jacket and crouched in a dry corner, out of reach of the snow that had gently begun to fall again.

“What are we going to do?” Lucia said.