Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

“Well done,” Leonardo said. “Very well done.”

That evening they heated the granoturco they had managed to retrieve on their fire. Alberto had hoped to make popcorn, but the cobs were so sodden they would only roast or turn into a mush resembling polenta. The place they had found for the night was an old hut belonging to the water board, on which a graffiti artist had drawn the impertinent face of a small boy with a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth. The place consisted of a single room crossed by a spider’s web of pipes of various sizes. The sheet metal door had been forced and the place had probably served as a refuge for others like themselves: the concrete floor had been insulated with rubbish and cardboard against the cold, and on the whole they could consider themselves lucky that it was clean and not too damp. It also had a high window through which the smoke from their bonfire could escape, leaving the air breathable.

Before lying down to sleep, they talked about how many kilometers they must have covered that day, and how clever Alberto had been to find the maize. The boy was the first to fall asleep, while Leonardo and Lucia stayed awake for a long time listening to him tossing restlessly and dreaming he was quarreling with someone to whom he then tearfully apologized.

When Lucia also crashed out, Leonardo spent some time watching the fire, feeding it from time to time with more wood. He would have liked to leaf through a few pages to make him sleepy, but all his and Lucia’s books had been left in the Polar, so he took the box of letters out of the children’s suitcase and reread a couple. This had the effect of annoying him profoundly and he was tempted to throw all of them on the fire, but he did not do this because he had to concentrate on holding back his tears. In fact, he now felt sure for the first time that both Clara and Alessandra must be dead and that he would never see either of them again. He imagined their bodies tossed into some field with their clothes ripped apart, their trousers around their ankles, and a parliament of crows conferring nearby.

He gave way to heavy tears, and then he dried his face and went on weeping in a more controlled manner. In the end, exhausted, he slept deeply and dreamlessly until morning.

As soon as he woke he lit the fire and moved the stale maize near to heat it, and then he went out to stretch his legs. It might have been seven o’clock, perhaps eight, and the day was going to be fine and very cold. The sky was a uniform blue and the light reflected from the snow was already blinding.

He sat on the railway line stroking Bauschan and removing several thorny burrs the dog had collected from the brambles he liked to bury himself in. He talked to him about writers who had written stories with snow as an essential feature, and Bauschan gazed into his green eyes, until distracted by a noise from the cabin.

They had breakfast around the fire. Alberto had woken up with encrusted eyes, a sign that his conjunctivitis was getting worse, but they had nothing to clean them with. After eating his portion of maize, Leonardo wandered around the cabin for half an hour looking for a container in which to boil snow so as to get some more or less sterile water, but all he could find was an empty plastic bottle. After walking on for two hours they came across several carcasses of cows in a plantation of poplars beside the railway and stopped to look at them without going near. The cows must have been dead for some time because their stomachs were swollen and the black patches on their coats had faded almost to gray. Even so their mouths and eyes seemed to be moving. On closer inspection it became clear that the effect was created by several small birds hopping on the animals’ faces. Leonardo and the children made the most of the break by taking off their jackets and tying them around their waists, and then they went on without discussing what they had seen.

Before noon they reached a group of houses. As on the previous day, Leonardo went off alone to inspect them and came back an hour later with a saucepan and a small bag with a little flour in it.

“We’ll boil some water,” he said. “Then you can wash your eyes.”

Alberto said neither yes or no and went to sit a little way off on the rails. He had grown much thinner in the last two days, and his legs seemed to be dancing inside his trousers like pencils in a sock. He had a red rash around his mouth that he continually scratched.

Leonardo lit the fire. This was not difficult because brushwood, ideal for starting bonfires, was growing beside the track.

As soon as the water boiled he dipped his handkerchief in it and took it to Alberto who, asking no questions, cleaned his eyes. Leonardo used the rest of the water to mix with the flour, using the suitcase as a work surface. The result was a round grayish mass that he put into the pan and left on the fire for five minutes, before stirring it and putting it back to cook for the same length of time again. The yellow disk that emerged was christened “focaccia.” They all ate a piece, even Bauschan. Lucia asked if they could make another. Leonardo said yes, but that they should only eat half now, leaving the rest for supper. Lucia nodded and smiled. Her face was magnificent: the sun and the cold had given it color, and her eyes had never before looked so warm and deep.

While fiddling with the fire to try and keep it burning, Lucia saw two people.

“Someone’s coming!” she said, getting up.

Leonardo put down the pan and studied the figures approaching along the railway track. “If we can see them,” he thought, “they must see us; there’s no escape.”

“We need to discuss this,” he told Lucia, who was collecting their things.

“But we don’t know who they are!”

“If we want food, sooner or later we’ll have to trust someone.”

By now the two figures were more substantial. Leonardo was sure one was a woman in red.

“I say let’s avoid them,” Lucia said.

Leonardo turned to Alberto. The boy was using his hand to shade his eyes from the sun as he looked at the two people.

“What do you say, Alberto?”

“We’ve seen some dead cows in the fields,” Leonardo said.

The man shook his head as he continued to stir the soup on the stove. Beans, cabbage, and large pieces of gray meat could be seen in the pan. The smell was hot and inviting.

“This is good meat,” he said, licking the spoon before returning it to his shirt pocket. “We had some yesterday evening.” Then he signed to the woman to bring the plates. Until now she had restricted herself to gazing tenderly at Lucia and Alberto, but now she put on the ground the three metal plates she had been holding on her lap.

“It seems to us,” the man explained, as he poured soup onto the plates, “that the planes are dropping some substance onto built-up areas. I have no idea what it is, but it’s certainly not harmful to humans; I’m a doctor and I haven’t noticed anything strange. It only has this effect on cows. It’s extraordinary the way game and birds are proliferating.”

The woman handed them their plates. The children thanked her and began eating. Leonardo balanced his on his knee and looked at the people walking about around them, about thirty of them. Twenty more were sitting with their backs against the wall of a large shed, enjoying the sun. The building that was their home was in the middle of nowhere and had probably been a warehouse used by men working on the high speed trains. Even when they first arrived no one had come up to ask them who they were, where they came from or where they were going. Those who crossed their path limited themselves to a disinterested glance.

“For two weeks we had terrible weather,” the woman said. “It never stopped raining or snowing. But look what a glorious day today.”