Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

I found what I was looking for in an apartment on the second floor of a newly redecorated block. The man sitting in the armchair looked as if he had dozed off while contemplating a wall papered with photographs, postcards, and small maps.

The only dead bodies I had seen before last summer were those of my father, an old aunt, a Latin scholar, and my mother. Only in the last case was I present at the moment of death. My mother had been a practical woman, composed and not much inclined to frivolity, yet her exit had taken place with the lightness of fresh air replacing stale in a well-aired room. My impression as I watched her last breath, and the immobility that followed, was one of delicate inevitability. Something like the closing or opening of a flower. The darker feeling that came over me beside her lifeless body had been one of nostalgia; I believed no one would ever love me unconditionally again. I would never again be able to make someone happy with so little effort. What a pity. The bodies I have seen recently affect me quite differently. Their lives have not slipped away but have been snatched from them. Not like a child’s milk tooth, that after dangling for days drops out to make room for its successor, but like healthy teeth needlessly ripped out with cold forceps and no anesthetic. I can’t get used to seeing these bodies, and I am always disturbed by them.

For this reason I immediately looked away from that man sitting in his armchair studying the opposite wall. The small maps traced the stages of many itineraries, probably journeys he had made with the young woman featured in the photographs. The maps were recent ones, with the surrounding countries shaded gray and neither their borders nor their cities marked.

I looked at the man. He was short and fat, with a thick black mustache and a large mole under his left eye. When I approached, the mole flew away and I realized it must have been a fly.

Apart from its pallor, there was nothing unseemly about his face. The bullet had entered his temple cleanly. The hand holding the pistol had fallen back on the arm of the chair, while his other hand was decently covering his genitals. Only one earpiece of his glasses had slipped off.

I carefully took off his right shoe and measured it against my own: size 9 ½. I put it back on him and I went to look for a more robust pair. Some hiking boots in the lumber room fit me. There was also a camping stove, a sleeping bag, water bottles, a backpack, and fishing equipment. I took the backpack and filled it with whatever I thought might come in handy, and then I went to look for food.

The larder contained flour for making polenta, freeze-dried soup, some bars of muesli, and powdered milk: more than we had eaten for a week. I gulped down one muesli bar and gave another to Bauschan, who had not eaten since the previous day.

In the bedroom a dozen exercise books with hard covers were piled on a desk. The man had used them meticulously to record means of transport, times of departure, alterations of travel plans, and places visited. He had also stuck in vouchers, air and rail tickets, and photographs featuring the young woman from the living room wall with an open, friendly smile.

It was not easy to imagine the two meeting and beginning a relationship.

She looked like a woman open to new things, who needed a certain dose of unconventional romance. He, until he met her, must have been a man who had happily survived the usual time of life for passion unscathed. Someone who had probably found in his work, and his love of fishing, ample justification for his existence, just as I had been satisfied with books, teaching, and parenthood. But we had both made an error of judgment, and this realization had at first seemed a miracle. Though in the long run, in different ways, we had both paid for it.

I was rummaging in his drawers when I found the unused exercise book I am now writing in. Without a second thought I shoved it in the backpack together with some underpants and socks and left the house.

Writing had once been my profession, in the sense that I had been technically defined as a novelist, but that was now closed behind a solid wall in the distant past. What had first gotten me started had probably been the need to create a world on my own modest scale, a world of relationships, meetings, public gardens, shops, memories, gestures, and feelings that I could inhabit without feeling inadequate, just as I did in the real world. “Stories of courage always come from the basest part of ourselves, poetry and profundity from the most arid part,” in the words of an elderly writer I happened to meet early in my career. I know now it was his way of putting me on my guard against the path I was beginning to follow.

Now for eight years, apart from several unanswered letters, I have not written a single line, but that hasn’t stopped me still living in a world of books, both my own and those written by others—continuing to cut myself off from life.

Now death, fear, cold, hunger, and the children I am responsible for have forced me to return to real life, and the world I have found waiting for me is far more ferocious and degenerate than the one I ran away from. How did we come to this? Did the evil germinate in our hearts or have we been the victims of infection? And in either case, how can the germs have fallen on such fertile ground? I can’t offer a single word of explanation. I simply wasn’t there.

Days earlier we had left a warehouse where we had been well received; a place that at first had seemed safe but had soon shown itself quite otherwise, and after a day’s walk we had reached the outskirts of T. We decided to circle the town to the east rather than the west. I had been convinced of this by the sky, always clear in the east but blotted out by large gray clouds to the west.

Passing some hills, we ran into a pack of dogs. The setting sun perfectly outlined their shapes on some high ground. At first I took them for horses, they were so still and solemn. We were walking into the wind so they had not yet scented us.

Lucia and Alberto slowly began to retreat. Even Bauschan stopped. Whereas I continued down the cart track, my eyes fixed on those animals so sharply silhouetted against the indigo of dusk. A moment later, as if responding to a trumpet call, the dogs turned their heads toward me and, starting from a gentle trot, rushed down the hillside at full speed. The pack dodged the trees and reformed like drops of water attracted to its own substance.

Magnificent, I thought.

Only then did I notice Lucia was calling my name. I turned. The children and Bauschan were about fifty meters behind me. They had reached the gate to a farm. Only then did I understand and start running.

Thanks to a wooden ladder, we were able to climb up to what had once been a hayloft. A few seconds later, the dogs entered the farmyard and stopped, panting, to look at us. They showed neither disappointment nor ferocity, but it was clear that if it hadn’t been for the ladder they would have torn us to pieces.

The children threw a few tiles in an attempt to drive them away, but the dogs merely moved to avoid being hit. After a while a few crouched down. Others went to drink from a pool of melting snow. Two copulated.

We ate supper with our legs hanging down and the dogs watching us. It was very cold, but with hay around it would have been dangerous to light a fire. Bauschan stared at his fellow creatures and whimpered. He knew we were trapped.

“Go away, you shits!” Alberto shouted, but all I could think was that they were perfectly adapted for what they had been created to do. And to me that made them piercingly beautiful.

During the night, listening to Lucia shivering with cold beside me, I realized I was utterly unsuited to the task entrusted to me, and I wept. When we woke in the morning, the dogs had completely vanished.