Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

“Come,” the boy said.

Leonardo struggled down the short ladder and followed the boy across the field. His bandaged feet trod uncertainly on the damp grass. The boy walked ahead, knowing Leonardo could not escape. He gave off a strong feral smell, as if he had just emerged from an uncured bearskin, and his hair was cut in a triangle with its point between the tendons at the back of his neck.

The young people were waiting on the steps of the little amphitheater while below, facing it, Richard was sitting in his pastel-shade tunic with Lucia at his side. When Leonardo came before them she continued to look at the ground. The boy who had brought him made him kneel and went off to sit with the others. Leonardo looked at Lucia’s white, shaved head, wishing he could weep on it and then dry it with his hands. She was wearing a decent blue dress and long earrings Leonardo had never seen before. Her face and body were intact yet seemed lifeless as if they had disintegrated or been contaminated.

“They tell me you’re a dancer,” Richard said.

Leonardo studied his straight nose, thin lips, long hair, and honey-colored beard framing his light smile: every part of his face expressed beauty and gentleness, yet its light and warmth, like those of a will-o’-the-wisp, somehow had more to do with the extinction of life than its creation. Leonardo looked at his calm blue eyes and found them utterly insane. There was nothing human there. They were more like the eyes of a majestic bird of prey or a great creature from the depths of the sea, infinitely solitary and universally feared.

“I’d like you to dance for us,” Richard said.

There was no mockery in his voice. Leonardo noticed the cripple was sitting a little higher up behind them. Armed with a pistol.

“I can’t dance,” Leonardo said. “I’m not a dancer.”

Richard smiled.

“You’re too modest, dancer,” he said, offering his hand.

Leonardo dropped his eyes and felt the man’s fingers slithering through his hair, loosening the knots of congealed blood that glued it together. Keeping his eyes on the ground, he saw little pieces of straw falling and shining in the shadows. The fire was warm on his shoulders. It was many days since he had felt such heat. Richard pushed Leonardo’s hair back one last time and withdrew his hand.

“From now on you will dance,” he said, “and you will be delighted to do it, because that will give us pleasure.”

Leonardo looked at the man’s neat feet, at his long, well-proportioned hands and perfect teeth. Christ in our time, he thought; a Christ generated by the times we live in and thus certain to make converts and to build a church and sow his word throughout the earth.

He was forced to his feet and led toward the fire. A couple of youths with spades had spread a circle of embers across the concrete which glowed red in the wind.

“Take off your bandages,” the cripple said.

Leonardo’s eyes searched for Lucia, but she was still looking down as though the whole world was confined to the few centimeters of ground between her feet. But Richard’s predator eyes were staring at him, revealing neither malice nor amusement, only an infinite power of concentration.

Leonardo breathed in the smell of meat, bodies, and burned fur weighing on the air. The unskinned snout of a small boar impaled on one of the stakes had caught fire. He sat down and began to unwind his bandages.

“Get up,” the cripple said as soon as he had finished.

He moved unassisted toward the embers. The usual hypnotic music was coming from the amplifiers. He placed his right foot on the embers, then his left. At first all he felt was a light tickling, like walking at midday on a sun-warmed beach, but when the first pangs rose up his legs he began to dance from one foot to the other. The audience drove him on with cries of “Dancer!,” stamping their feet on the steps.

He began waving his arms, leaping, and gyrating. A mad exaltation filled him, and the pain in his feet faded.

He closed his eyes and danced faster, more frenetically, then opened them again and saw Richard’s light but penetrating expression, which brought back familiar dreams from his childhood of warriors with matted hair and women huddling in caves. Nightmares involving dogs, bones, cold, and bodies burned on high flaming pyres in faraway villages. Recurrent visions from which he woke terrified and certain there would never be a place in the world for him.

In his mind he passed down a corridor opening onto rooms with no floors. If he had gone through one of those doors, he would never have been able to get back and his body would have been degraded to a shell capable only of killing and violating and, in the end, opening his own veins with a shard of flint and waiting for death with his eyes turned up to the moon.

In some hidden corner where it had been hidden for goodness knows how long, the memory came back to him of a spring morning many years ago. He and Lucia had woken late, as often happened on Saturdays, and had breakfast at the kitchen table, listening to a radio program Lucia did not entirely understand and that Leonardo only loved for the voice of the female host. Then they had washed and started to get ready to go out. When Leonardo had laid out Lucia’s clothes ready for her on the sofa, the little girl had taken off her pajamas, pulled on her pants, and begun to leap about on the bed, calling out that she was like Tarzan, Mowgli, and Jesus.

“Jesus too?” Leonardo had asked.

“Jesus died with torn pants, didn’t you know that?”

He remembered that while Lucia had finished getting dressed he had listened to the sound of cars on the wet road and realized he had now come really close to the secret, no matter how close he may have been before. He must preserve that perception, he told himself. Not the perception of what he himself was but of what that child had been, what she was now, and what she would become.

He recalled his mind to the present. She turned to look at him with the eyes of a dog that has escaped to run free along the safety barrier of the autostrada but has finally agreed to return and come back. He was aware of this because he felt new pain in his feet and humiliation for what he was doing. The youngsters were whistling, cheering, and throwing pinecones and bits of wood at him. Then Richard raised a hand and all was silent, except the music, which continued to vibrate against the immobility of the bodies and the natural world around them.

Leonardo took a step forward and felt cold concrete refresh his blistered feet. The wind had dropped. An elongated cloud was fleeing to the east leaving the moon behind, like a reptile that has laid her egg and wants to be far away when it hatches.

Richard stood up, and taking Lucia by the hand helped her to her feet. She was tiny beside him, as if small enough to fit into the palm of his hand.

“We are grateful to you, dancer,” he said. “Now you can go back to your cage.”

Panting, his mouth parched although full of saliva, Leonardo looked at him. There had not been the slightest note of derision in the man’s voice. He turned and hobbled through the surrounding silence to the wagon. No one followed to make sure he went to the cage. He climbed the stepladder, entered, and closed the door. David was watching him in profile.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

He sat down with his back to the partying in the arena. The shouts and the music, the smell of meat, and the crackling of branches thrown on the fire reached him; then he realized the smell of meat was coming from himself. He looked out at the night before him, so inexorable and ancient, and wept tears quite different from the tears he would have once wept.

After that evening, the young people started coming to see the cage where David and Leonardo spent their days. Only Richard could give the order to open it, but that did not stop them from goading Leonardo to dance or prevent them from throwing stones and food at him through the bars. When he saw them coming, he would crouch in a corner or hide behind David, trying to make himself invisible. Sometimes, having tried to provoke him with sticks and stones in the useless hope of getting him to react, the kids would stay there to study him in silence as though Leonardo were the unusual creature and not the elephant, for whom they seemed to feel little or no curiosity. As soon as they were bored, they would go away and Leonardo would be able to emerge from his hideaway to collect the food. It usually turned out to be something his teeth could not cope with: bones, such as the skull of a hare or a badger, or the paws of a wild boar or fallow deer, but sometimes he was lucky and found an onion, some potato peel, or a rabbit skin he could chew for its fat before laying it out to dry.