Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

At the time he had attributed his choice to his haste to get organized and to the disorder of the time, but when he thought about it he soon convinced himself he would have done the same anyway. Throughout his life the objects he worked with, chose, and gathered around himself had always been a matter of indifference to him.

He found some crackers in the cupboard and sat down at the table to eat them by the light of the small neon tube above the cooker. The house he had been living in for the last seven years was one that, in the days when architectural magazines still existed, would have been worth photographing. He had had a large window put in facing the vineyard and the veranda where he could sit and enjoy the sunset behind the chain of mountains that closed the horizon like a zipper. On the western side of the house was a strip of meadow, and on the other side of the courtyard was an outhouse, its ground floor kept as a storage area and its upper floor reconditioned to accommodate a dozen people.

Leonardo finished the crackers and continued to gaze at the night through the great window.

Maybe better warm, he thought.

He heated the milk for a few seconds in a small pan, then poured it into the glove again. When he approached the dog with it, he moved his eyes behind closed lids, nothing more. When Leonardo squirted a little milk on his muzzle the puppy instinctively licked himself. Leonardo repeated the action until the dog realized where the milk was coming from and timidly began to suck the rubber finger. In the end they both stretched out exhausted, side by side on the sofa. The clock showed eleven-twenty.

“Bauschan,” Leonardo said.

Bauschan was the dog protagonist of a story by Thomas Mann, a story Leonardo could only vaguely remember but which had taught him that familiarity can develop between a man and his dog; something he had never experienced himself, having never had an animal of his own.

“Beddy-byes now,” Leonardo said, placing the dog on the carpet to prevent him from falling in the night.

The air on the veranda was chilly. Leonardo picked the two letters up from the floor and glanced at them long enough to recognize the “return to sender” stamp before going back into the house to his bedroom, where he opened the wardrobe and took a box with colored stripes from under his jackets. Lifting the lid, he slid the two letters in on top of the others, which were now almost filling the box to the top. Taking off his bathrobe, he pulled on a pair of white linen trousers and matching shirt then went back into the bathroom to comb his hair in front of the mirror. He cleaned and filed his nails, took the book he had started reading that morning from his bag, and went out.

He walked around the house to the west side, which had two small windows on the second floor and an arched door. He opened the door with a key he had taken from a nail before leaving the house and went in.

When he was a child this room had been home to a dozen casks: his father and his grandfather had known every virtue and defect of each cask at least as well as they knew the individual combination of courage, patience, and malice in each of their children.

His family had been wine producers for many generations, but in his last years his father had given up the work, selling the grapes to some local wine grower. Nevertheless the casks had remained in place until, seven years before, Leonardo had sold them together with the rest of the furnishings of the house. Then he had filled the space, about ten meters by four, with bookshelves he had had custom-made and fixed to the walls by a carpenter. Apart from thousands of books there was nothing but an armchair and a standard lamp on a carpet in the middle of the room. The floor was exactly as Leonardo had found it: earth trodden down so hard that you could not even scratch it with a pointed object.

Leonardo contemplated his books, which he had missed constantly, almost physically, during the four days he had been away, and then he lit the little standard lamp and sat down in the armchair. Twenty minutes later he had finished the story of Felicité for the umpteenth time and carefully replaced the book on the shelf reserved for the French nineteenth century.

He woke about ten, and realizing the time, he ran into the kitchen where he found Bauschan collapsed on the carpet. He’s dead, he told himself, but when he touched the puppy and called him by name, he raised his muzzle toward the warm breath of Leonardo’s mouth. Then Leonardo noticed traces of feces in the room and realized that the dog had been exploring during the night. So, after washing the animal’s pus-encrusted eyes and giving him a little more milk from the glove, he took him around the house.

As he did so he became convinced the best place for the dog at night would be the studio. This square, empty room had nothing in it that could be destroyed. It contained only an office chair and a coarse wooden table under its big window.

It had been an attempt to reproduce the conditions in which he used to write in his studio in T., a pied-à-terre off an internal yard in one of the city’s main squares, where he had never wanted a telephone or doorbell or even his name on the door. But this project had been shipwrecked and the romance interrupted by the tumultuous events that had overturned his existence, and he had never gotten beyond the line he was writing when the telephone rang and the massacre started.

He looked at the little white portable typewriter abandoned in the dust on the table. It had been a present from Alessandra so he could write on trains and in hotels. He had punched out two novels on those keys, expending many hours of his life on them at a time when writing was indispensable to him for defining himself to himself and to others. Then suddenly his writing had vanished, just as stadiums and competitions and training and sponsors can vanish from the life of an athlete when he inadvertently severs his Achilles tendon by stepping on a piece of glass while playing on the beach with his six-year-old son. This was exactly how writing had disappeared from his life, and it had become a different life; and all this only a few years before his publisher went bankrupt and the newspapers and magazines he used to write for closed down and reading became something comparable to the final extravagant request of a condemned man.

“The room’s very well lit,” he told the puppy. “When you open your eyes you’ll see for yourself.”

Leonardo washed his ears carefully in the shower and examined and disinfected the wound on his chest. Its lively pink color reassured him and, since the pain of his sciatica had subsided, he decided to ride his bike into the village. He searched for a shirt with a large pocket and a lightweight scarf to go around his neck, and then he put on the linen trousers he had folded on the chair and went out.

The distance from house to village could easily be covered even by a cyclist as unfit as he was. The dog, his head sticking out of the pocket, enjoyed the fresh breeze downhill and hung his head on the uphill parts as if helping to pedal. When he reached the first houses, Leonardo left the asphalted road for an unpaved track that cut through a luxuriant hazel grove, ending in the yard of a large, neglected but busy farm.

“Ottavio!” he called.

Two very dirty and mischievous-looking sheepdogs emerged barking from the back of the farmhouse. Leonardo offered them a friendly hand, but they kept their distance and continued to bark.

“Who’s there?” someone shouted from the cowshed.

“Leonardo.”

The dogs for some reason went quiet and moved off, going to lie down in the shadow of a tractor. The yard was a mess, with sacks of animal feed, buckets, and agricultural implements all over the place. Under cover in one corner was what might have been an ancient station wagon or hearse. Leonardo was studying it when Ottavio emerged from the cowshed.