Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

“Someone who got captured like us. I think he must have played the game and is now free to come and go. Maybe you’ll be able to join the tribe in a few days too.”

The man laughed, then coughed, spitting out a black clot. His legs were lying in a dark pool of blood. For Leonardo, the smell of his blood blended with the smell of the body burning on the bonfire and the smell of David sleeping behind him.

“What were you? A teacher? The director of a museum? A journalist?” the man asked.

“I used to teach literature in a university.”

The man laughed again, then wiped his face with his bloody hand.

“After everything they’ve done to you, you should grab the first one who comes anywhere near this cage and strangle him with your own hands. Instead of just sitting there trembling with fear. Don’t you agree that madman must be the Antichrist? The incarnation of evil? He didn’t even have the courage to watch while we were cutting off our fingers. He’s a bastard.”

Leonardo contemplated his own bruised, cold, and blackened feet. When he looked up again the man was dead.

At dawn, taking care not to dirty his shoes, the doctor approached the body and placed a hand on his neck. His wounds were dry. The great patch of blood had reached the middle of the wagon, where it vanished down a wide crack between the floorboards.

“He was a hemophiliac,” the doctor said.

“There’s nothing you can do?”

“Nothing.”

The procession started out again, leaving behind the ashes of the bonfire, which still contained the visible remains of the man with white hair. They continued all day along narrow roads between woods and fields marked by snow, passing ruined houses, a farmers’ union building, and a couple of shops that had already been looted. When several youngsters came to the wagon and Leonardo told them the man was dead, they just threw a couple of stones at the body to see if it would move, then went away. The jolting of the wagon had made the man’s body fall on its side in an entirely unnatural position. Leonardo got to his feet, grasped it under the armpits and dragged it to a clean part of the floor. Then he used a little of his water ration to wash the face. He closed the eyes. Doing this comforted him, like digging Adele’s grave. Maybe this is my vocation: burying the dead, he thought. Then with his finger he traced the man’s tattoo marks: the skin was hard, cold, and smooth, like a Nordic warrior killed in battle, Leonardo thought, or an apocalyptic Old Testament prophet ready to be placed on a pyre of fragrant wood and burned in the middle of the desert. The man’s badly shaved beard looked like gold dust.

It began snowing, but before the snow could settle on the asphalt, two youths with pimpled faces came into the cage, pulled the corpse out, and threw it down at the side of the road. The man’s left foot remained visible above the edge of the ditch, and Leonardo continued to stare at it until it was too far away and everything was absorbed in the whiteness precipitating from the sky.

They spent a few days in a large industrial building waiting for the roads to become usable again; the snowfall had not been heavy, but it was so cold it formed a firm crust the sun could not penetrate.

That evening Leonardo was taken to the fire and, without being forced to, danced to amuse the tribe. Lucia, sitting beside Richard on a sofa, followed his clumsy movements with her mouth half open and her eyes expressionless, and when Richard gave the order for Leonardo to be returned to the cage, she got up and let the man take her back into the trailer, where a light stayed on all night.

The youths resumed hunting, catching mainly hares, dogs, and small wild animals. It was a district of sparse woodland and occasional vineyards; the plain could not be far away. One night Leonardo heard a plane pass overhead. The youths put out what was left of the fire and kept still with their eyes on the ceiling of the building. Then, as the sound of the twin-engine plane disappeared in the distance, they started dancing again but did not relight the fire.

Leaving the warehouse, they found themselves on roads in the foothills searching deserted villages, where they found nothing but a can of motor oil, some bottles of wine, and black potatoes that had spent all winter in the earth. Then, one evening, Leonardo saw three church towers rising in the distance above the considerable expanse of a town with a square castle in the middle.

The next day, they kept to the foothills and skirted around the inhabited area; Richard must have been afraid of something since the youths carried their weapons all day and no one went near the villas they passed. Nightfall found them on a muddy track between fields marked by irrigation ditches and the occasional farm. The sky had been heavy and leaden all day.

Hearing the sound of motors, Leonardo got to his feet in time to see four cars traveling slowly down a parallel road not more than two hundred meters away. As soon as the youths saw the cars, they leaped into the field separating the two tracks and, gun in hand, started running toward the cars. The lead car increased its speed but the others stopped. Eight men got out, all armed with rifles, and immediately dropped to their knees ready to fire. At this the youths, though more numerous, slowed down and stopped.

For a few seconds the two groups studied each other. The field was dark brown and it had just started raining again. The last of the light was falling obliquely from behind the mountains and painting everything an identical violet.

Richard, who had come out of the trailer, called the cripple. The man listened to what his boss had to say, and then he put down his pistol on the hood of one of the cars and began walking toward the men on the other side of the field, who still had their guns trained on the boys. One of them, seeing him approach unarmed with his hands up, slung his rifle over his shoulder and came to meet him. His uniform was reminiscent of the National Guard, but by now it was too dark for Leonardo to see clearly.

The cripple and the other man met in the middle of the field and talked for several minutes without ever raising their hands from their bodies, after which the man turned toward his own people and shouted something that reminded Leonardo of a dog’s bark.

Then two of the soldiers made a woman get out of one of the cars.

All Leonardo could see at that distance was that she was very fat and had a red sweater. They pushed her into the field, where she slipped on the wet ground and fell. Getting back to her feet, she cleaned her pants with altogether incongruous care before moving toward the cripple and the man in the uniform, who were waiting some fifty yards farther ahead. When the group reached them, the cripple turned toward Richard, who nodded. The cripple signed to the woman to follow him and headed for the trailer with the youths.

Walking in the other direction, the man in uniform rejoined his own people on the road. Leonardo saw him get into one of the cars, and then the cars moved off and finally disappeared behind a group of houses blackened by smoke.

The woman was extraordinarily fat. As she crossed the swamp, her buttocks bounced in her tight wet pants, and her enormous breasts hung against her belly, like a cuttlefish with its mass of flesh centered on a single bone. The youths escorting her paid her no attention. They seemed afraid the soldiers might return and, from time to time, cast a wary eye on the group of houses where the cars had vanished.

When they got to the road two boys helped the woman over the ditch. Her black hair had once been bobbed, and she had slightly elongated eyes. Otherwise the lines of her face were coarse and unfinished, though entirely feminine. An insensitive man would have dismissed her as fat and ugly, but a closer look would have made it clear that the first adjective in no way implied the second. Watching her pass close to the cage, Leonardo noticed she had small hands and she was wearing light bowling shoes.