Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

After they had helped her into the coach, the youths went back to their own vehicles and the procession get under way again. Leonardo could hear the engine of the coach getting into gear and the heavy wheels of the wagon groaning under the cage floor. He looked at David. The elephant’s melancholy eyes were fixed on the field where the exchange had taken place.

“I don’t think this woman can take Lucia’s place,” Leonardo said, then he crouched on the branches the elephant had stripped clean the day before, and wept.

They traveled all night. It was the first time they had done so, and Leonardo noticed that only the trucks, the coach, and the Land Rover had their lights on; there was no fuel for the other vehicles, which were all being towed. For this reason their progress had become slower and slower; a man walking quickly would have been able to overtake them without difficulty.

They stopped at dawn in the yard of a large abandoned farmstead. As soon as the bonfire had been lit, the cripple distributed a little canned food, and several dogs that had been killed the day before were skinned and prepared to be cooked. Half the farm’s roof had fallen in, but one part of the building seemed to be in good shape. Still, no one took the trouble to explore. The boys sat around the farmyard strangely silent, showing no interest whatsoever in the fat woman who, tied to one of the roof supports, was watching her new masters with inexplicable serenity.

For a few days now it had been as if some minor melancholy had sometimes disturbed the tribe and made them uneasy. Their nights of partying had become increasingly short and fierce, and when Richard was out of sight in the trailer, brawls constantly broke out. The cripple watched without intervening, but these quarrels would last only a few minutes and end for no apparent reason as suddenly as they had begun. Apart from meat, which was never in short supply, their food was running out. There was no more beer, only wine.

Now when Richard came out of his trailer, some of the young people still ran to surround him, but for the first time about half of them stayed under their covers, their eyes on the flames. It was not raining, but the night had made everything damp and a sterile sun hinted at another day without warmth.

Showing no disappointment in those who were absent, Richard blessed those who were there and talked to them. Leonardo was sure his mind must be working on this new state of affairs and that he was capable of doing this without his face showing any emotion at all. In fact, Richard soon told Enrico to free the captured woman and take her to the wagon for “union.” This order created a ferment of excitement that quickly spread to those who had been keeping to themselves. While the cripple guided the woman to the big wagon and introduced her into the cage, the youngsters gathered around with their faces glued to the bars.

“Look, dancer!” Richard announced in a loud voice for everyone to hear. “We’ve found you a girlfriend so you can have some fun.”

The youngsters continued to make excited noises. Leonardo looked at Richard; he was smiling as serenely as usual, but Leonardo could read something in his expression that inspired contempt rather than fear.

“We’re waiting, dancer,” Richard sneered.

The woman, standing inside the cage door, was watching Leonardo calmly.

He guessed she must be someone who, all her life, had been used to remaining calm in situations that tended to bring the worst out of other people. But there was no sense of her holding anything back; rather, her calmness seemed to take the form of acceptance. The beauty so absent from her body seemed concentrated in the Asian slant of her eyes.

“Enrico,” Richard said, “please be so good as to give our dancer a little encouragement.”

The cripple took his pistol from his belt and fired into the wall just above David’s head. The elephant trumpeted and began tramping nervously around the cage. Leonardo leaped to his feet and he and the woman both pressed themselves against the bars to avoid being crushed. But David soon calmed down. He timidly approached the woman, and his trunk gently explored her hair, arm, and belly. She closed her eyes and let him touch her; face to face they were the same height. When David returned mournfully to his corner, she opened her eyes again and pushed her hair back from her forehead.

“Screw her!” someone shouted.

A stone thudded against Leonardo’s chest with the dead sound of a stick striking an empty barrel. He dropped to his knees, conscious of his heart beating under the hand he pressed against his chest.

“Screw her! Screw her! Screw her!” yelled the young people.

A second pistol shot drowned their voices; it passed over Leonardo’s head and was lost in the farmyard. This time David only walked around on the spot, making the floorboards shake. When Leonardo looked up he saw the woman taking off her pants. She was not wearing underpants. Her flesh had the whiteness of fresh lime, with a tuft of black hair under her belly.

“Screw her! Screw her!”

Leonardo looked at Richard, and this time he saw no mirror image of Christ but just a cunning, inordinately arrogant man of thirty-five. Mediocrity and fear marked him like a drop of oil on a surface of water, and they were a mediocrity and fear with no redeeming qualities whatever. His was a third-rate mind decked in feathers.

“Enrico!” Richard called out irritably.

The cripple pushed his way through the yelling youngsters pressed against the bars of the cage and came as near as he could to where Leonardo was standing. He pointed his pistol between the bars at Leonardo’s head.

“Screw her! Screw her! Screw her!”

Leonardo looked for Salomon among the boys but could not see him. Instead he met the eyes of Alberto, who was staring at him eagerly from the shoulders of the blond youth who had captured them. Under his green paint, he no longer had the face of the child Leonardo had known so much as the snout of a predator used to raiding the lairs of other animals among the bushes. He had pulled his hair back into a ponytail.

“Do what they want,” the woman said, lying down on the floor.

Her calm voice cut through the shouting like a sword slicing through a coat of mail. She was now naked apart from her socks and a flesh-colored bra scarcely able to hold her huge breasts. Beyond the farmyard the hilltops were a vivid white against the railway gray of the sky. Very soon it would begin raining or snowing again.

Leonardo moved toward her.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

She shook her head to dismiss this as irrelevant. Her eyes were not black but a lively dark brown. He lowered his trousers and lay down on top of her. She smelled of earth and of something long buried. It was not a good smell but one that gave the impression of having existed long before humanity, to have been part of this planet, and many of the creatures living on it, since time immemorial. Leonardo remembered the other women he had slept with: a fellow student, Alessandra, then Clara. The first two thin and supple; the last slender with big breasts. All had light-brown eyes and smelled of paper, tobacco, and dried bark. All had offered him carefully rationed warmth.

Leonardo felt his penis stiffen and slide into the woman. For a moment he lay still, lost in the simplicity of what was happening and the warmth of her belly, and then the floorboards began to thump under the blows of dozens of hands.

“Screw-her-now! Screw-her-now!”

Leonardo rested his chin on the woman’s shoulder and watched the leaves of a holm oak growing near the farm move lightly in the wind. Her breasts pressed against his thin chest at every breath.

“Am I hurting you?” he whispered.