Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

“No.”

He began moving slowly and soon he was standing alone in the middle of a white room waiting for someone. The shouts of the youngsters were no more than a distant hiss and their handclaps the noise of a train that had already passed long ago. The room had no windows; it was square and on the end wall a painting had been hung. This showed a plate and a glass, both empty. Leonardo knew it had a title: “Steady Courage.” It had been painted by the person he was waiting for, but the painter, when he arrived, would not be able to add anything to what Leonardo already knew about it, simply because he already knew all there was to know. So he felt no anxiety as he waited. He might wait hours, months, or years; that did not matter. The room was white, its walls a regular shape and the painting concealed no secrets.

Leonardo felt a spoon scoop the inside of his belly as something escaped from it and traveled far away. Then he lay exhausted, listening to his body and the light scratching of his beard against the woman’s cheek.

The voices of the youngsters gradually diminished, moved off, and fell silent.

Leonardo fastened his pants and went back to sit in the place David had left for him against the wall. They were alone, and the woman was getting dressed.

When she had finished they stayed silent, each staring at their own feet. The only sound was the crackling of the bonfire on which potatoes had been put to boil. The rectangle of sky above the farmyard was an expanse of gray marble that had the same warmth as marble.

David got up, walked around the cage, then flexed his legs and crapped. Leonardo saw the woman smile.

“I’ve never seen an elephant do that,” she said. “They’re so funny!”

Leonardo looked out into the yard. Several of the young people were throwing blankets, clothes, and toys out of the windows of the farmhouse. Others were eating by the fire and still more were asleep. The bald girl, leaning against the coach, was being penetrated from behind by a smallish boy with muscular buttocks. Another was inhaling from a pouch as he waited his turn.

“What’s your name?” the woman asked.

“Leonardo.”

“Well, Leonardo, there’s nothing bad about what we’ve done.”

He looked at her in silence.

“The important thing is to stay alive. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Excellent. Do you think they’ll give us anything to eat?”

“Usually the doctor brings something, but today he hasn’t come.”

“Never mind, we won’t die of hunger. What’s the elephant’s name?”

“David.”

“Can I trust David?”

“Yes.”

The woman lay down on her side with her head supported on her hand and closed her eyes.

“Why don’t you try to get a bit of rest too?” she said.

Leonardo continued to look at her unusual body stretched out on the floor. Soon it seemed utterly familiar to him, as though she had been with him in that prison ever since he first got there. He would not even have been able to say whether she was really fat or not.

“Listen to me, Leonardo,” she said. “Try closing your eyes.”

A few moments later he heard her snoring.

The doctor came toward evening with a bucket of potato peelings among which a few pieces of gray meat could be seen. The woman asked if it was dog meat. The man said he did not know.

“Do you know where we’re heading?” she asked him.

“I’m here to give you food and that’s all,” the doctor said, throwing an armful of bushes on the floor for David. “You mustn’t ask me anything.”

While the man went to and fro carrying branches to the wagon, the woman began eating the potatoes but avoided the meat. Leonardo in contrast took a large chunk of meat and broke it in pieces, using his fingers to do what his teeth could no longer manage. Behind them David’s elastic lips were stripping the branches with a squeaky noise, like new shoes on a rubber floor. When the doctor had finished stacking David’s branches, he filled two buckets with water from a tap at the farm.

Leonardo put several pieces of meat into his mouth and began chewing.

“I think they’re trying to get to France,” he said.

The woman nodded.

“The first people who captured me tried that too, but at the frontier we were shot up by an aircraft. They were kids like this group but not as many, and on the plain they met those National Guard men. A few escaped into the forest and the rest surrendered. The soldiers forced them into a ditch and killed them all. There was another prisoner with me, a very kind elderly man. He had been high school principal. The soldiers killed him too.”

The woman put another piece of potato in her mouth and chewed it slowly.

“Have you always been on your own here?”

Leonardo shook his head.

“There was a man, but he died the same night they captured him.”

The children had pulled two beds out of the house. Alberto was laughing and jumping from one mattress to the other. Leonardo studied his face and gestures. For some days now he had been thinking he had never known any child named Alberto and that the girl in the trailer was not his daughter. Sometimes he felt sure he had left Lucia in her mother’s home eight years ago and had never seen her again. At such moments he experienced something like the serene drowsiness that is said to precede death from frostbite.

“My daughter’s in the trailer,” he told the woman.

She looked at the bald girl huddled against the rear wheel of one of the cars. The girl had walked all day and night without stopping. The remains of her dress barely covered her meager buttocks and her breasts.

“When they find a new girl,” Leonardo said, “this is what’ll happen to Lucia.”

The woman continued to stare at the bald girl; several children were trying to push pieces of wood down the front of her dress. All she did in an attempt to discourage them was to wave her hand.

“It won’t happen to your daughter,” the woman said.

The doctor came back with the water. He put one bucket in the middle of the wagon and took the other to David. Leonardo and the woman began to drink by cupping their hands, then she asked the doctor if he could get them some blankets. The man took the bucket emptied by the elephant and went away.

Once they were alone the woman wanted to drink some more, but Leonardo said it was better to keep some water for the next day. She asked if the elephant would drink it in the night. Leonardo reassured her that he would not. The woman went to urinate in the corner; then sat down with her legs crossed. As night fell, a cold, sharp wind shook the junipers beside the yard. Leonardo studied the dark clouds approaching from the east. During the night, or at the latest the next day, it would snow.

“It’s nearly the end of February,” the woman said.

For a couple of hours they watched the young people dancing, pairing off, and stripping the shutters from the house to keep the fire going. Leonardo read a new fury in their actions that worried him and forced him every so often to look away.

The eyes of the woman, on the other hand, showed no trace of despair or resentment. Her broad, irregular face seemed stretched as if she had long been taking in everything she had seen. Leonardo noticed two black hairs sprouting from a mole under her chin.

“What did you do in the world?” he asked her.

“I was a midwife.”

As soon as the cripple saw Richard and Lucia emerge from the trailer, he jumped down from the roof of the van where he had spent the whole evening and went to meet them, climbing over the young people sitting on the ground.

“Your daughter’s very beautiful,” the woman said.

Leonardo watched Lucia walk as far as the bonfire and sit down on the sofa Richard had ordered to be unloaded from the truck.