Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

He stood up.

“Now I have to go,” he said.

“Evelina?”

“Yes.”

“Are you asleep?”

“No.”

“Will you do something for me?”

“If I can.”

“I’d like you to tell me how I am.”

“In what sense?”

“Tell me what my face and body are like.”

“It’s a bit dark at the moment.”

“Tell me what you saw when it was light.”

“Where shall I start?”

“With my face.”

“OK, it’s thin and hollow and where there’s no beard it’s been affected by the cold. You have a scar on your forehead and a smaller one on your cheekbone. I think you have some teeth missing, I don’t know how many, and your eyes are a very beautiful dark green. But the whites of your eyes are a bit yellow, perhaps from what you eat. Your nose is bent, I can’t remember whether to the left or the right. You have long gray hair that has grown into sort of tails. Your beard’s dark gray, with occasional white hairs. I don’t know what else to say.”

“That’s great. And my body?”

“Tall, with long legs and a very stiff back. When you were lying on me I could tell you weren’t heavy for a man of your height. I could also tell your shoulder has been bound up, and when you walk you hold it higher than the other. One very beautiful thing about you is your hands. In my work I have always paid a lot of attention to hands and I can tell you that yours, even if they are not in good condition now, are extremely shapely. But the first thing I noticed was your feet. At first I thought they were wrapped in rags, but when I realized they were naked I wanted to cry. When you were dancing I wondered how you could possibly do it.”

“Fear’s the only thing that keeps me going.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Now tell me about my smell.”

“Do you think it’s unpleasant?”

“It must be, I haven’t washed for weeks.”

“When we are alone for a long time without anyone touching us, our smell reverts to what it was when we were born. Rather like a piece of cardboard soaked in milk. It’s not disagreeable. I often came across it in the delivery room, but it was my husband who first drew my attention to it. I’d like to talk to you about him, it’s so long since I had anyone I could do that with.”

“Was he a doctor?”

“A historian of the Enlightenment. When we met he was teaching at the University of Antwerp. He had come to the hospital to see his daughter, who had just given birth. She lived abroad, too, in her case in England, but her water broke two months early while she was at a conference of antiques dealers. Gianni arrived the next day from Germany. He was a very small man of nearly seventy; I was forty at the time. He wanted to speak to me about the birth; we talked briefly in front of the coffee machine, not more than a few minutes. Apart from his politeness, nothing particularly impressed me about that frail man with thick hair. As for me, with my physique, I didn’t think any man could be attracted to me, not even one so much older.

“But a week later a letter addressed to me arrived at the hospital. Just a few lines about a boat trip he’d made the previous Sunday with a university colleague and the man’s wife. I didn’t know whether to answer or what to say. I didn’t write back. A week later a second letter came telling me about a curious event that happened in the last century to the architect who built the Antwerp concert hall. I wondered what on earth this university professor could want from me; he was not young or good-looking, but certainly he was in a position to interest more attractive women. I was confused. I had never been in a serious relationship, only been pestered by a couple of men who were sexually excited by my obesity. This had made me pessimistic and diffident. I thought he must be another of these, but when I showed his letters to a woman friend she said she didn’t think so.

“So I sent him a postcard. He answered, and for a year we wrote to each other once or twice a week. He never suggested meeting, even though he had been divorced many years before and was living alone in a house near the university.

“He had a very sober way of writing, simple and straightforward but filled with constant surprise. He avoided difficult words but didn’t use the simple ones he preferred in quite the same way as most other people. He wrote in tiny capitals, in the kind of writing one might expect from the first person from an uneducated family to have a chance of higher education. And in fact that’s how it was: his father and mother had run a grocery shop in the Lomellina district.

“I bought myself a little chest with three drawers and kept his letters in it beside my bed. I kept a sheet of paper in the kitchen with the titles of the books he talked to me about so I could buy them in the bookstore. One day, talking to a hospital colleague, I realized that a whole day had passed without me thinking once about my unattractive appearance. That evening I wrote to Gianni and said I’d like to meet him. Are you asleep, Leonardo?”

“No. I’m listening. Where did you meet?”

“In Saarbrücken, a little German town near the French border. I don’t know why he chose that place, it wasn’t my idea. More than a year had passed since our first meeting. I imagined us sitting in a café and walking beside the river while we talked about ourselves in the way one would expect in an affectionate relationship between a man who had outlived his physical needs and a woman who had long believed her personal appearance could never encourage any. An alliance of deficient people. But what happened was that we had tea in silence in the station bar, and then we went to one of the two rooms he’d reserved in a small local guest house and spent two days there making love in every imaginable way.

“In the months that followed we went back to writing to each other without ever mentioning what had happened in that bedroom. His letters were light and full of affection but never hinted that he’d like to see me again or do any of the things we had done together again. Then, in April, a few lines arrived in which he asked me to marry him. I answered with a postcard, and three months later we met in front of the registrar. It was our third meeting, and in the meantime I’d arranged to buy us a house and he had applied for his pension.

“In the five years we lived together he continued to talk to me with the same loving kindness and care for my body, as though it was always new to him. This was how he saw everything around him: it was as if he was born again every morning and as if when he put on his pajamas each evening he was dressing for his grave. His steps on the stairs coming down to breakfast would be like those of a boy at the threshold of life. This filled me with joy and an infinite sense of security and desire to have him inside me always.”

When Evelina stopped talking, Leonardo listened to the sounds the night should have produced but they had been trapped by the cold in a compact block of silence. The wind passed silently over the bodies of the young people lying in the farmyard and made the embers of the bonfire glow. Apart from those vermilion fragments of light, and the echo of the woman’s words, the world was a cold shadow with no tomorrow.

“What happened to your husband?”

He had the impression she shrugged her shoulders.

“The kids who captured us realized at once that it would be a bore having to drag him along with them. For several months he’d been having problems with his hip. So they tied him to the kitchen table and threw it into the river near our house. I think they did this because one of them had seen it done in a film. As the current carried him away, Gianni stared up at the sky with the same amazement that he had felt for everything. It was a beautiful sunny day. You’ll think me morbid, but as I watched him drifting away all I could think of was lying naked in bed with him again.”