Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

Leonardo rested his cheek against David’s rough flank and looked at the point in the darkness where he knew the trailer to be. The wind had something minimal and cold in it. Beyond the bars it was perhaps starting to snow but beyond the bars was enormously far away. Great quantities of air and food were moving around inside David’s belly.

“I would like to know which is worse,” Evelina said. “To be raped a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run a Bulgar gauntlet, to be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fé, to row in a galley, to experience finally all the miseries we all have endured, or simply to stay here with nothing to do?”

They were silent for a while, then he heard her get up, drink from the bucket, and sit down again.

“Do you know the whole thing by heart?” Leonardo asked.

“Only that bit. It has always made me laugh when the old woman talks like that after all they’ve been through. Gianni was crazy about Voltaire. He used to say Candide was the cruelest thing ever written by anyone while laughing.”

One of the boys in the farmyard got to his feet and walked a few steps, then they heard the dull thud of his body hitting the concrete.

“Do you think we’ll die?” he asked her.

Evelina scratched her leg.

“Something like that.”

A week passed during, which it snowed for at least an hour or two every night.

The procession, coming in sight of the town, had veered to the east and begun skirting the approach to the valleys. Leonardo asked Evelina where her home had been, and she pointed to the white mountain hovering above the town and named a small village clinging to its foot.

At night the snow turned the countryside and the roofs of the buildings along the road white, while by day a milky sky presided over the silent progress of the procession. From time to time, the youths would stick rifles out of the windows to shoot at the deer, dogs, and white hares that populated the areas where they parked, then would run and retrieve the carcasses and throw them onto the truck without the procession stopping. Along the main road they passed abandoned cars and empty heavy goods vehicles as well as houses, but the only tracks in the new snow were those they made themselves. The days were getting longer, but the cold still made their breath visible and gripped their hands in its bite.

During the daytime Leonardo and Evelina would cuddle together, stupefied by the rocking of the wagon. The shots would wake Leonardo from dreams in which he was talking to animals and being nourished by their milk. Evelina, in contrast, dreamed about beds too high for her to climb on to. In the evening, the tribe would camp in buildings that had once hosted car dealers and furniture showrooms and gut the animals captured during the day and cook them around the fire. When Leonardo was not called out to dance, he would stay in the cage with Evelina and David. They spent the nights talking, pressed up against the elephant, until the doctor brought them their food at dawn. Mostly they discussed places they had visited in the past and familiar events, but there was always a moment when they remembered that the places they were talking about did not exist anymore and that the people whose faces and actions they were trying to describe were dead. Then they would interrupt themselves and lie in each other’s arms listening in the silence to their own breathing, which deafened them like the squeaking of a bicycle on a dark road.

Two boys had managed to retrieve a can of diesel from the tank of an old combine harvester; but even so, by now the only vehicles still capable of moving under their own steam were the van and the coach. Nearly all the cars had been abandoned, and the young people collected in the coach. Their empty eyes peered out through the windows at the mountains on one side and the desolate and apparently endless plain on the other.

Leonardo felt he could detect for the first time a belief in the young people’s faces that there might be a tomorrow, and that if this was so it was something they could lose. This perception must have seemed to them like an object just dug up from under the ground, something to turn over in their hands in an attempt to understand what it was and who had buried it and why. The effort seemed to make them very tired.

That evening, when the music was switched on and the fire had been lit, they paired off without enthusiasm and after dancing for half an hour fell into a sleep like death, from which no one woke to feed the fire.

Richard seldom appeared. When he did, his face looked as serene and cheerful as ever, even if very pale. Lucia followed him as he passed among the young people, talking to them and blessing them, and she sat with him to watch Leonardo dance. This was the only time the tribe seemed to recover their savage innocence.

“I’ll never be able to get her away from here,” Leonardo said one evening, returning to the cage.

Evelina stroked his cheek.

“Of course you will!”

“How?”

“Don’t underestimate yourself. Soon you’ll be stronger than he is. Perhaps you already are.”

Leonardo looked at her. In the weak moonlight the innocence of her face was enough to send him to sleep. In the afternoon the sky had broken, showing a section of the heavenly vault.

“What will you take with you when you go?” she asked

This seemed an absurd question to Leonardo.

“Lucia, you, David, Salomon, the bald girl, and my exercise book,” he said.

“What exercise book?”

“A book I was writing in. I think it must be in the trailer.”

“And Alberto?”

Leonardo said nothing.

The next day a series of shots broke several windows on the coach, hitting one boy in the throat and wounding another in the arm. The van towing the trailer stopped, and everyone ran for shelter. Only Leonardo and Evelina stayed exposed inside the cage.

The shots had come from a large fortified building perched on a spur half a mile from the road. Dating from the fifteenth, perhaps sixteenth century, it must once have been the seat of some minor feudal lord and was now surrounded by modern villas of shoddy design. When some of the youths fired back, it provoked a burst of return fire, more concentrated this time, that pierced the surface of the coach, the van, and the trailer. Richard, who had gotten out to take shelter with Lucia, called the cripple, who hurried over with his head down. They talked together for about ten minutes, a discussion punctuated by silences during which they stared at the sparse patches of snow on the asphalt. Leonardo knew they were weighing up the pros and cons of attacking the fortress and whether to wait for night or try to negotiate. In the end the cripple got up and came to the cage, after first taking a rifle from one of the boys and tying a white shirt to the barrel. When he opened the door, Leonardo squeezed Evelina’s arm.

“Move,” the cripple said to Evelina from the entrance. The expression on his face was as blank and ferocious as ever.

Evelina turned to Leonardo with a smile.

“Don’t let yourself down. OK?”

“I won’t.”

Leonardo got to his feet and stroked her arm.

“You are dear to me,” he said.

“So are you to me,” she answered; then went to David and rested her head against the elephant’s forehead for a moment before following the cripple out of the cage.

Leonardo watched them make their way up the little road leading to the fortress: the little cripple bent over, with the white shirt hoisted on the barrel of his rifle and Evelina with her bulk enclosed in her dirty trousers and red chenille sweater. As he watched her, Leonardo was aware of the existence of a form of beauty he had never previously known in things. It was a wonder that was not to be found on their surface or even in their depths but that fluttered around them, nourished by a time that was not the present but the recent past or a future soon to come, at any rate not the present, or no longer so.