Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

An hour later the procession came to the first road signs announcing the pass and veered off the main road heading for the valley. The surrounding whiteness was untouched. The few houses on the two still high sides of the valley had been abandoned but were in good condition. There were no signs of fires or wrecking, and everything was steeped in the kind of silence one might expect after a dignified exodus.

Leonardo inhaled the cold air to clean out his lungs.

We’ll never make it to France, he thought, watching the setting sun turn the white snow deep cobalt blue. There’s too much snow and the frontier will be guarded. We shall all die.

None of these thoughts affected his heartbeat in any way at all.

The next day they managed to climb the valley as far as one of the last villages before the pass, but on reaching a hollow cutting where the road forked, they ran into a deep snowdrift out of reach of the sun and had to stop.

They parked the vehicles on a village square, where a century earlier holidaymakers had stayed in a comfortable pale-pink three-story hotel more recently converted into a customs post and then sealed up by the military. On the other side of the square were the civic center, a bar, a haberdasher’s and a furniture store, though all that was left of any of them was their shop signs.

The coach was parked in the middle of the square to form an L with the trailer and the van while the young people scattered around the village, which had a single main street with stone houses, to search for wood and something to eat. It was still early afternoon and several others went to hunt in the forest immediately above the houses. The frontier cannot have been more than twenty kilometers away, but the surrounding mountains were deep in snow and a steady wind was shifting great masses of clouds like a roof over the valley. Leonardo stuck his legs out through the bars to enjoy the warmth of the sun. He had seen Alberto and others head for what had once been a grocery shop with a gas pump next to it. Only two were left to guard the square. The trailer stayed shut. As usual during the day, there was no sign of the doctor. Suddenly he heard someone calling him. He turned and saw Salomon’s face just above the floor of the cage. Leonardo sat down with his back to him so that no one should see him talking to the boy.

“Are you well?”

“Yes,” said the child.

“Do they give you enough to eat?”

“Yes, but when are Mamma and Papa going to come for me?”

Leonardo adjusted his back against the bars.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I don’t think they will be coming.”

“Not at all?”

“No. We have to try and manage by ourselves.”

Salomon mulled over this idea, staring at the floor deep in excrement and broken branches. Each morning, after the doctor’s visit, Leonardo had once been in the habit of clearing both out of the wagon but had not bothered after Evelina left.“It’s very dirty here,” the child said.

“You’re right, I really must clean the place up.”

The child nodded.

“I’m sorry the lady has gone.”

“So am I, but she’ll be fine where she is now.”

“But she was a bit of company for you.”

“I’ve still got David.”

Salomon was playing with a twig sticking out of the cage; then he snapped it off and let it fall to the ground.

“Alberto has told me some very nasty things about you.”

“What has he said?”

“That you’re worthless and if he’d stayed with you he would’ve died, but that now he’s the children’s leader and Richard loves him very much.”

“You know what to believe and what not to believe.”

Salomon picked up the broken twig and joined it to the branch he had broken it from, fitting the two parts together again. His nails were dirty.

“I don’t want to do any more theater,” he said.

“I know, but you must be patient a little bit longer. OK? Now go away. I don’t want them to see you talking to me.”

“Will you be dancing this evening?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t like it when you dance, but it’s funny too.”

“Just remember I’m dancing to make you laugh. That it’s what I do. OK?”

“OK.”

“Now go away.”

“I don’t know where the others are.”

“Wait for them in the coach. It must be nice and warm behind the windows.”

“There’s a seat covered with blood. Where Giampiero was sitting.”

“Then sit on those steps over there. Close your eyes and think of something nice.”

“Can I think of Mamma, Papa, and Paul?”

“Of course you can.”

“So shall I go?”

“Yes, go now.”

Leonardo heard his footsteps rounding the wagon. As he made his way to the steps, Salomon waved a hand behind his back without turning. The bald girl was lying on the ground taking a little sun on her wasted body. One of her small white breasts was peeping out of her dress.

In the evening it began snowing again and by the next morning twenty centimeters had fallen on the square, transforming it into an unwritten page. The young people had spent the night in the great hall and ground floor of the hotel, where the previous day they had piled clothes, mattresses, stoves, and wood collected from the houses in the village. The place had two glass walls and the stoves had been arranged in such a way that their chimneys led through several broken panes, which had then been resealed with nylon and old curtains. Leonardo had watched through the glass as they ate and then threw themselves onto the mattresses and drifted off into deep sleep.

He had spent all night watching the snow falling without ever wanting to close his eyes. There was no moon, but the square was lit by a photovoltaic street lamp and the snow emerging from the black sky was tinged a deep fluorescent blue that turned to pewter as it settled on the ground. It was not cold, or at least it was not as cold as the night before, when the sky had been full of stars.

In the morning, when he emerged from the trailer, Richard’s face was twisted with rage: now they could go neither forward nor back. They were stuck, under the gray still sky. Looking around himself, he found Leonardo’s eyes staring at him. He held his gaze for a moment, until Lucia appeared with a blanket around her shoulders and both moved pale and trembling toward the hotel. Leonardo realized the trailer’s heating must have failed.

That evening he was taken to the great hall where the mattresses had been pushed aside to free a circle in the middle of the room. The atmosphere was warm and comfortable, but the young people seemed restless and disappointed, and even while Leonardo was dancing some preferred to look out at the snow, which had begun falling again on the parking lot below them.

Richard and Lucia watched the dancing from behind a desk with a black-leather writing surface, and then Richard took Lucia by the hand, and without bestowing his usual blessing on the tribe, climbed the stairs and disappeared to the floor above.

Before the cripple sent him back to the cage, Leonardo had a chance to study the faces of the youngsters. Their old naïve ferocity had given way to something still terrible but more human, and though he did not know their names, he felt that for the first time he could tell them apart. Before leaving the hall he noticed Salomon sitting pretending to smile stupidly at nothing.

Two days later a donkey appeared in the square with her foal. Leonardo saw them emerge from the road leading from the country; they were thin and in very bad condition. Noticing them from the hotel windows, the youngsters ran out and surrounded them; the donkey, who must have been searching for food, let herself be caught without putting up any resistance.