Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

A squabble then broke out between those who wanted to tell Richard and those who wanted to kill the two animals without telling him. During the ensuing brawl Leonardo noticed that the aggressive indifference that had previously characterized their actions was dwindling into petty malice.

The cripple came out, pistol in hand, and fired a shot into the air. Leonardo saw a second-floor curtain move aside and Richard’s face appear behind the glass. Then he opened the window and stared for a while in silence at the panting youngsters in the square. He was bare to the waist, with a few blond hairs on his gaunt chest.

“Only eat the little one,” he directed before closing the window again.

It snowed every day of the following week. Showers that lasted only a few hours but were enough to preserve the depth of snow on the ground and prevent the procession moving forward despite a rise in temperature and the gradual lengthening of the days.

Leonardo waited every evening for the young people to fall asleep; then he went over to Circe and spent a long time sucking her rough little teats. It had not occurred to anyone that the donkey was lactating, and Leonardo tried the keep this little source of nourishment to himself. For her part, Circe seemed happy to be relieved of the burden and stood still while Leonardo massaged her teats to make the milk descend. He called her Circe after a fable he had written for Lucia when she was little, in which a donkey named Circe decided she only had to puff out her cheeks to be able to fly. The other animals on the farm mocked and scorned her, but in the end she succeeded.

One night he woke up to find his thoughts as still as crocodiles under the moon, all motionless below the surface of the water as they waited for their prey to come down to drink. Basic thoughts without frills, stretched taut and ready for action.

This reminded him how much his mind used to be agitated by an infinity of imprecise ideas wriggling about like eels in a bucket. He was ashamed of this busy lack of purpose, but since this guilt too belonged to the past, he let it go.

When the doctor came that morning Leonardo watched him moving from one side of the cage to the other to give food and water to the two animals. Since Circe’s arrival, David would no longer leave his side of the cage. The two had tacitly agreed to divide the available space and limited themselves to exchanging an occasional glance. Leonardo would sleep next to one on one night and the other on the next night. When the doctor had finished, he stroked David and began to leave.

“Push the door to, but don’t close it,” Leonardo told him. The man stopped.

“Do you want to run away?” he said, studying Leonardo’s impassive face.

“No. But I need you to do something else for me.”

The doctor noticed Leonardo was looking at the hatchet he used to cut branches for David.

“What are you hoping to do?”

“Leave it on that window ledge over there,” Leonardo said, using his chin to indicate the bar on the other side of the square.

“You’re mad. You’ll only get yourself killed. And then what’ll happen to your daughter?”

Leonardo looked at the man and the entirely rational expression he always wore on his face.

“Where’s your son?” he asked him.

The man raised an eyebrow.

“What do you mean?”

“One day you told me your wife and daughter were dead but that you don’t know where your son is.”

“That’s true.”

“When did you lose him? Where did it happen?”

The doctor wiped his left hand on his side. A very slow movement. Then he looked through the windows at the several young people circling lazily in the great hall. The sky was overcast but with a strip of lighter clouds stretched across it.

“Who did you play finger-cutting with?” Leonardo asked him.

The man half opened his lips but said nothing. His eyes were very tired.

“You played finger-cutting with your son, didn’t you?”

The doctor shook his head, his face overcome with weariness at this reappearance of something he had loaded with ballast and sent to the bottom of the sea. Then he turned for the door. When he left, Leonardo could hear that he had not bolted it. He got up and stroked David’s head first, then Circe’s.

“This evening,” he whispered to them both.

That afternoon Leonardo slept a calm, restful sleep, of the kind that normally follows rather than precedes an event that may change the course of one’s life.

What woke him was the lighting of the lamp in the square; day had already retreated behind the mountains, though a trace still survived in the blue profiles of the highest peaks. Thawing snow was dripping softly from the roofs.

He looked at the hall where the young people were dozing on the mattresses. They had already cleared a space in the center of the room; soon Richard and Lucia would come down and someone would fetch him to dance.

He got to his feet, pushed open the door left unbolted by the doctor, and climbed down from the wagon.

Crossing the square to the old bar with bare feet was like crossing the middle of an immense space, big enough to walk through for days without ever reaching a destination. This did not dismay him in the least.

He picked up the hatchet left on the window ledge, stuck it into the back of his pants, and started back to the wagon. But before he got there he moved aside from his footprints in the snow and headed for the trailer instead; the door was ajar.

It was like entering the office of a methodical clerk who was able to rest for an hour or two on a camp bed between jobs. There was nothing formal, just a narrow space decorated with pornographic photographs and a large ceiling mirror that reflected a dirty green bedcover. The floor was rubber, and pans on the gas cooker had been used for cooking rice. From an iron hook over the bed hung cords, chains, and other improvised sadomasochistic contraptions, including a machine with rubber tubes designed for milking cows.

Leonardo went to the desk. Propped on its surface were several charcoal sketches and a Bible with a fabric cover. The sketches showed Lucia naked and bound. There were others in a filing cabinet above the desk. Leonardo assumed they probably featured other girls and did not open them.

He found what he was looking for in the second drawer of the desk. He took the exercise book, slipped it into what was left of his back pocket, and left.

Once back in the cage, he closed the door and began waiting. Two lamps fed by an electrical generator feebly lit the hall where the bodies of the youngsters were moving to music that was increasingly drowned by the sounds of the thaw. The mountains were hidden by a black cloak, though it was obvious they were still keeping a watch on everything.

When he saw Richard and Lucia appear at the foot of the stairs, Leonardo took his hands out of his pockets but did not move. Not yet. The dancing stopped, and he watched them circulate among the young people in the hall. Lucia was in a red dress that must have belonged to a larger woman who had been a mother, while Richard was wearing a beige tunic and a wool scarf draped artistically over his shoulders. When he saw Richard have a word with the cripple and sit down at the desk, he knew the moment had come for him to get to his feet.

The boy who had been sent to fetch him saw him approaching the hotel and briefly stopped dead at the door to stare at him in astonishment, as if he were watching the flight of an animal that cannot fly. He was young and blond, with a high forehead and a chin that seemed borrowed from someone else’s face.

When Leonardo entered the room the young people did not move, their eyes fixed on him. The music was far away and the only noise was the sound of the fires burning in the stoves. The air smelled of sweat, thunderstorms, and youth.