Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

By the time Lucia and Salomon woke, Leonardo had already milked Circe.

The child and the girl sat at the table sipping milk from steaming cups. Leonardo rubbed his nails on a sponge at the sink, trying to clean them of earth. Then he joined the others at the table.

“The woman who was with us has gone,” he said. “Her family is not far away, and she wants to join them.”

Salomon looked at the muddy bandage that Leonardo had not yet changed and the scratches on his right hand, lowered his eyes and said nothing. Lucia went on staring at the stove, chewing a potato left over from the night before.

In the afternoon, while they were busy in the cellar, Salomon and Leonardo heard music from the road. They ran to the beeches at the edge of the field and, hiding in the bushes behind the great trees, they watched the familiar procession pass on the main road. The Land Rover was leading, followed by a car they had not seen before, and the coach, towed by a tractor. Most of the youngsters were lying on the roof of the coach or on an agricultural trailer that had been attached to it. The cripple, sitting on the hood of the first car, was wearing a bizarre piece of headgear and inspecting the road ahead. He was holding a pike on the end of which Leonardo recognized Richard’s head, blond hair waving in the wind like a ragged flag.

When the music faded in the distance, Leonardo and Salomon went back to the cellar where they had been struggling with the snare for a couple of hours already, trying to replace its old spring with another one taken from a sofa.

“What was the name of the lady who went away this morning?” Salomon asked.

Leonardo realized that Salomon had not recognized Richard’s head.

“Silvia,” he said. “Now let’s try again.”

He grasped the cord that he had attached to one end of the spring while Salomon tried to fasten a hook to the snap mechanism connected to the framework.

“It’s gone in!” Salomon said at one point.

Leonardo opened his eyes, which he had closed with the effort he was making.

“Good.”

The child placed the trap carefully on the floor. He studied it for a long time: it looked like the jaws of a fish, but also like a great dried flower.

“Will the lady be able to find her family?” he asked.

“Yes,” Leonardo said, not feeling he was telling a lie.

That evening, when the boy was asleep, he went down the stairs to the room where Lucia was. Placing the lamp on the windowsill, he sat down at the foot of the bed. Lucia was staring at the ceiling, a slight smile on her lips. She was still wearing the red dress and had not washed since they arrived.

Leonardo slipped off her shoes, took her little feet in his lap, and began massaging them with his remaining hand. She went on gazing at the ceiling as if her feet belonged to someone else.

“I’ll do this every evening,” he told her, “for as long as I live.”

He stopped talking and massaging her feet because it was dawn. Then he put out the light and, by the feeble light of daybreak, climbed the stairs to bed. Salomon was asleep, but some dream must have disturbed him because his mouth was twisted in a grimace and his hair, usually so neat, was in disorder. Using his fingers as a comb, Leonardo tidied the boy’s hair; then he lay down beside him and shut his eyes.

With the coming of May they reached the hills from where they planned to begin their descent to the sea.

It was a clear evening and the sky was bright in the east, as if the sun setting behind the mountains was already about to appear on the other side of the world.

For twenty days now they had been trudging through the woods, avoiding roads, villages, and even hamlets with only a few houses. When Leonardo noticed the youngsters were tired, he got them to climb onto David’s back. The elephant accepted this burden without protest and proceeded at a slow, solemn pace. Circe, bringing up the rear, was saddled with two large panniers they had constructed from wicker baskets. These contained blankets, clothes, knives, the lamp, tools, and a little food collected before they left, including a pumpkin, some nuts, a handful of flour, a bottle of wine, and two onions. Along the way they had found the bodies of a woman and a man in a hut and the carcasses of cattle devoured by dogs, deer, wild boars, and other game, but no one they could exchange a word with.

One morning they saw from a distance an old man running on the road and disappearing into a factory building, but neither Leonardo nor Salomon wanted to go and find out who he was and whether there might be anyone else there.

A little before dusk Leonardo would decide where they would spend the night, and after lighting the fire would go out and set the snare.

“We’ll reach the sea tomorrow, won’t we?” Salomon would ask while they waited for the rabbit or hare caught the previous night to cook on the flames.

“Not quite yet.”

“But it can’t be very far now?”

“No, not far.”

They would eat in silence, Lucia and the child with a good appetite and Leonardo less hungrily; then he and Salomon would sew the animal’s skin together with other skins from which they were making a cover. If the day had been wet and the skin was not dry enough, they would stretch it out by the fire and postpone their work until the next day. While he was sewing, the boy’s eyes would sometimes close so that he pricked himself with the wire they used for a needle, but he would refuse to go to sleep until the job was finished. When he put the cover down he would go and greet David and Circe, who would be browsing in the circle of light cast by the fire; the elephant polishing off newly sprouting leaves while the donkey concentrated on young grass. Salomon would stroke them and thank them for carrying him when he was tired, then he would go back to the fire, say goodnight to Lucia without ever looking her in the eyes, and lie down under his cover.

While they chatted before going to sleep, the boy would talk about his father and mother and other people he cannot have known. Leonardo would listen without interrupting because he knew true things were spoken in those words, and he would stroke his head until he fell asleep, then get up and go to Lucia.

Sometimes the girl would be staring up at the immense vault heavy with stars above them, and sometimes she would be asleep. Leonardo would take her feet in his lap and caress them lovingly, talking to her about her childhood, places they had visited and things they had loved doing together, but never about things that had frightened them. David and Circe, attracted by his voice, would come near and listen spellbound, their round black eyes reflecting the fire.

Lucia would breathe softly, her expression never changing: even in sleep her body seemed wrapped in a shroud of stillness and distance.

By the time Leonardo lay down it would be nearly day and the air chilly, but even without covers he would quickly fall asleep and not feel the cold.

He would walk all day in bare feet, eating and drinking very little, sleeping two hours a night, defecating when he woke in the morning and urinating three times a day, yet he would never have claimed to be hungry, tired, cold, or tormented by any great physical need. The months spent in the cage had toughened his body, paring him down to the essential; his arms bundles of nerves with prominent veins and his leg muscles like sheaths of leather. His eyes, half hidden behind a curtain of hair and beard, shone sea-green. The skin of his face was brown and wrinkled. The scar of his amputation had healed well and looked as if his hand had been not so much cut off as reabsorbed into his arm.

In the morning, by the time the young people woke, he would have already milked the donkey and retrieved whatever had been caught in the snare. Often a rabbit or hare was attracted by the potato bait, but once he was surprised to find a badger and another time a fox. The animals were nearly always dead and if they weren’t Leonardo would finish them off with a stick and take them to the camp, where Salomon would tie them to a branch to skin and gut them. When Leonardo had told the child that this must be his job since with only one hand he could not do it himself, Salomon had been reluctant, but as the days passed he had proved an able and meticulous butcher.