Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

When they had cleaned the animal, they would go back to the water and wash their hands, arms, face, and feet, drying themselves on a large beach towel they had found. Lucia would wait for them by the fire. She showed no fear of being left alone and when they were on the march she would sometimes disappear into the woods, Leonardo imagined to attend to her physical needs, reappearing at the exact point where they had stopped to wait for her. With time the red dress got torn and one of the flat shoes she wore began coming apart, but she seemed to have no interest in the change of clothing Leonardo had brought for her.

“Will we see the sea today?” Salomon asked. The airy valley below them was of such a dazzling green as to force them to look away. These were the first steps they had taken downhill in a long time.

“A few days more.”

“How many?”

Leonardo looked toward the far hillside where the wind turbines were revolving silently. This time he had decided to take a route to the south, where the map had shown an ancient series of military trenches that, as he hoped, had turned out to be overgrown with brambles and impassable for cars.

“Three,” he said.

Late in the afternoon they saw the roofs of a village beneath them and the ruins of a castle high above it. All that was left of the castle was a shell of walls covered with ivy, but the village looked to be in good condition if deserted.

Leonardo sat down on a stone and studied the castle for a few minutes, with Salomon crouching at his side. Lucia stood behind them. David and Circe, as always when they stopped, went off to eat. Nearby, a sorb tree blown down during the winter was still putting out toothed oval leaves.

“Do we absolutely have to go there?” the boy said.

“No, we don’t have to,” Leonardo said.

“Then why do you want to?”

“I don’t know.”

The hot sun was piercing the roof of leaves above them and marking out patches on the surrounding grass. Leonardo was thinking about a man he had never seen or known but who he knew to have lived in one of those houses. He could smell his clothes. For days he had been having similar visions and clearly remembering everything he had read or heard in the past. Even so, his mind was light and free, as if his immense archive of stories could fit into a suitcase in an empty house.

“Can we come too?” Salomon asked.

“Better not. I’ll be back soon.”

He went down to the village through the woods, reaching the backs of the first houses: tall, narrow stone structures in the Ligurian style but solidly built in the way that things are in the mountains.

He found an alley and walked down it as far as the main lane, which was no wider than his extended arms and paved with round cobbles. The shutters of the houses were closed, their doors ajar or wide open to empty rooms. After some fifty meters the main street opened into a space with a fountain, a small play area for children, and the terrace of a bar. A cat dozing on a low stone wall was the only living creature to be seen. Up a flight of steps was the church.

Leonardo went in. There were no pews or fittings. High up, a great wooden crucifix was watching over the empty aisles like someone casting a final glance over his home before closing the door and leaving for a new life elsewhere.

Leaving the church, he wandered through the village until he found the house. Access was by a set of stone steps, but the door was hidden by a vine that had spread over the whole garden. Above it a Japanese persimmon extended its branches, and in front were olive trees and what had been a terraced kitchen garden but had now been taken over by wild boars.

First he came into a small room with a high ceiling and then the kitchen. The house had been built vertically with small rooms one above another linked by steep stairways up to the top floor, which from the outside looked like a small turret covered with ivy. There was no trace of the man who had lived there, or of the woman Leonardo knew to have shared most of his life: no garment, book, or furniture, only the great cloths and sheets of paper on which the man had traced designs in ash, anticipating what the world would become.

In the space under a roof that must have been his studio, Leonardo found jars of burned earth, sand, and dust, each with a small label written in pencil. Also fragments of wood smoothed by the sea and strangely formed stones. He picked up one of the stones; it was gray, interlaced with white circles of a different mineral, and as he held it he could feel the man’s warm, bony hand in his palm. He could see him, small and white-haired, moving through the rooms in a pullover and bending for hours over his artwork of ashes, the work of a man who knew that all things begin in poverty. Leonardo spoke to him.

By the time he left the garden of the house, the sun had lost its heat. He climbed back up the main lane to the square, but before reaching it he heard singing and stopped. A cheerful song sung by a woman.

He followed the music to the door it was coming from and found himself in a bare kitchen with a table laid for three. From the stairs leading to the floor above came two female voices, one responding to the other. They were singing in old French.

He climbed the stairs and even before he reached the top step, met the eyes of three women sitting together in the middle of a room. All the furniture, consisting of a sofa, sideboard, wardrobe, and double bed, had been moved to one side as though someone had tilted the floor to make it slide, while the other walls were hung with carpets giving it a peaceful and Arab feeling.

The women stared at Leonardo for a moment without interrupting their song, then turned around to face the window beyond which the sun was sinking and tingeing the colors of the valley with yellow. The thin woman in the middle was about fifty and her black dress would not have looked out of place under a raincoat on some suburban street in Amsterdam or Paris. Her mulatto face was beautiful, even if tired and bloodless, sparse hair framing it like a veil. The other two were younger but infinitely more resigned. All three must have lost something; in fact, their eyes clashed with the frivolity of their song, clearly intended to raise a smile. The mulatto woman was conducting, raising and lowering her hands from her knees. When the song ended she got up and walked toward Leonardo.

“Did you like that?”

“Very much.”

She was just as tall and slim as he remembered her.

“You really mean that?”

“I do.”

The woman returned to the others, complimented them, and took her leave of them, making an appointment for the next day. Then she went back to Leonardo.

“It’s such a lovely day,” she said. “Shall we sit outside for a while?”

Leonardo followed her into the street and toward the bar. There were still two tables and a few chairs on the terrace. They chose two that still had unbroken seats and sat down, facing the hillside behind which the sun would set. The door of the bar at the back had been smashed and one could imagine excrement and screwed-up waste paper inside on the floor. Small skulls could be seen in the shadows. On the other hand, the terrace was clean and full of light. From the acacias came a good smell and the buzzing of wasps.

“Have you ever been here before?” the woman asked.

Leonardo remembered her face surrounded by curly hair, of which hardly any now remained.

“No,” he said.

She looked at the terraces rising above the houses and the two lanes, one coming out behind a swing and the other beside the church. A notice said GO SLOW, CHILDREN STILL PLAY IN THE STREET HERE.

“I first saw this place thirty years ago. I’d come to Europe as a backing singer for Leonard Cohen and the day after a gig in Nice a lighting technician brought me here on his motorbike. I was twenty-five then, and I thought sooner or later I’d come to live in this village, especially if I had a child.”