Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

“I have so many things to tell you,” Leonardo said.

They sat down by the fire facing the sea and began to eat the octopus. Bauschan, sitting against his master’s back, stared at the elephant and the donkey, who were crouching between the pillars of the restaurant. Every so often he would let out an uncomprehending howl.

“Alberto’s lost,” Leonardo said, “but we’ve got another boy with us now, and soon Lucia’s going to have a baby.”

Sebastiano went on staring at the gentle coming and going of the waves, as if he had already heard these facts many times. He was wearing a flowered coat with a hole in place of the pocket and formal twill pants.

Leonardo opened his mouth to say more but realized that there was nothing else in what had happened that he needed to report. He could remember a time when the past had played a great part in his life, but that seemed a remote period and no longer his.

He stroked the dog in silence for a little longer. The rising sun was softening the air, and large slate-colored clouds were rising from the sea. Then he got up, went into the restaurant, woke the young people, and told them it was time to move on.

They walked eastward along beaches that had once echoed with the cries of vacationers and were now desolate and silent. Many of the villages had been raided and set on fire; others seemed intact but lifeless, like cold casts of their former selves. Empty houses, overgrown gardens, harbors without boats. Groups of cats were dozing under cars and in the shade of pittosporum bushes, taking note without interest of the passing humans. No human sound tempered the stillness; only the cries of gulls and crows and the constant lapping of the sea.

It was sunset by the time they came to the section of beach facing the island. Leonardo helped Lucia down from the elephant and went to sit with her on one of the rocks at the end of the stretch of sand. At that point the coast extended into the sea as a rocky promontory, like a hand trying to recapture something it had absentmindedly allowed to escape. The island, a few hundred meters from the shore, seemed naked and unfriendly despite the oblique light of the sun—a triangle of opaline rock with nothing on it but a few shrubs, including broom.

Leonardo looked at it: it seemed sprinkled with lime and looked like a relic from a far distant past. When he turned, he saw Sebastiano heading toward the embankment that carried the road. After a moment his figure vanished into the dark arch of a tunnel.

“Why are you crying?” Leonardo asked.

Salomon, sitting on the donkey, shook his head to indicate it was nothing but went on glowering at the island. He had been silent all day without ever asking who the man leading them was, or where they were going or how long it would take to get there. In a cave where they had stopped for a half hour’s rest he had found a woman’s old handbag and spent the afternoon filling it with crabs he caught on the way. The legs emerging from his shorts were as dry and dark as sticks of licorice. His bright-yellow shoulder-length hair made him look like someone born for running over moors.

“Are you scared?”

The child shrugged and tipped up his nose. The island was all rocky outcrops and seemed to offer no landing place. On the highest point were the circular ruins of an ancient lookout tower, now little more than a pile of stones.

Leonardo reached down to Bauschan’s head. The dog’s hair was rough with salt, his nose cold and damp. When he looked back at Salomon, he realized the child’s eyes and the dog’s were exactly the same blue.

“What do you mean, scared?”

Salomon looked around as if wanting to relate this fear to something visible, then simply slid his hand down a couple of times from his throat to the top of his stomach. The elephant crapped, filling the air with a smell of rotten fruit. The sun had set, removing both the warmth and the ferocity of the day.

“I understand,” Leonardo nodded, “but it won’t happen.”

Salomon looked Leonardo in the eye, and then at the elephant, the island, the dog, and Lucia, who was holding her bump in her hands and glancing back at the stretch of coast they had come along. Leonardo realized the boy’s mind was occupied by one of those thoughts we live with from the moment we are born to the moment we leave the earth. Something to do with finishing a task passed on to us by those who have gone before. He remained dumb to think of the violence and grace involved in all this.

“Now let’s eat,” he said, aware the boy had stopped weeping and that the crisis had passed.

Salomon jumped off the donkey, came up to Leonardo, and emptied his handbag on the ground. After a moment of uncertainty, the crabs began fleeing in all directions. Leonardo grabbed one of the biggest that was about to disappear among the rocks.

“The knife from the basket,” he said.

The boy caught up with the donkey, which was heading for the road, and took a small knife with an arts-and-crafts handle from one of her panniers. David was ripping long sprays of bougainvillea from the embankment with his trunk. This vegetable noise was the only sound in the world. The wind had dropped, silencing the backwash of surf, and the sea just a few meters away was a motionless membrane.

Leonardo opened the crabs and the young people ate their flesh, then Salomon went on a trip around the rocks and came back with some sea snails and limpets. By the time they had finished their meal the sand around them was dotted with mother-of-pearl shells. The smaller crabs, in translucent armor, circulated among the leftovers polishing off what remained.

At this point they saw Sebastiano come out of the tunnel.

He laid a series of round poles on the ground at regular intervals, went back into the tunnel, and a few seconds later the bow of a small rowing boat began to emerge from the darkness. Before Leonardo and Salomon could even get to their feet, the boat had slithered toward the waterline with a thundering echo like a drumroll.

Sebastiano lit an oil lamp in the boat, and while Leonardo and Salomon loaded on the baskets, he collected the poles and carried them back to the tunnel. After a moment of reluctance, the donkey agreed to get into the boat and, as they left the shore, stood gazing ahead like an old sea hand.

The crossing took half an hour, and throughout this time Salomon looked back at the shore where the elephant was staring steadily at the little light from the lamp disappearing toward the island. Leonardo put his arm around the boy’s narrow waist and felt his thin stomach shaken by sobs.

“We’ll find a way,” was all he said.

They landed on gravel at a little bay on the side of the island facing the open sea. A few meters from the shore, with a dexterity that betrayed long experience, Sebastiano pulled in the oars, and letting the boat bounce on the waves, guided it right up to the beach. The donkey got off by herself, and they unloaded the panniers and two large cans of water that Sebastiano had filled. Then Leonardo helped Lucia off and they were on their way.

During the last few months Sebastiano had added to the only hut already on the island, transforming it into a house with three rooms. The room they entered contained four chairs, a table made from a door placed on two tree trunks, a basin, a stove, and three shelves with some dishes and cutlery and a couple of pans. Stretched in a corner, next to a prie-dieu, was an animal hide similar to the one Sebastiano had given Leonardo when they separated. The only furniture in the other two rooms was three lounge chairs.

They drank a little water, pouring it into a bowl from one of the cans that Sebastiano had carried up to the house on his shoulders, after which Lucia retired to the room with a single bed while Leonardo and the boy took the other. The plastic on the beds was hard and smelled of chloroform, so they covered them with the rabbit skins they had sewn together in recent months and lay down. Leonardo had the solar battery with him but did not switch it on.