Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

“Have you ever been on an island before?” he asked the boy.

Salomon thought.

“Yes, but I was very little. They told me about it.”

“Was it a large island?”

“I think so, because we couldn’t even see the sea.”

Leonardo stretched out his hand and passed his fingers through the boy’s hair. Bauschan was lying in the space between the two beds. Leonardo understood from his whimpers that Salomon was stroking him.

“Has it gone now?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“Then go to sleep, we’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

“For David?”

“Yes, for David too.”

Lucia’s room was smaller; she had moved the bed against the wall, right under the window. Leonardo sat beside her, listening to her breathing interrupted by little wheezing sounds. A dream. Then he took her left foot and ran his thumb over the sole. He did this many times, then switched to her ankle and the other foot. When he got up to go he felt her lightly touch his hand. She gave him time to understand the meaning of what she had done after such a long absence, then after a minute or two she moved his hand to her belly. Leonardo felt hot firm skin under his fingers, then something press against his palm, like a little dog waking up in a sack.

For the first time he was fully aware of Good. Not like in the past, as something that burns and consumes, but as a fire you can hold in your hand and eat in small portions. A fire containing both hot and cold, both light and dark shadow, and that for this reason is more closely related to humanity than to any other creature. Because, in principle, humanity can never be separated from it, in the same way that the water of the sea, the water of the stream, and the water that forms the clouds intercommunicate and belong together.

When Lucia released his hand he got to his feet and tiptoed to the door.

“Thank you,” he said before leaving the room.

As usual, he only slept for a few hours and at first light went out with Bauschan. It only took him a few steps to realize that the opaline color of the island was not due to salt or the nature of the rock but to a covering of dogs’ bones.

He climbed up to the ruins of the tower from where he could take in the whole handkerchief of land, but he could see no dogs or animal carcasses. Bauschan stayed quietly at his side with no smell to follow. Whatever happened on the island had happened long ago.

Returning to the house, he found Sebastiano busy watering the kitchen garden.

During the months he had been here, he had been cultivating a rectangle of land about fifty paces from the shanty. His garden offered zucchini, tomatoes, melons, and peas and, like the house, was on the part of the island not visible from the mainland.

“Do you know why these are here?” Leonardo asked him, indicating the bones Sebastiano had raked up from his garden and piled in a little white pyramid.

Sebastiano shook his head then emptied the bucket between two lines of tomatoes and went off to the tank where he kept the water. The sun was getting strong enough to define shadows, and from the pines at the highest point of the island came the first chirping of two cicadas.

Leonardo looked back at the settlement on the western coast: in fact there was a fortified town or citadel enclosed within walls and ugly houses built in the previous century leading down to the sea. In the clear morning air he could make out threads of smoke rising from the upper part, already turned to ocher by the sun. During the crossing the night before he had noticed fires on the walls but had said nothing because he did not want to worry the young people.

“Who are those people?” he asked.

Sebastiano went back to watering the garden. Leonardo looked at him and waited for an answer, before realizing none would come because no answer existed.

“Have they ever come looking for you?”

Sebastiano bent down to pull up a tuft of grass from among the carrots and indicated no. Leonardo looked at the house where the youngsters were still asleep. The outside of the shanty had been painted with sea-blue paint, and Sebastiano had covered the windows with large jute sacks now swelling in the wind from the mainland, giving the whole house the appearance of an enormous and complicated wind instrument.

“Thank you so much for all this,” Leonardo said.

In fifteen days they managed to scrape together four empty drums that Leonardo and Sebastiano had found by pushing on as far as a service station on the main road; also about twenty wooden planks retrieved from bathing huts, a few meters of rope, some nails and tar, and two almost complete rolls of adhesive tape.

Each morning, after milking Circe and drinking a cup of milk, they left the donkey to graze on the island and took the boat back to the beach.

David, seeing them arrive, would start turning around on himself and giving long emotional trumpetings.

The first to embrace him would be Salomon, who jumped into the water a few meters from the shore, and then it would be Leonardo’s turn. Sebastiano and Lucia would join in these effusions from a distance, while Bauschan would run between David’s legs as if to demonstrate confidence in the elephant’s slowness and gentleness. Once mutual greetings were over Sebastiano and Leonardo would begin work on the hull and Salomon would concentrate on the octopuses. Lucia would pass the time sitting with her hands on her belly and watching the sparse clouds crossing the blue sky from a little shelter of branches Leonardo had built for her.

Toward midday the two men would take the boat and the rest of the material back to the tunnel so that it would not be too noticeable, and, with the young people and the elephant, would go a little way inland to a stream, about twenty meters from the beach.

Under a roof of birches, holm oaks, and carob trees the water had scooped out a number of pools where David was able to refresh himself and Salomon amused himself by diving from the elephant’s back. Even Lucia, without any warning, one day stripped naked and slid carefully into the water in a more secluded pool, where she spent a long time floating with her eyes half closed and her large belly turned to the sky.

When he had refilled the freshwater cans, Leonardo would go off to inspect the snare he had set the day before. The prey it caught was more sporadic than it had been in the hills and the forest, but he did find a small wild boar and a doe whose meat, when salted, could last them the most of the summer.

Lunch would consist of tomatoes, boiled zucchini, and dried peaches; or an omelet made with gulls’ eggs, which Sebastiano had taught Salomon to search for among the inlets on the island. They never lit a fire and before leaving were careful to cover their traces by collecting every scrap left over from their meal.

Back on the beach, the men would work until sunset. Then everyone except the elephant would get back into the boat, which every day looked more like a clumsy catamaran, and would row back to the island.

“Tomorrow can David come too?” Salomon asked as he watched the gray bulk of the elephant shrink until it was lost in the evening.

“Not yet,” Leonardo would say.

When they got to the island Sebastiano would go up to the house, light the stove, and put on the soup to heat, while Leonardo and the boy fished on the rocks until nightfall. It was then that Salomon would tell his dreams and ask Leonardo to tell his, but Leonardo’s dreams were too obscure for a child, so he would replace them with stories from the vast library of his mind. First he told African stories about man and woman; then the exploits of Achilles, the wiles of Ulysses, the misadventures of Don Quixote, the vengeance of the Count of Monte Cristo, and Ahab’s obsession. Leonardo had to tie the fishing line to the child’s wrist so he would not let the fish slip through his hands. Then they would take home what they had caught to be boiled, cured, or eaten raw. Some of the entrails were given to Bauschan, and some were kept as bait for the next evening’s fishing.