Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Quite sure, but you go to sleep now.”

“But what if they come here?”

“They won’t come here.”

“Maybe they’re good swimmers.”

“They won’t come here.”

As soon as Salomon was asleep, Leonardo went out to sit with Sebastiano, who was looking at the fires on the walls of the fortified town. The sky was clear and a thin slice of moon was suspended a little above the hills. The storm had disturbed the sea and a salty vapor rising from the rocks forced them to close their eyes. Leonardo stroked his stump, feeling conscious of the loss of his hand.

“Let’s go as soon as it gets light,” he said.

Fifty meters from the shore Leonardo signaled to Sebastiano to stop the boat.

Sebastiano took the oars out of the water and the bow pitched to the left, breaking the straight line their journey had maintained until that moment. The three men had gotten up and were waiting in silence. The covers they had slept on were lying abandoned around the fire like open petals around a burning pistil.

Minutes passed in which nothing happened. The elephant was lying on the sand, his belly rising and falling in his sleep. In the quiet moments of the sea’s ebb and flow, Leonardo could hear the animal’s breath and smell the cold stench of his dung, both brought to them on the wind.

Then the oldest man understood; he said something to the other two, who began to go along the beach in the direction of the village. It took half an hour for their figures to disappear around the jetty behind the first houses.

“Get close to the shore,” Leonardo told Sebastiano. “Then go back to the kids.”

The old man was standing waiting for him beside the fire, which by now had gone out. When Leonardo was a few paces from him, he nodded a greeting.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We had no intention of frightening you.”

He was more than seventy, but his short, compact body was in no sense fragile. He had the strength of an olive tree grown in a pot. His black eyes must once have been formidable, but they seemed to have signed a truce with humanity and the world.

“What is it you want?” Leonardo asked him.

The man smiled weakly. “Let’s sit down,” he said.

The three men had left a small saucepan on the embers. The water had gone cold but the man moved it to where the charcoal was still hot, then poured in a powder resembling coffee from a small envelope taken from his pocket. His movements were calm and precise.

“We didn’t recognize you,” the old man said, “but the boy who was here just now, the red-haired one, was certain he wasn’t making a mistake. He said he used to work in the bank where you were a customer.”

Leonardo remembered the young man with freckles who had advised him to accept the fact that he had lost his money. Ever since he had lost all sense of time, the people who had appeared in his life, even those he had only met for a few minutes, inhabited a special place in his mind from where he could recall them without difficulty. It was rather like what had happened to all the stories he had read or listened to.

The old man took a spoon from his pocket and stirred the coffee, on which a thin ivory-colored froth was forming.

“There are more than five hundred of us in the citadel,” he said, “most are from far away. This winter we rescued a lot of people who were dying of starvation on the coast. They’d come hoping to find a boat to take them to France, but all the boats vanished long ago and the border’s guarded by the army. If we hadn’t taken them in they would have died or become victims of the gangs.”

The man broke off to taste a spoonful of the liquid, then he nodded that it was almost ready.

“Inside the walls we have a kitchen garden, an orchard, a dozen cows, chickens, goats, and a small vineyard. There’s also an old furnace and a well we’ve been able to restore to active use, and what we still lack we’re building a little at a time or retrieving from the lower town. Every two or three days we go hunting in the hills. We also have two boats hidden among the newer buildings, but we only use them at night and without lights.”

He put the spoon back in his pocket and took two glasses from the backpack, which must have been his pillow during the night.

“Some time ago a woman who came from the north told us about a man with only one hand who was traveling with an elephant, a horse, and two children. She had never met him but had heard it said that he’d been shut in a cage and had given up his hand to be free. When you arrived we realized it must be you but didn’t recognize you at first. We haven’t many weapons, and we prefer not to use those we do have, so we keep a careful eye on anyone circulating around here. We prefer them to come to us first. That’s why we didn’t approach you earlier.”

The man filled the glasses with the hot dark liquid. He gave one to Leonardo and lifted the other to his own lips. For a while they sat in silence, watching the island slowly emerging from the darkness.

“I worked as a marine biologist in this nature reserve for thirty years,” the man said. “It was I who built the hut you are sleeping in, because I needed somewhere to keep my tools and the instruments I used for surveying.”

He savored a mouthful of coffee then swallowed it.

“Two years ago, when the dogs began to be a problem, someone thought of dumping them here. There was no building big enough to house them and it would have been too costly to exterminate them, so they began sending them here from the whole Riviera. They were brought in cages by the truckload, put in a boat, and winched onto the island. They were given nothing to eat or drink, so they tore each other to pieces. Any that survived mated, producing puppies that were either devoured at birth or hidden by their mothers in some lair until they were strong enough to come out, and themselves start killing.

“It was utter hell, but people said it was better than having the dogs in town or on the beaches. In fact there was no more economical way to get rid of them and dispose of their bodies. There’s a strong current between here and the island, and those that tried to swim back to the mainland were drowned at sea. One day on the beach we found a Labrador that had lost a leg, the only one that made it across. I hid it, but it died a day later.

“I was living on the hillside at that time and at night I couldn’t get any sleep. The dogs snarled and howled incessantly, then they would suddenly stop. They knew that the cages would arrive the next day and wanted to save their strength. In the morning they would all be there on the beach.

“There was the kind of silence that makes your hair stand on end while we were lowering the cages, but as soon as we opened them the inferno would begin again. They would form bands and divide the island between them, but once the weak, the old, and the puppies had been torn to pieces, they would return to fighting among themselves. There was a great deal we could learn from them, if one could face watching them. Homo homini lupus . What happened afterward proved my point. I wish I could have been wrong, but I wasn’t.

“The last to survive was a large white dog from the Maremma district. He went around for days trying to find a lair full of puppies, but there was nothing left on the island. And no more cages would be arriving, because the few dogs left on the coast had fled inland. Then he began to howl. When I went out onto the balcony at night I could see his white shape on the highest point of the island where the old tower was. It was like a kind of singing. Begging for a mate so he could impregnate her and then rip her to pieces. Then he stopped and I realized he must be dead.”