Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

Danilo slammed down his last card, then got up and went behind the bar, and without Leonardo saying anything made him a cappuccino without froth. When it was ready he put it down on the bar and, giving an expressionless glance at the dog’s snout sticking out of Leonardo’s pocket, went back to his cards. His companions had totaled the score and dealt the cards for the next hand. All four looked contrite, as if only playing to punish themselves.

“But I think,” the man with the postman said, “they must be found. We have to know what they look like and find out what they plan to do.”

Leonardo looked down at Bauschan’s smooth head. A fly had settled on one of the dog’s ears; he smiled and blew it away.

“I’d like to know what the professor thinks,” the postman said.

Leonardo looked at him. In the first months after his return, the postman had come every morning to deliver letters from the lawyer, the court, the publisher, and readers offering either support or expressing disappointment at what had happened, but with the passing of time the only letters that kept arriving were written in his own hand and returned by the woman to whom he had sent them. A correspondence that made sure Leonardo and the postman still met roughly once a week.

“About what?” Leonardo said.

“We know you’re just back from a trip. You must have some idea about what’s going on.”

“The professor has other things to think about,” said one of those at the table. “Unlike the rest of us.”

No one laughed, but the men near the fridge exchanged glances with the card players. Leonardo took a sip of coffee and wiped his lips with a napkin from the dispenser.

“I saw nothing unusual,” he said.

The postman drank from the glass of white wine he had on the freezer.

“You must have been lucky,” he said smiling. “To listen to this group it seems they’re everywhere.”

An alarm went off. Danilo pressed a button on his big wristwatch and the alarm stopped, then he went to the counter and used a remote control to switch on the television in the corner of the room. The other players had already put down their cards and turned their chairs to face the screen. After the music introducing the broadcast, a woman newsreader with an expensive hairdo commented on images of an encampment in the middle of a forest with shacks of cardboard and sheet metal hidden in luxuriant vegetation. The camera showed men in uniform circulating among these rudimentary shelters with their camp beds and improvised pallets, blankets, gas cookers, and other objects.

Finishing his cappuccino, Leonardo walked toward a wall with two doors, one leading to the toilet and the other marked PRIVATE. A man with a shaved head was sitting on the floor in the space between two video poker machines. His sharp, serious face was like a tool used for prying open doors. His eyes were black but not at all malicious.

“Will you come to supper with me, Sebastiano?” Leonardo asked.

The man looked up but did not move. His legs were drawn up to his chest, hiding his mouth.

“Please come, we’ll make some pasta,” Leonardo said.

It seemed to take Sebastiano a long time to get to his feet, and he made Leonardo, himself more than one meter eighty tall, look tiny. Sebastiano was as thin as a rake. He had large bones and hairy legs sticking out from a pair of Bermuda shorts stained with fruit. He looked like nothing so much as an enormous prehistoric bird.

“Can I pay?” Leonardo asked, turning to the bar.

Without taking his eyes off the television screen, Danilo placed the palm of his hand on a black book beside the till to indicate that he had marked it down. Now the newsreader with the expensive hairdo was giving the latest news about the eastern front, while a small panel was showing images of a roadblock where three National Guards armed with machine guns were forcing several unkempt and very dirty people to get out of a car.

Before he left the village, Leonardo gave Elio the money he should have repaid him the evening before, then he and Sebastiano set off for home, pushing the bicycle. It was mid-September, but the one o’clock sun was hot on the asphalt, making it shimmer in the distance. Leonardo asked Sebastiano to walk on his left, in order to give shade to the sleeping dog in his pocket.

Lupu and his family arrived early in the morning.

Leonardo, woken by the sound of cars, came out onto the veranda in pajamas and raised an arm in the gray light of early morning to greet them. They did not have the van of previous years but two cheap secondhand cars, and they were not wearing their usual dinner jackets over white tank tops, but T-shirts with slogans in English and well-worn sneakers.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Leonardo said.

Lupu stood beside his car staring at Leonardo, as if trying to make out something he should have been able to see even at that distance. Despite his tanned skin and powerful arms, there was an unfamiliar fragility about him. His cousin, who had gotten out of the second car, was looking at the vines sloping down beyond the low fence of the yard. All the others had stayed inside the cars.

“Come in,” Leonardo said, “I’ll make you some coffee.”

At a nod from Lupu, his wife got out of the red car with their small son and older daughter and Lupu’s two brothers, both similar to him, even if different in build. The daughter was seventeen now and already a woman who had learned to show herself off to her best advantage, while her mother had grown thinner in the face and broader in the hips. In the second car were Lupu’s cousin’s wife and a teenage boy Leonardo had not seen before. This boy had different eyes from all the others; uncertainty seemed to have produced something sharp and fearless in him. None of them were wearing gold on their necks, fingers, or wrists.

They sat on the veranda and accepted the coffee Leonardo had mixed from real and ersatz coffee, and then they put their cups on the floor and watched the rising sun dispel the gray from the vineyard and the forest beyond the river.

Bauschan was gnawing at one of Lupu’s wife’s sandals. Leonardo called him and the dog sprang over to him. His eyes had been open now for a couple of weeks, turning out to be a silvery light blue. Ottavio had established that he was a cross between husky and some sort of hound with his pendulous ears, plus a touch of setter in his back and gait. There were broad black patches on his ash-gray coat.

“That’s a dog who will follow you even if you throw yourself in the river with a stone around your neck,” Ottavio had declared before launching into a long speech from which Leonardo understood that the dog would grow to medium size and would be incapable of excelling in any of the special qualities of his ancestors but would preserve a decent dose of each.

“Now go and have a rest,” Leonardo said. “You can settle in over the store like in previous years.”

He took the cups to the sink and washed them, and then he looked out of the studio window. Lupu and the others were standing in the middle of the yard holding plastic bags and old triacetate sports bags with the logos of firms, banks, and sponsors that no longer existed.

The teenager was the only one not carrying anything; he was talking to the others in an excited voice. He could have been sixteen but was probably one of those boys who long retain the traits of adolescence only to lose them from one day to the next. When the adolescent had finished speaking, Lupu said a few words. The boy lowered his eyes as if they had suddenly grown heavy, and they all moved toward the storehouse.

During the morning Leonardo reread The Death of Ivan Ilyich. By eleven o’clock he had come to some conclusions he thought he could develop, but by eleven thirty they already seemed odd to him. The sun beat down relentlessly; none of the few distant wisps in the sky could really have been called a cloud. Since they had retired, Lupu and his family had made no sound; the guest rooms, that was the name Leonardo used these days for the rooms above the store, seemed as empty as ever, apart from an orange towel spread over a windowsill.