Davide Longo - The Last Man Standing

“Let’s go for a walk,” Leonardo said to the dog.

He and Bauschan crossed the yard, but when they reached the vineyard the dog stopped. Turning to follow his gaze, Leonardo saw Lupu at the door of the store in shorts and work shoes.

They descended the headland together and halfway down entered one of the rows of vines, following it until the vineyard ended in a field of parched grass. The vines were heavy with grapes, the bunches a powerful violet under a thick coating of dust. Lupu let a bunch slip into his hand as one might lift the breast of a woman who was no longer young, but to whom one feels an enormous debt of gratitude.

“This winter at the workshop I worked nights so no one would know they’d taken me back. I’d go in through the back after dark and find a note telling me what needed to be done. For a while Tashmica was able to do a few hours cleaning there too, but then they did not ask for her again.”

Lupu delicately picked a grape, dusted it on the sleeve of his shirt, and put it into his mouth.

“No one even trusts official papers. The man who took us on for the peaches had problems and had to ask us to go. We’ve spent the last month near the mountains with a relative.”

Bauschan was tormenting a large lizard. The reptile seemed stupefied by the sun and made no attempt to get away. Leonardo watched its tail, detached from its body, writhing on the ground.

“What will you do after the grape harvest?”

Lupu thrust his hands into his pockets and looked over to where the haze was growing denser and the sky was turning opaque with heat. He seemed to be listening for a far-off noise.

“I don’t know whether to go back to the town. Mira’s afraid of going back to school. Before we left we took everything to my sister’s; it’s not safe to leave stuff in an empty home, those people come in and steal and smash everything.”

“Who comes in?”

Lupu shrugged.

“Gangs. People say they’re searching for outsiders, that they’re everywhere and that it’s not true the army has dealt with them. I haven’t seen them. I did see two bodies on the pavement, but they weren’t outsiders.”

Leonardo picked a ladybug from a leaf and watched it walk on his finger. It was a pale orange and extremely elegant. In the heavy midday silence he imagined the sound of its footsteps.

“When you’ve finished, you can all stay on here,” he said.

Lupu nodded without conviction. Bauschan, sitting in the shade, was watching the final twitches of the lizard’s tail. The main body of the reptile, a few centimeters away, was interested only in soaking up the heat it needed to keep its tiny heart beating.

“How long do you think the harvesting will take?”

Lupu looked at where the vineyard ended and the hillside began. A ditch had been dug and the strip of meadow beyond the ditch turned to forest farther up.

“Four days. There’s two less of us than last year.”

Leonardo removed a fragment of earth from one of his sandals.

“Starting tomorrow?”

“As soon as possible.” Lupu gave a half smile.

“That can’t be too soon,” Leonardo said with the other half of the smile.

At the end of the first day of the harvest they ate in the courtyard on a board propped on two trestles, after which the women carried the plates to the wash house behind the store while the men sat watching the smoke rise from their cigarettes and disperse before it could reach the starry sky.

For a while Leonardo studied their gas-lit faces, unable to read either doubt or exhaustion on them, and then he wished them goodnight and went indoors to undress, brush his teeth, rub cream into his sunburned arms and neck, and get into bed.

He would have liked to fall asleep instantly to wake again free of the constant pain in his arms, legs, back, ankles, and hands, as well as in the stomach muscles he had forgotten he had since the year before. That had been the last time he had found himself thinking the same thoughts in the same bed.

Until he was twenty-five he had been a good long-distance runner and every evening, summer and winter, had covered a fifteen-kilometer course along the river and out of the city before returning to the old center. But after taking his doctorate he sacrificed sport to his university duties and work on his first novel. In a few years his longer muscles grew slack and the occasional outings he attempted in shorts after that led to cramps and a massively discouraging exhaustion.

During the last thirty years his shoulders had curved and narrowed while his legs grew thin and his stomach got bigger even though he had always been a moderate eater and never drank alcohol. He now had the body of a man of fifty-two dedicated to books, intellectual speculation, and conversation. Not much use in the world now unfolding before his eyes.

With these gloomy thoughts, Leonardo got out of bed and went into the kitchen in the dark. He poured a glass of water and went to the large window: there were no lights on in the guest rooms and the building was silent. Moonlight seemed to have covered the courtyard gravel with a thin layer of water.

Seven years since I last made love, he thought.

Bauschan had dirtied the parquet in two places and was now asleep on the carpet with his head between his paws, probably drunk. He had spent all day eating windfall grapes fermenting in the sun; seeing him stagger about, Leonardo had thought it best to put him indoors.

He crouched down and stroked Bauschan’s neck. The dog seemed to smile in his sleep.

Taking pen and paper from the drawer, he sat down at the table. When he had finished writing, he put the paper into a buff envelope, addressed it, and put it on the dresser, planning to mail it the next day when he went to get the money to pay Lupu. Going back to bed, he fell asleep immediately and dreamed about a hotel room he had known many years before.

“You really want the money now?” the cashier asked, looking over her spectacles at him.

“Yes,” Leonardo smiled. “Please.”

The woman touched her breast. Clearly her mind was somewhere else.

“I realize it’s not very professional of me to mention it, but you took out a considerable sum only last week. I have to say this because this new withdrawal could cause a problem of liquidity.”

Leonardo understood from the woman’s expression that a tediously practical complication was about to come into his life.

He had known for some time that most people had emptied their accounts down to the last cent, hiding the money in their homes or goodness knows where, so as not to have to worry that they might one day be told at the bank that their money was no longer there. He had also known that it had been devalued or burned, or simply that money transfers no longer existed so that it could not be moved from one place to another, but Leonardo had never been sufficiently interested to get the idea into his head that one day his money might simply disappear. His only shrewd move had been to choose that particular bank because it had its central office in A. and no apparent ties with the major banks that had in the past closed down because of scandals, the mortgage crisis, or the fall in exports. He had deliberately chosen this particular bank because it raised money locally, kept it in the form of cash in a safe, and redistributed it in the same area.

“When will it be possible for me to withdraw my money without causing problems?”

The woman pursed her lips to indicate that she could not answer that offhand. The two of them were alone. The bank’s gray marble walls dated from the Fascist era, erected like the rest of the building in the middle of the village a century earlier. Only one of the building’s three doors was open; the others had been masked with opaque paper to prevent anyone seeing through to the other end of the hall. This despite the bank’s proclaimed motto: “Territory and Transparency.”