The Last Man Standing (14 page)

They would spend the rest of the day at home. Sometimes Leonardo would go out to look for firewood, or to exchange a few words with Adele and buy some honey from her. At such times he would leave the children on their own but never for more than an hour.

Once a week he would go into the village to buy bread, a couple of small cans of food, and some pasta and tomato sauce. Apart from milk and cheese this was all that was available; meat had become very expensive and fish could not be found at all, even frozen. The only shops still open were Norina’s grocery store and the bar. The pharmacist had moved all his medicine to his home, where he was available to customers every morning between ten and midday. The proprietors of the shoe shop and the hairdresser had done the same. The village streets were fragrant with the smell of burned wood and even though the dustcart no longer operated, the garbage cans were empty. Cars were hardly ever heard and the only voices came from the church during services or from the bar, where the circle of regulars had grown since hardly anyone now had any work, agricultural or otherwise. Conversations tended to be brief and nearly always ended in silences full of questions. Only ersatz coffee was now served; the real thing had run out. And despite the fact that it was nearly Christmas, no one had put up decorations.

For Christmas Eve they asked Adele and Sebastiano to come over.

They arrived with five eggs, a pan, a basket of vegetables, and a large parcel. The table had been laid with care and a half candle was burning in the middle of it.

While waiting for the rabbit and potatoes to heat up on the stove, they dipped the raw vegetables in the last of the olive oil. From now on they would have to make do with other edible oils. As they ate, Adele told a story from when she was a girl, of a hornbeam growing near their house that her father had wanted cut down to make room for a shed for the tractor. One evening while she was feeding the chickens, the tree had told her it was ready to go, but only if moved to a precise point that it indicated. That evening Adele explained this to her father but he told her that the next day the builders would come, the tree would be cut down, and the shed for the tractor would be built. That was all there was to it.

But the following morning her father seemed less sure of himself. At breakfast he looked exhausted, as if he had had no sleep.

“I had a bad dream last night,” he told his daughter.

Adele had then interpreted the dream for him in detail as if she had dreamed it herself, and her father had lowered his eyes in shame because it was not the first time he had put his daughter’s talent to the test. When the builders arrived, Adele showed them the place they must move the tree to, and without asking too many questions they got to work. That very night, with the leaves of the tree rustling outside the window, Adele’s father had dreamed of a blackbird whistling a tune and the next morning, beside his cup, he found a black feather that his daughter had left for him before going to work.

Several times, Leonardo surprised Alberto and Sebastiano staring solemnly at each other while Adele was speaking, as if something had happened between them that the others were not aware of.

After dinner, Adele made a
zabaione
that turned out rather bitter because she had to use Fernet rather than Marsala, but they ate it all the same, and then unwrapped the presents.

Leonardo gave Lucia an edition of the
Odyssey
that had been printed in Florence in 1716. For Alberto his first thought had been a book by Salgàri, then, thinking he would not have much use for it, he had added a small box of tools with a little tube of glue for woodwork, pincers, hammer, pliers, nails, some oakum for trimming, and two batteries found in Elio’s shop. The idea was that Alberto could use this to build something. He gave Adele a book of gems of Islamic wisdom given to him many years before by a friend who translated from Arabic. Adele gave three knitted scarfs and balsamic drops for coughs and sinusitis and to discourage lice. Sebastiano gave no presents but got a cap from Leonardo, which turned out to be rather too tight. Lucia gave Leonardo a collection of ten poems written in her own hand and bound in a firm cardboard cover cut from a box of detergent.

A little before midnight, Adele and Sebastiano went into the village to Mass; by now Alberto had been in his room for some time. Lucia and Leonardo decided to have herb tea on the veranda. The sky was overcast, but if you stared at it for long enough you could sense the moon’s path behind the clouds. The cold was very dry.

They did not feel like discussing what the future might or might not hold, so they simply listed little events that can brighten a day. Unimportant things, just to be able to share the sound of their own voices in the darkness. To Leonardo, Lucia’s voice sounded like the swish of water in a metal basin.

It was very late when Lucia said she was sleepy, and it would have been entirely natural if before going in she had bent to kiss her father goodnight on his cheek, but she did not do so.

Left alone, Leonardo was touched by the memory of mornings when he had woken in the great double bed at Via B. to hear Lucia breathing beside him. Holidays when her nursery had been closed and Alessandra had already gone off to some engagement, and the light was pouring serenely through the shutters and projecting oval shapes throughout the room. At such times he had liked to lock his hands behind his head and stare up at the chandelier, immersing himself in the story he was writing at the time: the characters, the course of events, the places where they lived, and the things that were making them happy or sad. At such times he felt he understood the pleasure a horse must feel when given a huge field to roam in, with the grass tickling its stomach and nothing to be heard but the beating of its own heart. Reaching out his hand he would touch Lucia’s little calves, as perfect as a ship in a bottle. The little girl’s eyes would be closed and slightly puffed up with sleep. She was four or five years old at the time, and during the night her long hair would have formed little knots that would be troublesome to disentangle.

As he slipped onto the sofa that had become his bed, he thought of this as the happiest of all his memories and asked himself what he would feel if Alessandra’s car came into the courtyard a second time.

Alberto spent the morning making a harpoon by fixing a fork on the end of a stick, and after lunch said he wanted to go down to the river.

Once they had reached the shingle of the bank he spent at least an hour trying to spear a trout darting about in the middle of the riverbed, where a strip of water was flowing, gentle and dark, through the ice. Leonardo and Lucia, sitting on a large smooth rock, discussed Achilles and Aeneas. Leonardo had once read an essay that maintained that Aeneas had been the first epic hero to hesitate before killing an enemy, the first to see death as a subjective choice and not as an action of destiny like an eruption or a conception. Alberto launched his harpoon with a cry that sounded like a twice-repeated German word. On the other side of the river, Bauschan was inspecting the edge of the forest. When Alberto got tired, Lucia asked him if he would like to go up to the little church to see if any animal had been digging up the bones of the dead.

It was after three by the time they reached the cemetery, where they sat on the low wall enjoying the weak sun on their faces and on their gloveless hands. Alberto asked Leonardo to repeat the story of the Alpine troops preserved in the ossuary. He then asked a few questions about the Aztecs and cruel things done in antiquity. A Nordic fluorescence lit the sky while an insubstantial mist oscillated in little waves lower down.

It was not easy to climb back up the vineyard below the house: the rising temperature had turned the earth to sticky mud.

As they struggled up the final stretch, Leonardo noticed the veranda door was ajar. He tried to remember whether he had been the last to come out, then stopped and summoned Bauschan in a whisper of a kind one might have used to attract the attention of a relative at the other end of a bed as one kept watch beside a dead body: neither a whistle nor a word but sharing the quality of both.

“What is it?” Lucia said.

Leonardo beckoned the others, then bent over and followed the line of vines to his right. When he came to where the briers were thicker, he knelt down and the children did the same.

A young man with his hair combed in a curious quiff was coming out of the house carrying a bag of food and a bag of clothes. He went down the steps and disappeared around the corner. They heard the door of a car open and close.

“They’re stealing our things!” Alberto said.

The man reappeared. He was in a leather motorcycle jacket of the type with showy padding on the elbows and back. This made him look hunchbacked, which he was not, even if something about his body and legs suggested rickets. As he climbed the steps a woman in a hat came out of the veranda and offered him the bottle of Fernet that Leonardo had opened for the Christmas
zabaione
. They talked for a minute or two, passing the bottle back and forth between them; when it was empty, the man threw it into an armchair and they went back into the house.

“You’ve got to do something!” Alberto said.

Leonardo merely held Bauschan close and kept his eyes fixed on the house. Alberto, a few centimeters away, stared at his pale, thin, well-shaved face.

“Let’s go and call someone,” he said, pulling Leonardo by the jacket.

“No!” Leonardo said. “Let’s wait for them to go.”

“But they’ve taken over the house!”

“Shut up!” Lucia said.

By the time the door opened again the church clock had long since struck four and the sun had set behind the mountains. A flat, almost rosy haze had shut off the sky to the north. Two men and the woman brought out bags and suitcases. The older man was wearing Leonardo’s camelhair coat and leather gloves. His hair was an unnatural gray as though ash had fallen on his head. The plump young woman at his side was in a T-shirt. Under her arm was Lucia’s vanity case and a bag containing a packet of biscuits and a bottle of wine. The younger man, the one in the biker jacket, was carrying the stereo. They went around to the back of the house. Leonardo and the children heard the sound of an approaching engine and a few seconds later a gray car slipped through the gate and disappeared behind the mulberry trees skirting the road.

They stayed kneeling in the mud for another minute or two, then Leonardo released Bauschan. The dog moved a few meters away and urinated at length, at the same time giving Leonardo an afflicted look as if unsure whether he had passed whatever test he had been set.

“Bravo, Bauschan,” Leonardo said to reassure him.

Every drawer in the kitchen had been pulled out and turned over on the floor. Leonardo moved toward the table where the intruders had left a pan covered with tomato sauce, a bottle of coffee liqueur, and a few eggshells; then he turned toward Lucia, who had stayed close to the door. He stared at the plates, cutlery and CDs strewn across the floor amid flour and detergents.

“Let’s tidy up a bit,” he said to her.

She said nothing but wept in silence. Leaning against the doorway, her face at a slight angle, she was like a seventeenth-century Madonna with skin as impalpable as moonlight yet enthralling the viewer’s gaze. Behind her, Alberto was holding back Bauschan so he would not cut his paws on the broken glass.

Going down the corridor, Leonardo glanced into the bathroom: among the bottles and containers emptied at random he thought he could also see plaster rubble, but did not go in to check. In the bedroom there was a suffocating smell of urine, and the clothes the raiders had not taken away were lying slashed and piled up in a corner in a many-colored mountain someone must have pissed on.

“What would they have done if we’d been here?” Lucia asked, looking into the room.

Leonardo noticed the bedcover was stained with blood. Not a large patch with sharp contours, but more as if something had been rubbed against it. He said nothing but opened the window and then went to Lucia and gave her a hug.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll sort it out.”

They were careful not to tread on the small eighteenth-century maps lying on the corridor floor among fragments of frame and glass. In the kitchen Bauschan was licking something. Leonardo lifted the dog’s head to check what it was but realizing it was peanut butter, let him continue. Alberto was neither there nor on the veranda.

Leonardo found him in the studio with his hands behind his back. He was looking through the window, toward the vineyard and hillside, now indistinguishable in the dusk.

“All OK?” he asked.

Alberto went on staring at whatever he was looking at. There was a terrible stench in the room. Someone had defecated on the desk and scattered Leonardo’s collection of letters over the floor. The walls were stained with the bloody imprints of hands that had taken on the color of the brickwork.

The woman was menstruating, Leonardo thought, and she must have coupled with one man in the bed and with the other here against the wall.

Such thoughts slipping so easily into his mind frightened him. A year ago such stains would have made him think of Basquiat’s paintings or the caves of Lascaux. A year ago such an image of entwined bodies would never have sprung so vividly and realistically into his mind. And he would never have thought of words like “menstruation” and “coupled” to describe it. Perhaps this was what barbarism was, he thought: a new vocabulary gradually taking over with new images. The first word was the Trojan horse. Which polluted the well and reproduced itself. Sickness. Cholera.

He looked at Alberto and gave him a smile.

“Let’s go out,” he said.

The boy took a few paces toward the door as if to do so but instead stepped up to Leonardo and unleashed a punch at the base of his stomach.

Leonardo doubled over in pain and Alberto punched him again, this time on the nose and in the left eye. During the few seconds this took neither of them uttered a sound, then Alberto left the room.