The Last Man Standing (20 page)

“Only those for the children.”

Leonardo took the children’s suitcase, then removed the box of letters from his own case and opened it to show what was inside.

“Keep them.”

“I’m sure you’ll be able to use the food.”

The boy said yes without asking the others.

“That leaves the jackets.”

The boy took them from the back seat and gave them to Leonardo, closed the trunk, and was about to get back into the car but stopped. His face, despite his frozen nose now reduced to a black lump, still had gentle Teutonic features. The skin of his cheeks was peeling under his faint trace of beard.

“At the border they shoot at everyone,” he said.

Leonardo smiled.

“We have our permits.”

The boy shook his head and was about to say something more, but one of the others called him by name: “Victor.”

Shortly afterward the car vanished at the point where the gray of the
autostrada
met the more luminous gray of the sky. Leonardo looked at the children. Lucia was crying. Alberto had crossed his hands on his chest and was staring at the permits being blown open by the wind on the wet tarmac.

“Put these on,” he said, holding out their jackets to them. “We’ll make it.”

They walked until evening along the
autostrada
toward T. in the hope of a lift, but in three hours or so only two cars passed. The first had only one person in it but didn’t stop; the second, a white delivery van with blackened windows, slowed down and pulled up about fifty meters further on. Two men got out and beckoned to them.

“No, Papa,” Lucia said.

The two men continued to indicate that they should come nearer. One, very fat, had a cowboy hat on his head. The other, taller, was in fur with black gloves.

“I don’t like them, Papa. Let’s not go.”

Leonardo raised an arm to indicate they had changed their minds, but one of the two, the one in the hat, started toward them. It only took them a second to vault over the safety barrier and start running across the snow-covered field beside the
autostrada
, with their bags and the suitcase banging against their legs. They did not stop until they were sure the man was not following. Turning, they saw the van put on its lights and move forward again. A moment later it had vanished.

They spent the night in a nearby ruin, a house abandoned long ago when none of what had happened since was even imaginable. Maybe for this reason the desolation of this building was of a very different quality from the one they had most recently been concerned with: it had more the atmosphere of an ancient Roman temple, and the children were happy to go in without making a fuss.

It had wooden floors and a falling tree had broken through the roof and its branches reached into a couple of the rooms. But they had left their matches in the car and had nothing to light a fire with, so they ate three sweets from the pocket of Alberto’s jacket and crouched in a dry corner, out of reach of the snow that had gently begun to fall again.

“What are we going to do?” Lucia said.

“Go back home.”

For a few seconds no one spoke.

“I don’t want to hitchhike,” Lucia said.

“We can walk along the railway.”

“It’ll take a hell of a long time,” Alberto said.

These were the first words he had spoken since the morning.

“Three or four days,” Leonardo said, “but with any luck we’ll get a lift with someone we can trust. Feeling cold? Sit between me and Lucia.”

“No.”

“Then call Bauschan and keep close to him. He’ll warm you up.”

Alberto did not move and Bauschan stayed curled between Leonardo’s legs. After a little they heard the boy’s breathing get slower, broken by little hisses, and knew he was asleep.

“Papa?”

“Yes?”

“Can’t you sleep?”

“Not at the moment. Are you cold?”

“My feet are.”

“Is there a sweater in your case?”

“Yes.”

“Then take off your shoes and wrap your feet in it, that’ll warm them up.”

He had read this in a story about gold prospectors in the far north.

“Better?”

“Yes, better now.”

Leonardo looked at the patch of sky above them. There were orange reflections in it, as if somewhere nearby a volcano was erupting, casting a glow of lava on the clouds. An occasional snowflake settled gently on parts of his cheek unprotected by his beard. He was fifty-three and had never slept in the open before.

“Papa?”

“Yes, Lucia.”

“You’ve been very brave,” she said, taking his hand.

Leonardo closed his eyes the better to feel the perfection of her fingers.

All the next morning they followed the railway track. They could sense the regular geometry of the rice fields all around them, but apart from this the countryside seemed to have thrown off all trace of humanity. The occasional farms in the distance seemed deserted, and the only thing that passed on the
autostrada
was a tanker escorted by two army vehicles. Only once, nearing a village, did they see a house burning and some men moving around it in an attempt either to put out the flames or feed them. Lucia made it clear she would not go near it in any circumstances, and Leonardo, convinced deep down that she was right, kept going.

At midday they sat down on the track and ate the last of the sweets. The snow they melted in the palms of their hands only made them thirstier, and the surrounding whiteness was starting to blind them. Alberto’s eyes were red and had begun to weep.

Leonardo promised he would go and look for something to eat at the first farmhouse they came to, leaving them to wait for him beside the railway. Neither Alberto nor Lucia raised any objection.

By the time they came reasonably near a farm it was late afternoon and the light was beginning to fail. The children watched Leonardo put the suitcase on the ground, climb down the railway embankment and set off across a field with Bauschan. They sat on the track with their hands in their pockets to protect them from the cold wind that had kicked up, and gazed after Leonardo until they could no longer distinguish the brown of his jacket from the blue of his trousers. Seen from a distance, with his long gray hair blending with the white ground, he looked as if he had no head, according to Alberto. Lucia told him he was talking nonsense, but secretly she was ashamed because she had thought the same.

The building dated from the early twentieth century when trains brought rice workers to the nearby stations from where they would be transported by cart to the farms. It was typical of the farms in the district, even if it must have later been converted by someone whose work had no relation to agriculture. The yard had been paved and there was no trace of the machinery and other odds and ends normally to be found on a working farm. The store had become a garage, while large glass windows had been added to the upper floor, revealing an interior of wood and brick. It looked like the home of a painter, sculptor, or art critic. This explained the statue in the courtyard, a work in concrete and fiberglass two meters high, which represented two embracing bodies but could equally well have been an enormous fossil shell or a DNA helix.

Leonardo could find nothing edible anywhere in the house.

He searched every drawer, box, and container; there was only one small tube of tomato paste that had already been nibbled by mice. Nothing else. Otherwise the house seemed in reasonable condition with its beds in place, its roof solid, and its windows intact. It was certainly very cold, but there was a large fireplace in the ground-floor living room, and when he found a cigarette lighter behind the radiator in the bathroom, he began to think that they might be able to sleep there for the night and light a fire.

Walking down the stairs he imagined that the person who lived there must have smoked secretly in the bathroom, perhaps an adolescent, or a sick person forbidden to smoke by his doctor. He tried to imagine the voices of the people who could have lived in the house. But they seemed remote and painful, and he decided to stop.

He was about to leave when he noticed the door to the cellar. Unlike the other doors it was blue and closed. His mind filled with images of salami, wine, preserves, and everything else that had to be kept in a cool place rather than close at hand.

He opened the door, throwing light on a downward staircase. He just had enough time to recognize dark streaks left by something that must have been dragged, before a powerful acid stench of decomposition hit him from below, forcing him to close his eyes and step back. When he opened his eyes again he was facing the blue door, which he had instinctively closed. Until then he had associated blue doors with Greece or Provence, but from now on for the rest of his life they would remind him of that stench and what it must conceal.

He had gotten most of the way back to the railway when he noticed Bauschan was not with him. His first thought was that he must have gone in through the blue door before he closed it. He imagined the dog imprisoned in the putrid darkness.

“Bauschan!” he called, his voice echoing across the fields like a blow from an ax. He was about to call again when in the semidarkness he saw a shape come running from the farm gate, disappear behind a hedge, and reappear in the field. Bauschan must have sensed a note of reproach in his master’s voice because he slowed down in the last few meters and would not allow himself to be touched until he had circled once or twice around Leonardo’s legs, with his ears down, as if to beg for an audience. His back was cold, but his throat was still throbbing from his race. He must have been eating something because his breath smelled of vinegar.

“Did you find anything?” Lucia asked from the top of the embankment.

Leonardo showed her the lighter.

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing else,” he said, climbing up the embankment.

“You’re pale.”

“You too. Because we’re hungry. And it’s very cold. We must find somewhere before dark and light a fire. Now that we can do that.”

“Was that house not all right?”

“No, it wasn’t,” Leonardo said, picking up the suitcase.

Lucia must have understood because she took the bag of sanitary pants and headed down the track. She had only gone a few steps when she turned to her brother.

“I’ve found something,” Alberto said.

“What?”

“Come and see.”

They went toward the
autostrada,
which was now almost invisible in the dusk. Alberto was walking diagonally across a field. They could detect the rustle of
granoturco
stubble under the snow. When they reached a deep irrigation channel, Alberto stopped and pointed at something in the ditch. Leonardo climbed cautiously down the snow-covered bank and studied the few centimeters of frozen water covering the bottom: imprisoned in the ice were pieces of corncob flung to the edge of the field by the combine harvester.

“Well done,” Leonardo said. “Very well done.”

That evening they heated the
granoturco
they had managed to retrieve on their fire. Alberto had hoped to make popcorn, but the cobs were so sodden they would only roast or turn into a mush resembling polenta. The place they had found for the night was an old hut belonging to the water board, on which a graffiti artist had drawn the impertinent face of a small boy with a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth. The place consisted of a single room crossed by a spider’s web of pipes of various sizes. The sheet metal door had been forced and the place had probably served as a refuge for others like themselves: the concrete floor had been insulated with rubbish and cardboard against the cold, and on the whole they could consider themselves lucky that it was clean and not too damp. It also had a high window through which the smoke from their bonfire could escape, leaving the air breathable.

Before lying down to sleep, they talked about how many kilometers they must have covered that day, and how clever Alberto had been to find the maize. The boy was the first to fall asleep, while Leonardo and Lucia stayed awake for a long time listening to him tossing restlessly and dreaming he was quarreling with someone to whom he then tearfully apologized.

When Lucia also crashed out, Leonardo spent some time watching the fire, feeding it from time to time with more wood. He would have liked to leaf through a few pages to make him sleepy, but all his and Lucia’s books had been left in the Polar, so he took the box of letters out of the children’s suitcase and reread a couple. This had the effect of annoying him profoundly and he was tempted to throw all of them on the fire, but he did not do this because he had to concentrate on holding back his tears. In fact, he now felt sure for the first time that both Clara and Alessandra must be dead and that he would never see either of them again. He imagined their bodies tossed into some field with their clothes ripped apart, their trousers around their ankles, and a parliament of crows conferring nearby.

He gave way to heavy tears, and then he dried his face and went on weeping in a more controlled manner. In the end, exhausted, he slept deeply and dreamlessly until morning.

As soon as he woke he lit the fire and moved the stale maize near to heat it, and then he went out to stretch his legs. It might have been seven o’clock, perhaps eight, and the day was going to be fine and very cold. The sky was a uniform blue and the light reflected from the snow was already blinding.

He sat on the railway line stroking Bauschan and removing several thorny burrs the dog had collected from the brambles he liked to bury himself in. He talked to him about writers who had written stories with snow as an essential feature, and Bauschan gazed into his green eyes, until distracted by a noise from the cabin.

They had breakfast around the fire. Alberto had woken up with encrusted eyes, a sign that his conjunctivitis was getting worse, but they had nothing to clean them with. After eating his portion of maize, Leonardo wandered around the cabin for half an hour looking for a container in which to boil snow so as to get some more or less sterile water, but all he could find was an empty plastic bottle. After walking on for two hours they came across several carcasses of cows in a plantation of poplars beside the railway and stopped to look at them without going near. The cows must have been dead for some time because their stomachs were swollen and the black patches on their coats had faded almost to gray. Even so their mouths and eyes seemed to be moving. On closer inspection it became clear that the effect was created by several small birds hopping on the animals’ faces. Leonardo and the children made the most of the break by taking off their jackets and tying them around their waists, and then they went on without discussing what they had seen.