The Last Man Standing (21 page)

Before noon they reached a group of houses. As on the previous day, Leonardo went off alone to inspect them and came back an hour later with a saucepan and a small bag with a little flour in it.

“We’ll boil some water,” he said. “Then you can wash your eyes.”

Alberto said neither yes or no and went to sit a little way off on the rails. He had grown much thinner in the last two days, and his legs seemed to be dancing inside his trousers like pencils in a sock. He had a red rash around his mouth that he continually scratched.

Leonardo lit the fire. This was not difficult because brushwood, ideal for starting bonfires, was growing beside the track.

As soon as the water boiled he dipped his handkerchief in it and took it to Alberto who, asking no questions, cleaned his eyes. Leonardo used the rest of the water to mix with the flour, using the suitcase as a work surface. The result was a round grayish mass that he put into the pan and left on the fire for five minutes, before stirring it and putting it back to cook for the same length of time again. The yellow disk that emerged was christened “focaccia.” They all ate a piece, even Bauschan. Lucia asked if they could make another. Leonardo said yes, but that they should only eat half now, leaving the rest for supper. Lucia nodded and smiled. Her face was magnificent: the sun and the cold had given it color, and her eyes had never before looked so warm and deep.

While fiddling with the fire to try and keep it burning, Lucia saw two people.

“Someone’s coming!” she said, getting up.

Leonardo put down the pan and studied the figures approaching along the railway track. “If we can see them,” he thought, “they must see us; there’s no escape.”

“We need to discuss this,” he told Lucia, who was collecting their things.

“But we don’t know who they are!”

“If we want food, sooner or later we’ll have to trust someone.”

By now the two figures were more substantial. Leonardo was sure one was a woman in red.

“I say let’s avoid them,” Lucia said.

Leonardo turned to Alberto. The boy was using his hand to shade his eyes from the sun as he looked at the two people.

“What do you say, Alberto?”

“We’ve seen some dead cows in the fields,” Leonardo said.

The man shook his head as he continued to stir the soup on the stove. Beans, cabbage, and large pieces of gray meat could be seen in the pan. The smell was hot and inviting.

“This is good meat,” he said, licking the spoon before returning it to his shirt pocket. “We had some yesterday evening.” Then he signed to the woman to bring the plates. Until now she had restricted herself to gazing tenderly at Lucia and Alberto, but now she put on the ground the three metal plates she had been holding on her lap.

“It seems to us,” the man explained, as he poured soup onto the plates, “that the planes are dropping some substance onto built-up areas. I have no idea what it is, but it’s certainly not harmful to humans; I’m a doctor and I haven’t noticed anything strange. It only has this effect on cows. It’s extraordinary the way game and birds are proliferating.”

The woman handed them their plates. The children thanked her and began eating. Leonardo balanced his on his knee and looked at the people walking about around them, about thirty of them. Twenty more were sitting with their backs against the wall of a large shed, enjoying the sun. The building that was their home was in the middle of nowhere and had probably been a warehouse used by men working on the high speed trains. Even when they first arrived no one had come up to ask them who they were, where they came from or where they were going. Those who crossed their path limited themselves to a disinterested glance.

“For two weeks we had terrible weather,” the woman said. “It never stopped raining or snowing. But look what a glorious day today.”

Leonardo nodded. She must once have been attractive, but her body seemed to have suffered much more than her husband’s from recent events. Her double chin seemed unrelated to the rest of her tall, slender figure.

“Have you been here long?” Leonardo asked.

The man smiled. He was obviously well over fifty, but he still had a slim, athletic body. Seeing him approaching in his vest with his pullover tied around his waist, Leonardo had thought he might be a former tennis professional or yachtsman, but he had introduced himself as Dottore Barbero, a dermatologist.

“A couple of months already,” the doctor said, “but only a few days more. Signor Poli, who owns this place, is getting permits for us.”

“For Switzerland?”

The man and woman exchanged a smile.

“They won’t let anyone into Switzerland anymore,” the man said, “but Signor Poli has good contacts in France. His wife worked at the embassy.”

Leonardo put the first spoonful into his mouth.

“My compliments,” he said. “This is excellent.”

“Thank you, but I can’t claim any credit for it. It wasn’t my turn in the kitchen yesterday.”

For a few minutes they ate in silence, watched by the couple. The two were sitting on a little wooden bench they had carried out of the warehouse when they had gone in to fetch the food and the small stove. Leonardo and the children had freed several ties from the snow near the railway and were treating them like the lowest tiers of a stadium. Bauschan was sitting comfortably at their feet. Several of the people walking around the building were now going back into it. Leonardo had noticed that no one had gone more than about twenty meters from the building and that there were no old people among them. He had also noticed that some were smoking real cigarettes.

“Do you think it would be possible for us to spend tonight here?” he asked, putting down the spoon on his empty plate.

“I think it might be,” Barbero said, “but you’ll have to discuss it with Signor Poli. He comes at about six to bring food and whatever else we’ve ordered. He also leaves two armed men here for the night: security’s included in the price.”

“May I ask the price?”

“Five hundred per person,” the doctor said. “Chocolate, tuna, tea, and specialties extra. Gas canisters” the man indicated the little stove “are also extra. On the other hand, heat and water are included. There are two showers and they heat the water two days a week. Compared to the rest of life out there that’s a four-star hotel, don’t you agree?”

Leonardo smiled back, but he thought it odd the man had not said “five-star”; why had he not automatically pushed the hyperbole to the limit?

Rhetorical exaggeration had always fascinated him. Once he had flown to New York to attend a conference organized by a famous Jewish-American writer who was soon to die of a tumor. This man, who had always previously been known for his reserve and modesty, had asked his press agents to invite five hundred writers from all over the world, a list he personally drew up. He wanted to give a final conference for these five hundred colleagues, and admit no one else other than a journalist he played golf with once a week, a Peruvian girl working on a thesis about him, a boy from Cameroon doing the same, plus his barber, his present companion, and a class of children from an elementary school in New Jersey, where he had lived since childhood.

The conference was held in a Broadway theater that had long been closed but which the writer had reopened at his own expense. This had surprised many people, since one of the most reliable rumors about him was that he had been stingy to a maniacal degree. Before the keynote speech, fixed for 8 p.m., a small buffet was offered, so minimal that it was restricted to white wine in cartons, Mexican cheese, and pineapple. To administer these refreshments two middle-aged ladies, possibly the writer’s neighbors, had been recruited. One poured the wine into glasses while the other looked after a soup tureen containing a strawberry-colored liquid, which gave off balsamic fumes.

That night, in his room in the large cheap hotel where the writer had quartered his guests, Leonardo had grieved for the imminent death of this short, pockmarked, and unusually talented man. He had assumed that despite everything he had written, despite his hard-won style and the acuteness with which he had been able to thread words together making them resound like lines from Homer, that all this would be completely forgotten. The memories of those present at the conference would not be enough, and even the notes he had seen some people taking during his magnificent lecture on hyperbole, ranging from the lowest to the highest, like Glenn Gould playing Bach, would be lost in minds packed with their own stories and appointments, soon reduced to the condition of an aquarelle left out too long in bad weather.

“Would you like some more?” the woman asked.

“Thank you,” the children said.

Signora Barbero filled their plates again, then put her hand on her husband’s shoulder as she stood watching Lucia and Alberto beginning to eat again. She was wearing velvet trousers, a beige broad-stitch sweater, and red moon boots with white laces. Her husband had a check shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows and trekking trousers. Everyone Leonardo had seen there had been wearing warm, well-made clothes.

“Are many people staying here?” he asked.

“About sixty at the moment,” the man said. “But ten left last week. Their permits arrived just when they were about to run out of money.”

The woman noticed Leonardo had finished his soup, and so without saying anything she took his plate and filled it again with what was left in the pan. A couple of people were still leaning against the wall; the rest had gone in. The sun had set very quickly, as happens in winter.

After another spoonful or two, Leonardo put his plate on the ground and Bauschan quickly came to lick up what was left. The doctor touched his mustache without trying to hide mild disappointment, but his wife smiled and placed her hands on her heart.

“The little one,” she said, “he was hungry too.”

They spent a couple of hours resting on the camp beds of the doctor and his wife. These were military pallets, but after several nights on the floor they seemed very comfortable. As always, Alberto was the first to fall asleep, then Lucia, while Leonardo lay listening to the voices reverberating inside the warehouse roof. Some of the guests were lying on their beds, while others were in what Signora Barbero called the “daytime area,” that is to say the two tables where they ate their meals and could sit on a dirty sofa and a few armchairs, pretending they were in the hall of a great hotel or the waiting lounge of an airport or, more intimately, in their own homes. Everyone talked in a low voice so as not to disturb those resting or to save energy. There were also a couple of small children, one breastfeeding from his mother. The other, a three-year-old, seemed to be alone with his father.

“Papa?”

Leonardo turned. Lucia was looking at him from the next bed. She had one hand under her head and the other by her side. Apart from her eyes, she now seemed in every respect a full-grown woman.

“Do you think we’ll be able to stay here for a while?”

“Maybe tonight, but tomorrow we’ll have to go on. We have no money.”

Lucia slipped a hand under the covers and pulled out a bundle of banknotes folded in two.

“Where did you hide those?”

“Same place as the others.”

“If they’d searched you . . .”

“Would I have had to hand them over?”

Leonardo looked at her without knowing quite what to say about the two possibilities that came to mind.

“Would you like to stay?”

“They seem like respectable people. Alberto says he’d like to stay too.”

It occurred to Leonardo that “respectable people” must be an expression Lucia had picked up from her mother’s second husband. For several days now Leonardo had been feeling a deep, if (to be fair) unjustified, resentment of this man. A sentiment he was ashamed of but which made him feel alive. I’m getting wicked, he thought, and I’ve come a long way down that path.

“If we can, we’ll stay a few days,” he said.

“If we have enough money, we can stay.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Not now.”

“Alberto?”

“Asleep. We must get him to wash.”

“Tomorrow, OK?”

“OK.”

While the central-heating pipes were starting up, they heard the sound of a car approaching.

Signor Poli was a man of primitive appearance, short-legged and with disheveled gray hair. He had a suede jacket open on his prominent stomach, a green pullover, and jeans that puckered just below his knees. On the whole, he could have passed as a shepherd used to spending long solitary summer days in mountain pastures or the proprietor of an engineering workshop with little in the way of formal studies to his name but an innate talent for getting others to work.

The two tall young men with him had submachine guns on their shoulders. They were not Italian but not outsiders, either. As soon as he saw this, Leonardo remembered that the man’s wife had been employed at the French embassy, and he felt as if he were hearing one of the more cacophonous passages in Debussy.

Poli told his men to unload the provisions from the van and pour a couple of cans of diesel into the generator, then leaning back against the door of his Land Rover, he pulled a notepad from his pocket. A line of about ten people had formed in front of him.

Calmly, and without lifting his eyes from the pad, he made a note of what each person wanted, took their money, and put paper and pencil back in his jacket pocket. Only when he had done this did he light the Toscano cigar already in the corner of his mouth and look up at the stars. By now only Leonardo and Barbero were still before him.

“Signor Chiri arrived here today with his two children and would like to stay for a few days.”

The man contemplated Leonardo’s bedraggled appearance.

“How old are the children?”

“Seventeen and ten,” Leonardo said.

“That’ll be one thousand five hundred a day. Have you got the money?”

Leonardo nodded.

“You pay at least three days in advance. No one-night stands.”

Leonardo pulled out two banknotes. The man took them and gave him five hundred in change.

“Do you need clothes?”