The Last Man Standing (34 page)

Then two of the soldiers made a woman get out of one of the cars.

All Leonardo could see at that distance was that she was very fat and had a red sweater. They pushed her into the field, where she slipped on the wet ground and fell. Getting back to her feet, she cleaned her pants with altogether incongruous care before moving toward the cripple and the man in the uniform, who were waiting some fifty yards farther ahead. When the group reached them, the cripple turned toward Richard, who nodded. The cripple signed to the woman to follow him and headed for the trailer with the youths.

Walking in the other direction, the man in uniform rejoined his own people on the road. Leonardo saw him get into one of the cars, and then the cars moved off and finally disappeared behind a group of houses blackened by smoke.

The woman was extraordinarily fat. As she crossed the swamp, her buttocks bounced in her tight wet pants, and her enormous breasts hung against her belly, like a cuttlefish with its mass of flesh centered on a single bone. The youths escorting her paid her no attention. They seemed afraid the soldiers might return and, from time to time, cast a wary eye on the group of houses where the cars had vanished.

When they got to the road two boys helped the woman over the ditch. Her black hair had once been bobbed, and she had slightly elongated eyes. Otherwise the lines of her face were coarse and unfinished, though entirely feminine. An insensitive man would have dismissed her as fat and ugly, but a closer look would have made it clear that the first adjective in no way implied the second. Watching her pass close to the cage, Leonardo noticed she had small hands and she was wearing light bowling shoes.

After they had helped her into the coach, the youths went back to their own vehicles and the procession get under way again. Leonardo could hear the engine of the coach getting into gear and the heavy wheels of the wagon groaning under the cage floor. He looked at David. The elephant’s melancholy eyes were fixed on the field where the exchange had taken place.

“I don’t think this woman can take Lucia’s place,” Leonardo said, then he crouched on the branches the elephant had stripped clean the day before, and wept.

They traveled all night. It was the first time they had done so, and Leonardo noticed that only the trucks, the coach, and the Land Rover had their lights on; there was no fuel for the other vehicles, which were all being towed. For this reason their progress had become slower and slower; a man walking quickly would have been able to overtake them without difficulty.

They stopped at dawn in the yard of a large abandoned farmstead. As soon as the bonfire had been lit, the cripple distributed a little canned food, and several dogs that had been killed the day before were skinned and prepared to be cooked. Half the farm’s roof had fallen in, but one part of the building seemed to be in good shape. Still, no one took the trouble to explore. The boys sat around the farmyard strangely silent, showing no interest whatsoever in the fat woman who, tied to one of the roof supports, was watching her new masters with inexplicable serenity.

For a few days now it had been as if some minor melancholy had sometimes disturbed the tribe and made them uneasy. Their nights of partying had become increasingly short and fierce, and when Richard was out of sight in the trailer, brawls constantly broke out. The cripple watched without intervening, but these quarrels would last only a few minutes and end for no apparent reason as suddenly as they had begun. Apart from meat, which was never in short supply, their food was running out. There was no more beer, only wine.

Now when Richard came out of his trailer, some of the young people still ran to surround him, but for the first time about half of them stayed under their covers, their eyes on the flames. It was not raining, but the night had made everything damp and a sterile sun hinted at another day without warmth.

Showing no disappointment in those who were absent, Richard blessed those who were there and talked to them. Leonardo was sure his mind must be working on this new state of affairs and that he was capable of doing this without his face showing any emotion at all. In fact, Richard soon told Enrico to free the captured woman and take her to the wagon for “union.” This order created a ferment of excitement that quickly spread to those who had been keeping to themselves. While the cripple guided the woman to the big wagon and introduced her into the cage, the youngsters gathered around with their faces glued to the bars.

“Look, dancer!” Richard announced in a loud voice for everyone to hear. “We’ve found you a girlfriend so you can have some fun.”

The youngsters continued to make excited noises. Leonardo looked at Richard; he was smiling as serenely as usual, but Leonardo could read something in his expression that inspired contempt rather than fear.

“We’re waiting, dancer,” Richard sneered.

The woman, standing inside the cage door, was watching Leonardo calmly.

He guessed she must be someone who, all her life, had been used to remaining calm in situations that tended to bring the worst out of other people. But there was no sense of her holding anything back; rather, her calmness seemed to take the form of acceptance. The beauty so absent from her body seemed concentrated in the Asian slant of her eyes.

“Enrico,” Richard said, “please be so good as to give our dancer a little encouragement.”

The cripple took his pistol from his belt and fired into the wall just above David’s head. The elephant trumpeted and began tramping nervously around the cage. Leonardo leaped to his feet and he and the woman both pressed themselves against the bars to avoid being crushed. But David soon calmed down. He timidly approached the woman, and his trunk gently explored her hair, arm, and belly. She closed her eyes and let him touch her; face to face they were the same height. When David returned mournfully to his corner, she opened her eyes again and pushed her hair back from her forehead.

“Screw her!” someone shouted.

A stone thudded against Leonardo’s chest with the dead sound of a stick striking an empty barrel. He dropped to his knees, conscious of his heart beating under the hand he pressed against his chest.

“Screw her! Screw her! Screw her!” yelled the young people.

A second pistol shot drowned their voices; it passed over Leonardo’s head and was lost in the farmyard. This time David only walked around on the spot, making the floorboards shake. When Leonardo looked up he saw the woman taking off her pants. She was not wearing underpants. Her flesh had the whiteness of fresh lime, with a tuft of black hair under her belly.

“Screw her! Screw her!”

Leonardo looked at Richard, and this time he saw no mirror image of Christ but just a cunning, inordinately arrogant man of thirty-five. Mediocrity and fear marked him like a drop of oil on a surface of water, and they were a mediocrity and fear with no redeeming qualities whatever. His was a third-rate mind decked in feathers.

“Enrico!” Richard called out irritably.

The cripple pushed his way through the yelling youngsters pressed against the bars of the cage and came as near as he could to where Leonardo was standing. He pointed his pistol between the bars at Leonardo’s head.

“Screw her! Screw her! Screw her!”

Leonardo looked for Salomon among the boys but could not see him. Instead he met the eyes of Alberto, who was staring at him eagerly from the shoulders of the blond youth who had captured them. Under his green paint, he no longer had the face of the child Leonardo had known so much as the snout of a predator used to raiding the lairs of other animals among the bushes. He had pulled his hair back into a ponytail.

“Do what they want,” the woman said, lying down on the floor.

Her calm voice cut through the shouting like a sword slicing through a coat of mail. She was now naked apart from her socks and a flesh-colored bra scarcely able to hold her huge breasts. Beyond the farmyard the hilltops were a vivid white against the railway gray of the sky. Very soon it would begin raining or snowing again.

Leonardo moved toward her.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

She shook her head to dismiss this as irrelevant. Her eyes were not black but a lively dark brown. He lowered his trousers and lay down on top of her. She smelled of earth and of something long buried. It was not a good smell but one that gave the impression of having existed long before humanity, to have been part of this planet, and many of the creatures living on it, since time immemorial. Leonardo remembered the other women he had slept with: a fellow student, Alessandra, then Clara. The first two thin and supple; the last slender with big breasts. All had light-brown eyes and smelled of paper, tobacco, and dried bark. All had offered him carefully rationed warmth.

Leonardo felt his penis stiffen and slide into the woman. For a moment he lay still, lost in the simplicity of what was happening and the warmth of her belly, and then the floorboards began to thump under the blows of dozens of hands.

“Screw-her-now! Screw-her-now!”

Leonardo rested his chin on the woman’s shoulder and watched the leaves of a holm oak growing near the farm move lightly in the wind. Her breasts pressed against his thin chest at every breath.

“Am I hurting you?” he whispered.

“No.”

He began moving slowly and soon he was standing alone in the middle of a white room waiting for someone. The shouts of the youngsters were no more than a distant hiss and their handclaps the noise of a train that had already passed long ago. The room had no windows; it was square and on the end wall a painting had been hung. This showed a plate and a glass, both empty. Leonardo knew it had a title: “Steady Courage.” It had been painted by the person he was waiting for, but the painter, when he arrived, would not be able to add anything to what Leonardo already knew about it, simply because he already knew all there was to know. So he felt no anxiety as he waited. He might wait hours, months, or years; that did not matter. The room was white, its walls a regular shape and the painting concealed no secrets.

Leonardo felt a spoon scoop the inside of his belly as something escaped from it and traveled far away. Then he lay exhausted, listening to his body and the light scratching of his beard against the woman’s cheek.

The voices of the youngsters gradually diminished, moved off, and fell silent.

Leonardo fastened his pants and went back to sit in the place David had left for him against the wall. They were alone, and the woman was getting dressed.

When she had finished they stayed silent, each staring at their own feet. The only sound was the crackling of the bonfire on which potatoes had been put to boil. The rectangle of sky above the farmyard was an expanse of gray marble that had the same warmth as marble.

David got up, walked around the cage, then flexed his legs and crapped. Leonardo saw the woman smile.

“I’ve never seen an elephant do that,” she said. “They’re so funny!”

Leonardo looked out into the yard. Several of the young people were throwing blankets, clothes, and toys out of the windows of the farmhouse. Others were eating by the fire and still more were asleep. The bald girl, leaning against the coach, was being penetrated from behind by a smallish boy with muscular buttocks. Another was inhaling from a pouch as he waited his turn.

“What’s your name?” the woman asked.

“Leonardo.”

“Well, Leonardo, there’s nothing bad about what we’ve done.”

He looked at her in silence.

“The important thing is to stay alive. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Excellent. Do you think they’ll give us anything to eat?”

“Usually the doctor brings something, but today he hasn’t come.”

“Never mind, we won’t die of hunger. What’s the elephant’s name?”

“David.”

“Can I trust David?”

“Yes.”

The woman lay down on her side with her head supported on her hand and closed her eyes.

“Why don’t you try to get a bit of rest too?” she said.

Leonardo continued to look at her unusual body stretched out on the floor. Soon it seemed utterly familiar to him, as though she had been with him in that prison ever since he first got there. He would not even have been able to say whether she was really fat or not.

“Listen to me, Leonardo,” she said. “Try closing your eyes.”

A few moments later he heard her snoring.

The doctor came toward evening with a bucket of potato peelings among which a few pieces of gray meat could be seen. The woman asked if it was dog meat. The man said he did not know.

“Do you know where we’re heading?” she asked him.

“I’m here to give you food and that’s all,” the doctor said, throwing an armful of bushes on the floor for David. “You mustn’t ask me anything.”

While the man went to and fro carrying branches to the wagon, the woman began eating the potatoes but avoided the meat. Leonardo in contrast took a large chunk of meat and broke it in pieces, using his fingers to do what his teeth could no longer manage. Behind them David’s elastic lips were stripping the branches with a squeaky noise, like new shoes on a rubber floor. When the doctor had finished stacking David’s branches, he filled two buckets with water from a tap at the farm.

Leonardo put several pieces of meat into his mouth and began chewing.

“I think they’re trying to get to France,” he said.

The woman nodded.

“The first people who captured me tried that too, but at the frontier we were shot up by an aircraft. They were kids like this group but not as many, and on the plain they met those National Guard men. A few escaped into the forest and the rest surrendered. The soldiers forced them into a ditch and killed them all. There was another prisoner with me, a very kind elderly man. He had been high school principal. The soldiers killed him too.”

The woman put another piece of potato in her mouth and chewed it slowly.

“Have you always been on your own here?”

Leonardo shook his head.

“There was a man, but he died the same night they captured him.”

The children had pulled two beds out of the house. Alberto was laughing and jumping from one mattress to the other. Leonardo studied his face and gestures. For some days now he had been thinking he had never known any child named Alberto and that the girl in the trailer was not his daughter. Sometimes he felt sure he had left Lucia in her mother’s home eight years ago and had never seen her again. At such moments he experienced something like the serene drowsiness that is said to precede death from frostbite.