The Last Man Standing (41 page)

Leonardo opened his mouth to say more but realized that there was nothing else in what had happened that he needed to report. He could remember a time when the past had played a great part in his life, but that seemed a remote period and no longer his.

He stroked the dog in silence for a little longer. The rising sun was softening the air, and large slate-colored clouds were rising from the sea. Then he got up, went into the restaurant, woke the young people, and told them it was time to move on.

PART SIX

They walked eastward along beaches that had once echoed with the cries of vacationers and were now desolate and silent. Many of the villages had been raided and set on fire; others seemed intact but lifeless, like cold casts of their former selves. Empty houses, overgrown gardens, harbors without boats. Groups of cats were dozing under cars and in the shade of pittosporum bushes, taking note without interest of the passing humans. No human sound tempered the stillness; only the cries of gulls and crows and the constant lapping of the sea.

It was sunset by the time they came to the section of beach facing the island. Leonardo helped Lucia down from the elephant and went to sit with her on one of the rocks at the end of the stretch of sand. At that point the coast extended into the sea as a rocky promontory, like a hand trying to recapture something it had absentmindedly allowed to escape. The island, a few hundred meters from the shore, seemed naked and unfriendly despite the oblique light of the sun—a triangle of opaline rock with nothing on it but a few shrubs, including broom.

Leonardo looked at it: it seemed sprinkled with lime and looked like a relic from a far distant past. When he turned, he saw Sebastiano heading toward the embankment that carried the road. After a moment his figure vanished into the dark arch of a tunnel.

“Why are you crying?” Leonardo asked.

Salomon, sitting on the donkey, shook his head to indicate it was nothing but went on glowering at the island. He had been silent all day without ever asking who the man leading them was, or where they were going or how long it would take to get there. In a cave where they had stopped for a half hour’s rest he had found a woman’s old handbag and spent the afternoon filling it with crabs he caught on the way. The legs emerging from his shorts were as dry and dark as sticks of licorice. His bright-yellow shoulder-length hair made him look like someone born for running over moors.

“Are you scared?”

The child shrugged and tipped up his nose. The island was all rocky outcrops and seemed to offer no landing place. On the highest point were the circular ruins of an ancient lookout tower, now little more than a pile of stones.

Leonardo reached down to Bauschan’s head. The dog’s hair was rough with salt, his nose cold and damp. When he looked back at Salomon, he realized the child’s eyes and the dog’s were exactly the same blue.

“What do you mean, scared?”

Salomon looked around as if wanting to relate this fear to something visible, then simply slid his hand down a couple of times from his throat to the top of his stomach. The elephant crapped, filling the air with a smell of rotten fruit. The sun had set, removing both the warmth and the ferocity of the day.

“I understand,” Leonardo nodded, “but it won’t happen.”

Salomon looked Leonardo in the eye, and then at the elephant, the island, the dog, and Lucia, who was holding her bump in her hands and glancing back at the stretch of coast they had come along. Leonardo realized the boy’s mind was occupied by one of those thoughts we live with from the moment we are born to the moment we leave the earth. Something to do with finishing a task passed on to us by those who have gone before. He remained dumb to think of the violence and grace involved in all this.

“Now let’s eat,” he said, aware the boy had stopped weeping and that the crisis had passed.

Salomon jumped off the donkey, came up to Leonardo, and emptied his handbag on the ground. After a moment of uncertainty, the crabs began fleeing in all directions. Leonardo grabbed one of the biggest that was about to disappear among the rocks.

“The knife from the basket,” he said.

The boy caught up with the donkey, which was heading for the road, and took a small knife with an arts-and-crafts handle from one of her panniers. David was ripping long sprays of bougainvillea from the embankment with his trunk. This vegetable noise was the only sound in the world. The wind had dropped, silencing the backwash of surf, and the sea just a few meters away was a motionless membrane.

Leonardo opened the crabs and the young people ate their flesh, then Salomon went on a trip around the rocks and came back with some sea snails and limpets. By the time they had finished their meal the sand around them was dotted with mother-of-pearl shells. The smaller crabs, in translucent armor, circulated among the leftovers polishing off what remained.

At this point they saw Sebastiano come out of the tunnel.

He laid a series of round poles on the ground at regular intervals, went back into the tunnel, and a few seconds later the bow of a small rowing boat began to emerge from the darkness. Before Leonardo and Salomon could even get to their feet, the boat had slithered toward the waterline with a thundering echo like a drumroll.

Sebastiano lit an oil lamp in the boat, and while Leonardo and Salomon loaded on the baskets, he collected the poles and carried them back to the tunnel. After a moment of reluctance, the donkey agreed to get into the boat and, as they left the shore, stood gazing ahead like an old sea hand.

The crossing took half an hour, and throughout this time Salomon looked back at the shore where the elephant was staring steadily at the little light from the lamp disappearing toward the island. Leonardo put his arm around the boy’s narrow waist and felt his thin stomach shaken by sobs.

“We’ll find a way,” was all he said.

They landed on gravel at a little bay on the side of the island facing the open sea. A few meters from the shore, with a dexterity that betrayed long experience, Sebastiano pulled in the oars, and letting the boat bounce on the waves, guided it right up to the beach. The donkey got off by herself, and they unloaded the panniers and two large cans of water that Sebastiano had filled. Then Leonardo helped Lucia off and they were on their way.

During the last few months Sebastiano had added to the only hut already on the island, transforming it into a house with three rooms. The room they entered contained four chairs, a table made from a door placed on two tree trunks, a basin, a stove, and three shelves with some dishes and cutlery and a couple of pans. Stretched in a corner, next to a prie-dieu, was an animal hide similar to the one Sebastiano had given Leonardo when they separated. The only furniture in the other two rooms was three lounge chairs.

They drank a little water, pouring it into a bowl from one of the cans that Sebastiano had carried up to the house on his shoulders, after which Lucia retired to the room with a single bed while Leonardo and the boy took the other. The plastic on the beds was hard and smelled of chloroform, so they covered them with the rabbit skins they had sewn together in recent months and lay down. Leonardo had the solar battery with him but did not switch it on.

“Have you ever been on an island before?” he asked the boy.

Salomon thought.

“Yes, but I was very little. They told me about it.”

“Was it a large island?”

“I think so, because we couldn’t even see the sea.”

Leonardo stretched out his hand and passed his fingers through the boy’s hair. Bauschan was lying in the space between the two beds. Leonardo understood from his whimpers that Salomon was stroking him.

“Has it gone now?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“Then go to sleep, we’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

“For David?”

“Yes, for David too.”

Lucia’s room was smaller; she had moved the bed against the wall, right under the window. Leonardo sat beside her, listening to her breathing interrupted by little wheezing sounds. A dream. Then he took her left foot and ran his thumb over the sole. He did this many times, then switched to her ankle and the other foot. When he got up to go he felt her lightly touch his hand. She gave him time to understand the meaning of what she had done after such a long absence, then after a minute or two she moved his hand to her belly. Leonardo felt hot firm skin under his fingers, then something press against his palm, like a little dog waking up in a sack.

For the first time he was fully aware of Good. Not like in the past, as something that burns and consumes, but as a fire you can hold in your hand and eat in small portions. A fire containing both hot and cold, both light and dark shadow, and that for this reason is more closely related to humanity than to any other creature. Because, in principle, humanity can never be separated from it, in the same way that the water of the sea, the water of the stream, and the water that forms the clouds intercommunicate and belong together.

When Lucia released his hand he got to his feet and tiptoed to the door.

“Thank you,” he said before leaving the room.

As usual, he only slept for a few hours and at first light went out with Bauschan. It only took him a few steps to realize that the opaline color of the island was not due to salt or the nature of the rock but to a covering of dogs’ bones.

He climbed up to the ruins of the tower from where he could take in the whole handkerchief of land, but he could see no dogs or animal carcasses. Bauschan stayed quietly at his side with no smell to follow. Whatever happened on the island had happened long ago.

Returning to the house, he found Sebastiano busy watering the kitchen garden.

During the months he had been here, he had been cultivating a rectangle of land about fifty paces from the shanty. His garden offered zucchini, tomatoes, melons, and peas and, like the house, was on the part of the island not visible from the mainland.

“Do you know why these are here?” Leonardo asked him, indicating the bones Sebastiano had raked up from his garden and piled in a little white pyramid.

Sebastiano shook his head then emptied the bucket between two lines of tomatoes and went off to the tank where he kept the water. The sun was getting strong enough to define shadows, and from the pines at the highest point of the island came the first chirping of two cicadas.

Leonardo looked back at the settlement on the western coast: in fact there was a fortified town or citadel enclosed within walls and ugly houses built in the previous century leading down to the sea. In the clear morning air he could make out threads of smoke rising from the upper part, already turned to ocher by the sun. During the crossing the night before he had noticed fires on the walls but had said nothing because he did not want to worry the young people.

“Who are those people?” he asked.

Sebastiano went back to watering the garden. Leonardo looked at him and waited for an answer, before realizing none would come because no answer existed.

“Have they ever come looking for you?”

Sebastiano bent down to pull up a tuft of grass from among the carrots and indicated no. Leonardo looked at the house where the youngsters were still asleep. The outside of the shanty had been painted with sea-blue paint, and Sebastiano had covered the windows with large jute sacks now swelling in the wind from the mainland, giving the whole house the appearance of an enormous and complicated wind instrument.

“Thank you so much for all this,” Leonardo said.

In fifteen days they managed to scrape together four empty drums that Leonardo and Sebastiano had found by pushing on as far as a service station on the main road; also about twenty wooden planks retrieved from bathing huts, a few meters of rope, some nails and tar, and two almost complete rolls of adhesive tape.

Each morning, after milking Circe and drinking a cup of milk, they left the donkey to graze on the island and took the boat back to the beach.

David, seeing them arrive, would start turning around on himself and giving long emotional trumpetings.

The first to embrace him would be Salomon, who jumped into the water a few meters from the shore, and then it would be Leonardo’s turn. Sebastiano and Lucia would join in these effusions from a distance, while Bauschan would run between David’s legs as if to demonstrate confidence in the elephant’s slowness and gentleness. Once mutual greetings were over Sebastiano and Leonardo would begin work on the hull and Salomon would concentrate on the octopuses. Lucia would pass the time sitting with her hands on her belly and watching the sparse clouds crossing the blue sky from a little shelter of branches Leonardo had built for her.

Toward midday the two men would take the boat and the rest of the material back to the tunnel so that it would not be too noticeable, and, with the young people and the elephant, would go a little way inland to a stream, about twenty meters from the beach.

Under a roof of birches, holm oaks, and carob trees the water had scooped out a number of pools where David was able to refresh himself and Salomon amused himself by diving from the elephant’s back. Even Lucia, without any warning, one day stripped naked and slid carefully into the water in a more secluded pool, where she spent a long time floating with her eyes half closed and her large belly turned to the sky.

When he had refilled the freshwater cans, Leonardo would go off to inspect the snare he had set the day before. The prey it caught was more sporadic than it had been in the hills and the forest, but he did find a small wild boar and a doe whose meat, when salted, could last them the most of the summer.

Lunch would consist of tomatoes, boiled zucchini, and dried peaches; or an omelet made with gulls’ eggs, which Sebastiano had taught Salomon to search for among the inlets on the island. They never lit a fire and before leaving were careful to cover their traces by collecting every scrap left over from their meal.

Back on the beach, the men would work until sunset. Then everyone except the elephant would get back into the boat, which every day looked more like a clumsy catamaran, and would row back to the island.

“Tomorrow can David come too?” Salomon asked as he watched the gray bulk of the elephant shrink until it was lost in the evening.

“Not yet,” Leonardo would say.

When they got to the island Sebastiano would go up to the house, light the stove, and put on the soup to heat, while Leonardo and the boy fished on the rocks until nightfall. It was then that Salomon would tell his dreams and ask Leonardo to tell his, but Leonardo’s dreams were too obscure for a child, so he would replace them with stories from the vast library of his mind. First he told African stories about man and woman; then the exploits of Achilles, the wiles of Ulysses, the misadventures of Don Quixote, the vengeance of the Count of Monte Cristo, and Ahab’s obsession. Leonardo had to tie the fishing line to the child’s wrist so he would not let the fish slip through his hands. Then they would take home what they had caught to be boiled, cured, or eaten raw. Some of the entrails were given to Bauschan, and some were kept as bait for the next evening’s fishing.