The Last Man Standing by Davide Longo

touching it said, “But I left it just here.” At that point Leonardo had heard a woman behind him whisper to the friend beside her: “What a love! He’s going blind too!”
    Danilo played the four of hearts. The man with the beard took it with the six and then turned to the boy.
    “You heard what he told you?”
    The boy smiled and Leonardo realized that, young though he was, he was in perfect control of the situation.
    He also understood that what was happening in that room was the result of fear, but he himself had grown so far from his former self that he hid his awareness. He knew he was the only one among those present to have this feeling and he felt as humiliated by it as he had on every other occasion. What was paralyzing his legs and constricting his throat was exactly what he felt when watching a climber clinging by his fingers to a rock face or listening to how a man had thrown away all his possessions on a mere whim. Acts he could have easily proved to be pointless and stupid, as he had during a symposium on the extreme that he had taken part in once in Oslo, but even so such things had always filled him with a profound sense of inferiority.
    It was a truth that he had painfully been forced to acknowledge for some time, at least to himself: that the creative force in life was extravagance rather than tightfistedness, gambling rather than calculation, and that every true creative act was born of risk taking, without which nothing better than sterile repetition was ever possible. History and the march of civilization had been a long and successful attempt to reassure the meek and cowardly, constantly disguising in new clothes a terrible hypocritical reasoning in favor of logic, morality, and beauty. He with his profession, his books, his long slender body devoid of malice, was merely the ultimate development of this trend, like a fussy piece of lace worked with great skill for the sole purpose of lying covered with dust and compliments on some aunt’s bedside table.
    He noticed the card players were staring at him.
    “The boy’s working for me,” he said, trying to smile.
    Danilo stared at him. He was young and bald and it was said he had many lovers in the district though not actually in the village, because this was a pact his wife had extracted from him after they had quarreled for years.
    “If you must bring these people here,” Danilo said, “keep them at your own place.”
    Leonardo nodded, afraid he would not be able to control his voice if he spoke.
    “Let’s go,” he said to the boy, who stuck his hands in his pockets, apparently entirely at ease.
    “You’d best listen and keep out of the way,” the insurance man said.
    “Let’s go now, please,” repeated Leonardo.
    The boy took a few steps toward the door then stopped, turned, and gave the four players a smile.
    “You’re all dead,” he said, his words sounding terrible yet at the same time as mild as a verse from the Apocalypse recited by a child; after this he vanished into the light beyond the door.
    Leonardo caught up with him in the middle of the square, and for a while they walked side by side in silence. The boy, calm and indifferent, barely lifted his feet from the ground. Leonardo occasionally turned to make sure they were not being followed. He was conscious of a pulse in his temples, and his feet were cold.
    They passed a building on whose façade an ivy leaf had once been drawn so accurately that it still looked real from a distance, and several shoddily built apartment buildings, after which the road passed fields and clumps of hazel. Leonardo looked at the boy; there were drops of sweat among the few soft black whiskers on his upper lip. He remembered his name was Adrian and that he had always known this.
    “Once at school they made us read one of your books,” Adrian said.
    Leonardo had no intention of getting involved in a discussion about his work. His stomach was in turmoil, and all he wanted was to get home to