The Last Man Standing by Davide Longo Page B

Their eyes had been saying, “This place is not safe, and the reason it isn’t safe is that now there is nowhere we can feel safe any longer.” This animal instinct had led Lupu to set up turns of guard and had allowed him to save his family. Leonardo, in his pajamas with their slender vertical stripes, was fully aware of his own inadequacy. Part of the roof collapsed raising thousands of sparks that lifted gently into the sky where they were gradually extinguished.
    “I’ll make some coffee,” Leonardo said. “Come inside.”
    He put the large coffeepot on the gas, then sat down at the kitchen table and studied his own hands against the wooden surface. No one came in or went to the veranda. When the coffee was ready, he poured it into a dozen cups without counting if there were too many and carried them out on a painted wooden tray. Lupu and his family were still standing where he had left them. They had all covered themselves with something, leaving only Adrian without shoes.
    They acknowledged the coffee with an inclination of the head and drank it. The store was now burning peacefully.
    “Are you sure you want to leave tonight?” Leonardo asked.
    “Best for you too.”
    “Where will you go?”
    “Back to the mountains.”
    Leonardo went back into the house. Bauschan was sleeping on his rug in the studio and had not noticed anything.
    “You really are my dog,” he said, then opened a drawer in the desk. Inside was a lot less than he should have paid for the four days’ work planned and much more than what was due for the two they had done. He put the banknotes in the pocket of his pajama jacket and closed the door behind him to stop the dog from following.
    Lupu and the others had loaded the cars with the little they had saved from the fire and were waiting at the back. The upper floor of the store had collapsed and the flames had regained a bit of strength, but the darkness was reclaiming space and everything they did or said was now happening almost entirely in the dark.
    He handed Lupu the money and they shook hands, then the cars processed out of the courtyard to the subdued sound of crushed gravel.
    Left on his own, Leonardo went back into the house, urinated, and put Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello on the stereo before going out again to sit on the veranda steps with the dog in his arms. For a while Bauschan licked his right thumb, then dozed off. By now the burning store was crackling quietly and the air was filled with a good smell of resin and hot earth. It was a smell that made Leonardo think of Humanism and a baker’s window facing a lane with the light on all night.
    They stayed like this until dawn, when the building that had once been a store and lodging for guests appeared in the weak new daylight like an empty skull with thin threads of anthracite smoke emerging from it. Then the dog, followed by Leonardo, got up and went into the house, both of them exhausted, as if they had just had a long lesson from a master.
    The first to hear the news had been the teaching faculty, then their families and the literary world, and only after that the newspapers and the students.
    Leonardo had been one of the last it had reached among the lecturers, before the rest of his family. The telephone rang at six in the evening, and the level voice of the rector at the other end of the line begged him, despite the unusual hour, to come as quickly as possible to the university since only he would be able to throw any light on an unpleasant event that had occurred.
    The meeting had taken a couple of hours while a dozen of the most senior and influential teachers in the faculty had gone in and out of the office. No one had claimed to take seriously what was written in the letter that had accompanied the video and the photographs, but no one had asked Leonardo to vouch for the truth of those images either, still less the reasons for his relations with the girl.
    The next day he had stayed home: his lecture