Free The Last Man Standing by Davide Longo

was turning red and a few clouds that looked like ginned cotton were appearing in the east. The buzzing of the bees had stopped.
    Adele’s house was neither a farmhouse nor a modern home but one of the few buildings built in the seventies of the last century, when the hills were about to become a pilgrimage destination for tourists from the Nordic countries and America.
    Coming into the yard, Leonardo was greeted by cries from the geese in the poultry pen. There were three of them, one male and two female, and they usually scratched around freely, hurling themselves at anyone who ventured on their territory. After their most recent ambush, the postman had started leaving the mail in the fork of a pear tree a few meters from the gate.
    Hearing the noise of the geese, Adele came out of the house, her hair thrown roughly back, as if she had just been walking against the wind on a pier in Normandy. She was wearing a flowered dress under her apron and her legs were enclosed in brown tights. Her shoulders were those of a woman who had done a lot of swimming in her youth, but she had the hips and legs of an elderly peasant woman. On her feet were a pair of flip-flops.
    “
Ciao
, Adele. Do you have time for a treatment?”
    “Time’s the only thing I do have,” the woman answered.
    The kitchen was cool and full of cheap furniture. On the mantelpiece several vases with medicinal herbs were lined up and a yellow clock was ticking on the wall. The walls badly needed a coat of whitewash, but the total effect of the atmosphere was somehow restful. The table was set for two.
    “We can do it another day,” Leonardo said. “It’s nearly dinnertime, I forgot.”
    Adele dropped a leek into the pan boiling on the stove, then rinsed her hands.
    “If it hadn’t suited me I’d have said no,” she said, drying her hands on her apron.
    They went into the room where she kept her massage bed. Leonardo took off his sandals and lay down.
    It was a small room with walls of a gentle yellow. No posters, pictures, shelves, or books, just a small table holding a jar of ointment, a wristwatch, and a notebook.
    Adele sat down on the stool, took a little ointment from the jar, and began working it with her thumbs into the soles of Leonardo’s feet. She did this for about ten minutes without a word from either of them. Her fingers moved quickly as if running over a pattern they knew well but that sometimes needed to be explored with careful precision. Through the only window Leonardo watched the donkey grazing in the field behind the house.
    “Have you heard what happened yesterday?”
    Adele nodded, and the little oval she wore around her neck with the portrait of her husband moved against her wrinkled chest. When Leonardo was a boy, the man had toured the Langhe district in a small truck selling viticultural products. He was of Ligurian origin, and it was said he had been a billiard player when young, good enough to compete in serious championships, but in his free time doing the rounds of the fairs to relieve the farmhands in the bars of the money they had earned working with animals.
    Adele first met him at the railway station in Genoa. She was just back from South America, where she had been living for six months with a shaman, and the man had been in Viareggio and reached third place in the national championships.
    Before she agreed to marry him she had made quite clear what he already knew, that championships were fine but fleecing people at fairs must stop. In any case, cheating people out of their money involves constant traveling; you cannot do it to the local people where you live. The men, blinded by pride, may allow themselves to be milked for years, but sooner or later their women will find a way of getting their own back on you.
    He was a man known for good sense and discretion and would not have wanted to argue. Leonardo had once seen him dominating the billiard table in the bar, but when a stranger challenged him he had handed the