Free The Last Man Standing by Davide Longo Page B

cheeks was a complicated pattern of wrinkles and veins.
    “But that’s what you should do all the same.”
    Leonardo accidentally touched his bicycle bell and its trill spread through the courtyard. The surrounding silence was so complete it seemed the sound would radiate away to infinity without meeting an obstacle. He felt a great need for his own armchair, with a cup of coffee in his hand and a book on his knee.
    “Ever since he was a child Sebastiano has talked in his sleep,” his mother said. “I often go into his room to listen. He talks to people who are no longer alive and others who are yet to come. Take him with you, he’ll be useful to you.”
    Sebastiano could be heard coming down the stairs. He passed behind Adele.
    “You’re right to finish harvesting the grapes,” the woman said, looking up at the sky where a modest moon was shining.
    “It’s not good to let grapes rot. A sign people are going mad. Like not combing your hair or washing yourself. People sometimes come to me with dirty feet and when they realize it they apologize by saying ‘No wonder with what’s happening!’ But your feet are always clean. You haven’t gone mad yet.”
    Suddenly the geese began honking for no reason and Adele shut them up with a cry Leonardo had heard Mongolian shepherds use to make dromedaries run, and then she dismissed him and went back into the house.
    Leaving the yard, Leonardo cycled down the pathway as far as the road and once on the asphalt started in the opposite direction to the village. After ten meters or so he braked sharply and, laying the bicycle on the ground, took a few quick steps into the field by the road, opened his fly, and released a powerful jet of urine. It was the effect the massage had on him.
    Going back to the bicycle he noticed something among the lights on the plain that was full of life yet at the same time deeply saddening.
    A great fire burning under the nearest hills was sending up an enormous column of smoke. It must have involved a whole group of houses or a large factory because the flames were coming from such a wide base.
    Seven years earlier, on the same day and at about the same hour, he had been sitting at the desk in his study about to read an essay on
The Outsider
by Camus written by a student named Clara Carpigli; at that moment all he could have said of her was that she was a young woman with fair skin and raven-black hair who used to sit near the front at his lectures. It was the last piece of work he planned to correct before going into the dining room where Alessandra was waiting with their supper.
    At the end of the essay a piece of paper was clipped to the page with three lines on it written in ink between inverted commas.
    Starting from that moment, delicate glances, a couple of notes, and a coffee, gradually transformed Clara Carpigli into a face, a way of walking, an increased heartbeat, and an expectation. He knew well that many of his teaching and writing colleagues were in the habit of making the most of their status as
maestri
with dinners, weekends, and nights with women students or lecturers, but though he never moralized, he had always liked to think of himself as different.
    Then a month later he left home for an out-of-town restaurant where a girl twenty years his junior was waiting for him with no legitimate reason for meeting him anywhere other than in the lecture rooms of the university.
    Three days later, by midday, the grapes had been harvested.
    Elio drove the tractor he had borrowed from his uncle into the yard, loaded with the final baskets, and they went into the house for a bite to eat. Leonardo had avoided the village since the night of the fire and there was nothing left in the larder except pasta and cans, but Gabri had given her husband a pan to heat up containing vegetables, anchovies, and breadcrumbs.
    They sat down at the table and began devouring the food in big spoonfuls while Bauschan watched from the corner where he was lying,