The Last Man Standing

PART ONE

Leonardo pushed back the curtain and took a long look at the courtyard where three cars were parked, one of which was his own. The open space was surrounded by a metal net three meters high with barbed wire at the top. The previous evening, though blinded by the light the guard had shone in his face, he had noticed the outline of the little tower, but he now realized it had been skillfully constructed from old advertising panels, sheets of metal, sections of railing, a shower cubicle, and a fire escape. One of the two searchlights above it was pointed at the courtyard and the other directed at the desolate emptiness beyond the fence.

He looked out at the flat fields covered with low bushes where the road stretched into the distance, with occasional bends despite the fact that nothing seemed to be in the way to make them necessary. The sky was a monotonous unmarked gray for as far as he could see it, reminiscent in every way of the last few days.

A man appeared in the courtyard.

Leonardo watched him slowly make his way to the cars and walk around them, peering through their windows: he had a leather jacket and trousers with big side pockets. He could have been about thirty; he had the compact physique of a rugby player.

Why not tonight? he thought, watching the man stop in front of the trunk of his Polar.

The man took a screwdriver or knife from his pocket and with a simple movement flipped open the trunk.

For a few seconds he studied the jerry cans inside as if trying to work out what might be in them, then unscrewed the cap of one and sniffed. When he was quite sure of its contents he replaced the cap, grabbed a can, closed the trunk, and went away just as he had come.

Leonardo let the curtain fall back and went to the bedside table where he had put his water bottle. Taking a sip, he sat down on the bed. He could hear steps from the corridor, and the noise of something with wheels being pushed toward the stairs.

That evening he had hesitated for a long time before deciding whether to leave the cans in the car or take them to his room, but after thinking the matter over for a long time he had come to the conclusion that all in all he had done the right thing, or at any rate the least wrong thing, and that if the cans had been in his room it would have been worse.

He went into the bathroom, took his toiletry bag from the shelf and put it into the duffel he was packing on the bed. He stowed the vest and pants he had been wearing before he showered in a side pocket, then slipped on his jacket and left the room, leaving the key in the door as he had been told to do.

Passing down the corridor he glanced at the pictures on the walls: dead pheasants on big wooden tables, baskets of fruit, and pewter pots. There was the still the pervasive odor of boiled vegetables he had noticed the previous evening, and after the rain that had fallen in the night the fitted carpet smelled of damp undergrowth.

An elderly woman was clutching the handrail on the stairs. When he asked her if she needed help, the woman, wrapped in a most unseasonable tailor-made wool costume, looked at him with total indifference as though he had been nothing more than the sound of a closing door, then turned her face to the wallpaper. Leonardo apologized, pushed past her, and went on down to the hall.

The surroundings, despite their gesso statue, artificial plant, and carpet covered with cigarette burns, had clearly had quite a different appearance only a short time before. He could see marks where shelves and brackets had been roughly stripped from the walls, and big lead pipes ran the length of the ceiling. The door to the courtyard was protected by a heavy grill, through which the cars and the entrance gate were visible. Occasional circles were spreading in the puddles, and he could sense that the air was already heavy and sultry.

“Have the dogs been bothering you?” the man behind the counter asked without looking up from the papers spread in front of him. He was no longer wearing the green sweater he had had on the previous evening when he had demanded payment in advance and shown Leonardo how to use the hot-water token for the shared bathroom.

“There are packs of dogs all around the enclosure at night. We’ve tried poisoning them, but it doesn’t help.”

Leonardo watched him sign a paper in a sloping hand. His shiny head looked as if he were in the habit of greasing it with fat and polishing it with a wool cloth every morning. A lot of postcards showing places that were now inaccessible had been clipped with clothes pegs to the metal frame of a bed propped against the wall behind him. On the counter you could still see where objects, now vanished, must once have stood. One space looked as if it might have held a computer at one time. A telephone had survived, even if no longer attached to any cable.

“I think something’s missing from my car,” Leonardo said.

The man turned to detach a couple of fuel tokens from the metal net and copied their code numbers into a register. When he had done this he took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit one. He took a puff and looked at Leonardo through the smoke.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Certain?”

“Absolutely.”

The man dropped ash into a saucer with a picture of a saint on it. He had a leather armband around his wrist, and his right ear looked as if it had been chewed. Leonardo imagined these two facts must be connected in some obscure way that would have required time to figure out.

“The guard was in the watchtower all night,” the man said. “No one could have gotten into the enclosure.”

“Yes, I’m sure that’s true.”

The man studied Leonardo’s thin face and long, mostly gray, hair. He was probably reflecting that the man before him did not work with his hands and was physically inactive.

“Then you must suspect the other guests,” he said.

Leonardo shook his head.

“No, not at all.”

The man took in Leonardo’s frank gaze and then puffed out his cheeks as if this would help him to think. His eyes were the color of glass bottles that had spent years in a dark cellar.

“Denis!” he shouted loudly, then picked up his cigarette from the edge of the saucer and bent his bald head over his papers again.

A moment or two later a door opened behind him and the lad Leonardo had seen in the courtyard emerged.

“My brother,” the man behind the counter said without looking at either of them. “He looks after security.”

Seen close up, the lad looked younger than thirty. He had thick wool socks and the side pockets of his pants were full of short cylindrical objects.

“This gentleman says something’s missing from his car,” the bald man said.

The boy considered the tall body and narrow shoulders of Leonardo in his linen jacket, as if bewildered by a utensil that must have once been useful but had now become obsolete.

“I was on guard all night,” he said, “and we haven’t opened the gate yet this morning.”

There was no shadow of defiance on his face. Only the boredom of someone compelled to go once again through an overfamiliar rigmarole.

“I don’t doubt that,” Leonardo said, “but I also know that someone’s forced open the trunk of my car.”

“What have you lost?” asked the boy.

“A can of oil.”

“Motor oil?”

“No, olive oil.”

“Was it the only one you had?”

“No, I had four.”

The boy was silent, as if all possibilities had been covered. His brother stopped writing.

“If you like, we can call the police.”

Leonardo thought about it.

“How long would they take to get here?”

“We use a private security firm and they don’t much like to be called out. Once we had to wait two days.”

Leonardo looked at his own hands pressing on the desk: they were long, thin, and emaciated. The man continued to stare at him.

“Maybe you only had three cans and are making a mistake,” he said.

Looking up, Leonardo saw the boy’s back disappearing through the door he had come in by.

“I’m glad we were able to sort out this misunderstanding,” the man said, lowering his bald head over the counter. “You’ll find breakfast in the dining room.”

The room Leonardo entered had been divided by a plasterboard partition, from the far side of which kitchen and laundry noises could be heard.

The old lady Leonardo had met on the stairs was sitting at the table nearest to the door, while a fat man of about forty breakfasted by the window. He was apparently a commercial traveler, with two black cases leaning against either side of his chair. On a round table in the middle of the room were a pot, two Thermoses, some bread, a few cups, a rectangular block of margarine, and a bowl of jam of unappetizing color. A clock on the wall showed ten past eight. No staff could be seen.

Leonardo poured himself a cup of coffee and took it to one of the three free tables. He put his bag down and took a sip: real coffee diluted with carob.

It reminded him of a conference on the circularity of Tolstoy’s writing many years before in Madrid, and the dinner that had followed at a restaurant whose unmarked entrance had seemed like the way in to an ordinary block of flats. The chairman had been forced to spend the whole evening dealing with invective hurled by his wife against enemies of bullfighting. Most of those present must have been used to the woman’s heavy drinking and aggressive defense of this spectacle outlawed only a few months earlier by the government, and they seemed not to be bothered by it. Then, at the end of the evening, with the restaurant nearly empty, a young woman probably a student in the company of some lecturer whose more or less official mistress she was had sung a song she had written in which she maintained that love was nothing more than a means to an end. None of those present had either the strength or enough reverse experience to contradict her. The coffee they had then drunk, each imprisoned in his or her own guilty silence, had been like the coffee he had before him now, except that at that time you could still find decent coffee everywhere.

As he lifted the cup to his lips again Leonardo became aware that the old lady was looking at him. He nodded to her, but she continued to stare without responding. Her sparse hair had been built up into a gauze-like structure through which light weakly filtered from the skylight. Her fingers were covered with jewels and everything in her appearance seemed calculated and tense in some way about which it might almost have been blasphemous to speculate.

Leonardo took a book from one of the side pockets of his duffel bag and leafed through it until he found the story he was looking for.

It was a story he had read many times since the age of twenty-two, and for which he had always felt unconditional love. Both in moments of utter despair or fierce hope the story had always adapted itself to his mood, revealing itself for what it was: a perfect piece of design. He had always advised his students to read it, both those with literary ambitions and those who imagined that a man in his position must be able to offer them useful pearls of practical wisdom. Many years had passed since the last time anyone had expected any such thing from him, but if it ever happened again, now or in years to come, he was certain that his answer would have been the same: A Simple Heart, he would have said.

When he had finished reading Flaubert’s description of Madame Aubain, for whom Felicité was so ably performing her duty, he took another mouthful of coffee and it tasted better. The sun had come out in the courtyard and through the window he could see it reflected from the car windscreens. The incident of the oil can seemed remote and thus of little significance.

“I’ll be home by this evening,” he told himself.

Raising his eyes for a moment as he turned back to his book, he met those of the old lady, who had silently approached him.

“Please sit down,” he said, removing his duffel from the free chair.

The woman skirted the short side of the table and sat down. The skin between the few deep creases on her face seemed strangely young and taut. She had carefully outlined her lips with deep scarlet.

“I’m sure no one has recognized you,” the lady said.

Leonardo shut his book. The woman nodded severely.

“I couldn’t fail to. You’ve been one of the great delusions of my life.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I was so naïve. I spent years in the arts and should have realized better than anyone the huge gulf between the artist and the shabbiness of the man.”

Leonardo took a mouthful of coffee.

“What was your own field in the arts?”

The woman checked the architecture of her hair with her left hand.

“Opera. I was a contralto.”

Leonardo complimented her. The man at the other table was watching them; his heavy hands restless, the rest of his body motionless. Leonardo imagined he must be having ignoble thoughts.

“May I ask you a question?” the woman said.

“Please do.”

“After what happened, did you continue writing?”

“No, I stopped.”

The woman screwed up her eyes, as if reliving one of many memories.

“I could not sing for nearly two years when my daughter was born because of her health problems. I nearly went mad. And I don’t say this out of empathy with you. The situation I found myself in was very different from yours. I had done nothing wrong.”

Leonardo finished his coffee.

“Then you started again?”

“Of course,” the woman exclaimed. “One engagement after another. Not many contraltos can boast of singing until the age of fifty-two, but I had a voice other women could only dream of. I was on stage two days after I lost my son. Have you any idea what it means to lose a son and two days later find yourself singing Rigoletto in front of a thousand people?”

The fat man got up from his table and passed them on his way out.

“Good-bye,” the woman said.

“Good-bye,” he answered.

Leonardo followed the man with his eyes as far as the door. Rembrandt without the beard, he thought.

“An arms dealer,” the woman said. “Stays here two nights a month.”

Leonardo would have liked more coffee.

“Do you come here often?” he asked.

“I’ve been living here for a year. If that’s not often, I don’t know what is.”

The sound of the commercial traveler’s car attracted their eyes to the window. He maneuvered his luxury off-road vehicle and went out through the gate, which was being held open by the man from reception. The two acknowledged each other, and then the bald man closed the gate and padlocked it, slung his rifle over his shoulder, and slowly walked back.

“His car’s bulletproof,” the woman said. “That’s why he’s able to come and go as he pleases.”

Leonardo nodded and removed some perhaps nonexistent speck from his shoulder.

“Where did you live before you came here?” he asked.

“In P.,” the woman said. “But when this business with the outsiders started, my daughter persuaded me to move in with her. After a few months my son-in-law was called up for the National Guard and my daughter decided it would be safer to move to Switzerland. So I told her to go and find a house, then come back for me. She knew this place and brought me here so I’d be all right in the meantime.”

The old woman said no more, as if that was the end of the matter. Leonardo smiled weakly.

“Will you be staying here much longer?”

The woman gave him a sharp look.

“Where else should I go?”

“But I thought your daughter was waiting for you in Switzerland.”

“She’s not in Switzerland anymore,” the woman said, removing a crumb from the table. “When her husband died, she married again, a German. Now she lives in Germany. She has suffered, but for the better: her first husband was an inconsistent man. He died at V., so far as we can understand from whoever writes those official letters. But the one she has now seems a lot better, altogether another kettle of fish.”

“Why don’t you join her?”

The woman looked at him as if he had just wet himself.

“Don’t you ever watch television? Have you no idea what’s happening? When the lines were still working, my daughter used to call me every day and beg me, I’m not exaggerating, beg me to let her come and get me. But I always said no. That it wasn’t worth the risk. I’m ninety-two, I lack for nothing here, and she’s the only child I have left. You have a daughter, too, if I remember correctly?”

Leonardo lifted the cup to his lips, regardless of the fact that he had finished his coffee.

“Yes.”

“Does your wife allow you to see her?”

“No. I haven’t seen her for seven years.”

“So I thought.”

For a moment they studied different corners of the room in silence.

“Now I must get on with my journey,” Leonardo said.

“Where do you live?”

“At M.”

“Is that the village where The Little Song of Tobias the Dog is set?”

“Yes.”

“So you’ve gone back to your childhood home?”

“Yes.”

They heard a horn. A small tanker had stopped in front of the gate. There were two men in the cab.

“Not that I wish it for you,” the woman said, “but perhaps sooner or later you’ll want to start writing again.”

Leonardo smiled and shook his head. They watched the bald man open the gate and the driver bring the truck into the courtyard. Once out of his cab, the driver put on work gloves and attached a thick, ridged pipe to the tank while the bald man opened a manhole cover fastened to the ground by two locks. Both men had a pistol in a holster under their jackets. Leonardo stared at the ocher countryside and a sky the color of curdled milk.

“I really must be on my way,” he said.

He picked up his duffel. The woman fixed her eyes on the yellowing lily of the valley in the center of the table and waited until he had reached the door before calling him by his surname.

“The best possible interpretation is that you did something stupid,” she said. “But no one can ever forgive you for what you did.”

Leaving the hotel, he drove north on the same secondary roads as he had come by. The autostrada would have saved him several hours, but he had heard of fake checkpoints at which travelers were robbed, and for this reason he preferred a less obvious route well away from the larger towns.

He drove with the window down, the hot, clammy wind filling his shirt; from time to time he took a mouthful of water from the bottle beside him. Since starting out three days before he had passed about a dozen cars and several military convoys. The villages he passed through were mostly deserted, with only an occasional old man sitting in a doorway, a boy on a bicycle, or the face of a woman drawn to her window by the sound of the car.

About noon he stopped to fill up with gasoline. When he beeped his horn a man came out through the gate to the service station while another stayed in the doorway with his rifle lowered. Leonardo got out of the car, let himself be searched, and said how much gas he wanted. The man, who might have been about fifty, and wearing a rock band T-shirt, got into the Polar and drove it into the enclosure. Leonardo tried to check through the grill how much was being put in, but the back of the car was hidden by the prefabricated hut where the two men lived, and where a young woman with dark skin and curly hair was leaning out of a window. Leonardo imagined she must be tanned from working all summer in the open, unless she was an outsider who had got in before they closed the frontier.

The man in the T-shirt brought the car out again.

“See you later,” Leonardo said as he paid.

“Take care,” the man said, turning away.

Leonardo pulled over a couple of kilometers after the service station. Before getting out of the car he looked around. The countryside was flat and the yellow grass, mostly unmown, was bending over in the hot wind. A long way off was a hut and the ruins of what must once have been a kiln for making bricks. Then a line of mulberries and some electric pylons disappearing into the distance in the direction of an almost invisible group of houses.

Leonardo listened to the silence for a while then got out of the car and checked that the cans were in place. He opened them and sniffed to make sure the contents had not been replaced while the car was being filled up, then he closed the trunk and mopped the sweat from his forehead with his handkerchief. He became aware of an acid stench of decomposition.

He looked into the ditch separating the road from the fields. There was a dog lying in it, its belly swollen, a swarm of flies whirling around its eyes and open mouth. A black Labrador killed by another dog or poisoned.

He was about to turn back to the car when he heard a whimper.

A few meters from the dead dog, the ditch disappeared into a small tunnel no wider than a bicycle wheel. He understood at once what was going on.

He returned to the car, started it, and moved on. He switched on the radio, but the preset came up with nothing, so he switched it off again and drove for several kilometers without slowing down until he was forced to stop at a crossroads.

Checking to make sure there was no other car with the right of way, he noticed a group of men not far off in a field. There were six of them, armed with rifles, and they seemed not to have noticed him: two were using a long pole to explore the ditch that bordered the field, while the others were following them with their eyes on the grass.

Leonardo put the car into gear to drive away but, as he engaged the clutch, six, ten, perhaps twenty dogs jumped out of the ditch the men were searching and all began to run in the same direction. Taken by surprise, the men hesitated then started yelling and shooting at the tapering shapes racing through the grass. The dogs had almost reached a water channel that would have given them protection, when, for no apparent reason, they turned at right angles and offered the wider target of their sides to the hunters. Leonardo saw one or two roll over in the grass, others vanished as if swallowed up by a hole, yet others exploded into reddish puffs of air. Then the shooting stopped and the men spread out to comb the field. An occasional isolated shot followed and then total silence.

Leonardo realized his foot was still on the clutch. He put the car in neutral and took his foot off. The engine struggled, but did not stall.

The men went back to the irrigation trench from which the dogs had come. Leonardo saw some of them go down into the ditch and throw out what looked like small soft bags full of earth. After a few minutes there must have been about thirty of these, piled in a heap.

Then the men scattered across the field and dragged the carcasses of the dogs toward their puppies, and when this was done one of them took a can from his knapsack and poured the contents over the heap.

Leonardo closed his eyes, his chilled sweat-soaked shirt sticking to his chest. When he opened his eyes again a column of black smoke was rising in the air. He stared, paralyzed, for a few moments with the acrid smell of burned fur coming into the car through the window, then he engaged the gears and made a U-turn. Moving away, he thought he could see in his rear mirror the men waving their arms to attract his attention, but he continued to accelerate.

He recognized the place near the ruins of the kiln. He drew up and, while dust from the edge of the road enveloped the car, he went to the ditch. Lowering himself in, he slithered down it until he was lying on his face in the earth, a few centimeters from the dog’s carcass. Disgust forced an inarticulate sound from him, and when he touched his bare arms he realized they were dirty with yellow slime. He wiped them on his shirt, got up, and walked quickly to where the tunnel passed under the road.

No sound was coming from inside it; all he could hear was his own labored breathing and the rapid beating of his heart.

Bending down he looked inside. The tunnel was blocked by filth, stones, and refuse brought by the water. But nothing moved or made any sound. He smacked his lips. There was no response.

Leaping up again he checked the road: the pyre was no more than a couple of kilometers away, and he could not be certain the hunters would not follow him.

Kneeling down he stuck his head into the tunnel and thought he saw a movement. He reached in, and, as if he had been breaking a membrane, was struck full in the face by the smell of death. Suddenly what he was doing seemed just as incomprehensible to him as when, years before, after one of his books had just reached the bookstores, he had been unable to explain to himself how he had spent three years of his life writing a complicated poem in a difficult and antique verse form, which many of his readers, and most of his critics, had already dismissed as an affected minor work.

He lay face down on the ground in order to stretch out an arm, but also because his twisted position was making his head spin. His hand touched something soft and cold. Pulling it toward him, he saw it was a dead puppy covered with ants. He threw it behind him near to the body of its mother, and when he heard the thud as it hit the ground he retched, as if his gesture had validated the existence of a hidden part of himself that had now emerged into the light with pangs like childbirth.

Reaching into the tunnel again, he felt something tepid and let it slide across the palm of his hand like a baker collecting a loaf from the far end of the oven.

He pulled the puppy out. It instinctively hid its muzzle between his fingers. It must have been the first time it had seen the light. It was wet with urine, and yellow liquid had dried around its half-closed eyes. Leonardo climbed out of the ditch and sat down in the shadow of the car. Grabbing his water bottle from the seat he took a long drink, poured some water into his hand and tried to wash his arms and neck; he then tried to get the puppy to drink from his hand, but the animal seemed stunned by sleep or hunger and did not react. Even when he cleaned the incrustation from its eyes, the dog continued to keep them closed. It was black and its ears were hanging sideways, giving it an air of resignation.

He put it down long enough to take off his shirt and stretch it over the seat. He settled the dog on top and was about to get into the car when he was stopped by a sudden pain in the pit of his stomach. With long strides, his naked thin torso marked by large moles, he ran toward the edge of the road and was only just able to drop his pants in time before a gush of diarrhea emptied him.

Gasping for breath and bent double, he got back to the car door and took a roll of toilet paper from the inside compartment. He wiped himself carefully, wetting the paper with a little water.

Sitting down in the driving seat, he took a casual shirt with horizontal brown stripes from his bag and began searching on the map for a road that would help him avoid the crossroads where the pyre would certainly still be burning. He found one that would not take him too far off course: it was a case of going back about ten kilometers and crossing the river. His wristwatch said a quarter past three. To the north, blue mountains closed the horizon. By eight it would be dark, but if he couldn’t get home by then at least he would be on a familiar stretch of road.

He drove slowly, taking great care at corners as if his new passenger must not be disturbed. The dog never moved, and every now and then Leonardo reached out a hand to check its little heart, which beat rapidly under his fingers. Toward five it urinated, and when the light started to fail, it began lolling its head and emitting little blind whimpers. Leonardo stopped the car and cleaned its eyes, which were encrusted again, then he held a piece of the cheese he had eaten for lunch to its mouth, but the dog seemed not to recognize it as edible and turned away in irritation.

Leonardo went off to urinate in the shelter of a clump of acacias then got back into the car, put on his jacket because the air was getting cool, and took the dog in his arms.

He looked down at the plain from the height of the first foothills. With the dying of day the sky had cleared and now the sun was sinking behind the mountains, the vault of heaven a deep unshaded cobalt.

It won’t eat and tomorrow it’ll be dead, Leonardo thought, holding the dog close.

Far off the lights of A. and one or two other villages were shining softly, with the lights of some factory prominent among them. For several months now the minor roads had no longer been lit, the soccer league championship had been suspended, and the television closed down after the evening news at ten, not starting again until the news at ten the following morning.

He smiled at the swarm of lights and the beauty of several fires burning on a hillside to the east. The dog’s breathing had relaxed and the heat of its body through his shirt was warming his chest; it had the smell of things that are new to the world and still have no name. Like the smell of a birthing room or a cellar where cheeses ripen. Or a paper mill. A smell of transition.

“I won’t give you a name,” he said, stroking the puppy’s head with his finger.

When he arrived in the square, the church clock was striking eight.

He opened the door of the hardware shop. Elio looked up from a newspaper he must have salvaged from some packaging. The last newspaper had reached the village four months before. Leonardo went to the counter and put down the two cans he had brought in. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief.

“Only one more in the car,” he said.

Elio neither nodded nor shook his head. He and Leonardo were distant cousins, but their friendship had nothing to do with blood or books or with other passions that can link men, like hunting, the mountains, and sport. It was seven years now since Leonardo had come back to the village but he was still a city man, while Elio belonged as much to the hills as any man could. He spoke the dialect, he knew what was going on, he had tried the women, and played in the Sunday soccer matches against other villages. In the days when there were still summer tourists, he had spent long periods sitting with the other local twenty-year-old boys on the low wall that bordered the square, studying the German and Dutch girls at a distance before taking them in the evening to the vineyards, to the river, and up into the highest hills from where he had convinced them they would be able to look at the sea. When he was called up for the National Guard, he had done the usual thing and given a big party, then he disappeared for three days without anyone knowing where he was. He had served two years at the frontier until, in the winter of ’25, he had been hit by the bullet that now saved him from being called up again. As soon as he was discharged he took over the hardware business from his father and married the woman who had been his fiancée since he was nineteen: a woman with strong thighs and few frills; a type more likely to bore him than break his heart.

“What shall I say about the missing oil?” Elio said.

Leonardo raised his shoulders.

“Tell them it was stolen from me. That’s what actually happened. Tomorrow I’ll bring the money for you to give back.”

Elio fixed him with his calm eyes. He was not yet forty, of a reflective temperament, and Leonardo’s only friend.

“What’s happening out there in the world?”

Leonardo put his handkerchief back into his pocket. The mud had dried on his trousers in a dragon-shaped pattern.

“Yesterday some soldiers stopped me before L.; they told me to go back the way I’d come and sleep in the car because the road was closed until the next day to let a convoy of armored vehicles through.”

“Were the soldiers from OSRAM or from the Guard?”

“OSRAM.”

“Then there was no convoy: they were just sweeping up. According to the television most of them have stopped coming, but a few groups have managed to get through.”

Leonardo looked around the shop. Most of the shelves were empty, and despite Elio’s efforts to make what little was left go a long way, one had an impression of well-concealed desolation. A passerby unaware of the situation would have imagined the shop had been hit by floods, or that the proprietor had liquidity problems and was on the verge of going out of business.

“I’ve checked the vineyard for you over the last few days,” said Elio. “If it doesn’t rain, you should be able to harvest the grapes in a couple of weeks.”

“Good.”

“How do you plan to do it?”

“How do I plan to do what?”

“Harvest the grapes.”

Leonardo brushed hair from his brow with a gesture he had used since childhood.

“Lupu and his people,” he said. “As usual.”

“You think they’ll come?”

“I’m sure they will.”

Elio shook one of the cans and watched its contents move around until they settled again, and then he looked out at the square, where two silhouettes were passing silently under the only functioning street lamp.

“Even if they do come you’ll be wrong to make them work.”

“What do you mean, ‘wrong’?” Leonardo said with a smile.

Elio lifted his handsome shoulders.

“It’s two years now since anyone has brought in outsiders for harvesting, and those who were linked in one way or another to local firms have not been reemployed.”

“Lupu and his family have permits, and they all came in before the borders were closed.”

“Permits or no permits, it may have been all right last time around, but this year there’s bound to be some problem.”

Leonardo propped his long, slender pianist’s hands on the counter. He had never played the piano, but several women had told him he had the right hands for it. Only one woman had ever said he had “a writer’s hands.” A girl he had met on the train to Nice. When they got out at the station they had shaken hands, and he never saw her again. But that had happened long before he had married Alessandra. After his marriage he had never allowed any woman to come close enough to him to comment on his hands. Apart from Clara, that is, and such a thing would certainly never have occurred to her.

Suddenly he felt very tired. There was a pain in his leg: sciatica.

“Let’s not discuss that now,” he said. “We’re tired. Just come and get the other can, because I want to show you something.”

They went out into the fresh night air. The village was sleeping peacefully; like a child with an ugly scar on one cheek, who has fallen asleep pressing the scarred side against the pillow. The window of the hardware store, bright with metal tools, was like a Nativity scene. Leonardo opened the door of the Polar and the internal light revealed the dog huddled on the seat. It was sleeping quietly, revived by the fresh air or the little water Leonardo had finally succeeded in getting it to lick from his cupped hand.

“Did you find it or was it given to you?” Elio asked.

“Found it.”

Elio, short-haired and with an aquiline nose, looked at the dog as one might look at a car damaged in an accident that will either need work to make it roadworthy or have to be scrapped. Leonardo said he had tried to get it to eat some cheese but without success.

“There are always Luca’s baby bottles,” Elio said. “But if Gabri finds out you’re using them for a dog…”

He considered the problem, drumming his fingers on the roof of the Polar. The sound rang out clearly all over the square and up the narrow streets leading to the upper part of the village, the castle and the stars shining above it.

“I’ll give you a rubber glove,” he said. “You can fill it with milk and make a hole with a needle at the end of one finger.”

“When they stole my she-goat and I had to feed her kids, it worked. It won’t cost you anything to try.”

“All right,” Leonardo said.

The dog was sleeping with its back turned away from them, showing the pink skin of its stomach. It had a few light-colored hairs, wet with urine, around the point of its penis. One of its eyes had begun weeping again.

“I’ve heard there are packs of dogs on the plain that attack people,” Elio said. “I hope he’s not from one of those.”

“We traveled together a good few hours and he hasn’t attacked me yet,” Leonardo said with a smile.

Elio shifted his weight to the other foot.

Leonardo’s home was a modest little farmhouse but on the better side of the hill and secluded. His father had died when he was six and his mother, to make ends meet, had sold the half facing the village to a surgeon from T.

During his years as a university student, when he came home to see his mother on weekends, Leonardo often traveled with the surgeon’s family, who liked to escape the city in search of a little tranquillity in the hills. The wife, many years younger than her husband, was an intelligent woman who wore high-necked sweaters over her enormous breasts. They had two sons: one was born prematurely and suffered from dyslexia, while the other was a brilliant chess player. When the surgeon was killed in a road accident, his wife no longer felt like making the journey to the house and telephoned Leonardo’s mother to tell her so. Both had wept at great length. Two weeks later the wife had sent a moving company to take away their furniture, and from then on that part of the house stayed empty and unsold.

Leonardo parked the car under the lime tree, hoisted his duffel onto his shoulder and carefully lifted the still-sleeping dog. On the veranda floor were two letters; no surprise and he did not bother to pick them up. The fridge was empty apart from a small amount of milk left in a glass bottle; he sniffed the milk, and finding it acceptable, poured it, before doing anything else, into the glove, pierced the point of the little finger with a needle, and put it to the puppy’s lips. But the animal ignored it.

Leonardo sat on the sofa for a while, one hand on the puppy’s hot body, wondering whether rescuing the dog had been wishful thinking. An irrational gesture that had put him at risk and in the end would benefit neither of them.

He undressed in the bathroom, put his clothes into the washing machine, and looked in the mirror. On his pale chest he had a deep red mark he must have acquired while crawling into the tunnel. He shuddered at the thought of what he had done and for a moment thought he could smell the nauseating stench of the dead puppy and its mother on himself.

Without waiting for the water to warm up, he got into the shower and roughly scrubbed his body and hair, reflecting, as he had not done for some time, that everything leads to ruin and that in his case this had happened to him in utter solitude. He felt extremely tired, but even more empty and discouraged.

When he was dry, he put on some periwinkle-blue underpants and went back to the sofa, where the dog was sleeping in the same position as he had been left. The kitchen was equipped in a functional manner. None of the furniture had belonged to his family: he had never cared for arte povera, and when he moved away he had sold everything to a junk dealer. He had then bought himself furniture in African teak, basic and without any fancy design. He had added plates, glasses, and other necessary kitchen equipment from the catalog of a department store and had everything delivered.

At the time he had attributed his choice to his haste to get organized and to the disorder of the time, but when he thought about it he soon convinced himself he would have done the same anyway. Throughout his life the objects he worked with, chose, and gathered around himself had always been a matter of indifference to him.

He found some crackers in the cupboard and sat down at the table to eat them by the light of the small neon tube above the cooker. The house he had been living in for the last seven years was one that, in the days when architectural magazines still existed, would have been worth photographing. He had had a large window put in facing the vineyard and the veranda where he could sit and enjoy the sunset behind the chain of mountains that closed the horizon like a zipper. On the western side of the house was a strip of meadow, and on the other side of the courtyard was an outhouse, its ground floor kept as a storage area and its upper floor reconditioned to accommodate a dozen people.

Leonardo finished the crackers and continued to gaze at the night through the great window.

Maybe better warm, he thought.

He heated the milk for a few seconds in a small pan, then poured it into the glove again. When he approached the dog with it, he moved his eyes behind closed lids, nothing more. When Leonardo squirted a little milk on his muzzle the puppy instinctively licked himself. Leonardo repeated the action until the dog realized where the milk was coming from and timidly began to suck the rubber finger. In the end they both stretched out exhausted, side by side on the sofa. The clock showed eleven-twenty.

“Bauschan,” Leonardo said.

Bauschan was the dog protagonist of a story by Thomas Mann, a story Leonardo could only vaguely remember but which had taught him that familiarity can develop between a man and his dog; something he had never experienced himself, having never had an animal of his own.

“Beddy-byes now,” Leonardo said, placing the dog on the carpet to prevent him from falling in the night.

The air on the veranda was chilly. Leonardo picked the two letters up from the floor and glanced at them long enough to recognize the “return to sender” stamp before going back into the house to his bedroom, where he opened the wardrobe and took a box with colored stripes from under his jackets. Lifting the lid, he slid the two letters in on top of the others, which were now almost filling the box to the top. Taking off his bathrobe, he pulled on a pair of white linen trousers and matching shirt then went back into the bathroom to comb his hair in front of the mirror. He cleaned and filed his nails, took the book he had started reading that morning from his bag, and went out.

He walked around the house to the west side, which had two small windows on the second floor and an arched door. He opened the door with a key he had taken from a nail before leaving the house and went in.

When he was a child this room had been home to a dozen casks: his father and his grandfather had known every virtue and defect of each cask at least as well as they knew the individual combination of courage, patience, and malice in each of their children.

His family had been wine producers for many generations, but in his last years his father had given up the work, selling the grapes to some local wine grower. Nevertheless the casks had remained in place until, seven years before, Leonardo had sold them together with the rest of the furnishings of the house. Then he had filled the space, about ten meters by four, with bookshelves he had had custom-made and fixed to the walls by a carpenter. Apart from thousands of books there was nothing but an armchair and a standard lamp on a carpet in the middle of the room. The floor was exactly as Leonardo had found it: earth trodden down so hard that you could not even scratch it with a pointed object.

Leonardo contemplated his books, which he had missed constantly, almost physically, during the four days he had been away, and then he lit the little standard lamp and sat down in the armchair. Twenty minutes later he had finished the story of Felicité for the umpteenth time and carefully replaced the book on the shelf reserved for the French nineteenth century.

He woke about ten, and realizing the time, he ran into the kitchen where he found Bauschan collapsed on the carpet. He’s dead, he told himself, but when he touched the puppy and called him by name, he raised his muzzle toward the warm breath of Leonardo’s mouth. Then Leonardo noticed traces of feces in the room and realized that the dog had been exploring during the night. So, after washing the animal’s pus-encrusted eyes and giving him a little more milk from the glove, he took him around the house.

As he did so he became convinced the best place for the dog at night would be the studio. This square, empty room had nothing in it that could be destroyed. It contained only an office chair and a coarse wooden table under its big window.

It had been an attempt to reproduce the conditions in which he used to write in his studio in T., a pied-à-terre off an internal yard in one of the city’s main squares, where he had never wanted a telephone or doorbell or even his name on the door. But this project had been shipwrecked and the romance interrupted by the tumultuous events that had overturned his existence, and he had never gotten beyond the line he was writing when the telephone rang and the massacre started.

He looked at the little white portable typewriter abandoned in the dust on the table. It had been a present from Alessandra so he could write on trains and in hotels. He had punched out two novels on those keys, expending many hours of his life on them at a time when writing was indispensable to him for defining himself to himself and to others. Then suddenly his writing had vanished, just as stadiums and competitions and training and sponsors can vanish from the life of an athlete when he inadvertently severs his Achilles tendon by stepping on a piece of glass while playing on the beach with his six-year-old son. This was exactly how writing had disappeared from his life, and it had become a different life; and all this only a few years before his publisher went bankrupt and the newspapers and magazines he used to write for closed down and reading became something comparable to the final extravagant request of a condemned man.

“The room’s very well lit,” he told the puppy. “When you open your eyes you’ll see for yourself.”

Leonardo washed his ears carefully in the shower and examined and disinfected the wound on his chest. Its lively pink color reassured him and, since the pain of his sciatica had subsided, he decided to ride his bike into the village. He searched for a shirt with a large pocket and a lightweight scarf to go around his neck, and then he put on the linen trousers he had folded on the chair and went out.

The distance from house to village could easily be covered even by a cyclist as unfit as he was. The dog, his head sticking out of the pocket, enjoyed the fresh breeze downhill and hung his head on the uphill parts as if helping to pedal. When he reached the first houses, Leonardo left the asphalted road for an unpaved track that cut through a luxuriant hazel grove, ending in the yard of a large, neglected but busy farm.

“Ottavio!” he called.

Two very dirty and mischievous-looking sheepdogs emerged barking from the back of the farmhouse. Leonardo offered them a friendly hand, but they kept their distance and continued to bark.

“Who’s there?” someone shouted from the cowshed.

“Leonardo.”

The dogs for some reason went quiet and moved off, going to lie down in the shadow of a tractor. The yard was a mess, with sacks of animal feed, buckets, and agricultural implements all over the place. Under cover in one corner was what might have been an ancient station wagon or hearse. Leonardo was studying it when Ottavio emerged from the cowshed.

“What’s this?” he asked.

Ottavio wiped his hands on his trousers.

“A hearse.”

“Yours?”

“Of course, do you think I clutter up my yard with other people’s stuff?”

It was covered by two old sheets sewn together. On its small roof was the pointed shape of a cross.

“What are you going to do with it?”

“Not much you can do with things of that kind.”

“Then why did you buy it?”

“The funeral director at D. has moved to France. He’d been in debt to my mother for as long as I can remember so he paid up with what he had. He was an honest man; he could have left without a word. What’s that in your pocket?”

Leonardo looked down; the dog had turned around and all that could be seen was the end of his tail sticking out of the pocket. Leonardo extracted him carefully and showed him to Ottavio.

“How old would you say he is?”

“Ten days,” Ottavio said, after a cursory examination. “Maybe crossed with something useful for herding cows. Do you want to keep him?”

Leonardo looked at the dog, who seemed to be struggling to open his eyes.

“I think I do. Can you sell me any milk?”

Ottavio stared, his face red and sweat in the hair around his ears.

“Have you come here on purpose to annoy me?”

“How do you mean?”

They went into the cowshed past the immobile haunches of some twenty cows, about ten animals on each side, then passing through a metal door found themselves in a room tiled to the ceiling, in which a fan was stirring air charged with disinfectant. Ottavio took off his outdoor shoes and Leonardo did the same, placing his sandals in a small wardrobe. Both put on colored clog-like rubber shoes. There were two large zinc vats in the room, and shelves with cheeses of various sizes. Ottavio uncovered one of the vats. It was full of a yellowish liquid with what looked like thin metallic plates floating on the surface, and it smelled like shoemaker’s glue.

“What’s this?” Leonardo said.

“This morning’s milk.”

Leonardo stepped back from the overpowering smell. Ottavio closed the vat and went to a window facing the back of the farm, which Leonardo knew to be where he kept his heifers and orchard. Ottavio parked his elbows on the windowsill and contemplated his property.

“Do you hear the planes going over at night?”

“Sometimes,” Leonardo said. In fact, being a heavy sleeper, he had heard nothing at all. It had always been like that. Once he slept for five hours in an armchair at the Lisbon airport, missing all the flights that could have taken him home. Returning to his hotel he had gotten in touch with Alessandra, who had no difficulty in believing him, and then he went to bed to watch a bit of television but without being able to keep his eyes open to the end of the film.

“When the planes go over, the cows play this trick on me. A few months ago it was only now and then, but now for a whole week I’ve had to throw away all the milk. The big producers add powdered milk, but I don’t want that on my conscience. I don’t even give this stuff to the pigs.”

Seen from behind, Ottavio was a short, stocky figure with no sharp edges; veins bulging on his arms even when he was not lifting anything heavy. He was five years older than Leonardo but looked five years younger.

“Can you trust a married man?” Ottavio said.

Leonardo said yes and thought of Elio. Ottavio nodded.

“Then just ask him about women’s periods. My daughter hasn’t had one for two months but can’t be pregnant. And my wife, who hadn’t had a period for years, has started getting them again.”

Leonardo looked at the ascetic white of the tiles. Someone was singing a song somewhere accompanied by the regular beat of something like an old pedal sewing machine.

“I think,” Ottavio said, pausing to add emphasis to what he was about to say, “that those planes are dropping something; something to calm us all down, because if not we’re all going to go mad.”

They went out into the yard where a light wind from the mountains stirred scraps of straw and blew hair about. The two dogs watched them closely from under a bench by the wall. As he mounted his bicycle, Leonardo could feel the puppy’s hot urine running down his chest to his trouser belt. He pretended it was nothing.

“They’ve seen those two in the woods again,” Ottavio said, “and they’ve also found a fire and the bones of a goat.”

Leonardo swept his hair back from his brow.

“Must be campers,” he smiled.

But Ottavio fixed Leonardo’s pale greenish eyes.

“It’s not the time for that kind of crap, Leonardo, can’t you see how the wind’s blowing?”

Leonardo looked down at his foot on the pedal. A nail had gone black where the old woman, sitting down at his table in the hotel, had accidentally placed the leg of her chair on it.

“Have you done anything for the dog’s eyes?” Ottavio said.

Leonardo looked straight at him.

“What can be done?”

Ottavio shrugged.

“If you want my opinion, wash them with his own pee; he won’t like it, but if you don’t he’ll never open them again, because they’re full of parasites.”

At Norina’s grocery shop he bought some canned tuna, a couple of dairy products, some sardines, two packets of rusks, jam, and a box of pasta, then he got the baker to give him a French loaf and some baci di dama biscuits. There were no customers in either shop and the proprietors simply served him, took his money, and called him professor when they said good-bye.

On the other hand the woman at the pharmacy, one of those waiting for oil, asked him how his journey had been as soon as she saw him come in. Leonardo said it had been fine and asked if he could have some cotton balls and sterile gauze. Before he left the woman complimented him on the dog and remarked that they would meet again in the evening when the oil was distributed. Leonardo said Elio would see to everything.

As he made his way to the bar pushing his bicycle, he remembered a painting by Balthus of a young girl who could have been the pharmacist when she was young and the way she had not yet lost her adolescent confidence in the sensual gesture of raising her arms and doing her hair. It was said that nearly all women born with that quality lost it when they grew up, while those who had it later in life had nearly always picked it up along the way, not having originally possessed it. This to him seemed to reward hard work rather than talent, something that hardly ever happened in nature, and the thought generated a surge of good humor in him.

Pulling his shirt out of his trousers and checking that the smell of the dog’s urine was not too powerful, he went into the bar.

“Our professor!”

The postman was leaning against the ice cream freezer with another man who did not live in the village but was there to see his ailing mother. They were in the corner of the shop where it had once been possible to leaf through a national daily or local weekly and sports magazines. Now the fridge was silent and back issues of a hunting magazine were stacked on it. Danilo, the proprietor, and three other men were sitting around a table playing cards.

“Good morning,” Leonardo said.

None of the four looked up from the cards to answer his greeting.

Leonardo went to the bar and stood at an angle to it, so as to be able to keep an eye on the bicycle, which he had left outside with his shopping bags slung from its handlebars. The postman whispered something to the man beside him who smiled, revealing very irregular teeth: he was dressed for fishing and a thick white beard under his chin linked his ears by the longest possible route. The postman, in contrast, had a freshly shaven face; he was separated from his wife, and it was several months now since he had given up explaining to people why letters were not reaching them or were arriving weeks late. In any case, the explanations he offered came from a ministerial circular, which, as everyone knew, meant that they had only a limited connection with truth.

Danilo slammed down his last card, then got up and went behind the bar, and without Leonardo saying anything made him a cappuccino without froth. When it was ready he put it down on the bar and, giving an expressionless glance at the dog’s snout sticking out of Leonardo’s pocket, went back to his cards. His companions had totaled the score and dealt the cards for the next hand. All four looked contrite, as if only playing to punish themselves.

“But I think,” the man with the postman said, “they must be found. We have to know what they look like and find out what they plan to do.”

Leonardo looked down at Bauschan’s smooth head. A fly had settled on one of the dog’s ears; he smiled and blew it away.

“I’d like to know what the professor thinks,” the postman said.

Leonardo looked at him. In the first months after his return, the postman had come every morning to deliver letters from the lawyer, the court, the publisher, and readers offering either support or expressing disappointment at what had happened, but with the passing of time the only letters that kept arriving were written in his own hand and returned by the woman to whom he had sent them. A correspondence that made sure Leonardo and the postman still met roughly once a week.

“About what?” Leonardo said.

“We know you’re just back from a trip. You must have some idea about what’s going on.”

“The professor has other things to think about,” said one of those at the table. “Unlike the rest of us.”

No one laughed, but the men near the fridge exchanged glances with the card players. Leonardo took a sip of coffee and wiped his lips with a napkin from the dispenser.

“I saw nothing unusual,” he said.

The postman drank from the glass of white wine he had on the freezer.

“You must have been lucky,” he said smiling. “To listen to this group it seems they’re everywhere.”

An alarm went off. Danilo pressed a button on his big wristwatch and the alarm stopped, then he went to the counter and used a remote control to switch on the television in the corner of the room. The other players had already put down their cards and turned their chairs to face the screen. After the music introducing the broadcast, a woman newsreader with an expensive hairdo commented on images of an encampment in the middle of a forest with shacks of cardboard and sheet metal hidden in luxuriant vegetation. The camera showed men in uniform circulating among these rudimentary shelters with their camp beds and improvised pallets, blankets, gas cookers, and other objects.

Finishing his cappuccino, Leonardo walked toward a wall with two doors, one leading to the toilet and the other marked PRIVATE. A man with a shaved head was sitting on the floor in the space between two video poker machines. His sharp, serious face was like a tool used for prying open doors. His eyes were black but not at all malicious.

“Will you come to supper with me, Sebastiano?” Leonardo asked.

The man looked up but did not move. His legs were drawn up to his chest, hiding his mouth.

“Please come, we’ll make some pasta,” Leonardo said.

It seemed to take Sebastiano a long time to get to his feet, and he made Leonardo, himself more than one meter eighty tall, look tiny. Sebastiano was as thin as a rake. He had large bones and hairy legs sticking out from a pair of Bermuda shorts stained with fruit. He looked like nothing so much as an enormous prehistoric bird.

“Can I pay?” Leonardo asked, turning to the bar.

Without taking his eyes off the television screen, Danilo placed the palm of his hand on a black book beside the till to indicate that he had marked it down. Now the newsreader with the expensive hairdo was giving the latest news about the eastern front, while a small panel was showing images of a roadblock where three National Guards armed with machine guns were forcing several unkempt and very dirty people to get out of a car.

Before he left the village, Leonardo gave Elio the money he should have repaid him the evening before, then he and Sebastiano set off for home, pushing the bicycle. It was mid-September, but the one o’clock sun was hot on the asphalt, making it shimmer in the distance. Leonardo asked Sebastiano to walk on his left, in order to give shade to the sleeping dog in his pocket.

Lupu and his family arrived early in the morning.

Leonardo, woken by the sound of cars, came out onto the veranda in pajamas and raised an arm in the gray light of early morning to greet them. They did not have the van of previous years but two cheap secondhand cars, and they were not wearing their usual dinner jackets over white tank tops, but T-shirts with slogans in English and well-worn sneakers.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Leonardo said.

Lupu stood beside his car staring at Leonardo, as if trying to make out something he should have been able to see even at that distance. Despite his tanned skin and powerful arms, there was an unfamiliar fragility about him. His cousin, who had gotten out of the second car, was looking at the vines sloping down beyond the low fence of the yard. All the others had stayed inside the cars.

“Come in,” Leonardo said, “I’ll make you some coffee.”

At a nod from Lupu, his wife got out of the red car with their small son and older daughter and Lupu’s two brothers, both similar to him, even if different in build. The daughter was seventeen now and already a woman who had learned to show herself off to her best advantage, while her mother had grown thinner in the face and broader in the hips. In the second car were Lupu’s cousin’s wife and a teenage boy Leonardo had not seen before. This boy had different eyes from all the others; uncertainty seemed to have produced something sharp and fearless in him. None of them were wearing gold on their necks, fingers, or wrists.

They sat on the veranda and accepted the coffee Leonardo had mixed from real and ersatz coffee, and then they put their cups on the floor and watched the rising sun dispel the gray from the vineyard and the forest beyond the river.

Bauschan was gnawing at one of Lupu’s wife’s sandals. Leonardo called him and the dog sprang over to him. His eyes had been open now for a couple of weeks, turning out to be a silvery light blue. Ottavio had established that he was a cross between husky and some sort of hound with his pendulous ears, plus a touch of setter in his back and gait. There were broad black patches on his ash-gray coat.

“That’s a dog who will follow you even if you throw yourself in the river with a stone around your neck,” Ottavio had declared before launching into a long speech from which Leonardo understood that the dog would grow to medium size and would be incapable of excelling in any of the special qualities of his ancestors but would preserve a decent dose of each.

“Now go and have a rest,” Leonardo said. “You can settle in over the store like in previous years.”

He took the cups to the sink and washed them, and then he looked out of the studio window. Lupu and the others were standing in the middle of the yard holding plastic bags and old triacetate sports bags with the logos of firms, banks, and sponsors that no longer existed.

The teenager was the only one not carrying anything; he was talking to the others in an excited voice. He could have been sixteen but was probably one of those boys who long retain the traits of adolescence only to lose them from one day to the next. When the adolescent had finished speaking, Lupu said a few words. The boy lowered his eyes as if they had suddenly grown heavy, and they all moved toward the storehouse.

During the morning Leonardo reread The Death of Ivan Ilyich. By eleven o’clock he had come to some conclusions he thought he could develop, but by eleven thirty they already seemed odd to him. The sun beat down relentlessly; none of the few distant wisps in the sky could really have been called a cloud. Since they had retired, Lupu and his family had made no sound; the guest rooms, that was the name Leonardo used these days for the rooms above the store, seemed as empty as ever, apart from an orange towel spread over a windowsill.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Leonardo said to the dog.

He and Bauschan crossed the yard, but when they reached the vineyard the dog stopped. Turning to follow his gaze, Leonardo saw Lupu at the door of the store in shorts and work shoes.

They descended the headland together and halfway down entered one of the rows of vines, following it until the vineyard ended in a field of parched grass. The vines were heavy with grapes, the bunches a powerful violet under a thick coating of dust. Lupu let a bunch slip into his hand as one might lift the breast of a woman who was no longer young, but to whom one feels an enormous debt of gratitude.

“This winter at the workshop I worked nights so no one would know they’d taken me back. I’d go in through the back after dark and find a note telling me what needed to be done. For a while Tashmica was able to do a few hours cleaning there too, but then they did not ask for her again.”

Lupu delicately picked a grape, dusted it on the sleeve of his shirt, and put it into his mouth.

“No one even trusts official papers. The man who took us on for the peaches had problems and had to ask us to go. We’ve spent the last month near the mountains with a relative.”

Bauschan was tormenting a large lizard. The reptile seemed stupefied by the sun and made no attempt to get away. Leonardo watched its tail, detached from its body, writhing on the ground.

“What will you do after the grape harvest?”

Lupu thrust his hands into his pockets and looked over to where the haze was growing denser and the sky was turning opaque with heat. He seemed to be listening for a far-off noise.

“I don’t know whether to go back to the town. Mira’s afraid of going back to school. Before we left we took everything to my sister’s; it’s not safe to leave stuff in an empty home, those people come in and steal and smash everything.”

“Who comes in?”

Lupu shrugged.

“Gangs. People say they’re searching for outsiders, that they’re everywhere and that it’s not true the army has dealt with them. I haven’t seen them. I did see two bodies on the pavement, but they weren’t outsiders.”

Leonardo picked a ladybug from a leaf and watched it walk on his finger. It was a pale orange and extremely elegant. In the heavy midday silence he imagined the sound of its footsteps.

“When you’ve finished, you can all stay on here,” he said.

Lupu nodded without conviction. Bauschan, sitting in the shade, was watching the final twitches of the lizard’s tail. The main body of the reptile, a few centimeters away, was interested only in soaking up the heat it needed to keep its tiny heart beating.

“How long do you think the harvesting will take?”

Lupu looked at where the vineyard ended and the hillside began. A ditch had been dug and the strip of meadow beyond the ditch turned to forest farther up.

“Four days. There’s two less of us than last year.”

Leonardo removed a fragment of earth from one of his sandals.

“Starting tomorrow?”

“As soon as possible.” Lupu gave a half smile.

“That can’t be too soon,” Leonardo said with the other half of the smile.

At the end of the first day of the harvest they ate in the courtyard on a board propped on two trestles, after which the women carried the plates to the wash house behind the store while the men sat watching the smoke rise from their cigarettes and disperse before it could reach the starry sky.

For a while Leonardo studied their gas-lit faces, unable to read either doubt or exhaustion on them, and then he wished them goodnight and went indoors to undress, brush his teeth, rub cream into his sunburned arms and neck, and get into bed.

He would have liked to fall asleep instantly to wake again free of the constant pain in his arms, legs, back, ankles, and hands, as well as in the stomach muscles he had forgotten he had since the year before. That had been the last time he had found himself thinking the same thoughts in the same bed.

Until he was twenty-five he had been a good long-distance runner and every evening, summer and winter, had covered a fifteen-kilometer course along the river and out of the city before returning to the old center. But after taking his doctorate he sacrificed sport to his university duties and work on his first novel. In a few years his longer muscles grew slack and the occasional outings he attempted in shorts after that led to cramps and a massively discouraging exhaustion.

During the last thirty years his shoulders had curved and narrowed while his legs grew thin and his stomach got bigger even though he had always been a moderate eater and never drank alcohol. He now had the body of a man of fifty-two dedicated to books, intellectual speculation, and conversation. Not much use in the world now unfolding before his eyes.

With these gloomy thoughts, Leonardo got out of bed and went into the kitchen in the dark. He poured a glass of water and went to the large window: there were no lights on in the guest rooms and the building was silent. Moonlight seemed to have covered the courtyard gravel with a thin layer of water.

Seven years since I last made love, he thought.

Bauschan had dirtied the parquet in two places and was now asleep on the carpet with his head between his paws, probably drunk. He had spent all day eating windfall grapes fermenting in the sun; seeing him stagger about, Leonardo had thought it best to put him indoors.

He crouched down and stroked Bauschan’s neck. The dog seemed to smile in his sleep.

Taking pen and paper from the drawer, he sat down at the table. When he had finished writing, he put the paper into a buff envelope, addressed it, and put it on the dresser, planning to mail it the next day when he went to get the money to pay Lupu. Going back to bed, he fell asleep immediately and dreamed about a hotel room he had known many years before.

“You really want the money now?” the cashier asked, looking over her spectacles at him.

“Yes,” Leonardo smiled. “Please.”

The woman touched her breast. Clearly her mind was somewhere else.

“I realize it’s not very professional of me to mention it, but you took out a considerable sum only last week. I have to say this because this new withdrawal could cause a problem of liquidity.”

Leonardo understood from the woman’s expression that a tediously practical complication was about to come into his life.

He had known for some time that most people had emptied their accounts down to the last cent, hiding the money in their homes or goodness knows where, so as not to have to worry that they might one day be told at the bank that their money was no longer there. He had also known that it had been devalued or burned, or simply that money transfers no longer existed so that it could not be moved from one place to another, but Leonardo had never been sufficiently interested to get the idea into his head that one day his money might simply disappear. His only shrewd move had been to choose that particular bank because it had its central office in A. and no apparent ties with the major banks that had in the past closed down because of scandals, the mortgage crisis, or the fall in exports. He had deliberately chosen this particular bank because it raised money locally, kept it in the form of cash in a safe, and redistributed it in the same area.

“When will it be possible for me to withdraw my money without causing problems?”

The woman pursed her lips to indicate that she could not answer that offhand. The two of them were alone. The bank’s gray marble walls dated from the Fascist era, erected like the rest of the building in the middle of the village a century earlier. Only one of the building’s three doors was open; the others had been masked with opaque paper to prevent anyone seeing through to the other end of the hall. This despite the bank’s proclaimed motto: “Territory and Transparency.”

“I’ll be frank with you, professor,” the woman confessed in a low voice. “We’ve had no contact with head office for a week and no couriers have come.”

“Are you trying to tell me you don’t think any more money will get here?”

The woman moved her mouth without speaking; her eyes shone as she shook her head.

“I know it’s not your problem, but I haven’t been paid myself for three months.”

Under the vertical light waiting for him outside the building, Leonardo was seized by consternation. What should he do? That morning he had woken refreshed and unexpectedly vigorous and, before going down into the village, had worked for a couple of hours, ignoring the sharp twinges of pain running through his arms and legs. Now that energy was a distant memory: he felt exhausted and soaked with sweat.

At the post office he handed in his letter, slipping it under the glass window as lazily as the assistant took it and put it in the receptacle for outward post, then he returned to the square. The sky was a cloudless white; the sun covered the village without producing any shadows. The buildings, the two trees in the square, and the metal octagon of the old newsstand seemed insubstantial objects with no density. Everything seemed about to evaporate.

It was then that he saw the teenage boy materialize from a side street. With his short black hair and pointed chin he was heading for the bar with studied indifference, wearing the same clothes as in the vineyard, though he had rolled up his shirtsleeves to reveal a tattoo on his right shoulder.

Leonardo told himself that Lupu would never have dreamed of sending him to the village and decided his presence there was not a good sign. He raised an arm to attract his attention, but at that moment the boy turned his head to take a quick look at his reflection in the windows of the bar, and a second later he was inside.

When Leonardo followed, he found the boy standing in the middle of the main room watching the four men playing cards at the only table. Making up the game that morning with Danilo, the postman, and the man with the beard was an insurance agent who had once been the local pallapugno champion and the owner of a tobacconist’s shop.

“Got any cigarettes?” the boy asked.

None of the players lifted their eyes from their cards. The boy took a couple of paces toward them and stopped a meter or so away.

“I’d like some cigarettes,” he repeated in a calm, firm voice.

Danilo looked up.

“We don’t sell cigarettes,” he said.

“So what’s them over there then?” the boy asked, indicating a dozen packs on the shelf behind the counter.

Once in a London theater Leonardo had seen a show with a young actor who was famous on television. Every evening he attracted an audience of adoring girls who would have liked him as their boyfriend, as well as ladies of a certain age who would have liked him as their son or lover. In order to prove he was not just a petty small-screen celebrity, the actor had chosen an extremely complicated script and was applying himself to his performance in a spirit of frank self-denial. So much so that when in the third act his jacket was supposed to have vanished from its clothes hanger, but unfortunately was in fact still there for the whole audience to see, he had turned to the clothes hanger and the supposedly blind and pregnant actress who was playing the part of his woman, and asked her, as if the words were part of the script: “Where’s my jacket? Who’s taken my jacket?”

Since the blind woman was not supposed to be able to see the jacket, the actress had swallowed her cue, hoping for assistance from the actor who, far from helping her, had headed with great strides for the clothes hanger and, running his hands around the jacket without 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 his bathroom.

Even so he asked, “Which book?”

“The one about the dog.”

Around the corner they could see the gate. And among the rows of vines the straw hats of the grape pickers.

He wondered if he should tell Lupu what had happened. And whether he would do this for the good of the boy or only in the secret hope of having him punished.

Adrian kicked a stone into the dead grass at the edge of the asphalt.

“What’s the use of a book like that these days?” he said.

“Books are always useless,” Leonardo said to close the subject, “even when what’s happening now isn’t happening.”

The boy sighed and Leonardo believed he had given him something to think about but soon noticed they were no longer together and turned. Adrian had stopped and blood was pouring from his nose down his chin and soaking his shirt.

“Lift your right arm,” Leonardo said, searching in his pocket for a handkerchief.

The boy gave a broad smile, his perfect teeth stained with blood.

“I really believe you won’t survive,” Adrian said, and leaped away into the hazel grove at the side of the road.

The store caught fire that night and burned completely in less than an hour, giving off huge spirals of gray smoke.

Leonardo had stayed up late in the book room and once in bed had not been able to get to sleep. At two o’clock he became aware of variations in the light between the shutters on his window. At first he thought it was the moon, but when the glare began dancing and turned a magnificent shade of ocher, he ran from his room, his throat tight with bitter foreboding.

On the veranda, he was assailed by cold smoky air; the flames lighting up the yard like daytime had already eaten the left side of the building. Lupu and the others, lined up at the edge of the vineyard, were watching the blaze without moving. He counted them; all were there. Their faces were entirely calm, as if what was burning was not the beds where they would have woken the next morning if the fire had not consumed them.

“Anyone hurt?” he asked, walking toward them.

Lupu shook his head. The little child was sleeping on his mother’s shoulder. On the ground were the few bags they had managed to bring out.

“We realized in time,” he said, still staring at the building.

Like the other men he had nothing on but his underpants. The women, on the other hand, were fully dressed. Only the daughter was weeping, tears pouring down her sunburned cheeks like drops of brass.

Leonardo had never been so close to a fire before. Contrasting with the moving light, smoke and heat was an extraordinary silence. The fierce flames were stretching toward the rafters of the roof like the fingers of a rock climber reaching for a higher hold. The almost imperceptible sound of the flames was reminiscent of teeth being ground in moments of extreme effort. He wondered if the flames might attack the house, but seeing how calm the others were and judging that they must know the ways of fire better than he did, he stopped worrying about it.

When the glass in the windows shattered, everyone took a step back and the little child raised his head: he glanced at the vineyard where the light was projecting the long shadows of his family, then buried his face in his mother’s shoulder again and closed his eyes. Columns of black smoke were issuing from the windows of the store: the plastic baskets used for the harvest were burning.

“Tonight you’ll sleep in the house,” Leonardo said. “Tomorrow we’ll sort things out.”

Lupu looked at him without expression.

“We’re leaving,” he said.

Then Leonardo read in his eyes something that must have been clear to everyone from the start and had nothing to do with the question he did not ask himself.

“They poured gasoline under the door,” Lupu said. “Luckily my brother was on guard, or we’d all be dead.”

In that moment Leonardo understood the edgy expression in their eyes the day they came into his courtyard. 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 canceled because of sickness, the rector had suggested. Leonardo spent the morning in the studio with his computer turned off, listening to Alessandra on the telephone in the next room discussing her monthly schedule of exhibition reviews with the arts magazines she worked for, until finally at lunch, over a salad of shrimp and avocado, he had decided to face up to what had happened.

At first Alessandra had shown no reaction, suspecting it was some kind of game, but, becoming aware of Leonardo’s pallor and trembling lips, had asked her husband to tell her frankly whether he had really had sex with that piece of trash and to tell her what the video and photographic material actually showed.

Leonardo had very calmly told her the whole story, and Alessandra, equally calmly, had shut herself in her study for a couple of hours to reflect. Then a storm of insults and the hurling of objects had been unleashed, accompanied in the evening by the defacement of all his books in the lower part of the bookshelves.

Humiliated and impotent, Leonardo had witnessed this crescendo of violence against his books, condemned as “false intellectual shit,” then had retired to sleep in his daughter’s little bed while she, in view of the situation, had spent the night at her grandparents’ home.

The next day, from nine in the morning, when the video and photographs had been accessible on the Internet to anyone capable of keying in the three code words, his home telephone had never stopped ringing, and the shouting of Alessandra, Alessandra’s mother, and Alessandra’s father had alternated and been superimposed on one another until Leonardo decided to go away for a few days while the storm blew over, to an anonymous hotel outside the city where in fact he remained for the next seven months.

The first person he heard from, once the story had appeared in the press, was not one of the two or three friends he imagined he had among his fellow writers, but a university colleague of about fifty, a stalwart figure of mediocre ability, with whom he had never had any contact apart from exchanging the odd word at meetings.

For this reason he had been suspicious of the man’s suggestion that they meet for coffee; he had been put on his guard by his publisher and by many requests from both quality and other newspapers for a well-paid interview, in which he would have been able to put his own version of the facts. Yet the oppressive sense of loneliness he felt during those days had overcome every fear, persuading him to accept this meeting, which had been organized in a bar next to one of the city’s minor railway stations, opposite an open space that the Council had tried to improve by building an enormous fountain that terrified children and depressed the old by reminding them of the war.

Renato, a sociology lecturer, was waiting at a little corner table well away from the window. With his short hair, broad swimmer’s shoulders, and his tanned face despite it being autumn, the man was the very image of health and hunger for life. He looked like one of those winged lions on the end of banisters in apartment buildings where no expense has been spared on the marble. They shook hands, sat down, and ordered freshly squeezed orange juice and barley coffee.

“You and I are both people of superior intelligence,” Renato had started, “So I’m sure you won’t mind if I skip the ‘I’m so sorry’ and ‘I can imagine how you must be feeling.’”

Leonardo nodded in the most macho way his lanky figure allowed him.

“I’m not here only for myself,” Renato went on, “but on behalf of many of your colleagues, most of whom, I must say at once, will not have the courage to support you in public, but share my esteem for you and believe that what has happened cannot be other than the logical consequence of things.”

Leonardo waited, but the man seemed to have nothing more to add.

“What things?” he felt forced to ask.

The man smiled, like an experienced skipper warned by a radio station of bad weather at sea.

“Most of the girl students,” he said, “are sluts and use their bodies to try to get what they want, and then they yell rape if for some reason they can’t have it. As though any man who cares for culture must be a eunuch! A castrated man stuck behind the lecturer’s desk to entertain a gaggle of female idiots showing themselves off for their own amusement, in the certain knowledge that the teacher wouldn’t know what to do with them if he had them.”

Leonardo studied his coffee: it had delicate verdigris reflections, striking if entirely inappropriate, and tasted like boiled cabbage. He had never drunk barley coffee before, but then he had never spent three nights in a row without sleeping either.

“I’m grateful for your moral support,” he started, “but—”

“Our support is unconditional,” Renato interrupted, a fragment of orange hanging from his lip making him look even more deeply committed. “And we’ll bring pressure within the university to have this business set aside. The fact that you are also a writer doesn’t make things any easier, but many of us have passed the same way and could tell you that what in the morning may seem to have been a storm almost always turns out by evening to have been nothing more than a gentle breeze. But I would advise you not to try to extricate yourself just by fencing with a mere foil. You must reply with the same weapons used to attack you. You don’t know it yet, but you have much more to lose than to gain. The sooner you make that clear, the sooner you will be able to take a milder view of things.”

Leonardo realized the pointlessness of any attempt at explanation. Taking his silence for tacit agreement, the man placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Here’s my cell phone number,” he had said, “give me a call.”

Leonardo took the card he offered. The man got up.

“I won’t hide it from you, but I always thought you were probably a bit of a wimp. A man with lots of brain, but not much in the balls department. I have to admit I was wrong. You even deceived me.” Then he squeezed Leonardo’s hand, paid the bill, and left, offering Leonardo a final smile from the other side of the window.

Leonardo had never seen or heard of him again, but a year later, by which time he had already lost his job at the university and any chance of seeing his daughter again, he had noticed his name in the pages of a daily paper to which Renato had begun contributing a column, commenting and explaining the ins and outs of current affairs.

Six months later the daily closed down. By that time Leonardo had moved to M. and heard nothing more, good or bad, about Renato or any other of his former university colleagues.

He spent the afternoon sitting on the veranda staring at the rows of vines on which the grapes had started to wither, the air full of the constant buzzing of bees attracted to the ruins of the store by the smell of cooked grapes.

The hot weather continued and the vegetation on the far side of the river took on a ferocious yellow hue. Clouds above the mountains hinted at autumn, but for the time being the wind confined them to France.

It was already evening when Elio came into the yard on his bicycle and stopped short of the steps. He was wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and blue striped trousers. His folded jacket was clipped to the pannier rack. Drumming his fingers on the handlebars as if describing the scene in Morse code, he stared at the pile of blackened rubble.

“Well, look at that,” he said.

Leonardo picked up his glass from the African wood table and drank a mouthful of water. It tasted good. At the time he had decided to move to M. the excellence of the water had come first in the list of advantages he had looked forward to. This list had been one of the last ideas suggested by his psychiatrist. In fact, after a month of telephone calls, the man had told him he could do nothing more for him unless he came to the office by car. Leonardo had promised to think about it but had done nothing. So, from one day to the next, what he had thought of as an essential lifeline had been cut off. And this had been the second point on his list.

“Would you give me a hand to finish the grape harvest?”

Elio looked at him as one might look at someone on the bridge of a ship heading to a place from which he was unlikely to return.

“You must be joking.”

Leonardo shook his head.

“If you don’t, in a few days the grapes will have to be thrown away.”

Bauschan came out onto the veranda and sat down beside Leonardo. He had a slipper in his mouth, but his serious eyes were fixed on Elio. Apart from a shambling gait and huge paws, there was almost nothing left of the puppy with the round stomach he had once been; he seemed more like the miniature version of an adult dog.

“Even if we did harvest the grapes, what could we do with them?” Elio said. “The wine growers haven’t even harvested their own.”

Leonardo drank more water. Far off, beyond the river, he thought he could see movement amid the yellow stubble. It turned out to be two men carrying jerry cans down to the waterside. The sky was clear, but the heat made the atmosphere transparent.

“Maybe I can give them to the cooperative,” he said.

“Do you think they’ll be getting orders anymore?” Elio snorted. “Most of the wine used to be exported to northern Europe and America. Have you noticed it’s been nearly a year since the last truck passed on the main road?”

Leonardo went back to contemplating the point where the hill met the river. The two men had stopped on the bank; one was filling a container, while the other was watching the road that touched the edge of the river two hundred meters lower down before regaining height with a couple of sharp bends.

“Anyway, if you could spare a couple of afternoons to give me a hand I’d be grateful,” he said.

Elio set the bicycle on its stand and took a few steps toward the veranda. Leonardo heard him go into the house, take a glass, fill it with water, drink, rinse it, and put it back in its place. When he came back out he placed his hands on the back of the empty chair.

“The people who started the fire were not the ones you think,” he said.

Leonardo watched the men on the other side of the river carry their containers across the last open stretch of field and disappear into the forest.

“Who was it then?” he said.

Elio put his hands in his pockets.

“The schools are still shut and the boys are hanging out all day with nothing to do. The other day four or five of them had a few words with that young man who was staying with you.”

Leonardo rubbed one of Bauschan’s ears between his fingers. It was like silk. The sun was sinking and the shadow of the blackened walls of the store was reaching the edge of the veranda. Elio returned his hands to the back of the wooden chair and studied them, as if he suspected they might have changed color while in his pockets.

“Gabri’s in touch with her sister in Marseilles. She says they’re going to close the frontier, and these may be the last good days for crossing it. I’d like her to take the children, but she doesn’t want to go alone.”

Bauschan barked twice at the hazel grove near the house and a few seconds later a stocky shape emerged from the thicket. The wild boar looked fearlessly at them, then it grunted and three striped piglets came through the opening it had made.

The little family filed past the veranda at a gentle trot and disappeared behind the remains of the store. When they had gone, Bauschan sniffed the scent of forest in the air and lifted his head to see what the two men might have to say about it.

“There seems to be some gasoline at C.,” Elio said. “Shall I get you some too?”

Leonardo shook his head. The sun had half disappeared behind the mountains; the sky 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 cue to someone else, saying his wife was waiting for him at home.

“Do you think I ought to do something?” Leonardo asked Adele.

“What would you like to do?”

“Go and talk to the people who started the fire.”

Adele went on working on Leonardo’s thin feet. Her hands were barely warm, like ashes disturbed hours after a fire has gone out.

“Last year Laica had six puppies, but the next day there were only five. Bitches sometimes notice one of the little ones is too weak and eat it to make sure there’s enough milk for the others.”

Leonardo locked his hands behind his head and looked up at the flowered lampshade, noticing the black shapes of dead flies inside the ridged glass bowl. One was much longer than the others: a huge wasp.

“Is that a metaphor?” he asked.

“Don’t use words like that with me. You being a professor doesn’t interest me in the least. You don’t even know how to light a fire without matches.”

Leonardo let his head fall back and dozed off. He was awoken by the cracking of his own feet as the woman squeezed them between her hands. He had no idea how much time had passed.

“There,” Adele said.

Leonardo got off the bed and slipped on his sandals. Adele looked at the notebook where she had divided the pages in two columns.

“You’ve already paid,” she said “Last time I hadn’t any change to give you.”

They went back to the kitchen where the pan on the stove was spreading a good smell of boiled vegetables and rosemary. Beyond the misted windows there was little light, but he could make out a pile of firewood and the white of the birches that formed a crown around the courtyard.

“Is Sebastiano at home?” Leonardo asked.

Adele took a piece of cheese wrapped in parchment paper from the refrigerator and put it on the table.

“He’s upstairs. Tell him supper’s ready.”

Leonardo climbed the stairs and went along the corridor that led to two bedrooms and the bathroom. Sebastiano’s door was closed. Leonardo knocked and looked around the door. The room was tidy with nothing but a single bed, a wardrobe with two doors, a writing desk, and a bookcase. On the walls were a crucifix and a poster of Machu Picchu. Sebastiano was standing by the window. Leonardo knew that the night before he must have seen the glare of the fire.

“No one was hurt,” he said.

Sebastiano turned, showing his hollow cheeks and humped nose. He was ten years younger than Leonardo, but a bald head surrounded by thin hair made him look older. An African totem pole in a sweat suit.

“I need a hand with the grape harvest,” Leonardo said. “Can you help me?”

Sebastiano nodded, parting his lips to show extra-large teeth.

“Thanks,” Leonardo said. “Your mother’s waiting. See you tomorrow then.”

As he closed the door, Sebastiano turned back to the window. Leonardo went downstairs and back into the kitchen. Adele had served the soup.

“Will you stay?” she said.

“Thanks, but I’m tired. I think I’ll read a bit and go to bed.”

“You should always go to bed early and get up early. But you sleep too much, walk too little, and are always reading. If you were a man who works with his hands it would be all right, but people like you need to do a lot of walking.”

“I could always become someone who works with his hands,” said Leonardo, smiling.

“You’re too old now to be any different. And you’ve done too much studying.”

The courtyard was dark and there was a faint smell of fruit in the air. Leonardo went to the bicycle, which he had leaned against a wall. Adele watched from the doorway.

“When the time comes, you should take Sebastiano with you,” she said.

Leonardo put down the leg he had raised to mount the saddle.

“When the time comes for what?”

“When the time comes to go.”

“But I’ve no intention of going anywhere,” he smiled.

Adele touched first one eye and then the other to indicate either exhaustion or far-sightedness. On her 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, half closing his eyes from time to time like an employer not quite trusting his workforce.

Elio was wearing shorts and a shirt marked with one or two stains of varnish, while Sebastiano was in a mechanic’s overall that must have belonged to his father. His hands, after three days of work, were white and unmarked. The weather was mild and the sky covered with flat, inconsistent clouds hinting at the blue behind them.

As they ate, Elio told the story of a man from a nearby village where Leonardo had never been. This man, known to all by the name of Nino Prun, lived in an isolated ruin and several years earlier had bought himself a coffin that he kept in his bedroom. Apart from this eccentricity and a somewhat shabby style of dressing, everyone knew him to be mild, celibate, and reserved.

Two weeks earlier Nino Prun had gone down to the priest’s housekeeper to arrange for the curate to call on him the following day. Although the woman knew that the man had never been a churchgoer, she passed on the message and the next day the priest climbed up to the man’s house in hopes of a late repentance. Instead he had found Nino Prun in his coffin, stiff, washed, combed, and dressed for burial. All the priest had to do was administer benediction and order the lid to be nailed down. The man had left his few belongings on the dresser in two supermarket bags, one marked with the name of a prostitute from C., who by then had no longer worked for a number of years, and the other with the name of the Association of Alpine Mountaineers.

They talked of this and other things just as in earlier years when Elio’s shop had been full of customers, and when it was possible to see people in trains and on benches with one of Leonardo’s books in their hands. Sebastiano shifted his eyes from one to the other as he followed the conversation, but it was as if his silence were concealing thoughts unrelated to what was happening around him. A medieval Japanese poet might have described his figure as combining the strength of a centuries-old tree with the ephemeral wonder of a chrysalis.

“We could try Gallo,” Elio said as they put the dirty plates in the sink.

They lay resting on the veranda floor for half an hour and then loaded the filled baskets on the trailer and set off for the village. Elio took the driving seat while Leonardo and Sebastiano made room for themselves among the baskets. The air was tepid as the light faded and the smell of the grapes caused them a slight dizziness. Bauschan watched the passing countryside from his owner’s arms. Leonardo wished he could travel like this forever.

“Guido, if only you and Lapo and I,” he quoted in a murmur, “could be enchanted and put into a ship with the winds carrying us across the sea to your heart’s content and mine, so that neither destiny nor any other bad weather could impede us, but that on the contrary, united by a common desire, we would feel an ever-increasing need to keep together.”

They passed the carabinieri station. The windows were barred, and crocuses and wild spinach were growing from the steps. It was a year now since the men had been either diverted to the National Guard or transferred to a larger base. The nearest of these was at A., but no one was in a position to say whether there were any carabinieri there anymore, since the Land Rover that used to come every two days and park in the village square was no longer showing up.

When the road divided, they took the route that climbed the hill in gentle curves. The vineyard was at the top of the knoll with its entrance marked by a great red iron gate without any surrounding fence; all around it the vines sloped away like waves in a geometrical sea, to far-off churches and towers still lit by the sun. A clock in the village struck five.

Elio drove the tractor straight into the courtyard. The two-story house, neat as a biscuit, had its laboratory and cellar in an annex. The balconies on the upper floor were luxuriant with geraniums, and apart from some fifty or so cardboard boxes piled in the yard, everything seemed in perfect order.

Elio switched off the motor and headed with Leonardo for the portico, where Cesare Gallo was sitting on a white leather sofa; Sebastiano and the dog stayed in the trailer. Gallo was wearing leather boots and over his shirt collar was one of those leather ties that a hundred years earlier herdsmen on the other side of the world used to put on in honor of the Sunday sermon. Everyone in the district knew that in his basement dining room he kept one of those mechanical bulls that used to be found at fairs.

“Do you want me to laugh?” he said, even before the two men reached the steps. “We only picked our own because the thought of the harvest rotting away broke my heart.”

Elio and Leonardo looked at the yellowing boxes in the middle of the yard: five years earlier they would have been full of bottles that would have been quite inadequate to satisfy constant orders from Russia and the East. A swarm of swifts was circling the yard even though it was not the right season for them.

“Do you know anyone who might want the grapes?” Elio said.

Cesare picked up his glass from the ground and drank. What Leonardo had taken for a cardigan flung on the sofa moved and he realized that it was a gray shorthaired cat.

“If you want a friendly word of advice,” Cesare said, “go to the river and chuck the lot in, then go back home and get drunk like me.”

There was a short silence while each stared at the shoes of the other; then a boy with a large birthmark on his cheek and hair that looked as if it had been cut by someone who had become bored halfway through the job emerged from the shed.

“Allow me to present the last employee of the house of Gallo,” Cesare said.

Leonardo and Elio acknowledged the boy, who responded briefly.

“I’ve turned on the fans,” he told his boss. “Will you take care of turning them off again?”

Cesare nodded. The boy stuck his hands in his pockets and headed for the gate. The green of his overalls seemed to become darker before he vanished among the hedges lining the drive out of the estate. To Leonardo, it was like reading the last page of a South American family saga. A light breeze stirred a couple of lemon trees under the portico. Then Cesare got up and gestured to them to follow him.

The terrace around back was piled with a haphazard collection of furniture, children’s toys, and other objects. It looked as though several rooms had been emptied according to some criterion connected with the size of their contents. Below this, beyond the parapet, the plain extended in regular geometrical shapes defined by the fields and roads that linked the villages. It was a magnificent view. Far off the foothills of the mountains were hidden by a layer of mist that left their summits free.

“Look at the main road to C.,” Cesare said, offering them a small pair of binoculars from his pocket. “That’s how it’s been since this morning.”

Elio looked first, then passed the binoculars to Leonardo who took several seconds to find the road. Both lanes were jammed with a continuous line of motionless vehicles.

“My family left at seven,” Cesare said, “and at midday I could still see them. They’d gone five kilometers, more or less.”

“Are you the only one staying behind?” Elio asked.

Cesare nodded.

“After what happened at C., Rita couldn’t be persuaded. So we loaded the truck last night. They’re headed to our house in Nice.”

“What was it that happened?” Leonardo asked.

“Haven’t you heard? They committed every kind of obscenity and set fire to the village before leaving. This morning Stefano Pellissero ran to see if his sister was all right. He said all you can do is tear your hair out. It’s like war’s passed through.”

“Were they outsiders?” Elio asked.

“It seems so, but people say some of them spoke Italian.”

Going back to the front of the house they found the tractor abandoned. Neither Sebastiano nor the dog were to be seen. The setting sun had transformed the courtyard into a uniform gray lake on which the tractor and its trailer seemed to be floating.

“Did you know he was unfrocked because of a woman?” Cesare said.

Leonardo did know but said nothing.

After seminary, Sebastiano had taught in the college of theology, but after several years asked for, and was given, a parish in upcountry Liguria. There he had gotten to know a woman whose man was often away at sea. The relationship continued in secret for nearly a year, then Sebastiano abandoned his work as a priest to be with her. But at this point the woman decided to stay with her boyfriend. Everyone said the disappointment had deprived Sebastiano of his senses and speech.

“You have to know how to control women,” Cesare said. “I’ve known Rita for thirty-six years and there’s nothing about her I could possibly complain of, but if one day she stuck a knife between my ribs I wouldn’t look at her with astonishment as I died. It’s not a question of malice or bad faith. Women can just wake up one day with a new idea in their heads. It’s their nature. If you can’t accept this possibility, it’s better not to get involved at all. Let alone risk losing your speech!”

They heard the door behind them open. They turned to see Sebastiano on the threshold: he was holding the dog in his arms and had draped a cowhide around his shoulders, fastening it at the throat with a curtain cord.

“Hey!” Cesare said. “That’s my bedroom carpet!”

Sebastiano passed between them and went toward the trailer. His cloak smacked against his heels like a whip. It was a dappled cowhide but in some places so threadbare that the animal’s skin was visible.

“Can you let him have it?” Leonardo asked.

Cesare shrugged, picked his glass up from the floor and took a swig.

“Are these Barbera grapes?” he asked, indicating the trailer.

“Yes,” Leonardo said.

Cesare scratched his chin; he had not shaved that morning.

“I let Rita take all the cash,” he said, “but if you like, we could do a deal.”

In half an hour they had unloaded the grapes and replaced them on the trailer with a crate of potatoes and another containing cauliflowers, carrots, chicory, and a large pumpkin.

On the way back Leonardo hugged himself: a cold wind was blowing from the mountains and moving the tops of the trees. A few gloomy black clouds were floating around the moon and the countryside seemed full of unknown things. Once home, they unloaded the cases and Elio went back to the village. Left on their own, Leonardo and Sebastiano looked at the river: the water was shining like a strip of pewter against a black cloth. Bauschan sniffed the cowhide. Sebastiano bent down to stroke him.

“Nothing that goes from outside into a man can defile him,” he said.

Leonardo looked at him; his voice had passed through his body without leaving any trace as if through an empty pipe, but the silence around them had been completely transformed.

“Does that mean we should prepare ourselves?” he asked, but got no answer.

When Sebastiano had gone, Leonardo went into his book room and looked in St. Mark’s gospel. He read: “Nothing that goes from outside into a man can defile him. It is what comes out of a man that defiles him. For from inside, out of a man’s heart, come evil thoughts, acts of fornication, of theft, murder, adultery, ruthless greed, and malice; fraud, indecency, envy, slander, arrogance, and folly; these evil things all come from inside, and they defile the man.”

He tore out the page, folded it, and put it in his wallet. It was the first time he had heard Sebastiano speak. He was sure he would never hear him speak again.

Throughout the whole of October the line of cars continued to move slowly through the valley toward France, without thinning out. It was not easy to find out what was happening: the national radio had not been broadcasting for weeks and the only stations you could pick up were independent ones broadcasting music programs. Both landline telephones and cell phones were silent, and the Internet had been the first thing to crash. The only remaining source of information was television, which for several days now had been transmitting classical music concerts. A journalist made an appearance late one evening to read a government communication that claimed the situation was stable and urged citizens to be vigilant. Practical advice was also available about food and water, garbage collection, and the precautions to be taken by anyone planning to travel.

Halfway through the month a delegation went to the valley to interview the lined-up travelers. The picture they brought back was schizophrenic. Many maintained that the northeast of the country was in the hands of plundering gangs who took everything they could lay hands on and that although the National Guard controlled a few cities and major routes of communication, otherwise all law and order had broken down. Others, however, reported that things were near normal. They complained of a shortage of gasoline and other necessities but insisted they had seen or heard nothing of assaults or other violence. One man from T. said that in the city the market was crowded, the shops open as usual, and the streets well protected by the military. When asked in that case why he was taking his family to France, he answered, “To be on the safe side.”

The consequence, in any case, was that the country began emptying. The first to leave were those who had relatives or friends beyond the frontier, also families with children. Those who stayed behind were the old, people who were waiting for somebody, and those like Cesare Gallo, who would have stayed even if bombs had been falling.

Leonardo spent the month reading on the veranda or in the book room. Elio had closed his shop and passed by most days for a chat, updating him on who had left and on the general state of affairs. When the weather was fine, they would walk as far as the hill of Sant’Eugidio. There was a small Romanesque church on top of it, surrounded by an English-style churchyard, in which the most recent grave was a century old. Bauschan loved this walk for the river, the stretch of woodland, and the bushes from which he could make the thrushes rise.

When he ran out of provisions, Leonardo was forced to go into the village, which he had avoided since the night of the fire. Only Norina’s grocery, the bar, the baker’s, the pharmacy, and the butcher’s were still open. All the other shops had drawn their shutters with no notices to say why they were closed or for how long. Apart from a knot of old people leaning on the balustrade of the belvedere and commenting on the length of the line of cars down in the valley, the square was deserted. The narrow streets were full of the stench of the grapes rotting in the vineyards.

Waiting his turn at the grocer’s, Leonardo noticed the only subjects of conversation among those who were left were medications, gasoline, and cigarettes since no one knew if or when any of these would arrive. When he bought a loaf of bread, he told the three women who ran the shop that he would be going down to A. on business and would find out all he could about the availability of these goods; they looked at him as though he were a young blond volunteer sticking his head out of the window of a train heading for the front.

The next day he settled Bauschan on the rear seat, started the car, and drove through the village under the skeptical eyes of the old men on the belvedere. During the eighteen kilometers to A. he only passed two cars and one small truck going in the opposite direction. Many of the houses along the route had their windows barred and the fields looked neglected, but apart from this the hills had a gentle autumnal air while the Dolcetto vines were already a vivid yellow, the Barberas turning wine-red, and the Nebbiolos still green.

Things gradually changed the closer he got to the town. It seemed as if everything had suddenly grown old: shop signs, warehouses, supermarkets, even the road signs: everything seemed faded and cold. The gas pumps looked like archaeological relics, and the trucks and car transporters cluttering up the open spaces were like tanks from some ancient war waiting to be overgrown with ivy and rust away.

He felt better when he saw several people walking along the station approach with shopping bags, pushchairs, and overnight bags. Bauschan watched the coming and going of the town without much interest and from time to time yawned with boredom.

They parked in the central square and Leonardo took from his pocket a rudimentary leash he had made the evening before from a piece of cord, a clip, and a piece of Scotch tape. Bauschan accepted this philosophically and walked without testing the fragility of the noose. The shops were open, but few of the passersby showed any interest in what was left in their windows. The tables outside the bars on the main street were empty.

The bank was on the ground floor of a building from the Fascist era, originally an agricultural cooperative and later a school. The entrance was protected by a National Guardsman with a submachine gun, bulletproof vest, and helmet. The young man demanded to see his papers and read the details into his transistor radio, asking Leonardo to be patient for a few minutes while his identity was established. The man’s cranium was like a crudely hewn block of marble.

Once approved, Leonardo was allowed inside, where another soldier, who was smaller in size, checked his documents again.

“Go ahead,” he said when he had finished.

The young cashier at the window was thorough. Leonardo still had just over ten thousand lire in his account and, as was made clear to him on a circular with an annexed table, customers were permitted to withdraw in cash up to between 10 and 20 percent of their total deposit, depending on its size. The rest would be available at a monthly rate, but in order to state this the young man looked away from Leonardo and fixed his gaze on the pen tied by a little chain to the marble surface of the counter.

Leonardo established that the sum in his account allowed him to take out 13 percent of his deposit and, while the young man was counting out the one thousand three hundred lire, Leonardo asked him for the latest news of gasoline, medications, and cigarettes.

The young man could not have been older than twenty-five.

“We are not qualified to give such information,” he answered.

Leonardo studied his red hair and the freckles that covered most of his face. He could easily have been one of the children forced to thieve in the muddy streets of London by the crafty Fagin.

“I understand,” he said.

The boy asked him to sign a piece of paper, which he placed on a pile reaching from the floor up to his elbow, and then gave him a serious look.

“After a theater reading two years ago,” he said, “you autographed a copy of The Roses Near the Fence for me. You won’t remember, but I told you about a novel I was writing. You shook my hand and told me to keep at it.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t remember. And did you keep at it?”

The boy looked across at the girls moving between desks cluttered with papers and large registers on the other side of the great hall. For the first time, he seemed aware of his surroundings.

“No.”

“You’re very young, you can easily begin writing again.”

The bank clerk shook his head.

“I’m twenty-seven, but that’s neither here nor there. May I give you some advice?”

“Please do.”

“Don’t count on the money still in your account.”

Leonardo placed a hand on the marble counter and realized it was not cold.

“Thank you very much. Thanks to your sincerity I think I have an exact picture of the situation.”

“So far as is possible,” the young man added placidly.

“So far as is possible,” Leonardo agreed.

Leaving the bank, he walked through the town in no particular direction.

He spoke to a policeman, a priest who was painting a side door to the church, and a woman selling household objects from an improvised stall. He learned that the little gasoline still available was reserved for security, hospitals, and the local services, while medication could only be obtained from the hospital and a couple of authorized pharmacies, with the available drugs all requiring prescriptions, which only doctors were allowed to issue for the most serious emergencies. As for cigarettes, the woman said he would have no problem finding these in the district around the racetrack.

On his way back to the car, he saw a group of teenagers standing in front of a bar. Some had shiny quilted jackets and others tank tops or T-shirts with slogans in large letters, but all were wearing shades, tight-fitting trousers, and white sneakers and were talking in loud voices, their bodies nervous with unpredictable energy.

He crossed the road. Sitting on the steps of the bar were two girls in heavy makeup, who seemed to be waiting for some sort of response before deciding for whom they were destined. As they waited, they seemed entirely at ease.

Hearing a whistle, Leonardo decided the boys were trying to attract the attention of the dog, but immediately afterward the first insults reached him. He quickened his pace without turning around. He still had about twenty meters to go to the end of the block, where he would turn the corner and be out of their sight.

As he calculated the distance something small and hard hit him on the neck. For a moment he was stunned, but he kept going. Other coins struck the wall beside him and fell to the pavement; the dog, attracted by the noise, stopped abruptly and snapped his lead. Leonardo hurriedly bent to pick him up, but on straightening up again was hit by a fierce pain in his back.

He struggled on, double over and with tears in his eyes, terrified that at any moment a hand might grab hold of his jacket. His loud breathing drowned out every other sound, and he became aware that a thread of dribble was running from the right of his mouth.

Rounding the corner he still felt unsafe, and he made his way to the next corner where a small group was waiting in front of a large door. He passed them without looking up and rounded another corner and then leaned on a wall to catch his breath. Very soon he felt his legs give way, and he collapsed. He stayed like this for several minutes and saw the feet of two men pass him. Neither stopped to see how he was. Bauschan stared at him in despair, now and then licking his lips.

“It’s nothing,” he said to reassure the dog.

But it took him an hour to reach the square where he had parked the car.

When he got there the clock was striking one. He slaked his thirst at a small fountain in a little public garden where a woman was sleeping on a park bench.

He sat in the car and mopped the sweat gluing his hair to his forehead. After a few minutes his breathing steadied and the pain in his back became less intense. He gingerly took off his jacket: his sweat-soaked shirt had turned a light grayish-blue, but he had nothing to change into. Bauschan watched him, wagging his tail from the seat beside him.

“Home now,” he told the dog, then remembered the cigarettes. He did not feel like waiting for the shops to open again for the afternoon, or walking about in the hope of picking up more information, so he decided to drive around the area the woman had recommended, only stopping if he noticed a shop was still open. It was a district that had grown up at the end of the last century around the old motor-racing circuit: streets of detached houses and modest blocks of apartments for the middle class, a superstore, a bank, and a health center with a sauna and swimming pool.

The last time Leonardo had been there, six months before, the health center was already closed and the superstore had been transformed into a depository for scrap metal, but the houses still looked attractive with well-kept gardens, windows decorated with vases of flowers, and brightly polished brass doorbells. Everything had given an impression of serenity and quiet living.

As he approached, he began to be aware of the coming and going of people walking and cycling at the edge of the road, all carrying a wide variety of objects. A kilometer further, the first stalls appeared, and the throng of buyers and sellers grew until the road was completely blocked. Leonardo drove into a field that must once have been used for soccer, where hundreds of cars had been parked randomly. He left Bauschan in the car, the leash was broken and he was afraid of losing him in the confusion.

He moved through the mob with tiny steps because of the pain in his back. People were pushing and shoving as they struggled to get a look at stalls displaying clothes, furniture, electrical goods, lamps, alcoholic drinks in bottles, plates, tablecloths, curtains, sanitary appliances, and every kind of household goods.

At the beginning of their relationship, Alessandra had sometimes dragged him to villages and small towns where dealers in used goods and simple ransackers of cellars and attics displayed their merchandise, amusing themselves by haggling and claiming emotional links with horrible paintings and ancient chamber pots of every description. But what Leonardo saw now was quite different. Many of the sellers looked as if they were trying to make a little money by offloading things they would not be able to take away with them. The bargaining was fast and ferocious and colored the proceedings with a dismal air of misfortune and speculation.

In front of the racetrack gates were several armed guards who seemed to be neither from the police or the National Guard but from some sort of private militia specially created for the occasion. They were distinguishable by their orange caps and badges.

He crossed in front of their arrogant gaze and, passing through a tunnel, came out on tiers of steps. A huge crowd was circulating among tables displaying merchandise, producing the same indistinct buzz or hum as a swarm of insects.

Dizziness forced him to lean against a wall and, like a drowning man, he grabbed the nearest arm. The man jerked himself free and began moving away then changed his mind and turned back. Leonardo apologized.

“I’m looking for cigarettes,” he said.

The man smiled, showing a gold tooth.

Half an hour later Leonardo was driving toward the hills, the town now behind him. On the rear seat were four cartons of cigarettes for which he had paid more than two hundred lire, an excessive price even allowing for the fact that they were foreign, possibly Turkish; they were undoubtedly remainders stored long past their sell-by date, but he believed the village’s smokers would welcome them just the same.

He left the cigarettes with Elio, telling his friend to sell them at whatever price he could get; it would be enough if he could get back what he had spent on them. Elio, noticing he was having difficulty with the steps, asked him what had happened. Leonardo said he had strained a muscle getting out of the car and needed to lie down for a bit.

When he got home he found his most recent letter, mailed a month earlier, had been accurately returned to sender, evidence that for some bizarre reason the postal system was still working, at least in his case. Somehow the familiar disappointment comforted him and his backache seemed less painful.

As he prepared Bauschan’s lunch, he hummed Brahms’s song “Gestillte Sehnsucht” and then, while the dog ate, collapsed on the sofa and closed his eyes.

When he woke up it was dark. He had no idea of the time but looked neither at the watch on his wrist nor the clock on the wall. He simply stared at the night through the glass door of the veranda, a fragment of sky in which two very bright stars were shining, and wept for at least a quarter of an hour.

He remembered the last time he had wept like this, eight years before.

His relationship with Clara had been going on for several months, but they had never slept together. Leonardo had not felt like taking her with him on his trips to attend conferences and give lectures, and when he was in the city, family demands prevented him being away at night. On this particular occasion, Alessandra had gone to Paris to review an exhibition by an American artist who constructed perpetual-motion machines out of refuse, and Lucia had been excused school for two days to go with her.

That evening, after dining in Clara’s little apartment, they had gone to bed and Clara had made sure he came on her stomach. Then they had examined the shape of the pool of semen on her belly and invented resemblances as one does with the shapes of clouds. Then she had taken a pen from the bedside table and asked him to draw its outline on her before she went to the bathroom. He continued to lie there gazing at the large rose on the ceiling, meditating on the gift of love this young woman was presenting him with. Then, aware of being in the presence of some form of perfection, he had wept, the way an old man can weep when he recognizes in a child a turn of speech or gesture that had been his own in his youth.

Leaving the bathroom, Clara had come back to lie down naked beside him, her belly still marked by the ballpoint pen.

“Shall we always do it?” she had asked.

Leonardo had said yes.

The next time he had been on the point of tears had been seven months later, when the polaroid photographs of the drawings had been shown in court by Clara’s lawyer as evidence of the deviant sexual practices to which the well-known writer and university lecturer had subjected the young woman, with the threat of interrupting her career at the university as well as her doctoral degree.

Leonardo got to his feet and moved slowly toward the bathroom. The sight of himself in the mirror disturbed him.

There seemed to be new wrinkles around his eyes, and his cheeks had sagged to reveal sharp cheekbones. His body was drying up; soon he would be nothing but a husk, an old man in a world where speed and determination were necessary.

Why had he not faced those boys? He should have stopped and told them off. They were nothing but badly reared children, and he was a man of fifty who could have been their father.

In the gentle middle-class world he had inhabited until a few months before, his timidity had always been mistaken for moderation; the mediocre music his instrument played joining with others in an uninspired orchestra, but now everything was changing and there would no longer be any melody for him to harmonize with.

He rubbed painkilling cream into his back and dried his hair; the weather had changed and he was afraid that the cold air might bring on a migraine; then he put on his pajamas and went to bed.

Just before he fell asleep he felt for the first time that he was beginning to understand the true dreadfulness of what was happening. It was the beginning of a new age, a naked age that seemed likely to last and whose key word would be “without,” just as the key word of the previous age had been “with.”

But even the black glue paralyzing his thoughts could not keep him awake.

On the first Thursday in November a car came into the courtyard, and after making a slow half-moon on the gravel, stopped with its hood toward the way out.

Leonardo was sitting in one of the armchairs on the veranda with a fleece over his knees. He lowered the book he was reading and watched the woman who got out of the car as though she were merely a couple of hours late, whereas in fact he had not seen his wife for six years.

Alessandra walked toward him. She was slim and looked hardly any older, yet many things about her, starting with her hairdo, spoke of a woman who had made radical alterations to her scale of personal values. For all Leonardo knew this could have happened as soon as they separated, or only yesterday. But the decisive air with which she climbed the steps and stopped a few paces from him made it clear that this would not be a subject for discussion.

“Ciao, Leonardo.”

Leonardo got up and took a step toward her but stopped, hampered by the cover, which had slipped down between his feet. In the car were a girl, and a boy of about ten. The pair were watching them through the blue-tinted windshield. It was a high-powered car and extremely elegant. But its hubcaps had been taken off, as had its front grill and mirrors.

Leonardo looked at the girl and her long smooth hair.

“Is that Lucia?” he asked.

As he spoke he realized he had not pronounced her name for many years. The little girl he had taken to the movies and the puppet theater and spent the hottest summer months with in a little house in the Ligurian hinterland, the two of them alone, making up stories in rhyme, going for long walks in the morning and bathing only after four.

“Yes,” Alessandra said. “But first I need to talk to you. Can we come in?”

Leonardo made his way to the kitchen, where everything smelled of smoke. The tanker that usually passed in October to fill the cistern with methane gas had not come and, in any case, Leonardo no longer had the money to pay for it. So he had pulled an old stove out of the cellar and collected some firewood in the forest. His first attempts to light it had been pathetic, but for a few days now he had been able to heat at least this part of the house.

They sat down facing each other at the table.

“Do you have a dog?” she said, noticing the bowls under the sink.

“A puppy.”

She moved her hands on the table as if drawing something that would help her say what she had come to say. Thinking it might require summing up many years in a few words, Leonardo kept silent.

“I remarried four years ago.”

“I didn’t know.”

She said that was just how it was.

“I met Riccardo a few months after we separated. We dated for a year; then after our marriage Lucia and I moved to C. We have a villa by the lake. Riccardo’s a communications engineer. The boy in the car is Riccardo’s son. His name’s Alberto.”

Leonardo studied the woman who had once been his wife and now was another man’s wife. Her expression, her shoulders, and her small breasts still had the attractive nervousness of the days when she had worked and talked and been ironical and spent many hours flying to see exhibitions by painters desperate to impress her. Even so, Leonardo could not help noticing that the old warmth had gone from her body. She was much sharper now, like a poker kept beside the fireplace to stir up the fire.

“Last year Riccardo was called up,” she went on. “The army was working with new communications systems, and his expertise was indispensable. At first he came home every two weeks, then less often. Now I’ve heard nothing from him for four months.”

Alessandra spread her hands on the table. In addition to her wedding ring, she was wearing several rings set with small stones, none of which Leonardo recognized.

“Would you like something to drink?” he asked.

“A glass of water would be great, thanks.”

He went to the sink, filled two glasses from the tap, and returned to the table.

“I want to go look for Riccardo,” Alessandra said, “and in the meantime I’d like the children to stay with you. Riccardo’s mother is very old and I have no one else; most of our friends are abroad. If I don’t find him within a week, I’ll come back and get the kids. We have a pass for Switzerland. The last thing Riccardo sent us.”

Leonardo wiped a drop of water that was running down the outside of his glass.

“Tell me about Lucia,” he said.

Alessandra stared at him expressionlessly.

“What exactly do you want to know?”

Leonardo smiled. His back was still hurting.

“Does she get along well with her friends, what subjects does she like best, has she thought yet what she might like to study at university?”

Alessandra tucked some hair behind her ear. She must have had it dyed blonde, but now it was returning to its natural brown. Her eyelids were vibrating with tiny electric shocks entirely unrelated to tears.

“In September,” she said, “in front of your daughter’s school, they hanged a Pakistani couple, a husband and wife, who had worked for a family we knew. Our friends had been found dead two days earlier and it seems the Pakistanis had been seized in revenge. They were left hanging for a week, in the hope of discouraging other criminals. But it didn’t work like that. The assaults continued. Gangs of stray kids, goodness knows from where. No one can say how many there are of them. They do horrible things then vanish, and no one knows where they’ve gone until they come back, they or others like them.”

Alessandra touched the water in her glass and massaged a temple with her wet fingers. Her lips were marked with small cracks.

“All people can think of is getting out. They abandon everything they can’t get into their cars, including old people and animals. I know what I’m saying is hard to believe, but I have no reason to tell you lies. I just want to find Riccardo and take the children away. The only reason I haven’t already gone is that once I’ve left the country they won’t let me back in.”

A shuffling sound distracted them. Turning, they saw Bauschan staring at them from the door. They heard a car door opening in the yard. Alessandra jumped to her feet, made her way around the dog, and went out onto the veranda. Her black crew-neck sweater perfectly matched the gray sky. She was also wearing a pair of claret-colored pants. Her head stood proudly on the long neck she had inherited from her horse-riding ancestors, but he noticed her breasts were lower than before.

“Get back in the car, Alberto.”

“But there’s a dog!”

“I know, but get back in the car.”

“I want to touch it.”

“Later, now get back in the car. I’ll tell you when you can come out.”

“But I’m thirsty!”

“There’s a bottle of water in the bag. Tell Lucia to give it to you. I’m coming in a minute.”

Leonardo heard the door shut again. Alessandra stepped over Bauschan as if he were nothing more than a pair of slippers someone had left on the floor, and sat down again.

“OK if I smoke?” she asked.

Leonardo grabbed a saucer from the dresser. Alessandra took a pack of Marlboro and a lighter from her bag. Bauschan followed their movements with apprehension. Alessandra lit up and blew smoke from the side of her mouth. Before turning back to Leonardo, she stared for some time at the volume of Lorca’s poems next to a plate of boiled zucchini on the dresser.

“Alberto’s not an easy child,” she said. “He’s suffered during this last year from the absence of his father, but I’ve talked to him and he’s old enough to understand. And Lucia knows how to deal with him, she’ll take care of that.”

Leonardo understood from the way her fingers were working with a fragment of ash that had fallen on the table, that no matter what happened she was determined to be somewhere else before dark.

“Has Lucia ever asked about me?” he asked.

Alessandra quickly raised the cigarette to her lips.

“There was a time, during her first year in upper school, when she asked me a lot of questions. Maybe she’d found an old newspaper or someone had talked about it at school. I told her what had happened without hiding anything. Since then she hasn’t asked. I know that she’s found your books in the library and read them, but she has never asked to see you or talk to you.”

Leonardo fixed his eyes on a crumb on the table.

One September more than twenty years before he and Alessandra had gone to the sea together.

They had known each other for two weeks and had caught a midmorning train, lunched in a restaurant at the port, then walked as far as the town boundary. The sun was sinking, but the day was still open and luminous. Alessandra had suggested going for a swim, but he had excused himself because he had no bathing suit and had sat with his hands on his knees, watching the slow movements of her arms rising and falling in the water, raising weak, soundless splashes of spray. During that half hour, he had had a chance to measure his own inadequacy compared to this woman who had traveled, worked in Germany, and known the daring, cultivated and ambitious men whose names frequently came up in their conversations.

Seeing her emerge from the water in her one-piece, her skin suntanned and ribs prominent under the close-fitting cloth, he had experienced a fierce urge to possess her, a primitive need to make her body his property. An entirely amoral egoism.

They had spent that first night in a small hotel out of sight of the sea, methodically exploring each other’s bodies. By morning Leonardo had known that Alessandra’s sacrum stuck out in an altogether unusual way and that her right breast was smaller and more sensitive than the left, though he did not have the experience to judge whether the fact that her clitoris stiffened and relaxed with almost mathematical regularity, like the breathing of a tiny lung, was a special quality in her or a trait common to most women.

Alessandra crushed her cigarette against the saucer. There had been a time when, far from annoying her, the processes of Leonardo’s mind had seemed to her to have the seductive power of a closed box. But that time was past.

“I must have an answer,” she said.

Leonardo moved his glass in a little circle.