The Last Man Standing

PART TWO

November was a thoroughly wet month, lashed by a cold wind that deposited white sand on the windowsills. Something more typical of summer.

Great flocks of birds traced patterns with changing contours all day from north to west in the windy sky. Their passage was noticeable even at night, like an endlessly moving curtain in a dark room.

Halfway through the month several handwritten notices appeared, summoning residents to the elementary school gym on the evening of the twenty-second. They were signed by the deputy mayor and the only remaining member of the Council.

On the evening of the meeting, two hundred people gathered in the building. Some had brought greetings with them or permission to vote by proxy from relatives who had not felt like coming out, but even so the general impression was one of great distress; a year earlier the village had had more than a thousand inhabitants.

The most striking thing was the gray, discouraged faces of those who gathered in the hall. Each person’s despair seemed to reflect that of the others, and soon a timid initial buzz of conversation was succeeded by a deafening silence. The deputy mayor took the chair and, using an amplifying system borrowed from the local tourist office, read out the agenda.

First there was the problem of gasoline, medications, and heating. Discussing this did not take long, because no one knew anything that had not already been common knowledge for some time: all they could do was confirm that there was no gas left and that medication was only obtainable from the hospitals, which would only help the most pressing cases. As for heating, as things were at present there was no point in hoping for a supply of fuel oil or methane. Anyone with a wood-burning stove would be able to face the winter calmly, and those without had permission to take wood-burning ranges and stoves from abandoned homes. The deputy mayor, a short man whose remaining side hair was long enough to have been combed not just once over his bald head but back again as well, stated that the regulation requiring a chimney at least a meter high for the discharge of smoke was suspended, and anyone could arrange a chimney pipe in any way he liked.

The second item on the agenda dealt with the presence of outsiders in the area.

Many had seen strangers in the forest or on the riverbank and smoke rising every day from the hills as evidence of the increasing numbers of people camping there. Then there was the theft of fruit from orchards and the danger that the intruders, whether outsiders or not, might become so numerous and bold as to approach inhabited areas. Someone mentioned what had happened in A., where the supermarkets had been taken by assault, and in V., where inmates had escaped from the prison. Definite information was supplemented by rumors, inferences, and fears. It was decided that several volunteers would patrol the district the next morning and drive away anyone who had no good reason for being there. Two squads were formed, each of about a dozen men, mostly hunters with rifles. A third squad would stay in the village to protect it, since neither the local police nor the carabinieri were any longer in a position to do so.

But the most controversial item on the agenda was the last one, the change of hour from daylight-saving summer time to standard time. With both radio and television off the air, no one could be sure that this had actually happened, and in some neighboring communities the clocks had not been put back. When the shouting began, the parish priest, Don Piero, who had been silent until then, spoke up in favor of standard time and stated that if anyone decided otherwise he would stop the mechanism that regulated the church clock.

When the meeting broke up, a few groups continued the discussion for several minutes in the unlit square, until faint but chilly rain dispersed even the most heated disputants.

Leonardo and Elio waited for the square to empty, and then they walked as far as the belvedere and looked down at the plain beneath: few lights were moving on the road, and they belonged to freight escorted by the National Guard. The long line of cars had disappeared a few days after the frontier was closed.

“We’ll be leaving in a few days,” Elio said. “Gabri’s sister has gotten us passes. We’ll pay whatever we have to. It seems some people in the mountain crossing points have been waiting for days even though all their documents are in order.”

Two shadows passed in the street: a couple who lived beyond the gas station. The woman turned and saw them but offered no greeting. When they passed under the solitary street lamp their breath formed a fluorescent halo. It made Leonardo think of the soul.

“You and the children could come with us,” Elio said when the couple were some distance away. “It’s going to become more and more difficult to get away.”

Leonardo nodded, then he remarked that by spring things would be better.

Elio lit a cigarette. His father had been a heavy smoker, but he himself hardly smoked at all. He drew on his cigarette a few times in silence. Only three lighted windows could be seen anywhere near; the rest were all dark or barred.

“In the Frontier Guard,” he said, “we were divided into two squads. One to control the frontier, the other to operate a few kilometers further on in the valley.”

He stopped as if searching with his tongue for some small object caught between his teeth. The rain was lightly touching the umbrella over their heads.

“When unauthorized groups showed up, the first squad would demand payment to let them through, and if they had no money they would ask if they were prepared to lend their women for an hour or two. If they refused, they were sent back and if they agreed, they were let through. Then the other squad would intercept them further down, pack them into a truck and take them back over the border. The squads switched places once a week. I always wanted to stay in the valley. One day, while we were loading people on the truck, a man who had paid started shooting. That’s how I got a bullet in my lung.”

Leonardo studied his friend’s profile, and then he went back to watching the plain: a sea on which few lights were moving. Now that there were no vehicles passing it was hard to believe there had ever been a road there at all.

“Have you nothing to say?”

Leonardo placed a hand on the parapet.

“When you’re young you can do fine things or terrible things. Either can easily happen.”

Elio closed his lips around his filter.

“They’ll make us pay for everything we’ve done to them,” he said.

Four people passed through the square sheltering under two jackets and an umbrella. One was Don Piero. The jackets vanished into a doorway in the square. The umbrella accompanied Don Piero as far as the sacristy, and then it went on alone.

“Last month I was nearly lynched by a gang of boys,” Leonardo said.

Elio looked at him.

“Why?”

Leonardo shook his head. All that existed for him at that moment were the square, the church, the bell tower, the houses, and a wet street leading nowhere.

“Perhaps we went wrong much sooner than we think,” he said.

Elio took two more pulls at his cigarette and then threw it over the parapet; it drew a brief glowing arc, landed, and went out. With the hand not holding the umbrella he searched his jacket pocket and pulled out a bunch of keys.

“In the store you’ll find some tools and kerosene and two gas stoves, though the cylinders are finished. Take anything you can use.”

Leonardo pocketed the keys.

“I’ll leave you a can of gas, too. But don’t let it stay there too long; I wouldn’t like it to disappear. Here’s the address of our cousins in Marseilles. The telephone number, too.”

Leonardo put the slip of paper in his pocket with the keys. The church clock struck one. The light in one window went out and the night crept forward a few meters, stopping at the first rows of vines. Beyond that point there could have been anything.

“I’ll be going now,” Elio said.

“Say hi to Gabri for me.”

“Shall I leave you the umbrella?”

“I’ve got my hat, thanks.”

“Take care then.”

“You too.”

On the road home Leonardo noticed the rain getting heavier. He began walking faster. The night was closed, leaving no crack for escape, and no smell was rising from the asphalt. Rounding the last bend, he recognized the lighted window of his kitchen. That had not happened since he was a child.

“Papa?”

“Yes.”

“Have I woken you?”

“No, just resting my eyes a bit.”

“Have you finished your book?”

“Nearly. It’s excellent.”

“Do you really mean that?”

“Yes, I really think it is. What have you been doing?”

“Translating a bit of Latin, but I need a walk now. Would you like to come?”

“Alberto?”

“He’s in his room. Shall I ask him?”

“Yes. See what he says.”

He heard the door slide back and Lucia’s footsteps moving through the house. The sky was a ragged white, and puffs of mist were floating over the forest, just touching the tops of the trees. He stretched his legs, trying to shake off the sluggishness that had come over him immediately after lunch. A bird was still singing in the clump of acacias behind the storehouse. He had always admired writers who understood flying creatures and trees, not to mention those who were capable of writing knowledgeably about trails of animal droppings, but he had never managed to master such knowledge himself, and for his own books he had trusted the series Know Your Plants, Know Your Herbs, and Know Your Animals. The last one was divided into three volumes and was dedicated to large mammals, small mammals, and insects, which in the end turned out not to be animals at all. It had been enough for most of his readers to think of him as a wise man profoundly symbiotic with nature.

He heard the door behind him open, then close. Lucia passed him and went to lean against one of the roof supports.

“Did you tell him he can stop and play at the river?” Leonardo asked her.

“Yes, but he’d rather stay in his room with his game.”

They gazed at the river, swollen by the rain of the last few weeks. It was flowing slowly toward the valley, carrying on its brown waters large branches and stains of scum. The unknown bird had stopped singing either because it was tired or because it was satisfied.

“Did I like having a bath when I was little?” Lucia asked.

Leonardo looked at her back: under her cream-colored top it formed a perfect triangle, divided into two exactly equal halves by her long tail of hair. Her grandmother, Leonardo’s mother, had had the same shining black hair and clear skin. It was not unusual in those hills, and someone said it was a result of the Arab invasions. Lucia nearly always kept her hair gathered into a ponytail by a red rubber band. The only times Leonardo had ever seen it loose was when she had washed it and was sitting by the stove to let it dry. As she did so, she read a novel written a few years before by an American folk musician who had been a baseball player and a tireless traveler. Someone had called him the heir of Bob Dylan just as the young Bob Dylan had been the heir of Woody Guthrie, and several coincidences made it clear this was no meaningless idea.

Bob Dylan as a boy had gone to see Guthrie in the sanatorium during the last days of his life and had sung his own songs to him, and in the same way the young Isaiah Jones had been to Bob’s house several times in the months before Dylan’s death. Many claimed those meetings had ensured the passing on of the great popular American narrative message. This had struck Leonardo at the time, and he had written about it in a daily paper. He had admitted in his article that what had most attracted him in Isaiah’s songs, as in Dylan’s and earlier in Guthrie’s, had been a sense of wonder he did not understand but intuited. Like seeing a perfect naked body through frosted glass. A vision full of promise for the future. When he listened to their songs he understood how the first readers of the Bible must have felt, when there was a kingdom to be conquered and still the chance of spending long nights forging the swords for the battles ahead. The songs of those three gave hope.

“You had some rubber dolphins you liked to have in your bath,” he answered. “I used to sit on the floor and read out their names: there was the bottlenose dolphin, Hector’s dolphin, and the spinner dolphin, the common one. You used to look at the pictures in the book and divide them into families on the edge of the bath. The one you liked best was the beluga.”

“What’s that?”

“A white dolphin from the northern seas. Did Alberto enjoy having his bath at home?”

Lucia shook her head. Leonardo moved the book that had been lying open on his stomach while he was asleep to the little table; for a moment its silvered cover reflected the sky. A few drops landed on a metal sheet in the ruins of the store. In the vineyard fallen leaves had formed a mush the color and consistency of polenta.

“One day I’d like to talk about it,” Lucia said.

“About what?”

“About what you’ve done.”

Now the rain was beginning to fall in a tired manner, almost as if engaged in work it no longer felt up to.

Leonardo looked at the mountains: a blue deprived of light, as if painted by someone who has just lost a war. Lucia’s gaze passed over her father’s pants, his patched pullover, and the long gray hair that reached to his shoulders.

“We could do it this evening,” she said, smiling weakly, “after Alberto’s asleep.”

His face was open and full of gentleness. There were no hidden reasons why this should be so, just as there are no reasons on a windless day for the lake facing you to be completely still. Something uncommon but hiding no secrets.

“All right,” Leonardo said.

Lucia tucked some loose hair behind her ear.

“I’m going in now,” she said.

“Fine.”

“And you?”

“I’d like to finish my book.”

“You don’t have to, if you don’t like it.”

“But I do like it.”

“Sure?”

“Sure.”

“OK.”

For supper they boiled three eggs and half a red cabbage and heated some leftover soup on the stove, to which they added a little fine pasta, and then, when it was all ready, Lucia filled a plate, took a spoon and fork, and disappeared into the corridor. She came back a minute later without the plate or cutlery. Then she picked a CD from the many available, put it on the stereo, and joined Leonardo at the table.

“Where’s this music from?” she asked, putting the first forkful of cabbage into her mouth.

“Mali.”

“Where’s that?”

“Northwest Africa.”

“Did you go there before it was closed?”

“No.”

“And to Africa?”

“Once.”

“Mamma’s been there many times.”

“Yes. She’s been to lots of places.”

Bauschan let out a sigh from the rug next to the stove where he was dozing. For a couple of weeks now he had started leaving the house to patrol the environs. He ranged further afield every day, and Leonardo was sure that that afternoon he had seen him trotting among the beeches on the hillside at the front of the house.

“The apples smell good,” Leonardo said.

Lucia looked at the pan on the stove where they were cooking.

“I put in a little of Adele’s honey. The sugar’s nearly finished.”

“That was a good idea.”

After Elio’s orchard had been plundered, the only fruit they had been able to find had been these bitter wild apples.

“Why does Adele’s son dress in that cowhide?” Lucia asked.

Leonardo said he did not know, but that it was a recent development. To her next question he answered that Sebastiano wasn’t dumb but had just decided not to speak. They heard Alberto leave his room for the bathroom. Neither of them made any comment. Soon they heard the toilet flush and the steps of the child going back to his room.

“Did you go to Africa because of your books?” Lucia asked.

“No, for a demonstration.”

“What sort of demonstration?”

Leonardo looked at the egg he had just cut open. It had boiled too long and the yolk had a greenish tinge.

“At the time of the closing down, a singer organized a meeting in the Congo, a sort of sit-in protest, and he invited directors, musicians, painters, and other such people. Flights were forbidden, but those who had private planes made them available. We chartered a plane from Italy.”

“Cool!”

“It wasn’t bad.”

“And what did you all do?”

“The program was made up of a series of meetings, concerts, processions, and documentaries, which everyone would have later found some way to project in his own country, but I only attended the first session, after which I fell ill with fever and had to stay in the hotel.”

“For how long?”

“A couple of weeks. The others left because their governments were threatening not to let them back in, but I had a high temperature and wasn’t allowed on the flight. They were terrified I’d caught some tropical illness. Your mother wrote to the papers and moved heaven and earth, or I’d have been stuck there.”

“What a crazy story!”

Leonardo nodded.

“The person playing on this recording was my doctor. He gave me the CD as a present before I left.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“But what language did you speak with him?”

“Colin spoke both English and French extremely well.”

Lucia moved her fork automatically from the left to the right of her plate, keeping her eyes fixed on Leonardo’s face.

“And you’ve never seen him since?”

“No. We wrote to each other for a time, but then the net was blocked. The last I heard was that he had moved to South Africa.”

Lucia put a forkful of cabbage into her mouth.

“My literature teacher had lots of books by African writers. He used to photocopy parts of them and we would read them, but some of the parents didn’t like it. He could have lost his job.”

“That would have been a pity.”

“One of the stories was by a woman. I think she was called Jasmina.”

“Jiasmina Tofi.”

“It was about a boy who was desperate to have a pair of sunglasses, so while his mother was visiting her sick sister, he sold the well in the courtyard to a wandering peddler in exchange for a pair of Ray-Bans. By the time the mother got home, the man had put up a tent near the well and wanted to be paid for the water. In the end the boy died in a brawl in a disco and his mother married the peddler, who wasn’t as bad as he’d seemed to be.”

Leonardo nodded. “She’s a good writer. Do you want some more?”

Lucia shook her head.

Leonardo went to pour what was left of the soup into Bauschan’s bowl. The dog watched but did not move. When Leonardo started clearing the table, Lucia vanished into the corridor, reappearing soon afterward with Alberto’s plate.

“Has he eaten anything?”

“The egg. He’s left all his greens.”

Leonardo shook the tablecloth out of the window even though there had never been any crumbs on it since they had run out of bread, then poured hot water from the water heater into the sink and started washing the plates. Lucia sat down on the sofa. The CD had finished.

“Is there any more African music?”

“Yes, put on anything you like.”

Lucia calmly studied the CDs arranged by geographical origin, period, and type: there were up to a thousand of them, mostly classical, and she chose one with a green cover. Then she went back to sit down with her knees drawn up to her chest. The light from the only lamp lit up the kitchen leaving the area of the sofa and stove in shadow.

“That’s from Senegal,” Leonardo said. “Do you like it?”

Lucia stared at a point in the floor where the floorboards changed color. Years earlier there had been a leak and an area of the parquet had been soaked with water, but in the deceptive light of the lamp it looked more as if the room was on two different levels separated by a small stair. Bauschan had gone to his bowl and was eating peacefully.

“What’s the time?” Lucia asked.

“After nine.”

“Then I’ll be off to bed.”

“Yes.”

When the girl had left the room, Leonardo finished the dishes then he moved to the studio, where he put on a cashmere pullover. Since the children had come he had been keeping his things there, thus freeing the chest of drawers and wardrobe. Then he picked up the pillow, his toiletry bag, sheets, blanket, and pajamas piled on the desk and went back into the living room.

He brushed his teeth and washed his face in the sink, opened the sofa, and prepared his bed. When his sleeping place was ready, he sat down and studied the night through the window: everything lit by the moon looked mute, magnificent, and cold. The CD had finished and the crackling of the stove was the only sound dividing him from the silence. It seemed that to get up and put on more music would be a huge undertaking. He scratched his shoulder, then his ear, then his shoulder again.

He had no idea what might be passing through the head of that ten-year-old boy barricaded in his room all day. He had never seen him wash, weep, shout, be afraid, sleep, or even look sleepy. He had never heard him ask about his father or wonder aloud what would happen if Alessandra did not come back. Leonardo knew nothing of the boy’s likes and dislikes. Of what upset him or comforted him. Whether he slept on his stomach or whether his hair had always been the same length.

Though he had not heard Lucia speak for seven long years, he had immediately recognized her language, while the boy remained an indecipherable hieroglyph. An idiom invented by goodness knows who to express goodness knows what. A box closed from the inside.

In a dream the night before, Leonardo had found himself in the middle of a desolate expanse with no vegetation, sitting in front of a man with strange marks on his skin. The countryside around them was flat, without mountains or trees, or even a church tower or the outline of a building; there was no dust or stones or fragments of anything that could ever have existed: the earth was an immense expanse of solidified amber. Eventually the man opened his hand to show a little object unlike anything Leonardo had ever seen before or that he had ever heard anyone speak of. Then after saying a single word the man let himself slip to the ground, turning into burned paper, which was immediately blown away by the wind. Leonardo was left alone with the little object in his hand and that one incomprehensible word to define it, and small marks began appearing on his skin.

Feeling cold, he went to put another log on the fire to make the flames climb the chimney again, and then he closed the door of the stove. Going back to the sofa, he stroked Bauschan between the ears, and the dog rolled onto his back to show where he wanted to be scratched. Leonardo obliged. Ever since he had given his bedroom to the children, the dog had taken to spending the night with him in the living room, curled up beside the stove. He had been of a mild and meditative nature from the start. His eyes were like blue steel buttons on a shabby military tunic.

“Here I am,” Lucia said.

They made some herbal tea and sat down at the table.

Leonardo talked for twenty minutes without any interruption from Lucia and by the time he had finished the tea was cold.

He drank it all the same, in small sips, while Lucia contemplated the night beyond the veranda, her face expressing a subtle disappointment, as if she had just discovered that the heavy backpack she had been carrying for so long was only half full of food but otherwise contained nothing but rocks and useless knick-knacks she could have gotten rid of long ago.

“Mamma won’t be coming back, will she?”

Leonardo stopped lifting his cup to his lips and put it back down on the table.

“I’m sure she will come back,” he said.

Lucia went on looking out at the darkness beyond the window. She had a small beauty spot above her lip and an extremely graceful neck.

“She said one week and now four have passed.”

“Sometimes you have to stay where you’re safe. I’m sure that’s what she must be doing. As soon as things settle down a bit, she’ll be back on the road.”

Lucia looked at her cup, identical to her father’s but yellow.

“I must tell you something I haven’t told you before,” she said.

“You don’t have to.”

“Yes I do. Mamma said I must.”

Leonardo waited in silence. Lucia looked up, pale and serious.

“She said if she didn’t come back in two weeks, to give our permits to you and tell you to take us to Switzerland.”

Leonardo touched his shoe. He had an idea the laces had come loose, but that was not so.

“Even so, I think it’s better we wait for her here,” he said. “With the money she left we can buy all we need. The important thing is to keep warm and not get ill.”

Lucia looked down at her cup again. A fly that had been walking on the middle of the table flew away.

“Mamma told me you talk like this.”

“Like what?”

She raised a shoulder.

“Like everything’s always fine. She said she couldn’t stand it.”

The two men were caught a few days later in an isolated house on the main road not far from the village.

The proprietors, a couple with a three-year-old son, he a central-heating and plumbing engineer and she a nurse, had left at the beginning of September with the idea of getting to Marseilles and taking a flight to Canada, where they had relatives. The house, hidden behind a line of acacias and an ancient elm, was no sooner empty than it was raided by thieves who had first removed everything of any possible value and subsequently what was utterly worthless, too.

If they had resisted the temptation to light a fire, in all probability the two men would have been able to stay there for weeks, perhaps even for months, without anyone noticing. But the cold and the absence of cars on the road must have convinced them that the risk of detection was minimal. Then Giampaolo Sobrero, on his way to R. on his Ape three-wheeler to barter a cylinder of gas for a kerosene stove, noticed smoke from the chimney.

Returning to the village, he told his friend Massimo Torchio and they went together to the bar where the men whose job it was to watch over inhabited properties were warming themselves. They all agreed something had to be done, but not knowing who or what they would find in the house, they decided to wait for the patrol. This had already been in action for a couple of weeks with meager results; all they had been able to find was a shelter made from branches and scraps of nylon behind a wall of tufa rock. There had been footprints, excrement, and rabbit bones around it, but nothing to suggest the shelter was still in use.

When the squads came back, it was getting dark, and it was decided to put the expedition off until the next day. They took advantage of the wait to sum up their view of the situation: in the last few weeks rabbits, firewood, and poultry had been disappearing from the more isolated farmsteads, and Vigio from the Marchesa farm had lost a calf. Giovanni Alessandria’s eldest daughter claimed she had been followed by a man on her way back from the orchard. She had not been able to see his face clearly, but he was an outsider and had run off only when she reached the first houses and called out in a loud voice for someone to come out. Everyone knew Rita was not a woman to be easily scared and still less to invent stories. She had had a boyfriend from Luxembourg who had gotten up to all kinds of tricks, but eventually she had gotten out of the relationship with her house and cellar intact and her head held high, while he ended up as a door-to-door salesman for a big frozen-food chain on the Côte d’Azur.

The next morning some twenty men armed with hunting rifles took the road for R. When they reached the house indicated by Sobrero, they surrounded it. No smoke was coming from the chimney, but there was a strong smell of firewood and burned hides.

The director of the local tourist office, Vincenzo Maina, yelled out for the occupants to surrender and come out with their hands up, but there was no sign from the house. Norina’s husband then fired his rifle twice into the wall, dislodging a piece of plaster the size and shape of a cello. As the fragments fell they raised a little cloud of blue dust immediately dampened by the drizzle and a few crows took off from the roof. A few moments later a shutter on the second floor squeaked and a hand emerged waving a shirt the color of sugarcane.

The two men were forced to kneel in the middle of the courtyard while the leader of the patrol searched the house. The rooms were empty and the furniture had been broken up and burned, as had the upholstery and parquet. The only room with its floor intact was one on the second floor where they had rigged up a cast-iron stove and a couple of mattresses. By the wall were bags of fruit and vegetables, a can of water, and a suitcase full of clothes, among them a fur and a coat. Three rabbit skins had been stretched out on a line to dry.

Once the search was over the outsiders were interrogated: Where are you from? Why did you go into the house? Don’t you know you shouldn’t trespass? Where did you get your vegetables, fruit, and clothes? Did you steal a calf from Vigio at the Marchesa farm?

The two men said nothing, their eyes fixed on the nearest patch of ground.

Someone repeated the questions in French, but the prisoners still said nothing. The rain had glued their clothes to their thin bodies, and their beards and shaggy hair shone as if they had low voltage bulbs inside their heads. On the way back the party was swollen by people who came out on to the road to see the two prisoners, then the procession climbed the street to the center of the village and the school. Reaching the red gate, they all realized there was no good reason for them to have come so far, and no one knew what to do next. So they sent for the priest.

While they were waiting for him, Fausto Conterno, who had worked as school caretaker for twenty-five years, suggested using the little room next to the gym as a cell: it had a window with iron bars and a door that could be locked from the outside. It was the nearest thing the village had to a prison, apart from the secret parts of the ancient castle, which no one dared to suggest, so the two men were taken to this lumber room and shut up there amid gymnastics mattresses and soccer balls.

When Don Piero arrived it was past two, and he was furious to find Pietro Viglietta guarding the door alone with nothing but his rifle and bandolier. Pietro explained that when they had not seen Don Piero coming, the others had gone to lunch and would be back at four o’clock. The priest, calming down, asked Pietro to explain what had happened; Pietro, who had not been on the expedition because of his bad hip, passed on what he had been told. Don Piero asked if any water had been left with the two men. Fausto said he thought so.

At four the party reassembled in the main hall of the school, some twenty meters from the cell.

Assuming it was certain that the two men had been responsible for thefts from the unprotected orchards and houses, the villagers were now faced with the problem of deciding what to do. They could not hold a trial without any lawyers or a judge or at least a representative of the Council. The three lawyers with homes in the district had all gone abroad, the deputy mayor had also gone, and none of those present had any wish to assume any such responsibility. Nor did anyone want to go to A. to pass the problem on to the police or the magistrates’ court; even if there still were offices capable of taking on such things, they must be up to their eyebrows in similar problems. Even worse was the fact that it was impossible to communicate with the prisoners and find out who they were, where they had come from, and whether there were others like them in the district. They were certainly not Romanians or Slavs or even Africans, but apart from this no one had the faintest idea of their origin. At this point someone thought of Leonardo.

When he heard the car come into the courtyard Leonardo jumped out of his armchair hoping it might be Alessandra, but when he opened the door the light of a torch shone straight into his eyes.

“I’m alone here!” he protested, terrified.

The three men confronting him restricted themselves to explaining why they had come. As soon as he recognized Norina’s husband, Leonardo calmed down.

“Someone must stay with the children,” he said.

The shortest of the men said not to worry, he would do that.

So Leonardo said, “Please come in,” and after going to tell Lucia he would be away for half an hour, he put on his raincoat and left.

When he came into the hall the twenty or so men who by this time had been there for six hours looked at him as though Leonardo was not exactly what they had had in mind. Even though the central heating was off, the air was warm and fragrant.

“We’ve tried French,” the pharmacist said, “but it was no good.”

He was the only one with his rifle on his shoulder. The rest had propped their weapons against the wall under the blackboard. The prisoners were sitting on two children’s chairs on the other side of the room. The voices of women waiting for the outcome of the interrogation could be heard from the entrance hall.

Leonardo spoke to the men in English, then German, and, finally, his very basic Russian, but the two continued to stare at their own feet. The older man could have been about thirty; the younger one not much more than twenty. They had black curly hair, which had been given an auburn gloss by a combination of dust and humidity. One could easily imagine them landing from a Phoenician ship that had been on the high seas for months, or descending from a mountain range perpetually covered with snow. Their eyes were vigilant yet expressionless, like the eyes of goats.

“Would someone please get an atlas from the library?” Leonardo said.

While they waited, time seemed suspended. The rain continued dripping silently on the windowsills. Further off, the roofs of a few houses could be seen, also a lamppost, and the tower of a church deconsecrated many years previously. When Fausto came back with the atlas, Leonardo opened it in front of the two outsiders. The older man looked at a map covering a double page, then at Leonardo, then back at the map and pointed to an area south of Russia.

“Where are they from?” someone asked.

“Azerbaijan.” Leonardo said.

The two men did not react in any way to the name of the country. The elder rearranged his hands on his knees. The younger never moved at all. They were wearing winter pants, in one case a women’s pair.

“How long has it been?” Leonardo asked them.

The two men looked at Leonardo; they had not understood. Leonardo pointed to his watch, which was still on his wrist even though its battery was dead. The elder lifted two fingers.

“Two years?”

“Perhaps he means two months,” someone said.

“Two years?” Leonardo persisted.

The man shook his head as if to say either he did not know or did not understand or it was not important. At that point Leonardo noticed the younger man was weeping, shedding great tears that slithered down his cheeks and fell to the floor. He wept, Leonardo thought, in a very feminine way, musical and full of dignity. The elder man, perhaps his relative or a person who was in some way responsible for him, touched his knee to encourage him to stop. There could have been ten years between them, but the skin of the younger man was very smooth and his teeth perfect, whereas the weathered face of the elder had creases that shifted when he opened his mouth, but were all bitter. He was wearing a red waistcoat over a green sweater. The other had only a roll-neck sweater whose sleeves were too long; and a wool cap hanging out of his pants pocket.

“Why did you come here?” the pharmacist asked.

The man slowly passed a hand over the atlas as if sweeping crumbs away from his own country and toward Europe.

“What does that mean?” Don Piero asked.

“I don’t know,” Leonardo said. “Perhaps they were forced to move.”

At a quarter past ten the two were taken back to the room with the soccer balls. Leonardo asked if they had had anything to eat and everyone looked at each other in silence. A man went into the hallway where the women were waiting, and before anyone could ask anything, told his wife to talk to the other women and arrange something to eat for them.

“But what do they eat?” Leonardo heard the woman ask. The man returned, shut the door, and went back to sit where he had been before. At this point there was an exchange of views on what should be done. Someone suggested taking the two men away and letting them go on the understanding they must not set foot in the district again, but it was explained to him that there could be no guarantee that they would do what they were told. They might just as well be given one of the abandoned houses and a piece of land to cultivate to stop them from thieving. But if news of this got about, it might attract other strays to the area.

When the clock struck eleven, Leonardo, who had expressed no opinion and had not even been asked for one, said he must go home. The others, too, agreed they were all too tired to reach a decision: for the moment the two men must stay in the little room, and over the next few days there would be time to decide calmly what should be done with them. But by now it was clear to everyone that the only solution would be to expel them from the district.

The destiny of the two men changed course on the last day of the month, when Cesare Gallo was found on his back on the floor of his sitting room with his head smashed in. The chemist said that he must already have been dead three or four days, since his blood had been completely absorbed by the parquet and his body, despite the cold, had begun to decompose. Jewelry, money, and clothes had disappeared from the house, and the corpse had been stripped of its boots. The killers had come on foot, and, after killing Gallo, had searched the house and eaten in the basement dining room. The mechanical bull was stained with blood, a sign that they had set it going for a while. The footprints suggested two or three people.

Because of the body’s condition, the funeral was held the same evening, and next morning the two outsiders were shot against the wall of the handball court.

Three men volunteered for the firing squad, and three others were chosen by lot from the twenty-five who had voted for the death sentence. The assembly had contained thirty members, none of them women, and Leonardo took no part in it. Execution by firing squad was chosen because no one had any experience in preparing a noose, and hanging could have caused problems. It was reported that the assembly had proposed loading two of the rifles with blanks so that everyone could think it might not have been him to fire the fatal shots, but no one in the village had any blank cartridges so the suggestion came to nothing.

Leonardo heard the shots from his book room and stayed staring for a long time at the same page without thinking of the book or of what had just happened only a kilometer away. When he went back into the house he found Lucia sitting on the sofa. She was wearing a sweat suit and looked as if she was listening intently to music, but the stereo was not on.

“Something ugly has happened in the village, hasn’t it?” she asked, watching him slipping off his jacket.

“Yes, very ugly.”

“Like what happened to the Pakistanis where we were?”

“Something like that.”

Lucia pulled her knees up to her chest, freeing half the sofa. Leonardo, on his way to the table, hesitated and then sat down. He touched the palm of his right hand with a finger, as if looking for a spot where he had hidden something under his skin.

“What did you tell Alberto?”

“That they’re hunting wild boars.”

“Did he believe you?”

“I think so. He wanted to know how much a wild boar weighs and how you go about skinning it.”

Lucia stretched her legs and put her feet in his lap. Leonardo took them in his hands. It seemed to him the first such beautiful thing he had done for many years.

As Christmas approached it got colder and the earth froze. In the morning the sky would be clear, but in the afternoon slow clouds without distinct outlines would be drawn down from the north by the dusk. By nightfall they would have taken over the sky. This raised the temperature a few degrees, making it possible to sit on the veranda and watch a great, unbroken black cloth descend beyond the fence. During the night, though, no wind could be felt; the clouds would disappear and by morning the ground would be covered with frost. The sky, before the sun had fully risen, would reflect this pure white as flocks of large birds headed south.

Leonardo would be the first to wake. Putting on his slippers he would take Bauschan as far as the edge of the vineyard and bend to study the tiny crystals that looked as if they had been set there by an army of watchmakers. While the dog raised his leg against the fence, Leonardo thought of cathedrals, illuminated books, and other products of limitless and patient intelligence, asking himself whether anyone would ever again be able to devote himself to such laborious but inessential work. There had been a time when he had felt himself to be one of those who believed in art for art’s sake. Only such people would ever understand such things: a simple piece of wood cannot know why nails and hairpins leap toward a magnet.

When Bauschan had finished his patrol they would go back into the house and Leonardo would return to the book he had fallen asleep over the evening before. He would be able to read for a good two hours or so before Lucia emerged from her room. It was good that she and Alberto both slept late at this time when there was nothing special to do. Sometimes they managed to get Alberto to the river before lunch, where he would play with pieces of wood carried on the flooding river, throwing them back into the icy water in the hope that Bauschan would retrieve them. But the dog would not listen to the boy and never came nearer to him than a meter or so, as if by some form of intuition or foresight.

Alberto was tall for his age, but even so his head seemed exceptionally large.

His face was pale and covered with small freckles, and, like his gray adult eyes, was in no sense naïve. His whole personality seemed constructed around his eyes, as if to protect and mask them. His auburn hair had grown in the weeks since he had arrived and was now down to his shoulders. He had long bones, to which his flesh seemed to stick like paper, and it was easy to guess that he would be a tall man. But at the moment his walk and his hands were awkward and clumsy.

Lucia often threatened to leave him on his own and take away his video game if he didn’t come with them to the little church. Alberto said he did not care and that he would either stay where he was or go home. Leonardo stood aside to let them argue it out. The thrust and parry would last about ten minutes; a conflict whose rules, controls, and counterbalances were well tested. Usually Lucia had the best of it and Alberto would follow them along the lane in resentful silence.

When they got to the church, Leonardo and Lucia would lean against the low wall and watch the hills disappearing all around while Alberto would wander among the graves in the little cemetery. When it was time to go they would usually find him staring at the tombs of those who had died in Russia. Leonardo had told him about that interminable retreat in the snow and how so many had died of cold and hunger, while Alberto, impressed by the size of the massacre, constantly demanded more details. It was the only time he would ever approach Leonardo; otherwise he kept himself to himself and avoided close contact even with his sister. He had never once had a bath since his arrival. Sometimes the other two heard him running the water and apparently having a shower, but they both doubted it was really happening. There was a shadow around his neck and his hair had become dark with dirt. He always wore the same clothes and boots. Despite the fact that Alessandra had left two suitcases full of suits, socks, shoes, shampoo, bubble bath, bathrobes, slippers, tubes of toothpaste, soap, and a leather briefcase that Leonardo had not seen again, but which presumably contained their permits and some money.

They would spend the rest of the day at home. Sometimes Leonardo would go out to look for firewood, or to exchange a few words with Adele and buy some honey from her. At such times he would leave the children on their own but never for more than an hour.

Once a week he would go into the village to buy bread, a couple of small cans of food, and some pasta and tomato sauce. Apart from milk and cheese this was all that was available; meat had become very expensive and fish could not be found at all, even frozen. The only shops still open were Norina’s grocery store and the bar. The pharmacist had moved all his medicine to his home, where he was available to customers every morning between ten and midday. The proprietors of the shoe shop and the hairdresser had done the same. The village streets were fragrant with the smell of burned wood and even though the dustcart no longer operated, the garbage cans were empty. Cars were hardly ever heard and the only voices came from the church during services or from the bar, where the circle of regulars had grown since hardly anyone now had any work, agricultural or otherwise. Conversations tended to be brief and nearly always ended in silences full of questions. Only ersatz coffee was now served; the real thing had run out. And despite the fact that it was nearly Christmas, no one had put up decorations.

For Christmas Eve they asked Adele and Sebastiano to come over.

They arrived with five eggs, a pan, a basket of vegetables, and a large parcel. The table had been laid with care and a half candle was burning in the middle of it.

While waiting for the rabbit and potatoes to heat up on the stove, they dipped the raw vegetables in the last of the olive oil. From now on they would have to make do with other edible oils. As they ate, Adele told a story from when she was a girl, of a hornbeam growing near their house that her father had wanted cut down to make room for a shed for the tractor. One evening while she was feeding the chickens, the tree had told her it was ready to go, but only if moved to a precise point that it indicated. That evening Adele explained this to her father but he told her that the next day the builders would come, the tree would be cut down, and the shed for the tractor would be built. That was all there was to it.

But the following morning her father seemed less sure of himself. At breakfast he looked exhausted, as if he had had no sleep.

“I had a bad dream last night,” he told his daughter.

Adele had then interpreted the dream for him in detail as if she had dreamed it herself, and her father had lowered his eyes in shame because it was not the first time he had put his daughter’s talent to the test. When the builders arrived, Adele showed them the place they must move the tree to, and without asking too many questions they got to work. That very night, with the leaves of the tree rustling outside the window, Adele’s father had dreamed of a blackbird whistling a tune and the next morning, beside his cup, he found a black feather that his daughter had left for him before going to work.

Several times, Leonardo surprised Alberto and Sebastiano staring solemnly at each other while Adele was speaking, as if something had happened between them that the others were not aware of.

After dinner, Adele made a zabaione that turned out rather bitter because she had to use Fernet rather than Marsala, but they ate it all the same, and then unwrapped the presents.

Leonardo gave Lucia an edition of the Odyssey that had been printed in Florence in 1716. For Alberto his first thought had been a book by Salgàri, then, thinking he would not have much use for it, he had added a small box of tools with a little tube of glue for woodwork, pincers, hammer, pliers, nails, some oakum for trimming, and two batteries found in Elio’s shop. The idea was that Alberto could use this to build something. He gave Adele a book of gems of Islamic wisdom given to him many years before by a friend who translated from Arabic. Adele gave three knitted scarfs and balsamic drops for coughs and sinusitis and to discourage lice. Sebastiano gave no presents but got a cap from Leonardo, which turned out to be rather too tight. Lucia gave Leonardo a collection of ten poems written in her own hand and bound in a firm cardboard cover cut from a box of detergent.

A little before midnight, Adele and Sebastiano went into the village to Mass; by now Alberto had been in his room for some time. Lucia and Leonardo decided to have herb tea on the veranda. The sky was overcast, but if you stared at it for long enough you could sense the moon’s path behind the clouds. The cold was very dry.

They did not feel like discussing what the future might or might not hold, so they simply listed little events that can brighten a day. Unimportant things, just to be able to share the sound of their own voices in the darkness. To Leonardo, Lucia’s voice sounded like the swish of water in a metal basin.

It was very late when Lucia said she was sleepy, and it would have been entirely natural if before going in she had bent to kiss her father goodnight on his cheek, but she did not do so.

Left alone, Leonardo was touched by the memory of mornings when he had woken in the great double bed at Via B. to hear Lucia breathing beside him. Holidays when her nursery had been closed and Alessandra had already gone off to some engagement, and the light was pouring serenely through the shutters and projecting oval shapes throughout the room. At such times he had liked to lock his hands behind his head and stare up at the chandelier, immersing himself in the story he was writing at the time: the characters, the course of events, the places where they lived, and the things that were making them happy or sad. At such times he felt he understood the pleasure a horse must feel when given a huge field to roam in, with the grass tickling its stomach and nothing to be heard but the beating of its own heart. Reaching out his hand he would touch Lucia’s little calves, as perfect as a ship in a bottle. The little girl’s eyes would be closed and slightly puffed up with sleep. She was four or five years old at the time, and during the night her long hair would have formed little knots that would be troublesome to disentangle.

As he slipped onto the sofa that had become his bed, he thought of this as the happiest of all his memories and asked himself what he would feel if Alessandra’s car came into the courtyard a second time.

Alberto spent the morning making a harpoon by fixing a fork on the end of a stick, and after lunch said he wanted to go down to the river.

Once they had reached the shingle of the bank he spent at least an hour trying to spear a trout darting about in the middle of the riverbed, where a strip of water was flowing, gentle and dark, through the ice. Leonardo and Lucia, sitting on a large smooth rock, discussed Achilles and Aeneas. Leonardo had once read an essay that maintained that Aeneas had been the first epic hero to hesitate before killing an enemy, the first to see death as a subjective choice and not as an action of destiny like an eruption or a conception. Alberto launched his harpoon with a cry that sounded like a twice-repeated German word. On the other side of the river, Bauschan was inspecting the edge of the forest. When Alberto got tired, Lucia asked him if he would like to go up to the little church to see if any animal had been digging up the bones of the dead.

It was after three by the time they reached the cemetery, where they sat on the low wall enjoying the weak sun on their faces and on their gloveless hands. Alberto asked Leonardo to repeat the story of the Alpine troops preserved in the ossuary. He then asked a few questions about the Aztecs and cruel things done in antiquity. A Nordic fluorescence lit the sky while an insubstantial mist oscillated in little waves lower down.

It was not easy to climb back up the vineyard below the house: the rising temperature had turned the earth to sticky mud.

As they struggled up the final stretch, Leonardo noticed the veranda door was ajar. He tried to remember whether he had been the last to come out, then stopped and summoned Bauschan in a whisper of a kind one might have used to attract the attention of a relative at the other end of a bed as one kept watch beside a dead body: neither a whistle nor a word but sharing the quality of both.

“What is it?” Lucia said.

Leonardo beckoned the others, then bent over and followed the line of vines to his right. When he came to where the briers were thicker, he knelt down and the children did the same.

A young man with his hair combed in a curious quiff was coming out of the house carrying a bag of food and a bag of clothes. He went down the steps and disappeared around the corner. They heard the door of a car open and close.

“They’re stealing our things!” Alberto said.

The man reappeared. He was in a leather motorcycle jacket of the type with showy padding on the elbows and back. This made him look hunchbacked, which he was not, even if something about his body and legs suggested rickets. As he climbed the steps a woman in a hat came out of the veranda and offered him the bottle of Fernet that Leonardo had opened for the Christmas zabaione. They talked for a minute or two, passing the bottle back and forth between them; when it was empty, the man threw it into an armchair and they went back into the house.

“You’ve got to do something!” Alberto said.

Leonardo merely held Bauschan close and kept his eyes fixed on the house. Alberto, a few centimeters away, stared at his pale, thin, well-shaved face.

“Let’s go and call someone,” he said, pulling Leonardo by the jacket.

“No!” Leonardo said. “Let’s wait for them to go.”

“But they’ve taken over the house!”

“Shut up!” Lucia said.

By the time the door opened again the church clock had long since struck four and the sun had set behind the mountains. A flat, almost rosy haze had shut off the sky to the north. Two men and the woman brought out bags and suitcases. The older man was wearing Leonardo’s camelhair coat and leather gloves. His hair was an unnatural gray as though ash had fallen on his head. The plump young woman at his side was in a T-shirt. Under her arm was Lucia’s vanity case and a bag containing a packet of biscuits and a bottle of wine. The younger man, the one in the biker jacket, was carrying the stereo. They went around to the back of the house. Leonardo and the children heard the sound of an approaching engine and a few seconds later a gray car slipped through the gate and disappeared behind the mulberry trees skirting the road.

They stayed kneeling in the mud for another minute or two, then Leonardo released Bauschan. The dog moved a few meters away and urinated at length, at the same time giving Leonardo an afflicted look as if unsure whether he had passed whatever test he had been set.

“Bravo, Bauschan,” Leonardo said to reassure him.

Every drawer in the kitchen had been pulled out and turned over on the floor. Leonardo moved toward the table where the intruders had left a pan covered with tomato sauce, a bottle of coffee liqueur, and a few eggshells; then he turned toward Lucia, who had stayed close to the door. He stared at the plates, cutlery and CDs strewn across the floor amid flour and detergents.

“Let’s tidy up a bit,” he said to her.

She said nothing but wept in silence. Leaning against the doorway, her face at a slight angle, she was like a seventeenth-century Madonna with skin as impalpable as moonlight yet enthralling the viewer’s gaze. Behind her, Alberto was holding back Bauschan so he would not cut his paws on the broken glass.

Going down the corridor, Leonardo glanced into the bathroom: among the bottles and containers emptied at random he thought he could also see plaster rubble, but did not go in to check. In the bedroom there was a suffocating smell of urine, and the clothes the raiders had not taken away were lying slashed and piled up in a corner in a many-colored mountain someone must have pissed on.

“What would they have done if we’d been here?” Lucia asked, looking into the room.

Leonardo noticed the bedcover was stained with blood. Not a large patch with sharp contours, but more as if something had been rubbed against it. He said nothing but opened the window and then went to Lucia and gave her a hug.

“Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll sort it out.”

They were careful not to tread on the small eighteenth-century maps lying on the corridor floor among fragments of frame and glass. In the kitchen Bauschan was licking something. Leonardo lifted the dog’s head to check what it was but realizing it was peanut butter, let him continue. Alberto was neither there nor on the veranda.

Leonardo found him in the studio with his hands behind his back. He was looking through the window, toward the vineyard and hillside, now indistinguishable in the dusk.

“All OK?” he asked.

Alberto went on staring at whatever he was looking at. There was a terrible stench in the room. Someone had defecated on the desk and scattered Leonardo’s collection of letters over the floor. The walls were stained with the bloody imprints of hands that had taken on the color of the brickwork.

The woman was menstruating, Leonardo thought, and she must have coupled with one man in the bed and with the other here against the wall.

Such thoughts slipping so easily into his mind frightened him. A year ago such stains would have made him think of Basquiat’s paintings or the caves of Lascaux. A year ago such an image of entwined bodies would never have sprung so vividly and realistically into his mind. And he would never have thought of words like “menstruation” and “coupled” to describe it. Perhaps this was what barbarism was, he thought: a new vocabulary gradually taking over with new images. The first word was the Trojan horse. Which polluted the well and reproduced itself. Sickness. Cholera.

He looked at Alberto and gave him a smile.

“Let’s go out,” he said.

The boy took a few paces toward the door as if to do so but instead stepped up to Leonardo and unleashed a punch at the base of his stomach.

Leonardo doubled over in pain and Alberto punched him again, this time on the nose and in the left eye. During the few seconds this took neither of them uttered a sound, then Alberto left the room.

Leonardo prostrated himself on the floor like a beggar about to start his day’s work.

His testicles were throbbing and pain was spreading through his whole body. Even his buttocks had gone rigid, perhaps from some sort of muscular contraction, and he could not breathe because his whole body seemed to have petrified around the pain. His first breath was like the first breath taken after birth and he imagined it must have been taken with equal desperation. He studied his slightly trembling hands. Like the hands of a pianist told that from now on every piano will be destroyed and he will need his hands to extract all his food from fields that until then had simply been somewhere to walk while thinking out a more subtle interpretation of a prelude by Chopin.

No living creature had ever before deliberately hit him to cause pain; he had never fought as a child and his parents had never slapped him to punish him. Now, at fifty-three, he had been called to account and found wanting.

He could hear Lucia in the kitchen telling Bauschan not to do something, and then her footsteps came in his direction. When Leonardo tried to stand he was stopped by a sharp pain in his testicles.

“Are you looking for something?” Lucia said.

Without turning he moved a few of the pieces of paper on the floor. A drop of blood fell on one.

“Something I wrote.”

“Would you like me to help you?”

“No. Stay with Alberto.”

“They’ve taken his electronic game.”

Leonardo nodded without looking up from the floor.

“Wait outside, both of you. Take Bauschan with you.”

There was no sound of the girl’s shoes moving. Leonardo began rummaging among his papers again. Blood was pouring from his nose and he realized his eyes were full of tears.

“Papa?” said the girl after a little.

“Yes.”

“They’ve taken all the sanitary napkins.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll find some more.”

“But it’s difficult!”

“We’ll find some, I promise, now please go away. I’m trying to do a bit of tidying.”

Leonardo heard her footsteps move into the living room. When he was certain he was alone he took his handkerchief from his pocket and blotted his nose. The box of letters was by the wall. Some had been opened, perhaps in search of money, and then torn up, but most seemed intact. He collected them and put them back in the box together with the torn pieces, then picked the box up and carried it into the kitchen. His nose had stopped bleeding and the pain in his testicles seemed to have dulled and spread into his belly. He could hear the children’s voices in the yard trying to keep the dog outside.

He put the box of letters down on the sofa and took a brush, dustpan, and trash bags from beside the sink. He decided to start with the bathroom.

The fragments of plaster had come from the wall above the toilet. The intruders must have been attracted by a loose tile and, suspecting a secret hiding place, had smashed a few more to uncover it. Finding nothing, they had perhaps defecated in the bathtub out of sheer spite. They had certainly taken razor blades, scissors, the electric shaver, shampoos, the hairdryer, toothpaste, and medicine. Perhaps even more, but with such a mess it was difficult to say.

Leonardo opened the window, swept up the rubble and broken glass from the floor, cleaned the bathtub, and put everything in a plastic bag.

When the bag was full he realized it was too heavy to be lifted without tearing and tried pulling it along the floor, but the pieces of broken glass in the corridor ripped it and its contents came out, getting mixed up with the rest of the filth.

He stood for a minute staring at the part of the kitchen cut off by the door, then turned abruptly and went into the bedroom. Near the upended bedside table he found the keys he was looking for. He picked them up and put them in his pocket.

Hearing the glass door open, Lucia and Alberto turned and Bauschan lifted his head. When Alberto met Leonardo’s eyes he looked away.

“I’ve put a suitcase on the table,” Leonardo said. “Take what you need for the night and put it inside. We’ll come back for the rest tomorrow.”

“Where are we going?” Lucia asked.

“To Elio’s house.”

While the children were getting ready, Leonardo went to his book room. The door had been forced. He went inside with Bauschan and turned on the light. Now that the bookcases had been overturned the room seemed bigger. There was a strong smell of gasoline in the air.

He walked up to the mountain of fallen books in the middle of the room. He had once seen a similar installation in a major museum in New York, though the pile had been crowned with a wax Moses that had an enormous wick coming out of his head.

The jerry can Elio had left for him was lying empty in a corner. Gasoline had been poured over the books, but for some reason the pile had not been set on fire. He told himself he would never know why, and this seemed more seriously disturbing than anything else.

When he closed the door and left the room he knew he would never go in there again. He had eight books under his arm. He could have taken more, but he decided eight was right.

Snow was falling outside when they woke the next morning, and after breakfast with some chamomile Elio’s wife had left in a cupboard, they waited, each in a different room, for the snow to stop so they could go back and collect what had been left in the other house. Lucia had taken over the double bedroom, Alberto the child’s room, and Leonardo the sofa in the kitchen. From the window he could see large, slow snowflakes drifting obliquely down into the square. On the roofs opposite the snow was now as thick as a dictionary. The few passersby on their way to the grocery store would look up at the lighted windows. When they did this Leonardo waved to them. The only sound in the house was the crackling of wood on the kitchen stove.

At midday, as it was still snowing, Leonardo put the chains on the Polar and they drove out of the village. The driver’s side window had been smashed by the thieves, but Leonardo had patched it with an opaque sheet of nylon.

When they got to the house, Leonardo told the children to look especially for food, medicine, and clothes; they would be able to come back for the rest later. To save Alberto from having to go into the rooms with excrement and blood, Leonardo set him to collecting what could still be eaten from the kitchen. The boy made no comment but got to work.

There was no longer any bad smell in the bedroom and studio after a night with the windows open, but the rooms seemed contaminated by something obscurely connected with excess. When he went into them, Leonardo felt dazed, as though just waking from a dream in which he had done something contrary to his usual moral code. The whiteness and orderliness of the countryside outside the windows was confusing. Bauschan, as though aware of Leonardo’s bewilderment, kept close to him.

When the trunk of the Polar was full they went back to Elio’s house, having listed the things they had not found: the computer, the stereo, eggs, biscuits, pasta, vegetable oil, many of the medicines, sheets and blankets, gloves, and scarves. Alberto did not mention his video game and Lucia said nothing about the sanitary napkins. Leonardo made no reference to money.

They entered the storeroom from the back and took only a few minutes to unload what had taken nearly two hours to collect, since Lucia suggested it might be better if they stayed there long enough to sort the stuff out. Leonardo realized she did not want to go back to the house again and said it was a good idea to divide the jobs that needed doing. By the time he went back into the yard the snow had stopped. He decided to take a short walk. The white blanket was soft and dry, the river below him a line of Indian ink.

He walked for half an hour without any particular purpose or in any particular direction. Bauschan stayed a meter or two ahead, diving into the snow and occasionally raising his eyes not to the sky but toward something immediately above the hills. The light seemed to be coming to them through heavy air and appeared exhausted on arrival. There’s a mournful beauty in all this, Leonardo thought, a beauty he should make friends with, since from now on no other friend would be possible.

After another tour of the house, he took a piece of paper, wrote on it where they would now be living, and fastened it to the door with a piece of wire he had found among the ashes of the burned-out store building.

They spent the next day washing, mending, and storing what they had saved. Lucia looked after the clothes, putting them in the washing machine and setting them to dry on the rack before the wood-fired cooking stove. Leonardo sorted out the little food they had rescued and went out to buy more with the money that had happened to be in his pocket when they had gone out for their walk. Alberto took charge of dishes, matches, detergents, and other utensils.

The activity did them good and no one referred all day to what had happened. At lunch they ate pasta with margarine and, for supper, polenta and cheese. Leonardo, who had been wondering whether to hold Alberto to account for his aggressive behavior, finding him more cooperative than usual decided to let it go and treat the whole episode as no more than an attack of nerves. In any case his testicles were hardly hurting any longer and the same could be said for his nose so long as he did not try to blow it.

The only person he told about the incident was Norina, the proprietor of the grocery. She showed no surprise; rather that they should think themselves lucky that they had not been there when the house was raided unlike poor Cesare Gallo, and that it had been irresponsible of Leonardo to keep those kids isolated. Since before Christmas not even the armed patrol had gone out, and everyone had moved to abandoned houses in the center, where they could feel safer. Outsiders, vagabonds, and refugees had taken over the hills and nothing could be done about it any longer. Better to concentrate on defending their homes and shops. Norina knew this because her husband, a former National Guard officer, was responsible for organizing the local guard-duty roster. Two years earlier, when the frontier problem had reached dramatic proportions, he had asked to be recalled to the military despite being more than sixty years of age, but the ministry had simply rejected him with a letter of thanks.

Passing Leonardo a bag of cauliflower across the counter, Norina asked him if he had a gun.

“No,” Leonardo said, “we have no guns.”

“If you’d like one, I think I could arrange it.”

“Thanks, but I think I’d rather not.”

Norina took his money and put the banknotes into the cash register.

“Pay attention to a woman who has never had the advantage of education,” Norina said, pushing his change across the counter. “Please get a gun. It won’t be a waste of money.”

That evening, playing about with the radio, they hit on a station broadcasting fairly recent Italian pop songs interspersed with commercials for furniture manufacturers and department stores that had probably long since gone bankrupt or been plundered. The songs and recorded voices sounded mocking in light of the present situation, but they stopped to listen all the same. Lucia had heated a huge pot of water and taken it into the bathroom to wash her long black hair. Now she was sitting in front of the stove with wet hair down to her shoulders as she listened to those voices from what seemed an unbelievably distant past. Leonardo, also listening, felt an agonizing pang of nostalgia for those superstores, furrier’s shops, and beauticians he had never been to, which had once even opened on Sunday mornings. Some of his writing and teaching colleagues had always been ready to rant furiously against those temples of consumerism while others preferred to see them as phenomena to be monitored, analyzed, and classified. Leonardo had never inclined to either view because he had never held opinions about the matter. On the occasions when he had set foot in any of these places he had never really felt at ease, but the same could be said of his visits to the opera. But he had noticed that no one coming out of any such place was likely to have noticed what its ceiling was like.

“Papa?”

“Yes?”

“Did they take all the money Mamma left for us?”

“Not all of it.”

“How much is left?”

“What I had in my pocket. A bit less than a hundred lire.”

“That’s not much.”

“No. You’re right.”

“And the rest of it?”

“Was in the desk drawer.”

“Not a great place to hide it.”

“I agree.”

The radio played a song in which a man and a woman took turns describing what they could see from their window. They lived in neighboring apartments in the same building but reached by different staircases, so they had never met. They were both looking for love, but were divided by a wall seventeen centimeters thick. The title of the song was “The Seventeen-Centimeter Wall.” It was not very well written, but to Leonardo the idea behind it was attractive. Thinking of the building the two must have lived in, he imagined a concrete parallelepiped shape, like the home of the protagonist in some film Kieślowski had shot for Polish television.

He got up and poured water into a small pan that had been draining in the sink.

“Herb tea?”

Lucia shook her head. Leonardo placed the pan on the wood stove and a few drops of water from its wet base ran sizzling toward the edge of the hot surface.

“You should have something hot before going to bed. Do you good.”

The girl touched a small fragment of bread on the table with her finger. It was rye bread, dark enough to blend in with the doodles on the oilcloth. She turned it around and pushed it away. Her hair was nearly dry.

“We have to leave,” she said. “If we stay here something nasty will happen to us.”

Leonardo took a cup and dropped in an herbal teabag that had already been used more than once. The small jar of honey Adele had given them was half empty. He let a few drops slip into the cup and put the top back on the jar.

“We have enough money to last a few months,” he said, sitting down, “and things are bound to be better in the spring.”

“Don’t be stupid,” the girl said sharply. “Nothing will be better at all.”

Bauschan half opened one eye and looked at them as they faced each other across the table. The stove crackled.

“I’m sorry,” Lucia said.

“It’s all right.”

“No, really, I didn’t mean that.”

Leonardo smiled to show it was not important. He lifted the cup to his lips and took two small sips.

“We don’t have enough gasoline to get to Switzerland,” he said.

“We can buy some.”

“We don’t have enough money for that.”

Lucia took the little piece of bread on another circuit, bringing it back to the place where she had first found it.

“There was some money with the permits too. I hid it and they didn’t find it.”

Leonardo watched the steam rising from the big green mug in his hands. It must have been the mug Elio’s young son drank his milk from in the mornings. On it was the logo of a popular amusement park; until recently you could get there and back in a day.

“Are you angry?” Lucia said.

“Why should I be?”

“Maybe I’ve said something to make you cross.”

Leonardo shook his head. “You’ve been really clever.”

Lucia crushed the fragment of black bread against the table, dividing it into three bits of different sizes. Two months of housework had strengthened her shoulders and little veins had appeared on the backs of her hands.

“Papa?”

“Yes?”

“I’d like to ask you something.”

“Go on.”

“You won’t be angry?”

“No.”

Lucia shifted all her hair to her right shoulder. It was soft and shiny.

“When that girl denounced you, why didn’t you defend yourself? Why didn’t you tell people she’d set the whole thing up to blackmail you? Then maybe you and Mamma would have stayed together.”

Leonardo looked away from his daughter’s black eyes. Outside the window the snow had begun falling again.

“I didn’t want her to suffer.”

“Who?”

“The girl.”

Lucia looked at him as one might look at something whose very existence one doubts even though one has it before one’s eyes, then she looked down at the divided fragment of black bread, and wept. Leonardo watched her for a long time and noticed that she did not dry her tears. But when she had stopped weeping, the black of her eyes was very pure, like a bucketful of petroleum that could have mirrored the sky.

“Feeling better now?” Leonardo said.

She nodded, pulled a handkerchief from her pocket, and blew her nose.

“I’ve got to have some sanitary napkins,” she said. “In a day or two I’m going to need them.”

Achille Conterno was buried on the morning of the last day of the year. He had been ninety-four years old and lived alone in a house five hundred meters from the square, but because of the diabetes that afflicted his feet, he had not been out for months. His son and daughter had left at the end of the summer, but he had refused to go with them. They had asked some cousins to look after him, but these people had never been seen in the village.

The person who found Conterno had been Gregorio of the public weights and measures office. Suspicious of the lack of smoke from his chimney, he had gone to pay Conterno a visit and found the door locked. After calling him and getting no answer, Gregorio had gone to find a jimmy, and when he forced the door together with Felice Gallo and Mariano Occelli, they found Achille lying under the covers on his bed with his eyes closed and his cap on his head, exactly as he must have fallen asleep a couple of nights before. The three decided he must have died of cold. In fact there was not a trace of furniture in the rooms and even the matchboard wainscoting had been stripped off and burned in the stove; all that was left was an old table too tough to be broken into pieces.

The service was short. The church had not been heated for many months and everyone was numb with cold, forcing them to keep shifting their weight from one leg to the other. In his homily, Don Piero reminded them that in these difficult times everyone must gather around the church as a center both spiritual and physical, giving help as well as expecting to receive it. He also noted that soon the last batteries for the church clock would be used up, and that without the clock in the tower everyone would be plunged like wild beasts and dumb animals into a world of approximate time divisible only into day and night. Most people were aware of a hidden agenda in his sermon but no one felt like trying to figure out what, and for the moment even Don Piero seemed to prefer to pass over the details.

Four men lifted the coffin and carried it down the nave to Mariano’s pick-up truck, which was waiting on the church forecourt, and then a good half of the fifty-three mourners Leonardo had counted in the church made their way to the cemetery.

Mariano’s vehicle was the only one in the village big enough to carry a coffin. It had already been used for Cesare Gallo’s burial and also for removing the bodies of the two outsiders to the forest, where they had been buried in a place known only to the four men who dug the grave. When Leonardo looked at it he was reminded of the hearse in Ottavio’s yard and remembered that before leaving Ottavio had repainted it as best he could and had loaded it up with his property. Leonardo had not seen him since the beginning of November when he had come to say he was going, and to leave him a Toma cheese and some eggs. He had also asked Leonardo that day if he would like to buy one of his cows, but when Leonardo politely declined, he said it didn’t matter because two had died and he had slaughtered two more, and he was discussing terms with a dairy for the others. Before leaving he shook Leonardo’s hand and told him his daughter really was pregnant, and that things were back to normal with his wife, so Leonardo shouldn’t worry about the planes.

At the cemetery Don Piero pronounced a final blessing over the body and the sexton began to seal the tomb. A light dusting of snow had begun to fall again and the village was barely visible through the low mist.

As the mourners began to disperse, Leonardo decided on Elvira Rocca, a tiny woman of about forty with short hair, with whom he had never exchanged a word. All he knew of her was that she lived with her ancient mother and had taught chemistry at secondary school in A.

He followed her to the lane where she lived and approached her when she was about to put her key in the lock of her gate. Suddenly aware someone was behind her, she jumped, dropping her bunch of keys in the snow. For a moment they stared at each other without moving, as if awaiting the arrival of a third person to explain the situation; then the woman bent down and picked up her keys. When she stood up again she curved her lips in a tentative smile. The large eyes in her small face were a Carthusian gray. Her nose was neither hooked nor bent, but somehow irregular, and her short hair was sticking out from under her cap in a girlish way.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Good morning,” Leonardo replied. “I need to have a word with you.”

“Would you mind if we went in? We’ve already been exposed to so much cold.”

As she opened the door, Leonardo looked at her little green shoes, which had a bit of leather sticking out of them. They were like a travel souvenir or a present from a friend who had been abroad. Her heavy red jacket entirely hid the shape of her body.

They crossed a yard that contained nothing but an empty dog basket and went into the house by a glass door. The room they came into was warm and carefully furnished with a desk, a stove, a sofa, and some books on a low table. On the wall was a list of the elements that had probably been printed early in the twentieth century. There were two windows and a stair leading up to the next floor from the corner on the right. There was a smell of recently cut firewood and medicine. The total effect was restful.

“Make yourself at home,” Elvira said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She disappeared up the stairs. Leonardo heard her footsteps cross the ceiling, stop, and cross again more quietly. He moved a chair up to the table and sat down, unbuttoning his jacket but keeping it on and pushing his wet cap into his pocket so as not to mess up the room. There were four books by Thomas Bernhard on the table.

Strange, he thought.

He had known two other women who read Thomas Bernhard. One had been married to the publisher of nearly all his books, and the other was the agent who represented his novels on the American market. They had been of different ages, one married and one single, one an early-morning whiskey drinker and the other abstemious, but they had been very similar. Both liked to wear waistcoats winter and summer and both loved cold but not lonely places. They were both attractive, but in a way very different from most attractive women. They did not make a man think of sex and sheets or a mountain chalet surrounded by snow, but rather of a strip of leather and a freshly painted wall into which no one would dare to hammer a nail. Neither had the slightest vocation for maternity, and no one would have ever dared entrust them with a child even for a few minutes. Both found tea poisonous and held the muscles of their necks in a constant state of tension, but they slept very well and to a late hour.

Considering their professions it was hardly surprising that both often talked of books, and when they did the conversation would turn to Thomas Bernhard. Leonardo’s impression when he first met Danielle, years after he first came to know Kate, was that both women had first read Bernhard at a time in their lives when they were looking for a reason to hate the world. Yet they were too intelligent to hate at random: they needed a plan, a rule, some way of avoiding the risk of missing something they should detest. Bernhard spared nothing. There had been a time when Leonardo had read him eagerly, just as one might marvel from a safe distance at a huge vortex produced by marine currents. For the two women it had been different; they had dived into the vortex and allowed it to throw them around so long as it suited them. He had often heard one or the other make an innocuous comment on a journalist, on the color of a fitted carpet or on food made with soy, only to develop it into a long and deeply thoughtful monologue against journalism as a profession, fitted carpets as a choice of furnishing, or healthy food in general.

He had only seen them together once, when he had been awarded a prize in Argentina, followed by a celebratory dinner at the embassy. The two women sniffed each other out among the two hundred guests and spent the whole evening deep in conversation against a background of gloomy tapestry, grabbing a succession of martinis and nonalcoholic fruit juices, respectively, all delivered by waiters in topaz-colored livery. Seeing the two together against that eighteenth-century background had made Leonardo think of two halberds.

“Here I am,” Elvira said, coming down the stairs.

She had changed into a hand-knitted wool sweater. Without a hat her face looked longer, her nose less prominent. Her short hair had been combed with a part.

“Would you like some tea?”

“Thank you, but I shall only take up a few minutes of your time.”

“How strange you should come here today of all days. I’ve so often seen you in the village and wanted to talk to you about your books.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Elvira sat down at the end of the table.

“I imagined your coming back here must have been some sort of voluntary exile, and that you wouldn’t want to talk about your earlier life.”

Leonardo looked at the covers of the books on the table. They were very early editions with images of the Viennese Secessionists on them. It was warm in the room, but the stove seemed to have gone out and the open fire had not been lit.

“Why did you say ‘today of all days’?” he asked.

“In what sense?”

“You said it was strange that I came here today of all days.”

“Did I say that?”

“I think so.”

Elvira shrugged.

“Maybe I was referring to the fact that I can’t even offer you coffee, and that once we could have said things like ‘I’ve been to T. to see this exhibition or to hear that concert’ while now we can’t. Are you sure you won’t have some tea? I’d be happy to make it.”

“Thank you, but I must get home soon.”

Elvira looked at the clock on the wall. It had stopped. She smiled and waved a hand in the air as if to say “I’m always making that mistake.” She touched one of the books on the table.

“I expect you like Bernhard,” she said.

“I do.”

She picked up the book and looked at the misty countryside on the cover.

“It’s like watching a volcano erupt, don’t you think? It can be a wonderful sight, but it all depends how near you are to it.”

Leonardo nodded. Elvira put the book down on top of the others and smiled.

“I’m wasting your time with my chatter. I think there was something you wanted to say to me?”

Leonardo shook his head.

“Just something to do with my daughter. Two weeks ago our house was burglarized. My daughter’s sixteen and…”

“There’s a boy there with you too, isn’t there?”

“Yes, my ex-wife’s stepson. His name’s Alberto.”

“And your daughter’s?”

“Lucia.”

“Such a lovely name. So luminous.”

Leonardo nodded and opened his mouth to resume his prepared speech, then stopped. On the wall behind the woman, at the point where the stovepipe entered the chimney, a small brass ring had been fixed to seal the opening. Most people would have been satisfied with silicon or stucco, but this woman had thought of something more precise and attractive, a little piece of work wrought with devoted attention that must have taken some time to create. The ring had been fixed in place with care, avoiding rough incisions or dents. Leonardo was sure Elvira had done it because everything in the room was as simple and exactly appropriate as she was herself.

“My wife left the children here,” he said. “She should have been back within a week, but by now two months have passed.”

The woman looked at him closely with peaceful eyes. She had three small moles on her face, but if he had closed his eyes Leonardo would not have been able to say exactly where they were.

“The children must be worried,” she said.

“Extremely.”

“And you?”

“I used to spend most of my time reading; now I’ve left my books in an old cellar where the mice will eat them and I don’t give a damn. I suppose that means I’m worried.”

The woman smiled.

“Maybe,” she said. “Still, I think I’ve guessed why you’ve come.”

Leonardo pushed back his hair, which had begun sticking to his forehead as it dried.

“Really?”

“Yes. Come with me.”

There was a door under the stairs that Leonardo had not noticed. The woman walked straight through it while he had to bend low. Strip lights came on revealing a garage with a small blue car in it. It was very clean and almost new. There was also an old wardrobe and a couple of shelves on the wall with a neat collection of jam jars and vegetables preserved in oil.

Elvira took a green package out of the wardrobe. It was one of many such packages, carefully stacked to make full use of the interior.

“Maybe not quite what your daughter has in mind, but in an emergency they’ll do.”

Leonardo looked at the package: large sanitary underpants for adults.

“Take as many as you like. For years the health authority supplied us with a packet a week.”

“Won’t your mother need them?”

“My mother will die today,” the woman said, “or at the very latest tomorrow.”

Leonardo noticed how light the package was in his hands.

“I’m so sorry. I’ve disturbed you at a bad time.”

Elvira shook her head. She seemed incapable of looking solemn for long.

“My mother’s been ill for a very long time,” she said. “There used to be a drug that helped her, but now it can’t be found. We said good-bye ages ago, before she fell into a coma. I’ll get you a bag to put the packets in.”

Leonardo, left on his own, looked at the shiny, well-kept car. He could hear piano music from the living room. Elvira came back with two large plastic bags. They managed to get three packs into each bag.

“Is that Glenn Gould?” Leonardo asked.

“Yes,” the woman answered. “Do you like it?”

“Very much.”

“It seemed to me that the Variations would be the right music to play while rereading Bernhard. My mother loves them too.”

Elvira had thrust her hands into the pockets of her pants, which were velvet and stuck closely to her thighs and buttocks, revealing the musculature of a walker. She had high breasts.

“I’ll be leaving now,” Leonardo said, embarrassed by what he was noticing.

In the courtyard they stopped in front of the gate that opened on to the lane. Leonardo put on his cap. The falling snow was very light, but he could feel it touch his cheeks. Elvira was in a sweater. The heavy sky could hardly hide the luminosity of midday.

“Thank you so much,” Leonardo said, “and again, excuse me for coming at such a time.”

Elvira shook her head.

“I’m glad you came. Now we know each other, we’ll be able to meet for a chat sometimes.”

“Yes.”

Before he went into Elio’s house, Leonardo stopped to look at the backdrop of houses covered in white snow around the square. The silent, motionless village seemed beautiful in a way that only seems possible for things that have nothing to do with humankind.

In the evening, when he was sure the children were asleep, Leonardo went into the lumber room and took the box of letters out of his suitcase.

He spent half an hour sorting them according to the dates on their postmarks. Those he had mailed before the trial were missing, evidently because the lawyers had advised Clara to keep them as evidence to be produced in court. Even so, those returned to him from the first year were more than a hundred. One every three days. During the second year they had diminished to seventy or so, and in the last few years to not much more than twenty.

When he had finished doing this he put a log in the stove and boiled some water. He drank his herb tea leaning against the window. The new year had arrived, but he had heard no celebrations nor seen any movement in the village: only two people crossing the square with a saucepan at dinnertime. He had completely given up his plan to go and see Adele. The children had gone to bed early. Alberto had not gone out at all since they moved to the new house while Lucia limited herself to accompanying him on the short walks he took to attend to Bauschan’s needs.

Leonardo looked at the letters spread over the table. The idea of reading them again had never previously occurred to him, but since leaving Elvira’s house he had thought of nothing else.

He remembered a film he had seen many years before when he was a member of a jury at a festival. It had told the story of a widow who kept the urn containing her husband’s ashes on her living room table, the same place as where she sat and read, watched television, chattered with her women friends, or made love with the elderly gardener. One day, for no particular reason, she had been seized by the idea of opening the urn and looking inside. She realized there was something not quite right in this idea and for the whole hour and a half of the film was torn between her urge to open the urn and the obscure inhibitions that held her back. In the end, giving in to temptation, she discovered that her grandchildren had long been using the urn as somewhere to hide the aniseed lollipops she gave them every Sunday.

The film director who headed the jury, ignoring Leonardo’s positive vote, had dismissed the film as “slight.” The winning entry had been a Spanish film about a seventeen-year-old drug pusher who, to escape some loan sharks, flees to Tierra del Fuego, where he climbs a mountain and starts a small ranch in the middle of nowhere. He marries a woman older than himself with only one leg and decides to import a couple of yaks from Nepal. To pay for his journey to go and fetch them he mortgages the ranch and bets the parish priest of a nearby village that he can succeed in bringing two such animals all that way, keep them alive, and, above all, get them to reproduce. In the end the boy wins. Throughout the film Leonardo had asked himself how anyone could live for years in Tierra del Fuego and then walk on the glaciers of Nepal in one single pair of sneakers.

By the time he put the last envelope back in the box the church clock had just struck four. He went into the bathroom and spent a long time in the silence of the night on the toilet without managing to defecate, which is what he had thought he wanted to do. He was ashamed and surprised. He had always scoffed at other people’s faith, both faith in reason and faith in the hereafter, and then like all the faithful had gone for years to the same place to recite the same litany to a God who did not want to listen to him or even hear him out. Boredom was what he had experienced rereading those letters. The same boredom as he felt faced with the genealogies of Old Testament prophets, or people who mistake persistence for devotion and blindness for perseverance.

When he came out of the bathroom, the dog looked at him as if to ask if he was feeling well.

“Let’s go out,” Leonardo told him. “A little fresh air will do us both good.”

They walked around the square. Under the moon the open space looked like a new sheet, and both were afraid of soiling it. The sky, furrowed with great storm clouds, bore no relation to the season.

A figure appeared at the corner of the square. Leonardo recognized Adele’s walk and called the dog to stop his barking. The woman approached, cutting across the whiteness of the square. When she was near, Bauschan ran to sniff her feet, which always smelled of chickens, dog, and camphor. Her cheeks were red with cold and she wiped a drip off her nose with her sleeve.

“I like coming into the village at night,” she said with such simplicity that Leonardo found nothing strange in it.

For a while they talked of the cold and about one of Adele’s hens that was laying eggs with brown yolks. When she had exhausted these topics, she asked Leonardo if he was tired or sleepy. Leonardo said no.

“Good,” Adele said, “because I’ve got important things to say to you that I won’t be able to repeat.”

Leonardo kept his gaze on her calm eyes.

“You must get strong shoes and warm clothes for yourself and the children, because you’re going to have to do a lot of walking and it’s going to be very cold.”

Leonardo looked at the surface of the snow, which the night frost had turned to crystal. A bird bigger than a sparrow, but smaller than a dove, was sitting on a cable above them. The bulk of the church rose above the roofs, both imposing and somehow ephemeral.

“As soon as the roads are clear I’m taking them to Switzerland.”

Adele shook her head.

“Get yourself good shoes, you won’t get far with the ones you’re wearing now. And watch that boy.”

Leonardo realized his hands were numb with cold. He put them in his pockets.

“Why should I watch him?”

Under the high black clouds Adele looked like a small talisman carved in wood.

“Because there’s evil in him.”

He dreamed he was climbing the stairs to his old apartment. Not his home with Alessandra, but where he had lived as a student, in the mansard roof of a building without an elevator; an apartment complex from the 1970s overlooking the river and a factory that made laboratory instruments.

Even so, as he climbed the stairs, he had known it was Alessandra and Lucia he would find at home waiting for him. In fact, in his bag he had a present for the little girl who would be four the next day: a book in Dutch. He had bought it in Nijmegen, where he had gone for a conference on Dostoevsky and where he had skated on a frozen river that linked seven towns that participated in a competition. This contest was eagerly awaited all year long, as used to be the case with the Palio of Siena and the Pamplona bull run. He also seemed to have spent several nights with a blond woman with a thin body and big buttocks, but he could not be certain this had happened even though he could smell her sex when he sniffed his fingers, a scent unpleasant yet also attractive, like a shirt spread out to dry in a lightless place. None of this bothered him; that evening, after putting the child to bed, he would talk to Alessandra. For some days she would refuse to make love, but that would be an entirely reasonable price for casting light on the matter, and he would pay it.

The stairwell was cold and badly lit, but he knew every step of the way and was not at all disturbed by the fact that he had already been climbing for several hours. Rather, he felt rested and free from anxiety, entirely confident that he would very soon arrive at the entrance to his home, a door like all the others, with no name on the bell, no umbrella stand, and no doormat. An anonymous door facing the landing, identical to the hundreds of others he had already passed, but he would recognize it.

For this reason he was not disturbed by the cold air rising from below and bringing with it small dried leaves, or by the man he could see behind a bathroom window on each landing. As he passed the window, the man, busy shaving or engaged in some sort of irremediable action, would turn and fix infinitely tired eyes on him. Leonardo knew that he was shaving with his left hand because he had just come back from a war in which he had lost both his right hand and a childhood friend. He had himself buried his friend, digging the grave with his only remaining hand. He had dug it at the foot of a hill from where his friend would have been able to see a group of log cabins around a mill. Then Leonardo climbed on and forgot everything until he reached the next landing, where a man shaving with his left hand was waiting for him behind a bathroom window. Hearing him climbing the stairs the man turned and looked at him with infinitely tired eyes. Every time Leonardo looked away to continue climbing the stairs it occurred to him that there was nothing about the man that reminded him of his own father, though it was almost certainly him.

He was awoken by Lucia calling from the kitchen.

“What is it?” he asked without pushing back the bedclothes.

She did not answer. He dressed in a hurry and, without putting on his socks, came out into the corridor.

“What is it?” he said again, entering the kitchen.

“They’ve gone into the grocery shop.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Four of them.”

He went to join Lucia at the window. The snow on the square was opaque and still. It must have been nearly noon. The only signs of life were a few smoking chimneys.

“Are they local people?” he said.

Lucia shook her head. She was staring at the square like a child watching a dying animal, afraid to bat an eyelid for fear of missing the secret of the moment of death. Leonardo raised a hand to smooth his hair, but a shot rang out, stopping him abruptly. Nothing moved in the square.

They heard a second shot, then a third, causing the window to vibrate a few centimeters from their noses with a sound like a fly trapped between the pages of a book. Then four figures hurried from the shop and headed for the road leading out of the village from the far side of the square. They were in heavy jackets and hats, but Leonardo could tell from her walk that one was a woman. They were carrying shopping bags.

By the time Norina’s husband came out on the balcony they had reached the middle of the square. Wearing blue overalls, he watched them struggle through the snow for a few seconds then, as casually as if taking a comb from his pocket to tidy his hair, he raised his rifle and fired.

The first man collapsed face down on top of the bag he had been hugging to his chest. The woman, behind him, tripped over his legs and fell. As she struggled back to her feet, another shot hurled her back a couple of meters. Her hat fell off and long red hair spread like a handkerchief around her face.

Of the two remaining men, one kept running but the other stopped beside the woman. He did not bend over her or pick up any of the things strewn on the ground but just gazed intently at her. When he had enough he put down the bags he had been carrying in both hands and slowly turned back toward the shop. After a few steps he took a pistol from his jacket pocket and began firing at the balcony where Norina’s husband was reloading his rifle. Leonardo saw a spark as one of the bullets hit the rail, but Norina’s husband took no notice. When he had finished reloading, he closed the rifle, pointed it at the man, who was by now some twenty meters away, and fired. The man’s head exploded like a pumpkin hit by a stick and was scattered about, forming a colored semicircle on the snow. His body continued to stand for a moment as if unable to believe what had happened, then it doubled over at the pelvis and fell, burying its neck in the snow. Anyone arriving at that moment would have thought they were in the presence of a penitent who was required by some ritual to spend part of the day meditating with his head buried in snow.

Norina’s husband lowered his rifle and studied the three bodies in the square; they were lying apart in different but equally bizarre positions, like three letters spelling a word. The fourth intruder had vanished, but a few seconds later shots were heard some distance away, then silence. Norina’s husband turned, leaving his wet slippers on the balcony, and went back into the house.

Leonardo looked at Lucia. A thread of saliva had appeared between her open lips and her eyes were still but without tension. He led her to the sofa and made her sit down, stroking her hair until she took a deep breath and started weeping.

“Wait here,” Leonardo said.

Leaving the room, he went toward Alberto’s room at the far end of the corridor. The boy was sitting on his bed staring at the whiteness outside. His window faced the back yard. He did not turn when he heard the door open.

Leonardo called him by name.

The child went on sitting with his back to him, his red shirt making his back look smaller. His hair was unkempt and his hands were resting with their palms upward on his knees. Leonardo looked around the room: covers and clothes in disorder all over the place. It was only then that he noticed Bauschan.

The dog was stretched under the table with a sweater over his head, the sleeves knotted around his neck to prevent him getting it off. Alberto had tied his paws to the legs of the table with string.

“What have you done?” Leonardo said.

No answer.

Leonardo knelt down by the dog and freed his head. No sooner did Bauschan see the light again than he yelped and tried to lick Leonardo’s hands. While untying the dog’s paws Leonardo looked at Alberto and for the first time saw him smile.

Norina’s funeral was delayed to give her husband time to find a coffin. The last one available in the village had been used for Achille Conterno and the only alternative was to make one from whatever wood could be found around the place. But her husband would not hear of it and set out early in the morning for A. in his off-road vehicle.

He came back late in the afternoon. Leonardo heard the car in the square, and getting up from the table where he was peeling potatoes, saw the Land Rover parked in front of the shop door. A large dark wood coffin was sticking out of the open trunk, secured with a couple of elastic cords. It looked big enough for two people.

The next morning the bells rang out and some seventy people gathered at the church to pay their last respects. Leonardo looked for Elvira among them, but she was not there.

Studying the faces, Leonardo realized no children were present. Then he realized he had not seen any for a long time. Where were the young people? It was as if they had disappeared gradually without anyone noticing. The sound of motor scooters, the voices when the coach unloaded them onto the square on their return from school, their crabwise walk, their satchels, their smart clothes, their earphones; all these seemed to be images as far off in time as his own childhood. He felt a small pain between his shoulders and felt he was very close to understanding something that required courage to accept and that offered no return to what had been before.

Realizing the distress it would have caused him to pursue this idea to the very end, he leaned back in the pew, vaguely sleepy. For a few minutes he drifted off into an innocuous beyond, an island in the middle of a river where holidaymakers and weekenders were picnicking in the fields, calling their children to come quickly and eat food they had spread out on checkered cloths. Several rowing boats were moving on the river, which at that point was as slow and still as a lake. The rowers were city men with sleeves rolled up to their elbows. Their companions and friends, female and male, were sitting in the bows looking at the vegetation on the banks and the peaceful activities of the holidaymakers. Several of the women were holding parasols. The voices that reached him were speaking French; French men directing French women and children playing French games. Through the leaves of a willow he glimpsed a car, one of the first, as elegant as an inkstand.

The smell of incense recalled him to the cold church and the seventy tired-looking mourners. Norina’s husband was standing in the front row in his National Guard uniform, with his garnet-red beret, well-polished shoes, and riding breeches, on his chest a medal as big as a breakfast cracker.

When Mass was over, Don Piero asked him to say a few words in memory of his wife. He walked with firm steps to the lectern and declared in a loud clear voice that his wife had been the best companion a man could ever have and he was proud of not having submitted to the crime with bowed head as most people did these days. Even when he lowered his voice to recall their habit of bathing their feet together in the same bowl each evening, he still glared disdainfully at the faces in front of him.

The coffin was so large it took eight men to carry it out of the church.

While the cortège was making its way to the cemetery behind Mariano’s pick-up truck, Leonardo looked up at the windows of their home and recognized Lucia’s pale face behind the curtains. He raised his hand and she waved back.

In the days after the shooting, a veil of silence descended on their gestures, expectations, and fears. They exchanged a few comments about food, about the books Lucia was reading, and about the shower in the bathroom that was about to give up the ghost, but only as a way to avoid talking about what they had seen. Leonardo said nothing about what Alberto had done to Bauschan. They spent most of their time in the kitchen with the stove and radio. They ate what little food they had without complaint, washed themselves and their clothes, kept the fire burning, and slept a little more than strictly necessary.

“We’re dying,” Leonardo told himself, replacing his hands in his pockets as they processed toward the cemetery.

On the way he heard that the evening after the murder there had been a long discussion among the parish priest, Norina’s husband, and the men who had killed the fourth bandit. Don Piero had maintained that the four intruders, though thieves and murderers, were not outsiders, and so a funeral should also be arranged for them; whether anyone attended it or not was another matter. But the others argued that the four should be treated the same as the outsiders shot in November.

Apparently the decisive opinion had been Mariano’s, who had said he was not willing to have his car used to transport the thieves to the cemetery, and if the priest wanted a funeral, then he must bury them in his own garden himself. Faced with this, Don Piero gave way and the four were taken out of the village and buried in the forest before the ground froze at night. Papers had been found in the pockets of one of the men and the woman. They had been husband and wife and from a small village near V. She had been a radiologist, he an artisan. The youngest carried no documents, but was probably their son since he had red hair like his mother. The third man may have been a relative or just someone who had joined their gang. He had no papers, and his face had been disfigured by bullets.

Not much time was spent over prayers at Norina’s interment. It was beginning to snow again and everyone seemed on the point of collapse from exhaustion and hunger. Three men, including her husband, placed a heavy slab of marble over her grave to close it, then her husband added a silver frame with a photograph of her and started walking back to the village followed by the others.

Leonardo spent the afternoon in the kitchen listening to old songs and ads for furniture manufacturers and car dealers on the radio. At about four he heard voices in the square and saw a dozen armed men gathered in front of the shop, all locals. When Norina’s husband came out, they went with him on the road leading to R. and while the light lasted shots could be heard, only ending when dark fell and the group returned. The men went up into the apartment over the shop, and Leonardo could hear drunken singing until late at night.

Next morning the company came out at about ten and again stayed out all day. Leonardo carefully searched through the electronic croaking noises of the radio for a news bulletin, but in the end was forced to admit defeat. For a little he listened to a French station whose programs had nothing to do with what was happening: there was a public phone-in on the suitability or otherwise of having sex with one’s work colleagues: 70 percent thought it would cause tensions and reduce productivity. For lunch they had cauliflower and potatoes. Neither Lucia nor Alberto showed any sign of noticing the explosions that reached them from time to time from the hills, but Lucia got up and switched on the radio, which she had turned off as soon as she came into the kitchen. At the end of the meal they each retired to their own room.

Leonardo had a nap, brushed Bauschan, and put some apples on to cook. While the pan bubbled on the stove giving off a fragrant steam, he reread the whole of Flaubert’s A Simple Heart and felt he was beginning to understand something of the woman’s meekness in the face of pain and sorrow that he had never previously grasped.

That night he was woken by a smell of burning, and going out onto the balcony, which faced north, he saw a huge fire on the plain, possibly in F. or a town of similar size.

In the morning he saw Norina’s husband, rifle on shoulder, head for the hills. But he did not return in the evening.

Those with him on the previous days went out to look for him, but finding no trace, gave up the search. On Monday, in the presence of the priest, they forced open the locked door of the grocery and divided what was left on the shelves among the inhabitants in equal parts.

Leonardo’s share was a packet of biscuits, a savoy cabbage, some mints, some prunes, a cheese past its sell-by date, and some mahogany hair dye. Not seeing Elvira in the line at the grocer’s, he went to the lane where she lived.

They had tea together in the room where they had chatted before. Bernhard’s works were no longer on the table, replaced by several books of poems and a catalog of local nineteenth-century painters. Leonardo asked after her mother. She answered with her usual gentle smile that nothing had changed. They did not discuss the disagreeable events of the last few weeks in the village; Elvira simply admitted that she was aware of them, then they discussed two authors, one American and the other Chilean, that they had both much loved. For half an hour Leonardo talked about these books just as he would once have done when such things were a vital part of his life and the person he then was. As they chattered they ate some of the biscuits that Leonardo had brought and Elvira made a second pot of tea. This time the stove had been lit and a pleasant heat warmed Leonardo’s right side and Elvira’s left; she was wearing a cork-colored sweater and her face looked rather more tired than the week before.

Then they talked about painters and Leonardo, listening to her, became convinced that if he had met her sooner the last seven years of his life would have been brighter. In their rare moments of silence they were caressed by the viola da gamba of Jordi Savall.

Realizing it was getting late, Leonardo revealed the reason for his visit. Elvira said she was sorry, but that she did completely understand his decision. When they kissed each other good-bye on the cheek, Leonardo noticed how soft her skin was and wanted to take her face in his hands, but he resisted the urge.

Alone once more in the street, he started for Adele’s house, but as soon as he was out of the village he stopped. For about ten minutes he looked at the gray plain where leaning towers of black smoke were rising from burning villages and the air was full of tiny fragments of ash. The distant mountains seemed to be looking on with indifference.

After gazing at the mountains for what seemed a short time, but during which darkness fell, he turned on his heel and went back to the village.

For supper he boiled the cabbage and added some spaghetti to the same water, producing a sort of Vietnamese soup that the children claimed they could not eat. But when Lucia tried to put the cheese on the table, he told her to leave it in the fridge.

“We’ll need that tomorrow for the journey.”

They watched him pour out the last spoonfuls of soup. When they realized he had nothing more to say, they dropped their eyes and hurried to finish what was left on their plates.

The only signs of life they saw in the first hour of their journey were smoke from the chimneys of a few houses and a couple of cars heading in the opposite direction. As he approached them, the man driving the first car slowed down to give them a long, calculating look. Leonardo answered by raising a hand in greeting, but the man did not respond and the car vanished in his rearview mirror. In contrast, the second had been an ancient Fiat in metallic paint. Its middle-aged driver could have been a priest, or just a man who loved black pullovers and Korean-style shirts. There was an elderly woman beside him, and a single bed, complete with a mattress and a turquoise quilt, was tied to the baggage rack.

Leonardo often had to slow down and move into the other lane to avoid colliding with cars abandoned on the roadway. There were trucks too, their doors open and stripped completely bare. Some had been set on fire and reduced to black carcasses on which the white snow had settled as if in mockery.

The houses, sheds, and bars lining the main road had open doors and broken windows and looked to have been uninhabited for a long time. It was a cold, overcast day, but an occasional ray of sunlight filtered through the clouds and the rich brown of turned earth could sometimes be seen in the fields.

They had packed the trunk tightly with two suitcases, a box of blankets, the radio, medicine, books, and a bag with provisions to last several days. Leonardo had calculated that if he went no faster than 80 kph they would have enough gas to reach M. Beyond there it would be at least another 200 kilometers, during which he counted on being able to refuel. They would then head for Switzerland. Even though one of their permits was in Alessandra’s name, Leonardo hoped to be able to cross the border with the children. Once in Switzerland, they would go to Basel, where Lucia had the address of some relatives of Alberto’s father. They planned no further ahead than that.

After the ring road at C., they entered the main highway. On their right they passed the old foundry, which had been closed for fifty years already and was now merging perfectly with its surroundings. Alberto, sitting at the back, was gazing at the countryside and ignoring Bauschan curled up at his side.

“Stop!” Alberto shouted suddenly.

“Why?” Lucia said.

“A sheep!”

“Oh, shut up,” Lucia said. “We’ve only just started.”

“You shut up! We must stop, I said.”

Leonardo pulled over, and before the car had completely stopped the boy opened the door and got out. By the time Leonardo and Lucia followed, he and Bauschan had already rushed off, leaving a trail of footprints. The sheep was standing alone in the middle of a field, about a hundred meters from the road. Leonardo studied it from a distance to make sure it was real, then looked back at the main road disappearing toward the city. The city had once been his home and it was a long time since he had seen it, but looking toward it now he felt nothing.

“No one seems to be around,” Lucia said.

Leonardo looked at his daughter, smiled, and nodded. The evening before, he had heard her weeping in her room. When he had come back from the garage, where he had been using new tape to fix the sheet of nylon that served as a car window, the girl was asleep. On her bedside table was a photograph of her mother and a notice for the door to say they had left for Basel and the Ritch family.

“Best not stray too far from the car,” Leonardo said.

Lucia looked right and left as if about to cross a busy road, then jumped over the small ditch and went into the field. Leonardo followed.

In fact, it was not a sheep but a longhaired nanny goat, tied to an irrigation pipe by a cord about three or four meters long. The animal must have been there for some time because she had marked out a neat circle in the snow. Bauschan, stopping outside the circle, contemplated her with a thoughtful air. Alberto had already tried to approach her, but though showing no signs of fear, she kept moving with little jerks to keep out of his reach.

“Why have they tied her up here?” Lucia asked.

Leonardo studied the animal’s black, brown, and white coat. Her long beard looked like tow and her black eyes reflected the fluorescence of the snow. Behind her neck, right under her horns, she had been bitten by some animal, perhaps a small or elderly dog not strong enough to overcome her. Leonardo looked around; the shape of a farm could be seen in the distance. He calculated that it was much further from the farm to them than from them to the car. The surrounding plain, if you excluded the ditch by the road and a line of stumpy and graceless mulberry trees, offered no hiding place.

“We could set her free,” Lucia said.

“What are you talking about?!” Alberto exclaimed.

“You want to leave her tied up here? There isn’t even any grass for her.”

Alberto made a lunge for the goat, which leaped sideways and bleated. Alberto slipped and fell on the mud but immediately got up again, wiping his hands on his trousers. His shirt looked like a sort of short skirt under his jeans jacket.

“We’ve got to kill her,” he said.

Leonardo and Lucia looked at him. There was something adult and cruel in his face.

“Is that supposed to be a joke?” Lucia said.

Alberto held his sister’s gaze.

“We’ll kill her and cook her, like Indians.”

“What Indians?”

“Hunters in the forest.”

“There are no forests here, and we have other things to eat.”

“I don’t want to eat other things, I want the sheep.”

“But if we can’t even catch her…”

“You must help me, we can catch her together.”

“And then?”

“We’ll kill her.”

“Who’ll kill her?”

“Leonardo!”

Leonardo looked at the boy who was staring at him with his upper lip slightly raised. It was the first time he had ever heard Alberto say his name, and it seemed a word full of angles.

“I’m not capable of killing her,” he admitted.

“Not with your hands.”

“Then how?” Lucia asked.

“With a knife.”

“We don’t have a knife.”

“Then we hit her on the head with a stone.”

Lucia took a couple of steps toward her brother.

“You can’t be serious!”

“I could do it, I’m not a bit scared.”

Lucia pushed the boy aside and went toward the pipe where the cord was tied, but before she could get there Alberto flung a handful of earth at her.

“What’s that you’ve thrown at me?”

“Shit!”

“Stop it, or I’ll slap you.”

“Bitch! Black bitch!”

Lucia slapped him. For a few seconds everything was suspended, as if they were at the bottom of a swimming pool filled with formalin. Even the goat stood still and watched with a slightly lowered head, apparently distracted by other thoughts. Then Alberto started running toward the car and after a few steps fell to the ground, thrashing about with his arms and legs.

They ran to him. Lucia knelt down and tried to hold him still and received a kick on the breast that knocked the breath out of her, but she finally managed to calm him, holding him close for several minutes. He was struggling for breath, his face marked with mud. He was not weeping. Leonardo, standing over him, became aware of a warm smell of urine and realized he had pissed himself.

“Come on, we’ll get in the car now,” Lucia said.

The boy allowed himself to be helped up and walked toward the car with his sister.

Leonardo and Bauschan, left behind, looked back at the she-goat. She was exploring the ground with her snout. She could probably tell the field had once been sown with granoturco or maize and hoped to find traces of a cob or two under the mud.

People think it’s a plant the Turks brought us, Leonard mused as he tried to untie the knot restricting the animal, but the name is simply the result of linguistic confusion. In fact granoturco reached us from the Americas, where the English called it “turkey wheat,” i.e., grain suitable for turkeys to eat, but assonance caused the term to be translated into Italian as grano di Turchia, “grain from Turkey.”

This reflection occupied him for the five minutes he needed to untie the tangle of wet cord, then, fingers numb with cold, he returned to the car.

Alberto was stretched on the rear seat; he had changed his trousers and seemed to be asleep. Before starting the car, Leonardo looked once more at the goat; she was exactly where he had left her and seemed to be gazing at the gray sky above the mountains as if waiting for a signal. Her leash was hanging loosely from her neck, like a permanent umbilical cord linking her to the earth.

They filled the car at a service station on the bypass.

Even though there were only two cars in the line, this operation took more than an hour. The cars had to wait in a parking area at the side of the enclosure until a siren and an announcement by a man with a megaphone stationed on top of a small tower called them to the gate.

When it was their turn, the gate opened and they drove into a narrow space closed on three sides. Then the gate shut behind them and the man on the tower ordered them to get out of the car, place their money on the hood, open both hood and trunk, and move back several paces.

Lucia gave Leonardo the banknotes; the man checked them through a telescope, then told the children to stay where they were. Lucia and Alberto put on their jackets. Once they reached an area marked by four yellow stripes, a second gate opened and the Polar was allowed through.

The sum that Leonardo had to pay to fill the tank up would have been enough, a few years before, to buy a low-powered car, but it was obvious that in the last few months the money must have lost a great deal of its value. The man who served Leonardo had a pistol in a shoulder holster. Despite the fact that the right side of his face was missing, his look was alert and sharp. Even the men on the tower were armed. One pointed his rifle at Leonardo, while his colleague with the megaphone controlled the children in the narrow enclosed space.

Behind the corrugated iron hut, where the man operated the pump, Leonardo could see a full clothes line and behind that two toy cars and a plastic tractor. A family business, he thought.

“We’re on our way to Switzerland,” he said. “Have you any information that may be useful for us?”

The man looked as if he had been asked for details of his sexual habits.

“No one knows anything,” he answered.

Ten minutes later they were back on the bypass. They drove alongside several cars, but all eventually exited to the city and when they reached the entrance to the autostrada they found themselves alone again. The barriers to the tollbooths were open and there were several empty cars at the side of the road. One was a spray-painted Audi and Leonardo saw a body in it when he slowed down.

After a couple of kilometers he pulled over. It must have been about two o’clock, but no one had a watch that still worked.

“Let’s have something to eat,” he said.

Lucia divided the cheese in three and Alberto, who normally bolted down everything as quickly as he could, began chewing with exasperating slowness. He seemed to be having trouble keeping his eyes open. On the other hand, Lucia seemed completely calm. The crackers were stale and insipid, but the cheese had a strong flavor. When they had finished eating, they went off one by one to urinate behind a container with German words on it; then they resumed their journey.

They covered about eighty kilometers without seeing a human soul up to the exit to N., after which a barrier blocked the road and Leonardo was forced to slow down.

“What’s going on?” Lucia asked.

“Just a checkpoint, don’t worry.”

Behind the barrier were three men in the uniform of the National Guard. Two of them were armed. When the Polar stopped, the tallest man approached, in an air force pilot’s helmet. Leonardo had to open the door because the nylon “window” was opaque.

“All get out, please,” said the soldier.

He had several days of beard growth and yellow stains on his uniform.

“Our papers are in order.”

“All get out, please,” the man repeated.

While the man in the helmet opened the trunk and rummaged about inside the car, Leonardo, Bauschan, and the children formed up on a white line and were guarded by the second man, who looked about thirty and had a large tommy gun on his shoulder and his eyes fixed on the asphalt. A cigarette rolled from maize paper was hanging from his chapped lips. The third man, hardly more than a boy, had stayed behind the barrier. He had no hat or helmet, and his hair was a dazzling blond.

“Have you any money with you?” the man in the helmet asked after he had finished searching the car.

“Not much, we’ve just filled up with gasoline.”

“Bring it out.”

Leonardo took out his wallet and asked Lucia for the permits. She held them out to him and he passed them to the guard. Meanwhile the young boy had moved the barrier and had gone to sit in the rear seat of the Polar. He was not armed.

“I have to take these children to Switzerland,” Leonardo said. “Their relatives are waiting for them.”

The man stuck the money into the pocket of his camouflage jacket and dropped the wallet and permits on the ground.

“Have the kids got anything?”

“No,” Lucia said.

“If they have, they must give it to me,” the man said, still addressing Leonardo; then he pointed the barrel of his gun at Bauschan. “If not, I’ll start with the dog.”

There was no anger or resentment in his words, even if he clearly must have experienced both in equal measure in the past. But his eyes were now like parched earth where grass had difficulty growing. Two large veins ran below his temples.

When Leonardo touched Lucia’s shoulder, she pushed a hand inside her trousers and pulled out a roll of banknotes. The man added them to the rest of the money in his pocket. His reddened eyes softened for a moment, perhaps remembering something, but quickly returned to their earlier blankness.

“We need your car,” he said in the same expressionless tone he had used from the start.

Leonardo told him the keys were in the ignition.

Without another glance the men got into the car and started the engine. The man in the helmet said something to the one with the tommy gun, probably that it was an old car without automatic gears.

Leonardo took advantage of this by walking up to the Polar and knocking on the window with his knuckles.

“What do you want?” the man with the tommy gun said. His eyes were an intense cinematic blue, but his teeth were those of a man from the Middle Ages.

“I’d like to ask a favor.”

The man suddenly grabbed Leonardo by the ear and pulled it, simultaneously raising the window. When the glass hit Leonardo’s neck, the man let go of his ear and smiled. Leonardo could smell alcohol on his breath.

“We haven’t raped your daughter or killed your son. That’s what you can expect these days, you know.” Leonardo tried to nod but the edge of the window made it impossible. Behind him, Bauschan let out little yelps of distress.

“Please,” Leonardo mumbled.

The man in the driver’s seat signed to the other to lower the window. Released from the pressure, Leonardo put a hand to his throat and gave a long sigh but stood his ground.

“Thank you,” he said.

“You must be stupid. What do you want?”

“There are things in the trunk of no use to you but very precious to us.”

The two men looked at each other and then back at Leonardo, who nodded as if to confirm his own words. The man in the helmet half turned to the boy behind him.

“Check what the bastard takes,” he said.

The boy got out and tried to open the trunk but failed. Leonardo asked if he could do it and the boy moved aside.

“It’s defective,” Leonardo apologized, raising the door of the trunk and showing the boy the bag with Lucia’s sanitary napkins. The boy nodded that he could keep it.

“Can I take the clothes too?”

“Can he take the clothes?” the boy asked his colleagues.

“Only those for the children.”

Leonardo took the children’s suitcase, then removed the box of letters from his own case and opened it to show what was inside.

“Keep them.”

“I’m sure you’ll be able to use the food.”

The boy said yes without asking the others.

“That leaves the jackets.”

The boy took them from the back seat and gave them to Leonardo, closed the trunk, and was about to get back into the car but stopped. His face, despite his frozen nose now reduced to a black lump, still had gentle Teutonic features. The skin of his cheeks was peeling under his faint trace of beard.

“At the border they shoot at everyone,” he said.

Leonardo smiled.

“We have our permits.”

The boy shook his head and was about to say something more, but one of the others called him by name: “Victor.”

Shortly afterward the car vanished at the point where the gray of the autostrada met the more luminous gray of the sky. Leonardo looked at the children. Lucia was crying. Alberto had crossed his hands on his chest and was staring at the permits being blown open by the wind on the wet tarmac.

“Put these on,” he said, holding out their jackets to them. “We’ll make it.”

They walked until evening along the autostrada toward T. in the hope of a lift, but in three hours or so only two cars passed. The first had only one person in it but didn’t stop; the second, a white delivery van with blackened windows, slowed down and pulled up about fifty meters further on. Two men got out and beckoned to them.

“No, Papa,” Lucia said.

The two men continued to indicate that they should come nearer. One, very fat, had a cowboy hat on his head. The other, taller, was in fur with black gloves.

“I don’t like them, Papa. Let’s not go.”

Leonardo raised an arm to indicate they had changed their minds, but one of the two, the one in the hat, started toward them. It only took them a second to vault over the safety barrier and start running across the snow-covered field beside the autostrada, with their bags and the suitcase banging against their legs. They did not stop until they were sure the man was not following. Turning, they saw the van put on its lights and move forward again. A moment later it had vanished.

They spent the night in a nearby ruin, a house abandoned long ago when none of what had happened since was even imaginable. Maybe for this reason the desolation of this building was of a very different quality from the one they had most recently been concerned with: it had more the atmosphere of an ancient Roman temple, and the children were happy to go in without making a fuss.

It had wooden floors and a falling tree had broken through the roof and its branches reached into a couple of the rooms. But they had left their matches in the car and had nothing to light a fire with, so they ate three sweets from the pocket of Alberto’s jacket and crouched in a dry corner, out of reach of the snow that had gently begun to fall again.

“What are we going to do?” Lucia said.

“Go back home.”

For a few seconds no one spoke.

“I don’t want to hitchhike,” Lucia said.

“We can walk along the railway.”

“It’ll take a hell of a long time,” Alberto said.

These were the first words he had spoken since the morning.

“Three or four days,” Leonardo said, “but with any luck we’ll get a lift with someone we can trust. Feeling cold? Sit between me and Lucia.”

“No.”

“Then call Bauschan and keep close to him. He’ll warm you up.”

Alberto did not move and Bauschan stayed curled between Leonardo’s legs. After a little they heard the boy’s breathing get slower, broken by little hisses, and knew he was asleep.

“Papa?”

“Yes?”

“Can’t you sleep?”

“Not at the moment. Are you cold?”

“My feet are.”

“Is there a sweater in your case?”

“Yes.”

“Then take off your shoes and wrap your feet in it, that’ll warm them up.”

He had read this in a story about gold prospectors in the far north.

“Better?”

“Yes, better now.”

Leonardo looked at the patch of sky above them. There were orange reflections in it, as if somewhere nearby a volcano was erupting, casting a glow of lava on the clouds. An occasional snowflake settled gently on parts of his cheek unprotected by his beard. He was fifty-three and had never slept in the open before.

“Papa?”

“Yes, Lucia.”

“You’ve been very brave,” she said, taking his hand.

Leonardo closed his eyes the better to feel the perfection of her fingers.

All the next morning they followed the railway track. They could sense the regular geometry of the rice fields all around them, but apart from this the countryside seemed to have thrown off all trace of humanity. The occasional farms in the distance seemed deserted, and the only thing that passed on the autostrada was a tanker escorted by two army vehicles. Only once, nearing a village, did they see a house burning and some men moving around it in an attempt either to put out the flames or feed them. Lucia made it clear she would not go near it in any circumstances, and Leonardo, convinced deep down that she was right, kept going.

At midday they sat down on the track and ate the last of the sweets. The snow they melted in the palms of their hands only made them thirstier, and the surrounding whiteness was starting to blind them. Alberto’s eyes were red and had begun to weep.

Leonardo promised he would go and look for something to eat at the first farmhouse they came to, leaving them to wait for him beside the railway. Neither Alberto nor Lucia raised any objection.

By the time they came reasonably near a farm it was late afternoon and the light was beginning to fail. The children watched Leonardo put the suitcase on the ground, climb down the railway embankment and set off across a field with Bauschan. They sat on the track with their hands in their pockets to protect them from the cold wind that had kicked up, and gazed after Leonardo until they could no longer distinguish the brown of his jacket from the blue of his trousers. Seen from a distance, with his long gray hair blending with the white ground, he looked as if he had no head, according to Alberto. Lucia told him he was talking nonsense, but secretly she was ashamed because she had thought the same.

The building dated from the early twentieth century when trains brought rice workers to the nearby stations from where they would be transported by cart to the farms. It was typical of the farms in the district, even if it must have later been converted by someone whose work had no relation to agriculture. The yard had been paved and there was no trace of the machinery and other odds and ends normally to be found on a working farm. The store had become a garage, while large glass windows had been added to the upper floor, revealing an interior of wood and brick. It looked like the home of a painter, sculptor, or art critic. This explained the statue in the courtyard, a work in concrete and fiberglass two meters high, which represented two embracing bodies but could equally well have been an enormous fossil shell or a DNA helix.

Leonardo could find nothing edible anywhere in the house.

He searched every drawer, box, and container; there was only one small tube of tomato paste that had already been nibbled by mice. Nothing else. Otherwise the house seemed in reasonable condition with its beds in place, its roof solid, and its windows intact. It was certainly very cold, but there was a large fireplace in the ground-floor living room, and when he found a cigarette lighter behind the radiator in the bathroom, he began to think that they might be able to sleep there for the night and light a fire.

Walking down the stairs he imagined that the person who lived there must have smoked secretly in the bathroom, perhaps an adolescent, or a sick person forbidden to smoke by his doctor. He tried to imagine the voices of the people who could have lived in the house. But they seemed remote and painful, and he decided to stop.

He was about to leave when he noticed the door to the cellar. Unlike the other doors it was blue and closed. His mind filled with images of salami, wine, preserves, and everything else that had to be kept in a cool place rather than close at hand.

He opened the door, throwing light on a downward staircase. He just had enough time to recognize dark streaks left by something that must have been dragged, before a powerful acid stench of decomposition hit him from below, forcing him to close his eyes and step back. When he opened his eyes again he was facing the blue door, which he had instinctively closed. Until then he had associated blue doors with Greece or Provence, but from now on for the rest of his life they would remind him of that stench and what it must conceal.

He had gotten most of the way back to the railway when he noticed Bauschan was not with him. His first thought was that he must have gone in through the blue door before he closed it. He imagined the dog imprisoned in the putrid darkness.

“Bauschan!” he called, his voice echoing across the fields like a blow from an ax. He was about to call again when in the semidarkness he saw a shape come running from the farm gate, disappear behind a hedge, and reappear in the field. Bauschan must have sensed a note of reproach in his master’s voice because he slowed down in the last few meters and would not allow himself to be touched until he had circled once or twice around Leonardo’s legs, with his ears down, as if to beg for an audience. His back was cold, but his throat was still throbbing from his race. He must have been eating something because his breath smelled of vinegar.

“Did you find anything?” Lucia asked from the top of the embankment.

Leonardo showed her the lighter.

“Nothing else?”

“Nothing else,” he said, climbing up the embankment.

“You’re pale.”

“You too. Because we’re hungry. And it’s very cold. We must find somewhere before dark and light a fire. Now that we can do that.”

“Was that house not all right?”

“No, it wasn’t,” Leonardo said, picking up the suitcase.

Lucia must have understood because she took the bag of sanitary pants and headed down the track. She had only gone a few steps when she turned to her brother.

“I’ve found something,” Alberto said.

“What?”

“Come and see.”

They went toward the autostrada, which was now almost invisible in the dusk. Alberto was walking diagonally across a field. They could detect the rustle of granoturco stubble under the snow. When they reached a deep irrigation channel, Alberto stopped and pointed at something in the ditch. Leonardo climbed cautiously down the snow-covered bank and studied the few centimeters of frozen water covering the bottom: imprisoned in the ice were pieces of corncob flung to the edge of the field by the combine harvester.

“Well done,” Leonardo said. “Very well done.”

That evening they heated the granoturco they had managed to retrieve on their fire. Alberto had hoped to make popcorn, but the cobs were so sodden they would only roast or turn into a mush resembling polenta. The place they had found for the night was an old hut belonging to the water board, on which a graffiti artist had drawn the impertinent face of a small boy with a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth. The place consisted of a single room crossed by a spider’s web of pipes of various sizes. The sheet metal door had been forced and the place had probably served as a refuge for others like themselves: the concrete floor had been insulated with rubbish and cardboard against the cold, and on the whole they could consider themselves lucky that it was clean and not too damp. It also had a high window through which the smoke from their bonfire could escape, leaving the air breathable.

Before lying down to sleep, they talked about how many kilometers they must have covered that day, and how clever Alberto had been to find the maize. The boy was the first to fall asleep, while Leonardo and Lucia stayed awake for a long time listening to him tossing restlessly and dreaming he was quarreling with someone to whom he then tearfully apologized.

When Lucia also crashed out, Leonardo spent some time watching the fire, feeding it from time to time with more wood. He would have liked to leaf through a few pages to make him sleepy, but all his and Lucia’s books had been left in the Polar, so he took the box of letters out of the children’s suitcase and reread a couple. This had the effect of annoying him profoundly and he was tempted to throw all of them on the fire, but he did not do this because he had to concentrate on holding back his tears. In fact, he now felt sure for the first time that both Clara and Alessandra must be dead and that he would never see either of them again. He imagined their bodies tossed into some field with their clothes ripped apart, their trousers around their ankles, and a parliament of crows conferring nearby.

He gave way to heavy tears, and then he dried his face and went on weeping in a more controlled manner. In the end, exhausted, he slept deeply and dreamlessly until morning.

As soon as he woke he lit the fire and moved the stale maize near to heat it, and then he went out to stretch his legs. It might have been seven o’clock, perhaps eight, and the day was going to be fine and very cold. The sky was a uniform blue and the light reflected from the snow was already blinding.

He sat on the railway line stroking Bauschan and removing several thorny burrs the dog had collected from the brambles he liked to bury himself in. He talked to him about writers who had written stories with snow as an essential feature, and Bauschan gazed into his green eyes, until distracted by a noise from the cabin.

They had breakfast around the fire. Alberto had woken up with encrusted eyes, a sign that his conjunctivitis was getting worse, but they had nothing to clean them with. After eating his portion of maize, Leonardo wandered around the cabin for half an hour looking for a container in which to boil snow so as to get some more or less sterile water, but all he could find was an empty plastic bottle. After walking on for two hours they came across several carcasses of cows in a plantation of poplars beside the railway and stopped to look at them without going near. The cows must have been dead for some time because their stomachs were swollen and the black patches on their coats had faded almost to gray. Even so their mouths and eyes seemed to be moving. On closer inspection it became clear that the effect was created by several small birds hopping on the animals’ faces. Leonardo and the children made the most of the break by taking off their jackets and tying them around their waists, and then they went on without discussing what they had seen.

Before noon they reached a group of houses. As on the previous day, Leonardo went off alone to inspect them and came back an hour later with a saucepan and a small bag with a little flour in it.

“We’ll boil some water,” he said. “Then you can wash your eyes.”

Alberto said neither yes or no and went to sit a little way off on the rails. He had grown much thinner in the last two days, and his legs seemed to be dancing inside his trousers like pencils in a sock. He had a red rash around his mouth that he continually scratched.

Leonardo lit the fire. This was not difficult because brushwood, ideal for starting bonfires, was growing beside the track.

As soon as the water boiled he dipped his handkerchief in it and took it to Alberto who, asking no questions, cleaned his eyes. Leonardo used the rest of the water to mix with the flour, using the suitcase as a work surface. The result was a round grayish mass that he put into the pan and left on the fire for five minutes, before stirring it and putting it back to cook for the same length of time again. The yellow disk that emerged was christened “focaccia.” They all ate a piece, even Bauschan. Lucia asked if they could make another. Leonardo said yes, but that they should only eat half now, leaving the rest for supper. Lucia nodded and smiled. Her face was magnificent: the sun and the cold had given it color, and her eyes had never before looked so warm and deep.

While fiddling with the fire to try and keep it burning, Lucia saw two people.

“Someone’s coming!” she said, getting up.

Leonardo put down the pan and studied the figures approaching along the railway track. “If we can see them,” he thought, “they must see us; there’s no escape.”

“We need to discuss this,” he told Lucia, who was collecting their things.

“But we don’t know who they are!”

“If we want food, sooner or later we’ll have to trust someone.”

By now the two figures were more substantial. Leonardo was sure one was a woman in red.

“I say let’s avoid them,” Lucia said.

Leonardo turned to Alberto. The boy was using his hand to shade his eyes from the sun as he looked at the two people.

“What do you say, Alberto?”

“We’ve seen some dead cows in the fields,” Leonardo said.

The man shook his head as he continued to stir the soup on the stove. Beans, cabbage, and large pieces of gray meat could be seen in the pan. The smell was hot and inviting.

“This is good meat,” he said, licking the spoon before returning it to his shirt pocket. “We had some yesterday evening.” Then he signed to the woman to bring the plates. Until now she had restricted herself to gazing tenderly at Lucia and Alberto, but now she put on the ground the three metal plates she had been holding on her lap.

“It seems to us,” the man explained, as he poured soup onto the plates, “that the planes are dropping some substance onto built-up areas. I have no idea what it is, but it’s certainly not harmful to humans; I’m a doctor and I haven’t noticed anything strange. It only has this effect on cows. It’s extraordinary the way game and birds are proliferating.”

The woman handed them their plates. The children thanked her and began eating. Leonardo balanced his on his knee and looked at the people walking about around them, about thirty of them. Twenty more were sitting with their backs against the wall of a large shed, enjoying the sun. The building that was their home was in the middle of nowhere and had probably been a warehouse used by men working on the high speed trains. Even when they first arrived no one had come up to ask them who they were, where they came from or where they were going. Those who crossed their path limited themselves to a disinterested glance.

“For two weeks we had terrible weather,” the woman said. “It never stopped raining or snowing. But look what a glorious day today.”

Leonardo nodded. She must once have been attractive, but her body seemed to have suffered much more than her husband’s from recent events. Her double chin seemed unrelated to the rest of her tall, slender figure.

“Have you been here long?” Leonardo asked.

The man smiled. He was obviously well over fifty, but he still had a slim, athletic body. Seeing him approaching in his vest with his pullover tied around his waist, Leonardo had thought he might be a former tennis professional or yachtsman, but he had introduced himself as Dottore Barbero, a dermatologist.

“A couple of months already,” the doctor said, “but only a few days more. Signor Poli, who owns this place, is getting permits for us.”

“For Switzerland?”

The man and woman exchanged a smile.

“They won’t let anyone into Switzerland anymore,” the man said, “but Signor Poli has good contacts in France. His wife worked at the embassy.”

Leonardo put the first spoonful into his mouth.

“My compliments,” he said. “This is excellent.”

“Thank you, but I can’t claim any credit for it. It wasn’t my turn in the kitchen yesterday.”

For a few minutes they ate in silence, watched by the couple. The two were sitting on a little wooden bench they had carried out of the warehouse when they had gone in to fetch the food and the small stove. Leonardo and the children had freed several ties from the snow near the railway and were treating them like the lowest tiers of a stadium. Bauschan was sitting comfortably at their feet. Several of the people walking around the building were now going back into it. Leonardo had noticed that no one had gone more than about twenty meters from the building and that there were no old people among them. He had also noticed that some were smoking real cigarettes.

“Do you think it would be possible for us to spend tonight here?” he asked, putting down the spoon on his empty plate.

“I think it might be,” Barbero said, “but you’ll have to discuss it with Signor Poli. He comes at about six to bring food and whatever else we’ve ordered. He also leaves two armed men here for the night: security’s included in the price.”

“May I ask the price?”

“Five hundred per person,” the doctor said. “Chocolate, tuna, tea, and specialties extra. Gas canisters” the man indicated the little stove “are also extra. On the other hand, heat and water are included. There are two showers and they heat the water two days a week. Compared to the rest of life out there that’s a four-star hotel, don’t you agree?”

Leonardo smiled back, but he thought it odd the man had not said “five-star”; why had he not automatically pushed the hyperbole to the limit?

Rhetorical exaggeration had always fascinated him. Once he had flown to New York to attend a conference organized by a famous Jewish-American writer who was soon to die of a tumor. This man, who had always previously been known for his reserve and modesty, had asked his press agents to invite five hundred writers from all over the world, a list he personally drew up. He wanted to give a final conference for these five hundred colleagues, and admit no one else other than a journalist he played golf with once a week, a Peruvian girl working on a thesis about him, a boy from Cameroon doing the same, plus his barber, his present companion, and a class of children from an elementary school in New Jersey, where he had lived since childhood.

The conference was held in a Broadway theater that had long been closed but which the writer had reopened at his own expense. This had surprised many people, since one of the most reliable rumors about him was that he had been stingy to a maniacal degree. Before the keynote speech, fixed for 8 p.m., a small buffet was offered, so minimal that it was restricted to white wine in cartons, Mexican cheese, and pineapple. To administer these refreshments two middle-aged ladies, possibly the writer’s neighbors, had been recruited. One poured the wine into glasses while the other looked after a soup tureen containing a strawberry-colored liquid, which gave off balsamic fumes.

That night, in his room in the large cheap hotel where the writer had quartered his guests, Leonardo had grieved for the imminent death of this short, pockmarked, and unusually talented man. He had assumed that despite everything he had written, despite his hard-won style and the acuteness with which he had been able to thread words together making them resound like lines from Homer, that all this would be completely forgotten. The memories of those present at the conference would not be enough, and even the notes he had seen some people taking during his magnificent lecture on hyperbole, ranging from the lowest to the highest, like Glenn Gould playing Bach, would be lost in minds packed with their own stories and appointments, soon reduced to the condition of an aquarelle left out too long in bad weather.

“Would you like some more?” the woman asked.

“Thank you,” the children said.

Signora Barbero filled their plates again, then put her hand on her husband’s shoulder as she stood watching Lucia and Alberto beginning to eat again. She was wearing velvet trousers, a beige broad-stitch sweater, and red moon boots with white laces. Her husband had a check shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows and trekking trousers. Everyone Leonardo had seen there had been wearing warm, well-made clothes.

“Are many people staying here?” he asked.

“About sixty at the moment,” the man said. “But ten left last week. Their permits arrived just when they were about to run out of money.”

The woman noticed Leonardo had finished his soup, and so without saying anything she took his plate and filled it again with what was left in the pan. A couple of people were still leaning against the wall; the rest had gone in. The sun had set very quickly, as happens in winter.

After another spoonful or two, Leonardo put his plate on the ground and Bauschan quickly came to lick up what was left. The doctor touched his mustache without trying to hide mild disappointment, but his wife smiled and placed her hands on her heart.

“The little one,” she said, “he was hungry too.”

They spent a couple of hours resting on the camp beds of the doctor and his wife. These were military pallets, but after several nights on the floor they seemed very comfortable. As always, Alberto was the first to fall asleep, then Lucia, while Leonardo lay listening to the voices reverberating inside the warehouse roof. Some of the guests were lying on their beds, while others were in what Signora Barbero called the “daytime area,” that is to say the two tables where they ate their meals and could sit on a dirty sofa and a few armchairs, pretending they were in the hall of a great hotel or the waiting lounge of an airport or, more intimately, in their own homes. Everyone talked in a low voice so as not to disturb those resting or to save energy. There were also a couple of small children, one breastfeeding from his mother. The other, a three-year-old, seemed to be alone with his father.

“Papa?”

Leonardo turned. Lucia was looking at him from the next bed. She had one hand under her head and the other by her side. Apart from her eyes, she now seemed in every respect a full-grown woman.

“Do you think we’ll be able to stay here for a while?”

“Maybe tonight, but tomorrow we’ll have to go on. We have no money.”

Lucia slipped a hand under the covers and pulled out a bundle of banknotes folded in two.

“Where did you hide those?”

“Same place as the others.”

“If they’d searched you…”

“Would I have had to hand them over?”

Leonardo looked at her without knowing quite what to say about the two possibilities that came to mind.

“Would you like to stay?”

“They seem like respectable people. Alberto says he’d like to stay too.”

It occurred to Leonardo that “respectable people” must be an expression Lucia had picked up from her mother’s second husband. For several days now Leonardo had been feeling a deep, if (to be fair) unjustified, resentment of this man. A sentiment he was ashamed of but which made him feel alive. I’m getting wicked, he thought, and I’ve come a long way down that path.

“If we can, we’ll stay a few days,” he said.

“If we have enough money, we can stay.”

“Are you hungry?”

“Not now.”

“Alberto?”

“Asleep. We must get him to wash.”

“Tomorrow, OK?”

“OK.”

While the central-heating pipes were starting up, they heard the sound of a car approaching.

Signor Poli was a man of primitive appearance, short-legged and with disheveled gray hair. He had a suede jacket open on his prominent stomach, a green pullover, and jeans that puckered just below his knees. On the whole, he could have passed as a shepherd used to spending long solitary summer days in mountain pastures or the proprietor of an engineering workshop with little in the way of formal studies to his name but an innate talent for getting others to work.

The two tall young men with him had submachine guns on their shoulders. They were not Italian but not outsiders, either. As soon as he saw this, Leonardo remembered that the man’s wife had been employed at the French embassy, and he felt as if he were hearing one of the more cacophonous passages in Debussy.

Poli told his men to unload the provisions from the van and pour a couple of cans of diesel into the generator, then leaning back against the door of his Land Rover, he pulled a notepad from his pocket. A line of about ten people had formed in front of him.

Calmly, and without lifting his eyes from the pad, he made a note of what each person wanted, took their money, and put paper and pencil back in his jacket pocket. Only when he had done this did he light the Toscano cigar already in the corner of his mouth and look up at the stars. By now only Leonardo and Barbero were still before him.

“Signor Chiri arrived here today with his two children and would like to stay for a few days.”

The man contemplated Leonardo’s bedraggled appearance.

“How old are the children?”

“Seventeen and ten,” Leonardo said.

“That’ll be one thousand five hundred a day. Have you got the money?”

Leonardo nodded.

“You pay at least three days in advance. No one-night stands.”

Leonardo pulled out two banknotes. The man took them and gave him five hundred in change.

“Do you need clothes?”

“I could do with a pair of pants and a sweater.”

“I’ll bring them tomorrow. That’ll be another five hundred.”

Leonardo gave him back the banknote.

“Interested in permits? Fifty thousand each, but I could try and get a ‘certificate of travel in the company of a parent’ for one of the children.”

“I’m afraid your charges are too high for us.”

The man took the cigar out of his mouth and spat something onto the ground.

“How are things going with our permits?” Barbero asked.

“A couple of rubber stamps still needed. A matter of days.”

The man’s face was like a lump of turf cut by a spade. On his feet were strange moccasins with leather tassels.

“Signor Barbero will tell you how things work here,” he said. “I have to go now, I’ve got a long way to go.”

“Of course,” the doctor agreed.

When the internal light came on in the car, Leonardo noticed clothes thrown untidily on the seat and a small road map. The man started the engine and swerved sharply around the open space and onto the unpaved driveway leading to the fields, leaving behind the van in which the two armed men had come. They were nowhere to be seen; they may have still been filling the generator or have taken up sentry duty over the warehouse. The air was still and clear, with thousands of stars. Hearing a rattle of pans from inside the building, Leonardo missed the two nights he had spent in the silence and solitude of the countryside. He had never felt any fear. The rear lights of the Land Rover turned the powdery snow red as its big wheels disappeared into the distance.

“I must thank you,” said Barbero.

“What for?”

“For not saying you met us on the railway.”

“I don’t think I understand.”

“We’re not supposed to go so far from the warehouse. We were enjoying a little elopement today, if we can call it that. Community life can be inconvenient and every so often a couple needs a little privacy. I think you will understand.”

“That seems reasonable to me.”

“Good, I have a small flask of cognac. How about we share a drop?”

“I would happily, but I’m a teetotaler.”

The man went on staring at the point where he believed Leonardo’s eyes to be. A strip of light escaped from under the warehouse door.

“It’ll do for another occasion then,” he said, “but now we’d better go in. I wouldn’t like the guards to mistake us for intruders.”

The next morning they had their rations of bread, margarine, and tepid tea at one of the two tables in the day room.

Waking late, they had found most of the guests in front of the baths waiting to use the hot water. The Barberos had been among the first to use the facilities and had then gone for a walk around the building in the cold air to greet the morning.

When they came in, Signora Barbero said good morning to Leonardo and kissed the children on the head. Barbero, sitting down beside them, asked them if they had slept well. Leonardo said he had been disturbed by the baby crying, and Barbero assured him it was merely colic, common enough in males of that age, and one had to be patient. Leonardo took advantage of the occasion to ask him about the problem with Alberto’s eyes. Without examining the boy, the doctor diagnosed conjunctivitis. An antibiotic would have solved the problem in a couple of days, but with none available, the best solution would be chamomile compresses.

Alberto accepted this diagnosis with utter indifference. His eyes seemed to have lost the cold ferocity Leonardo had seen flash in them and were now observing everything with apathy. It was not even necessary to insist on a shower. He washed on his own without complaining that the water was only tepid, after which he and Lucia, but not Leonardo, changed their clothes, and all three sat close to the central-heating radiators to dry their hair.

Lunch was frugal: pasta with chickpeas and boiled onions. The smell, the metal plates, and the large pots and pans the food was cooked in gave them the impression of being in a resolutely Franciscan monastic settlement. Leonardo went out to give Bauschan an onion and a little pasta taken from his own ration. The dog devoured it in an instant. A minute later the Barberos joined them for a walk around the outside of the warehouse. It was a clear, windy day, though not limpid like the day before, and dark clouds from the Alps threatened bad weather.

“It’s the thirteenth of January today,” Signora Barbero said.

In the afternoon Leonardo slept for a couple of hours, and then he went to find Signor Rovitti. This man, introduced to him by Barbero the evening before, looked after the keys to the electricity generator, the heating panel, and the food store. Leonardo found him snoring on his pallet, but no sooner did the man hear him approach than he opened hare-like eyes.

For a while they discussed subjects of which Leonardo knew nothing: how to insulate large buildings of this kind, how to manage food resources, and the importance of regular timetables. Rovitti was one of those men who like to show off knowledge others do not have. Barbero had told him that in his younger days he had been the head of a private school, while his wife had managed a fashionable tennis club by the Po that had counted professional soccer players, industrialists, and female television celebrities among its members. Finally Leonardo asked him if he could possibly have a chamomile teabag. Rovitti said there were none in the food store, but he could order some from Poli that evening. And if necessary, given the confidence, even friendship, he boasted with Poli, he would remember to put in a good word for Leonardo.

Leonardo thanked Rovitti and went for a stroll around the warehouse. He took care not to tread on the many objects by the beds. There were no wardrobes or cupboards, and everyone had arranged their possessions under and around their beds as best they could. Some were asleep, some reading, and some playing cards, but they all seemed to be keeping conversation to a minimum, as if afraid of reading something embarrassing or shameful in the looks or words of others.

At about seven, Poli came back with the men who were to guard them. One was a young man whose shaven head he had noticed the day before, while the other was a very tall man of about forty with a thick neck and a tattoo on the back of his right hand.

Leonardo joined the line in front of the Land Rover and was given the clothes he had asked for. The jeans were padded and warm, but the sweater was threadbare and shapeless. He asked if next time they could have chamomile teabags. The answer was yes. He paid and went back into the warehouse, where he put on his clean clothes. Lucia said they looked good on him.

Supper was potatoes and cheese, and once the tables had been cleared, some people started playing bridge. The match went on for two hours during which neither the players nor those watching said a word. At eleven Signor Rovitti announced lights out in five minutes, and everyone retired to bed.

Leonardo was woken in the middle of the night by the sound of footsteps. He assumed someone was going to the bathroom, but in the weak moonlight filtering through the skylights he saw two male figures circulating among the beds. He recognized the guards and thought they must be looking for something to steal, but they stopped beside a pallet and woke the person sleeping there. It was a woman, and she got to her feet without saying anything and moved toward the exit escorted by the two men. Leonardo heard the door slide on its rail and close again. Someone coughed somewhere in the warehouse.

Leonardo got out of bed and put on his shoes. Bauschan raised his head, but Leonardo quietly told him not to follow and the dog obeyed.

Outside there was no more than a very slender sickle of moon, but the sky was clear and the snow reflected what light there was. There was no trace of the clouds he had seen in the afternoon or of the wind that had brought them.

He moved stealthily toward the van parked a few meters from the warehouse, but there was no one in the driver’s seat, and even when he put his ear to it he could hear no sound from the interior. He walked on along the wall with the intention of going the entire way around the building. He did not know exactly what he was doing or why. The countryside was peaceful and still, so much so that he could hear his footsteps squeaking on the snow, a sound at once reassuring but worrying. He felt like a bird that knows it must break the shell of the egg that has been its only home, even though it has no wish to do so.

Walking along one side of the shed, he heard a noise from around the next corner. A mechanical sound, like something rubbing or scraping. Putting his head around the corner, he saw them.

The woman was on her feet, leaning with her hands on a pile of railway ties stacked against the wall, her pants around her ankles. The older guard, his pants around his knees, was penetrating her from behind. The young baldheaded one was sitting on a tie watching the scene and smoking, his own gun and his colleague’s beside him.

Leonardo felt cold in the pit of his stomach and wished he had never left the warehouse.

The man extracted his penis, which appeared enormous and livid in the shadows, and tried to insert it higher up, but the woman pulled away. He placed a hand on her chest to pull her toward him, but she twisted away, saying no. Then the young bald man got up, calmly took out a knife with a blade no longer than his index finger, and slowly drew it across the woman’s cheek. She screamed and put her hands over her face, and in doing so she lost her balance and fell against the ties.

The older guard continued to stand there in the night, his large penis pointing at the woman like a grotesque inquisitorial finger, while the one with the knife waited a moment, perhaps to give the woman time to feel the cut and the blood running warm through her fingers, then he grabbed her by the hair and pulled her to her feet. While the other sodomized her, the young one held the knife to her throat, but with his gaze on the countryside, as if nothing interested him except the steepling mountains far away and the livid blue painted on them by the moon.

Leonardo felt weak in every part of his body and wanted to fall on his knees and call out a familiar name, but he did none of this.

When the older guard had finished, the young one handed over the knife and took his turn. Leonardo drew back, and walking as if on pieces of broken glass, reached the door and went inside.

Back in bed, he listened to his heart beating at a crazy rate, wishing he could have been dead or crippled rather than proving himself incapable of stopping what he had just seen. He desperately wanted to wake Lucia and hold her close to himself, or at least to watch her sleeping, but felt unworthy of it. He was sure the shame would be with him forever, night and day, and with the same intensity, because he would never be able to stifle it or sleep again.

When he woke in the morning his heartbeat was normal, but he felt great acidity in his stomach and realized that during the night a little urine had escaped him. He had no change of underpants, but waited his turn for the bathroom and washed carefully. During breakfast he kept his eyes on his cup. Lucia and Alberto were discussing Alberto’s claim that his eyes were feeling better and that he would no longer need the compresses; an irritatingly strident note had returned to his voice.

The woman came in when everyone else had left the table. She could not have been much more than thirty and had long, smoky-blond hair. She had covered the wound on her face by tying a handkerchief around her head like someone with toothache. She sat down cautiously and with reddened eyes studied the crockery and cutlery on the table, the bread, and the margarine, but she had trouble concentrating on anything for more than a moment. In contrast, her hands when she poured tea into her cup were firm and steady. Unlike Leonardo’s hands when she asked him to pass the sugar.

“But why?”

“Because I think it’s best.”

“So you’ve already said, but why?”

“We’ll have to go in a few days anyway. Better to keep the money. We may need it.”

“But we have nowhere to go.”

“We can go home.”

“But it’s not our home. And anyway, how long will it take us to get there? And we haven’t even got any food.”

“I’ve had a word with Barbero. They’ll sell us a little of their own supplies.”

“When did you speak to him?”

“After breakfast.”

“So you made up your mind before talking to me!”

Leonardo looked at the bottom of the basin Lucia was leaning against. The bathroom had seemed to him the only place private enough for this inevitable discussion. Bauschan watched with his head around the door. He knew he must not come in.

“Please trust me when I say it’s best for us to leave at once.”

“No, not unless you tell me why you’ve changed your mind.”

Lucia’s blue sweater neatly fit the outline of her shoulders and small breasts. She could have been an actress in a French film. Leonardo gave her a long look. He was afraid he could not find the words to tell her what he had seen the previous night, but nonetheless he did manage it, though in a partial and hesitant manner. Lucia listened in silence. As he went on her mouth took on an increasingly bitter twist, but her eyes never left his.

“You’ll never let anything like that happen to me, will you?” she said when he finished.

They packed the suitcase in a hurry and collected their things. They told Alberto they could not stay another night because their money was finished; he sat on his bed and followed their preparations without moving, after which Leonardo secretly got Lucia to pass him a banknote or two and went to join the Barberos outside the building.

When he told them they were about to leave, the woman said she was very sorry because she had grown so fond of the children. Leonardo explained the children wanted to get home because their mother could be there waiting for them, and Signor Barbero offered to sell them something to eat on the journey “at the same price they themselves had paid for it.” Leonardo accepted his offer and followed him into the warehouse, while his wife went to say good-bye to the children.

“Last night I saw a rape,” he said while Signor Barbero was extracting from under his bed the case in which he and his wife kept their canned food and biscuits.

The man looked at him with the half smile of someone who has not understood.

“That’s not possible,” he said, but something not quite frank distorted his mouth.

“Do things like that happen often?” Leonardo asked him.

Barbero looked down at the provisions, chose two cans of tuna and a packet of chickpeas and put them on the floor together with a box of grissini.

“We can’t give you more than this, I’m afraid,” he said. “We’ll need the rest for our journey to France.”

Leonardo stared at him. The vein pulsing below his temple was the only evidence that he was alive. Otherwise he face was waxen, his eyelids motionless.

“Do you really believe anyone who leaves this place ever gets to France?”

The man continued to stare at the contents of the suitcase. His lips were pressed hard against his teeth. Leonardo took the cans and packets and thrust them into the pockets of his jacket. He stood up and Barbero did the same.

“Will five hundred lire do?”

“More than enough.” Barbero took the banknote.

When they were about a hundred meters from the warehouse Leonardo and Lucia turned; Alberto, ahead of them, walked on. There stood the gray warehouse, dominating the flat white nothingness. The sun of the last few days had melted the snow on its corrugated iron roof. Only Signora Barbero was watching them.

“What’ll happen to that woman from last night?” Lucia said.

Before leaving, Leonardo had gone to the bed where the woman was resting.

“I saw what happened,” he said in a low voice. “If you like you can come with us.”

She merely shook her head, hiding her face in the pillow. The man sleeping in the next bed could have been her husband.

“Never mind,” Leonardo had said.

Signora Barbero raised her hand for one last good-bye, and then she turned and went into the warehouse. Leonardo and Lucia turned their backs on the building and resumed their walk. Twenty meters ahead, Alberto and Bauschan looked extraordinarily tall against the flat horizon of the rice fields. Leonardo’s feet felt wet and he noticed one side of his right shoe was coming unstitched. He transferred the suitcase to his other hand and tried to avoid the patches of snow between the railway lines. Many thoughts were passing through his mind. Thoughts of death, unworthiness, courage, and how far one could change one’s own nature. Not thoughts that could bring him any relief, but he knew he must think them through. Nevertheless in one small corner of his mind there was room for the small pleasure of being alone again with the children and Bauschan and of walking in the silence of a land that had never been walked on before. He tried to hang the portrait of his life on that fragile nail, a life that had never before seemed so miserable and inept.