The Last Man Standing

PART FOUR

It was not the sharp pain that woke Leonardo, but the sound of his nose being broken: a clean snap without an echo, like a stick breaking. Stunned, he opened his eyes, but barely had time to recognize the leaden first light of daybreak between the branches before something hard and hollow hit him on the cheekbone. As he sank into darkness he heard Lucia cry out. Opening his left eye, he saw her on all fours being dragged along by a man with an antique-looking rifle in his free hand.

“Lucia!” he tried to yell, but blood filled his mouth and turned her name into an incomprehensible choking sound. Then someone grabbed him by the collar. He kicked out in an effort to break free, but with the speed of someone who has done nothing else all his life, the man tied his head against the tree behind him with two turns of wire, forced his arms behind his back, and bound his wrists together. Leonardo felt his shoulder pop out of joint. He shrieked. Someone kicked him in the mouth, breaking several teeth.

When he opened his eyes again, a youth with blond hair was crouching beside him, his face a few centimeters from Leonardo’s. His hair was divided by a central part, and he had the nut-colored eyes of a young dog. Two glossy black marks on his cheeks looked as if they had been made with pitch or tempera. He had no eyebrows.

Leonardo began to say something, but the boy was too quick for him.

“Take it easy,” he said in a friendly voice.

When the boy got up, Leonardo saw Sebastiano and Alberto still lying where they had fallen asleep the night before. Raised on their right elbows, they were looking at him in astonishment. Sebastiano was holding Bauschan firmly under his arm; the dog was barking but could not drown Lucia’s cries.

The blond youth went to sit near them in front of what was left of the fire. He rubbed the bare, nervous arms emerging from his green leather waistcoat, and then he took a plastic pouch from his pocket, opened it, and lifted it to his nose and inhaled violently, before looking without interest at Sebastiano and Alberto. Nor did Bauschan’s barking seem to bother him. The part dividing his hair continued down the back of his neck, giving his head the appearance of a fish cleft in two on a serving dish. He had a large pistol stuck in his jeans.

Leonardo spat out his loose teeth and watched them disappear in the pool of blood forming in his lap. His nose felt enormous and shapeless and his right eye was throbbing as if trying to expel the eyeball. He began praying. The first thing that came to mind was the Act of Contrition, and he recited it straight through without hesitation even though he had not heard it for at least forty years. When he reached the end he realized Lucia was not shouting anymore. He looked at Alberto, whose eyes were fixed in spellbound terror on the boy before him.

“That’s enough,” the blond youth said, indicating Bauschan. “If you don’t silence him, I’ll shoot him.”

Sebastiano covered Bauschan with the cowhide and he stopped barking. In the enormous silence this created, Leonardo heard a sound from his right, like the sound of a garment being rubbed on a washboard. Weeping, he tried to turn his head, but the wire around his neck stopped him. He looked down. The grass around him was dark with his blood.

The noise stopped and footsteps could be heard among the dry leaves. A thickset dark-skinned youth went to sit next to the blond one. Leonardo recognized him as the man who had dragged Lucia away. He had the sawn-off antique rifle in his left hand.

“Have you left her on her own?” the blond youth asked.

“She’s passed out, and in any case I’ve tied her up. And the others?”

The blond boy looked at Alberto, who was staring at him without moving.

“Push off! Move! Get lost!”

Everyone stayed exactly where they were.

“See? He’s not moving. He’s shitting himself. And the one with the dog is bonkers.”

“Have you looked if they’ve got any food?”

“No.”

“So what have you done?”

The blond youth turned to glance briefly at Leonardo. He said nothing. On the other hand the dark thickset youth went on staring at the tall man before him, the child without shoes, and the dog under the cowhide. He seemed little enthused by what he saw. At the base of his skull was a round tattoo representing the Tao.

“Do you want to fuck the girl?”

“ ’Course I do.”

“Take her from behind then, that’s what I did. She could be a virgin.”

“Who cares if she’s a virgin or not?”

“But if we bring Richard a virgin, he’ll maybe take us back again.”

The blond youth got up decisively, but once on his feet, stopped to stare at the tattoo on the neck of the other. The thickset youth, still sitting on the ground, reached for Sebastiano’s bag, pulled it over, and began rummaging through it. The blond one spent a moment in thought; then thrust his hands in the pockets of his jeans and moved away. Leonardo heard his steps getting more distant. He counted to ten, realizing Lucia could not be far away. The light had changed: a pale sun had risen and the trees were beginning to produce vague shadows.

With a furious jerk he tried to get up, but the wire smacked into his Adam’s apple, threatening to make a shelled bean of it and taking his breath away. He began weeping or at least thought he was weeping, since all he seemed to have left for a face was a shapeless mass of flesh.

The dark youth, hearing his struggles, stopped inspecting their luggage and turned. His forehead sloped down in steps like that of a primate, and his gestures were graceless, but his little black eyes were evidence of an intelligence that was far from crude.

Leonardo wanted to kill him, kill him and then walk over to the blond boy and kill him too. It was a wonderful sensation, a revelation that lifted him and freed him from pain. Despite his dislocated shoulder and his smashed nose and eye, he knew his hands would have no difficulty in squeezing the necks of those two youths until they were dead. And he knew it would bring him joy and satisfaction. Guilt seemed something for others but not for him. Everything he had thought, done, written, and loved up to that moment meant nothing compared to this naked urge to kill.

The shaven-headed youth gave the other a smile as if welcoming someone who from now on will be a member of the family.

“What have you found?” the blond youth asked, fastening his trousers as he returned.

The dark one showed a package he had found in Sebastiano’s bag.

“What’s that?”

“Dried meat.”

“And the other one?”

“Coffee, I think.”

“Is it coffee or do you just think it is?”

“It is coffee.”

“Where did they get it?”

“How do I know?”

“Let’s ask them.”

“OK, let’s ask them.”

The thickset youth picked up the rifle and pointed it at Alberto.

“Where did you get this stuff?”

Alberto and Sebastiano stared at him in silence.

“Well?”

“In a house,” Alberto said.

“What’s this mumbling? Get up and speak up properly!”

Alberto stood up carefully. Once on his feet he looked down at the ash in the circle of stones. He had his hands between his legs as though he were naked.

“Some people in a house gave it to us.”

“What?” shouted the blond youth.

“They…”

The shot echoed through the valley and two huge birds rose from nearby bushes and passed close over their heads. The bullet must have hit a branch because something could be heard falling through the leaves and hitting the ground, but no one could see what it was. Bauschan started barking again. Alberto was crying and trembling.

“In a house!” he shouted.

“Where?”

“I don’t know! A long way off.”

“How far off?”

“Three days back,” Alberto shouted.

The thickset youth smiled at his companion.

“Do you believe him?”

The blond youth laughed. The thickset one lowered the gun and indicated to Alberto that he could sit down again.

“OK, OK,” he said. “Take it easy. Just joking.”

Alberto sat down with the same care as when he had got up and wiped away some snot hanging from his chin. Leonardo thought he could detect the shadow of a smile on his face even though it was contorted with terror.

“What now?” the blond youth said.

“Let’s move. Can the girl walk?”

“I think so, we just have to wake her up.”

“So go and wake her then.”

“And the others?”

“We’ll take the kid, to hell with the others.”

“Don’t we kill them?”

“I’ve only got one round left; I’m not going to waste it. You?”

“I’ve got two. We could kill them with the knife.”

The thickset youth passed a hand over his head. He had blue overalls over a short-sleeved shirt. His olive-colored arms bore little circular scars.

“I don’t feel much like it.”

“What if they follow us?”

“Their problem. Get the girl. You, nitwit, empty your knapsack.”

Sebastiano released Bauschan. The dog, once free, looked around uncertainly, then walked with his ears down to Leonardo and began licking his face. Sebastiano emptied the knapsack on the ground. A sweater, a pair of trousers, some children’s clothes, the exercise book with the brown cover, medicines, gloves, hats, powdered soup, two pans, a plastic bottle, two knives, a shoebox, a comb, some gauze. The thickset youth examined each item carefully, then he told Sebastiano to open the shoebox. Seeing the contents were only letters, he launched a kick at one of the stones around the bonfire. A cloud of ash danced in the air and was pierced by a ray of light before settling again.

“Haven’t you any money?”

Sebastiano went on staring at him in silence. His long, thin face seemed on the point of giving way to an emotion, but he stayed serious and distant.

“The girl had the money in her pants,” said the blond youth, who had disappeared to Leonardo’s right again. The thickset one looked at Alberto.

“Is there any more?” he asked.

Alberto shook his head.

“OK, put on your shoes.”

The blond youth came back, supporting Lucia with an arm around her back. She had lost her shoes and her sweater was torn. One foot was bloodstained.

“Make her put on her shoes,” the thickset one said.

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to carry her over my shoulder. Where’s the money?”

The blond youth took it from his pocket and handed it to his companion, then made Lucia sit down and looked around for her shoes. While he was putting them on her feet, Leonardo shooed Bauschan away with a sudden movement of his head and looked at his daughter’s face. She seemed to have aged by many years, years in which she had neither slept nor eaten nor seen the sun, just wept in the dark, until in the end she had forgotten life itself and what the experience of living can be. She had a bruise on her chin and her trousers were stained with earth. A leaf had settled in her disheveled hair.

“Shall I untie that one?” the blond youth asked when he had finished with Lucia’s shoes.

“Of course not! Take the food and let’s go.”

They filled a knapsack with the food and coffee, then the thickset youth signaled to Alberto to come over and put it on his back. The blond youth helped Lucia to her feet and supported her under the arms; she accepted this without protest. Leonardo watched them walk off. After a dozen steps, the forest swallowed them. All that remained was the silence of branches moving in the wind.

Feeling himself about to faint, Leonardo bit his lips with his broken teeth. Sebastiano had begun collecting things from the ground and putting them back in the backpack.

“What on earth are you doing?” Leonardo said.

Sebastiano seemed not to hear.

“Set me free, Christ!” Leonardo yelled, and felt the words resound in his head like a ball of wet rags. Even his left eye was misting over.

Sebastiano folded the children’s covers and Leonardo’s and put everything in the backpack. When he had finished he put his cowhide around his shoulders, then went to Leonardo. He freed his neck, then his hands. Leonardo felt atrocious pain when he moved his arm. Bauschan licked his ear.

“Please give me some water,” he said.

Sebastiano took the bottle and helped him to drink. When Leonardo touched his face it was like stroking a leather bag full of stones. A huge tear crept out of his left eye. Sebastiano supported him while he got up.

Once on his feet, Leonardo took a few steps holding his right arm, but quickly realized he would not be able to go far like that. He told Sebastiano to take a sweater from the bag and explained how to immobilize his limb. As soon as the weight of his arm was no longer pulling at his shoulder he felt relief.

“You stay here,” he said. “I have to go.”

Sebastiano nodded, but when Leonardo walked off with difficulty in the direction in which the children had disappeared, he picked up the backpack and followed. They began walking down toward the road. Leonardo fell a couple of times, once on his dislocated arm but managed to struggle up again and go on. Bauschan walked a few paces in front. He seemed to be following a scent, but Leonardo was not sure. Nonetheless, he put his faith in the dog since there were no paths and he had no other clues, and after about ten minutes he noticed a leaf with blood on it. They continued downward with the forest thinning out and came to a thicket of bushes. The sky was not entirely clear, but the sun was beginning to warm them. Leonardo stopped to drink because his throat felt full of dust. Sebastiano helped him. Then, weeping, he started forward again. He had no idea what he would do if he caught them up, but he did know that if he did not find them now he would lose them forever.

Emerging from the thicket they came into a field that must once have been cultivated. On the right the slope was studded with olive trees, turned gray with winter. The ground between the trees had been disturbed by wild boar.

It was then that he saw them, about fifty meters lower down, walking along the path beside the river. The blond youth was in front followed by Alberto, then Lucia, and bringing up the rear the other youth carrying the rifle. Lucia was managing without help, but limping. As if he had called them, the two children turned toward him and gave him a brief glance that showed no surprise.

For a while Sebastiano and Leonardo followed the path, keeping at a distance of about fifty yards, then passed a bridge and found themselves on the road. They walked for an hour, perhaps much less, losing sight of the group around sharp curves and seeing them in front again on the straight sections. Leonardo knew perfectly well that they could have hidden around a bend and shot at him, but the danger was nothing compared to his need to not lose sight of Lucia’s white sweater and black hair.

As the valley grew narrower Leonardo heard distant music that gradually got louder. It seemed to come from some kind of industrial machine, like a press with a regular beat. The four left the road for a lane with a sign pointing to a camping site. Following, Sebastiano and Leonardo found themselves on the other side of the river. The trees here formed a thick roof through which light filtered, depicting bizarre animal forms on the asphalt. The further they went the louder the music grew, drowning the noise of the river, until the path opened on a grassy clearing. Then they saw the camp.

Cars, trucks, and trailers were arranged in a circle like wagons in the old Wild West. A motor coach, a truck bearing the logo of a removal firm, and a large cage on wheels completed the circle. In the center was a large fire at least partly formed from tires. The smoke from it was black and rose very high before dispersing. Impaled on stakes around this bonfire were whole headless animals: roe deer, foxes, possibly dogs.

Leonardo studied the few figures hanging around inside the circle. They were confused-looking and half-naked, moving slowly without any obvious purpose, climbing over the bodies of others still lying on the ground. The incessant musical racket was coming from amplifiers and loudspeakers on the roof of the coach.

“Take Bauschan with you,” Leonardo said. “Go by road and you’ll be in A. before evening.”

Sebastiano looked him attentively in the eye, then took off the backpack and offered it to Leonardo.

“Best you keep it,” Leonardo said.

Sebastiano put the backpack on the ground, took off his cloak and draped it around Leonardo’s shoulders, lacing it up carefully, and then he took Bauschan in his arms and walked off. When Leonardo turned they had already passed the bridge. Bauschan was staring back at him, his snout over Sebastiano’s shoulder. He barked, but the din of the music drowned everything.

Leonardo looked at the encampment. He realized he was face to face with the heart of the new world, one of those places where madness was first created and then spread around. He was conscious of its presence and its attraction.

When he took a step he felt about to collapse, but he stiffened his back and stayed on his feet. This is nothing, he told himself as he moved on, nothing compared to what you are going to see.

For a long time he sat with his back propped against one of the great wheels of the truck without anyone noticing him. Every now and then one of the youngsters got up, climbed over the hood of a car, and, without deigning to look at him, went into the forest, presumably to urinate or vomit among the trees. They had all lost their eyebrows and had colored signs on their cheeks. Some, when they came back, opened the door of a white van and took out a beer, which they drank standing up before going back to lie down under their covers or letting themselves drop to the ground wherever they happened to be. Others did not come back. Leonardo imagined Alberto and Lucia must be somewhere in the forest; he imagined the two youths with them, the blond one and the thickset one, waiting for the camp to wake up before making their entry. He told himself there was no point in going to look for them and that it was better to wait where he was and where sooner or later they would come. Using his left hand, he tightened the knot on his bandage. His face was still swollen and painful, but his arm worried him more; he had to find some way of setting his shoulder, or he would stiffen with ankylosis.

He was very thirsty but had no water and could see none anywhere near him. The fire that had been burning fiercely when he arrived was now just a great patch of smoking embers. The sun had climbed up into a contourless sky. It must have been halfway through the morning.

A figure rose from the ground and took a few steps toward a cappuccino-colored trailer, and then suddenly it changed direction and came toward the truck. It was a girl. Leonardo thought she had seen him; then he realized her eyes were closed. She was about Lucia’s age, wearing army trousers and a flannel shirt. She dragged herself on another few meters, then tripped over a cover with two kids sleeping under it and fell down in the dust. On the ground she simply cuddled up to the other two bodies and fell asleep again.

It was past midday when a small individual, older than any he had seen so far, came out of the cab of the truck and, descending the three steps from the platform, trod on Leonardo’s lap. As soon as he regained his balance, the man looked at him with lively little metallic-gray eyes. Unlike the others he had no colored signs on his face and seemed to be in full and conscious control of himself. Leonardo noticed a hump under his jacket. Although his face looked no more than thirty he was bald at the temples, and what was left of his hair shone with brilliantine and hung down to his shoulders.

Leonardo raised his hand in sign of peace, but the man leaped back as though threatened and started jumping around, crying out, and waving his arms. A sharp continuous scream issued from his mouth, which reminded Leonardo of one he had heard many years before from an Arab woman when her bag had been stolen in a market in Marrakesh. The scream was louder than the din of the music and within a few seconds Leonardo found himself surrounded by dozens of youngsters kicking him and covering him with spit. He took what cover he could and protested his innocence, but someone grabbed him by the hair and began dragging him toward the middle of the clearing, where thin coils of smoke were rising from the patch of ashes. Other young people, woken by the noise, emerged from the cars and coach and other vehicles. Realizing what was about to happen, he dug his feet in. A lock of his hair was ripped out and for a moment he lay face down in the dust before other hands grabbed him, pulled off his shoes and socks, and pushed him on to the embers.

Feeling the soles of his feet begin to burn, he tried to turn back but the kids surrounding the fire closed off every escape route. He ran to the other side, but was again hemmed in. Then he hurriedly took off the cowhide cloak, threw it down, and stood on it. The kids, who until then had been laughing and shouting, were struck dumb, until a tall young man with a square face and big tattooed arms uprooted one of the stakes on which meat had been roasting, shook off the scorched corpse of a dog, and began to goad Leonardo with it, trying to drive him off the cowhide.

While he was trying to evade the blows, the hunchbacked cripple suddenly leaped through the circle and pulled the cloak from under him so that he fell. The kids greeted this with thunderous applause. Leonardo quickly got up again and tried to push away the hot charcoal with his feet to reach the ground beneath, but the soles of his feet, smoking and giving off a nauseating smell like burned chicken, no longer had any feeling in them. He howled and wept and hurled himself at the wall of children, who kicked and punched him. Forced back into the fire, he began leaping about.

“A dancer!” a girl screamed. “Ballerino!”

Someone started a chant: “Bal-le-ri-no, bal-le-ri-no, bal-le-ri-no,” and Leonardo found himself shifting the weight of his body from one foot to the other to the steady rhythm of a chorus. He could no longer feel any pain, aware only of a smell of roasting fat. He assumed his feet must have melted and that the fire would gradually climb his legs until it reached his balls and belly, and then he would be dead. The last thing he knew before losing consciousness was a refreshing liquid heat running down his legs.

The next thing he knew he was in a cage. Opening his left eye, he could see the sky through rusty bars with the leafy branches of a tree waving gently above him. The sky was a pale blue and the sun was sinking. He touched his face. By now the deformity of his nose and eye had become familiar, and it was reassuring to recognize them under his fingers. The monotonous deafening music was still thumping the air, its bass notes vibrating inside his chest like a shout in a closed fist.

He tried to raise himself up on his good arm with his back against the bars. The floor was wood and had been covered with straw. He looked out through the bars into the clearing. The young people, sitting, squatting, or lying down, were enjoying the evening sun. Many, in dark glasses, were chatting in small groups as if in a public park. Then he saw them.

They were sitting some way off, behind the big cappuccino-colored trailer. The blond youth was on his back with his hands behind his head and his legs crossed, one foot swinging. The thickset one seemed to be dozing, propped up with one hand supporting his head. No guns could be seen. Lucia was sitting between them, staring at the ground with a vacant expression. Alberto was beside her. It looked to Leonardo as if his cheeks had been marked with black.

He tried to stand up, but when he put weight on his feet it felt as if someone, for a joke, must have fastened them in a block of concrete while he was unconscious. He looked down and saw two enormous pieces of dark, livid meat. He told himself he would never walk again, and his left eye filled with tears. For a while he could see nothing. In the darkness inside him he struggled to reassemble his thoughts, to keep them separate from the despair that, despite himself, was overwhelming him. When his tears had dried and he could see again, the young people were still there.

“They’re alive,” he said, and saying this with his toothless mouth seemed to make the words more real. For a moment he forgot his feet and his shoulder and all the other parts of his body that were no longer what they used to be. He had to wait. To stay alive and wait.

The floor vibrated as if someone had started the engine of the van to which the cage was attached, but neither the trees nor the young people nor anything else around him was moving. Turning to the right he saw a huge dark wrinkly mass on the floor of the cage. When his eye got used to the dark he realized it was an elephant. The animal was sleeping curled against the wall like a great hairless and wrinkled cat.

Cries from the young people drew his attention to the clearing. They had all gotten to their feet and were shouting excitedly at a man who had just come out of the trailer. The blond youth and the thickset one hurriedly made Alberto and Lucia get to their feet, and when the man, advancing slowly toward the middle of the clearing, passed close to them, they threw themselves on their knees and bowed their heads. The man stopped and gazed at the necks of the two penitents with a benevolent smile. Leonardo realized this must Richard.

It’s Christ, he thought, or someone doing his level best to seem like Christ.

The man had a light-colored cowl of unbleached cotton and high tight-fitting leather boots. His long light-brown hair and his several days’ worth of beard completed the priest-like effect.

Richard took his hands out of his pockets, moved forward, and knelt down between the two youths like a confidant, an informer, or a father about to play with his children. Leonardo saw his lips pronounce some word with his eyes fixed on the dusty ground, then rest his chin on the shoulder of the thickset youth to listen. The youth took a little time to react; then he turned his head and spoke to the man as if kissing him on the neck. The kids in the clearing watched the scene in silence.

The confession took only a few seconds, after which the man got up and placed a hand on Alberto’s shoulder. He asked him something, perhaps what his name was, and nodded at the answer. Then he moved to one side and took a long look at Lucia’s face before pushing her hair slowly behind her ear like a lover. Returning to the two youths who were still on their knees, he placed a hand on the head of each to impart a silent benediction, then he held up all ten fingers, twisting to the left and right so that everyone could see. For a time the savage cries that greeted this even managed to drown the thumping of the canned music.

The two youths took off their waistcoat and T-shirt respectively, and the cripple took up position behind them, in his hand a short whip with many tails. As the first blow struck between the shoulder blades of the blond youth everyone cheered and shouted “One.” The man in the cowl smiled and embraced the whole scene with a benevolent gaze, and then he took Lucia by the hand and led her to the trailer, turning his back on the flogging he had ordered. Alberto, seeing them go, took a few steps forward but, as if he had a third eye in the back of his neck, the man raised a hand without turning and, with a complicated movement of his fingers, made him understand that he must stay where he was and carefully watch what was happening, because it would be extremely useful to him.

Leonardo watched the man who looked like Christ enter the trailer, followed by Lucia, and shut the door.

The cripple’s whip came down twenty times on the backs of the two youths, who did not flinch or emit the slightest protest. The blond one, before the last three blows, merely put his hands behind his neck to assure himself that the blows had not disordered his hair. When the youths got up, their backs were marked with red stripes but not bleeding. Several of the other young people ran forward to congratulate them. Leonardo imagined that the booty they had brought home and the whipping they had received must have made up for some fault and sanctioned their readmission to the clan.

Beer was brought and, while the two youths drank, a girl passed a wet rag over their backs. Alberto was swallowed up in the celebrations and Leonardo could no longer see him. The sun was sinking and soon it would be night, and night would bring him dark, silent hours for thinking.

He moved his weight to his left buttock because his right one was going numb. The music formed a constant background, but he no longer noticed it. Turning, he became aware of a black shiny point no bigger than a button, staring at him in the twilight. The elephant was scrutinizing him sadly, perhaps sorry to no longer be alone.

It can crush me whenever it likes, he thought, as if this were an everyday observation. Nothing to do with life or death in general. Still less his own.

The animal struggled to its feet; it was like being backstage in a theater and watching weights and counterweights rising and falling to raise the curtain. A complex operation, completed by the elephant with a long sigh. He had never seen an elephant so close before; it took up as much space as a large motorcycle but was twice as high. It was presumably Indian rather than African because its ears were small and its tusks barely visible, and a bump on its forehead gave it a worried look.

It moved toward him making the floor of the cage shake, touched him lightly with its trunk, then turned its face to one side and regarded him with compassion through the little eye in its wrinkled socket. Leonardo could feel the hot breath from its mouth and a smell like bark being steeped in water.

When the elephant had finished inspecting him, it drew back. Leonardo watched its little tail swinging artfully as it moved away. Returning to its place, the beast fixed its gaze on his eye and bent its back legs to assume a position that seemed both comic and painful before discharging from its anus a huge mass of dung that spread across the floor. Leonardo smiled, supposing himself to be mad.

In the rapidly falling dusk, a dozen kids had collected branches and dry wood in the place where the big bonfire had been. They doused them with gas and kerosene and soon a new fire was lighting up the encampment.

Leonardo started counting the young people. There are about a hundred, he told himself, without any clear idea of why it could be of any use to him to know this.

There was a group of small boys beside the fire, staring at the flames and at the bigger boys he had seen dancing around the earlier fire. One of these was Alberto.

Leonardo dreamed he was having sex on the sofa in the middle of the book room with a woman in vulgar makeup, who was insulting him for his impotence. In the dream, his rage grew, feeding on thoughts related to his childhood and his mother, until he began to slap the woman, whom he finally discovered to be Alessandra. So he apologized and went to have tea in a bar under the house, where he was called professor by the elderly proprietor whose walls were papered in photographs of the celebrated Torino soccer team, whose club doctor had been his grandfather.

He was woken by the cold and by his feet, which had begun to throb and send stabs of pain up beyond his knees. His arm had gone to sleep, leaving him no feeling in his fingers. He thought he should move it, but the moment he touched his shoulder he was torn by a lacerating spasm. His throat was dry, but he was not hungry. The elephant was standing at the other side of the cage. The cart under the cage may have been six meters long, not more than seven. The animal was gazing at the flames in the clearing, its trunk hanging outside between the bars.

Leonardo had no idea of the time. The animals impaled on the stakes had been eaten and the youngsters were writhing in time to the tiresome music. The smoke and glare from the fire was giving a rusty tinge to the sky, and neither moon nor stars could be seen. There was a light on in the window of the trailer.

He dragged himself to the bars and looked right and left. Several of the young people had detached themselves from the throng and lain down not far from the cart. They were smoking and staring at the sky as if waiting contentedly for some explanation. One of them, sitting up, inhaled a couple of times from a pouch; then let himself fall back among the others, who laughed. Two bodies clasped together inside a car were knocking against each another.

He tried to find Alberto in the crowd. For a moment he thought he recognized him, but the boy was too tall and his hair too short.

He needed to urinate. He unbuttoned his trousers and lay down against the bars in such a way that the urine would fall outside the cart. This operation took him at least ten minutes because his feet were not only unable to support him but were so heavy that he had to move first one leg and then the other with his only good hand. Maybe I should have drunk it, he thought, as the urine fell to the ground in a small shower.

Once, long ago, he had heard of a man stuck for two weeks in a rubber dinghy without food or water at the mercy of the ocean and who had survived by drinking his own urine. He looked at the elephant, on whose eye the yellow flames were reflected like the corolla of a flower.

It took him a long time to get back to the other side of the cage and settle himself again with his back against the bars. He put on the sweater but was shaken by shivers, apparently of cold, and his trousers, hardened by dried blood, were no comfort to him. Behind him were only the night and the forest and the wind they generated. The shoes and socks taken from him were probably burning in the fire.

“Lucia,” he called, just to hear the sound of his own voice.

For a long time he watched the young people dancing, drinking, and drugging themselves by inhaling from the small pouches. He saw some of them mate on the ground like dogs and others sit in a circle reapplying the colors on their faces. At one point a brawl broke out between two girls. One was captured and carried bodily into one of the cars and three boys shut themselves in with her. As the night went on the young people began to collapse one after the other, covering themselves with blankets or sheets taken from the cars. The last to stay awake sat around the fire half naked, their bodies shining with sweat, their heads swinging to the beat of the music. They did not speak but gazed at the dying embers and at the darkness advancing over the camp and cars and their recumbent companions. Their faces were full of grief and pain, as if at the extinction of life throughout the entire universe. Then they too lay down huddled close together against the cold and nothing moved anymore. After a while even the music stopped. Perhaps the generator had run out of fuel. Everything was buried in darkness and silence.

This was the hardest moment for Leonardo. He was shivering with cold and pain, but worse still, was tormented by thirst, which stopped him giving way to fatigue. The elephant was lying down. It had let itself crash heavily and gracelessly to the floor, tormented like Leonardo by the need to eat and drink.

Dawn was breaking when he heard steps approaching. Afraid to look around, he simply listened to the rustling of branches behind him and the abrupt blows with which they were being hacked off. After a while a man came up to the cage and began pushing branches through the bars. He had gray hair and round spectacles on a round face. He was small and plump and could have been sixty or even much younger. He went on with his work for a few minutes, completely ignoring Leonardo, until the cage was half full of shrubs and leafy branches and smelled of resin. Afraid he would go away again, Leonardo called to him.

“What do you want?” the man asked.

“I’m thirsty.”

The man stared at him for a moment then turned without speaking and vanished.

Leonardo was overcome by discouragement, but the man came back. Leonardo leaned one side against the bars to see him better. He was wearing a blue blazer with a crest on the pocket. A blazer that in any other situation would have looked elegant but which now seemed to have been put on specially to mock Leonardo. The man offered him a half-liter plastic bottle.

“Drink and give me the bottle back,” he said.

Leonardo had difficulty opening his lips, and some of the water ended up on his sweater.

“Can I have some more?” he asked, giving the bottle back to the man.

“Not now.”

Leonardo stared at his little gray expressionless eyes. Clearly life had been lived behind those eyes, but now all that was left of it was a weak reflection. To Leonardo, he looked like an old two-story house that had somehow survived among skyscrapers.

“My name’s Leonardo,” he said.

The man nodded but did not introduce himself. He rested his hands on the edge of the cage. He was holding a small hatchet in his right hand and had lost three fingers from his left: little finger, index, and middle.

“My daughter’s here. Have you seen her? Is there a young boy with her too?”

“The boy’s in the truck with the others,” the man said. “He’s fine.”

“And Lucia?”

The man went on staring at the clearing where the light of dawn was getting stronger, giving everything a livid tinge and covering it with a patina of frost.

“Your daughter’s with Richard,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

“That she’ll stay with Richard until he gets tired of her.”

“And then?”

The man looked at his shoes. He seemed to be drawing something in the dust with the toe of one foot.

“Then she’ll be common property, like the other girls you see around.”

Leonardo began sobbing. The man did nothing to comfort him. He just remained silent and watched.

“Who are you?” Leonardo said.

“A doctor.”

“Were you captured?”

“Yes.”

“And your family too?”

“No. My wife and daughter are dead. I don’t know where my son is.”

“Why don’t you escape?”

“Where would I go? At least I’m safe here and get fed.”

Leonardo studied the calm face and closed eyes before him. He realized fear and despair were so deep inside the man that nothing and nobody could reach them and pull them back to the surface.

“Tomorrow,” the doctor said, “if Richard allows it, I’ll give you something to stop your feet from getting infected. But it all depends on Richard and what he has in mind for you.”

They listened in silence to the slow, steady breathing of the sleeping elephant.

“I think I’ve got a broken shoulder too,” Leonardo said.

The doctor looked at him with dull eyes, then stretched out a tired hand to it.

“It’s dislocated,” he said.

Leonardo, who had held his breath because of the pain, breathed again.

“Can you fix it?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Can’t you do anything now?”

The man turned and disappeared behind one of the wooden walls that closed off the two ends of the cart. Leonardo thought he had gone, but the door opened and he came in, dressed in his ridiculous crested blue blazer. He was wearing moccasins with a little tassel at the back of each foot. He grimaced as he approached, perhaps because of the smell Leonardo was giving off.

“You mustn’t cry out,” he said. “Not for any reason at all.”

“I promise I won’t.”

The man looked toward Richard’s trailer: the light was off and everything in and around it was silent.

“Put something in your mouth.”

“What?”

The doctor broke a piece off a branch and gave it to Leonardo, who put it between his teeth, then, untying the bandage and using his foot as a lever under Leonardo’s armpit, he pulled his arm upward with a sharp jerk that made a sound like a nut being split. Leonardo collapsed whimpering.

“Quiet!”

Leonardo, his face squashed against the floor, nodded. He had clenched his teeth so hard that his mouth had begun bleeding again. The doctor left the cage and reappeared outside the bars. Leonardo was still lying on the floor, his good eye full of tears.

“Put the bandage on again. You can take it off tomorrow and pretend the arm has cured itself. Now I must go.”

But the man stayed, gazing at the dark bulk of the elephant asleep at the other side of the cage.

“Don’t be afraid of David,” he said. “He’s the only decent thing in this place.”

Leonardo struggled to a sitting position.

“You’ll help me?”

The man looked impersonally at him.

“I’ve already helped you. I can’t do anything more.”

“Then help my daughter.”

“I’m sorry, there’s nothing I can do.”

Leonardo heard him going away. He turned on his back and looked up at the wooden ceiling. It was painted blue, with the words CIRCO BALTO written in gold letters inside an oval border. The faces of an elephant, a hippopotamus, and a clown had been drawn inside the O.

I’m cold, Leonardo thought, I’ve never been so cold in my life.

He crawled as far as the pile of branches, lifted some, and crept underneath. Closing his eyes, he inhaled the smell of resin hoping it might stupefy him, but when he opened his eyes again he was still there, in the dark, in a newly prepared wooden coffin.

They stayed in the clearing another four more days during which no one except the doctor came near the cage or said a word to Leonardo. In his solitude he studied the rhythms and habits of what he was beginning to think of as a clan or tribe.

When the young people woke after midday, they spent a couple of hours wandering around the camp or going down to the river in an attempt to work off the effects of drugs and alcohol. After this, the cripple would distribute the weapons, which were kept locked up in one of the vans, to the older boys, most of whom went out in groups of two or three to hunt or carry out raids. They left behind in the camp a dozen armed youths, the children (including Alberto), the cripple, and the girls. When the groups returned from the hunt, they would place on a great blue cloth in front of Richard’s trailer not only deer, foxes, dogs, and cats but also the clothes, tools, weapons and everything else they had managed to find in the surrounding area. They would all be home by dark, when the bonfire was lit and the captured animals were skinned and stuck on the stakes to roast. Apart from the animals, the booty would not be touched until Richard came out of his trailer. This happened in the evening, after nightfall, when the bonfire had been lit. He would open the trailer door and raise his hand to acknowledge the ovation with which the young people would greet his appearance. Then he would come down among them and speak intimately to each as if he knew all about their hearts and their secret thoughts.

One evening Leonardo saw him take Alberto by the hand and go for a long walk with him but without ever going outside the circle of the camp. Alberto listened to him and answered his questions. Finally Richard embraced him and kissed him on the cheek, and Leonardo had the impression that, beneath its black markings, Alberto’s face swelled with pride. It was the first time since they had come there that the child’s eyes had searched behind the bars for his own. Only a moment, but enough to make it clear to Leonardo that Alberto would not return from the world he was now in and where perhaps he was destined to stay forever.

After Richard had exchanged a word with everyone, he would inspect what had been brought in. If there was not much booty, or if it was of little value, his face took on a bitter expression, but Leonardo never heard him reprove anyone or show any sign of anger. More often he would clap his hands to arouse the enthusiasm of the young people. Then he would address them with a few words that Leonardo, deafened by the music, never managed to hear, give the cripple a little urn containing the substance the youngsters inhaled, and withdraw into his trailer.

During those four days Leonardo never saw him eat or drink or join in the partying, which always went on in the same way until first light. He would spend all day in the trailer with Lucia, whom Leonardo never managed to glimpse despite keeping his eye fixed on the vehicle’s two windows.

The only person he had any contact with was the doctor, who came each morning at dawn with food for him and David. In his own case this would nearly always be potatoes cooked in the embers and very tough meat which, with his broken teeth, he could not ingest until he had sucked it for a long time. During his second visit the man sprinkled his feet with a yellowish powder before binding them up with care—to prevent infection, he said. Leonardo decided he must have been told to do this by Richard, and when he asked about this, the man confirmed it. But when he asked about Lucia the man would only say that she was well.

“Why does she never come out of the trailer?”

“She can’t.”

“Is she tied up?”

“No.”

Before leaving, the doctor would sweep the cage clean of both Leonardo’s excrement and the elephant’s, after which he would go to David, who was nearly always lying stretched out in his corner, and spend a long time stroking his head and whispering in the animal’s large ears words like those he must once have spoken to his wife and to his daughter before she went to sleep.

Leonardo, too, as the days passed, became fond of the animal. Sometimes, in moments of depression or loneliness, he would call to him by name and the elephant would come over to be stroked.

At night, on the other hand, it would be his turn to crawl on all fours to the end of the cage to seek shelter from the cold next to the animal. David’s skin was rough and his stomach noisy, but his huge body gave enough warmth to help Leonardo fall asleep quickly. At first he was afraid of being crushed, until he realized that David, even when asleep, was extremely careful of the fragile companion whom he had found sharing his cage. Sometimes, when David’s little eyes lit up and his trunk began swinging left and right and turning over backward, it seemed the elephant was laughing. This would happen when Leonardo squatted in a corner to attend to his physical needs. David seemed amused by the bizarre position his human companion had to adopt to perform this function.

On the morning of the fifth day Leonardo woke to find the youngsters sitting in two lines facing the trailer. There was no music and an unreal silence reigned over the camp, broken only by birdsong. He shuffled on his knees to the bars to look for Alberto, who was sitting with the others with his face painted and his dirty hair tied in little bunches.

They waited an hour, perhaps two; Leonardo no longer had any sense of time and was even uncertain about the rising and setting of the sun. Finally the door of the trailer opened and Richard came out accompanied by a young woman. It was immediately clear to Leonardo that this was not Lucia, because she was shorter than her and several years older. She had a very beautiful face and was wearing a ball gown with a wide belt. Her hair had been completely shaved off.

Richard led her to face the youngsters, who were watching in silence.

Then he called “Enrico!”

It was the first time Leonardo had heard Richard’s voice; it was deep and, to Leonardo, full of mysterious overtones.

The cripple got up from the front row and ran forward, took a sheet of paper Richard held out to him, tore it into little pieces, wrote something on each piece, then screwed them into little balls before distributing them among the young people.

When this operation had been completed, Richard said something in the ear of the woman at his side, after which he kissed her forehead and turned to go back into the trailer. She looked astonished, like a bride abandoned at the altar. She watched the door close behind Richard, and when a youth with curly hair got to his feet in the second row, she understood and began weeping.

The curly-haired youth handed the cripple his scrap of paper, then he went up to the woman.

Without looking her in the face he took hold of one arm and pulled her, but she shook herself free violently. He then grabbed her with both hands, but she threw herself on the ground and dug in her heels. The boy seemed discouraged; he was thin with very small bones. His eyes must be the same black as his hair, Leonardo thought.

The boy kicked the woman in the side; she gave a shrill scream but still resisted. Then he started slapping her, but his hands were small and weak and she managed to kick him in the groin. He collapsed, swearing.

“Number two,” shouted the cripple.

“No,” yelled the curly-headed youth, trying to struggle back to his feet. Everyone watched, but no one spoke.

“That’s enough, you idiot,” the cripple said. “Go back to your place.”

The boy went and sat down again with his head bowed. Another got up: about eighteen years old.

He leaped over the front row to the woman, who was sitting with her knees drawn up to her chest, weeping. Crouching beside her he said a few words, at which she shook her head. Then, when he leaned closer to her ear, she moved sharply away so that he lost his balance and fell. Someone laughed. Then he got up and stood for a few moments staring at the woman’s hips, as if he had heard there was something precious there, but was not quite sure. Then, without warning, he punched her face, knocking her backward into the dust. After a moment of astonishment she tried to scurry away on all fours, but the boy threw an arm around her waist and dragged her toward the coach. When they got there the woman pushed with her feet against the steps at the door, making them both fall backward. This time nobody laughed.

Showing no emotion the boy got up, twisted the woman’s arm behind her back, and banged her head three times on the step. Leonardo saw a wound open on her forehead and blood pour down her face. For the first time since he had been hit himself, he managed to open his swollen eye: he felt tears gush out of it and soak his face down to his chin. Getting to her feet, the woman climbed into the coach without offering further resistance.

A few minutes later the boy came out, raised his fist in triumph, and was received with shouts and applause. Then a third youth got up, handed his ticket to the cripple, and made his way to the bus.

Leonardo spent the rest of the morning huddled in a corner of the cage without raising his eyes from the floor, while David, beside him, watched with his sad little eyes the procession of boys and some girls coming and going from the coach. This continued until afternoon, by then the air had grown cold and the sun had vanished behind a cloud just above the mountains. They lit the fire and the monotonous and deafening music started again. Leonardo, from his corner, watched the youngsters dancing and wondered if Alberto had climbed into the coach.

Bringing him food at first light, the doctor found him crouching like a dog.

“We’ll be leaving soon,” he said.

The man had changed his pants and had a clean shirt on under his blazer. Leonardo took the plate the doctor had left near his feet and threw it at the wall. A potato fell on David’s head; he jolted in his sleep without opening his eyes. The doctor went away without saying a word or sweeping up the excrement.

The procession of vehicles left in the early afternoon and when it got dark stopped right in front of the hotel Leonardo had walked past with the children a week earlier. The climb had been slow because several of the cars were out of gasoline and had to be towed by the trucks and the coach. Leonardo noticed that many of the vehicles had been riddled with bullets. Even the roof of the cage was peppered with holes through which the sun filtered in blades of yellow-blue light. Noticing this, Leonardo got to his feet for the first time, and holding on to the bars moved to the far end of the cage, from where David was placidly contemplating the countryside beside the road. He saw several round scars on the elephant’s body that could have been bullet wounds.

When they were into the hills the vehicles were parked in a circle and the fire was lit in the middle of a little amphitheater once used for children’s shows. The amplifiers were set up and the stakes impaled with animals, and the youngsters began drinking and dancing as usual. Alberto, sitting on the concrete steps with other children, was sharing a pouch from which each inhaled in turn. Every now and then one or other of them would throw a pinecone at the bald girl, who was tied by a short chain to the bumper of one of the cars. The woman kept her head bowed, and even when hit did not react in any way. Her dress had been torn to shreds and her face was a dark stain the fire seemed unwilling to illuminate. A three-quarters moon appeared from time to time from behind the clouds, but its light was lost long before it could touch this part of the earth. The strong wind blowing from the sea brought nothing mild with it. All was cold and tense. Leonardo could see the great wind turbines rotating and the red lights above them marking the escape route along the crest of the hills.

He lay down with his head against David’s stomach and closed his eyes. He imagined Bauschan and Sebastiano sitting at the entrance to a cave, a fire behind them and their eyes fixed on the sea, waiting for something to come from far away. His feet could only just support him, but they did not hurt anymore and the pain in his shoulder had faded to a slight numbness. Only thirst still tormented him.

Even though he tried to ration the water he was given, the bottle would already be empty by midafternoon. The elephant would drink his two bucketfuls and eat though barely awake, spending the rest of the day with nothing. Leonardo wondered how he managed to survive.

With sleepiness beginning to confuse his thoughts he heard someone fiddling with the lock on the door. He thought the doctor must have come early, but when the door opened he saw a boy in black trousers and a yellow shirt, with painted face and no eyebrows like all the others.

“Come,” the boy said.

Leonardo struggled down the short ladder and followed the boy across the field. His bandaged feet trod uncertainly on the damp grass. The boy walked ahead, knowing Leonardo could not escape. He gave off a strong feral smell, as if he had just emerged from an uncured bearskin, and his hair was cut in a triangle with its point between the tendons at the back of his neck.

The young people were waiting on the steps of the little amphitheater while below, facing it, Richard was sitting in his pastel-shade tunic with Lucia at his side. When Leonardo came before them she continued to look at the ground. The boy who had brought him made him kneel and went off to sit with the others. Leonardo looked at Lucia’s white, shaved head, wishing he could weep on it and then dry it with his hands. She was wearing a decent blue dress and long earrings Leonardo had never seen before. Her face and body were intact yet seemed lifeless as if they had disintegrated or been contaminated.

“They tell me you’re a dancer,” Richard said.

Leonardo studied his straight nose, thin lips, long hair, and honey-colored beard framing his light smile: every part of his face expressed beauty and gentleness, yet its light and warmth, like those of a will-o’-the-wisp, somehow had more to do with the extinction of life than its creation. Leonardo looked at his calm blue eyes and found them utterly insane. There was nothing human there. They were more like the eyes of a majestic bird of prey or a great creature from the depths of the sea, infinitely solitary and universally feared.

“I’d like you to dance for us,” Richard said.

There was no mockery in his voice. Leonardo noticed the cripple was sitting a little higher up behind them. Armed with a pistol.

“I can’t dance,” Leonardo said. “I’m not a dancer.”

Richard smiled.

“You’re too modest, dancer,” he said, offering his hand.

Leonardo dropped his eyes and felt the man’s fingers slithering through his hair, loosening the knots of congealed blood that glued it together. Keeping his eyes on the ground, he saw little pieces of straw falling and shining in the shadows. The fire was warm on his shoulders. It was many days since he had felt such heat. Richard pushed Leonardo’s hair back one last time and withdrew his hand.

“From now on you will dance,” he said, “and you will be delighted to do it, because that will give us pleasure.”

Leonardo looked at the man’s neat feet, at his long, well-proportioned hands and perfect teeth. Christ in our time, he thought; a Christ generated by the times we live in and thus certain to make converts and to build a church and sow his word throughout the earth.

He was forced to his feet and led toward the fire. A couple of youths with spades had spread a circle of embers across the concrete which glowed red in the wind.

“Take off your bandages,” the cripple said.

Leonardo’s eyes searched for Lucia, but she was still looking down as though the whole world was confined to the few centimeters of ground between her feet. But Richard’s predator eyes were staring at him, revealing neither malice nor amusement, only an infinite power of concentration.

Leonardo breathed in the smell of meat, bodies, and burned fur weighing on the air. The unskinned snout of a small boar impaled on one of the stakes had caught fire. He sat down and began to unwind his bandages.

“Get up,” the cripple said as soon as he had finished.

He moved unassisted toward the embers. The usual hypnotic music was coming from the amplifiers. He placed his right foot on the embers, then his left. At first all he felt was a light tickling, like walking at midday on a sun-warmed beach, but when the first pangs rose up his legs he began to dance from one foot to the other. The audience drove him on with cries of “Dancer!,” stamping their feet on the steps.

He began waving his arms, leaping, and gyrating. A mad exaltation filled him, and the pain in his feet faded.

He closed his eyes and danced faster, more frenetically, then opened them again and saw Richard’s light but penetrating expression, which brought back familiar dreams from his childhood of warriors with matted hair and women huddling in caves. Nightmares involving dogs, bones, cold, and bodies burned on high flaming pyres in faraway villages. Recurrent visions from which he woke terrified and certain there would never be a place in the world for him.

In his mind he passed down a corridor opening onto rooms with no floors. If he had gone through one of those doors, he would never have been able to get back and his body would have been degraded to a shell capable only of killing and violating and, in the end, opening his own veins with a shard of flint and waiting for death with his eyes turned up to the moon.

In some hidden corner where it had been hidden for goodness knows how long, the memory came back to him of a spring morning many years ago. He and Lucia had woken late, as often happened on Saturdays, and had breakfast at the kitchen table, listening to a radio program Lucia did not entirely understand and that Leonardo only loved for the voice of the female host. Then they had washed and started to get ready to go out. When Leonardo had laid out Lucia’s clothes ready for her on the sofa, the little girl had taken off her pajamas, pulled on her pants, and begun to leap about on the bed, calling out that she was like Tarzan, Mowgli, and Jesus.

“Jesus too?” Leonardo had asked.

“Jesus died with torn pants, didn’t you know that?”

He remembered that while Lucia had finished getting dressed he had listened to the sound of cars on the wet road and realized he had now come really close to the secret, no matter how close he may have been before. He must preserve that perception, he told himself. Not the perception of what he himself was but of what that child had been, what she was now, and what she would become.

He recalled his mind to the present. She turned to look at him with the eyes of a dog that has escaped to run free along the safety barrier of the autostrada but has finally agreed to return and come back. He was aware of this because he felt new pain in his feet and humiliation for what he was doing. The youngsters were whistling, cheering, and throwing pinecones and bits of wood at him. Then Richard raised a hand and all was silent, except the music, which continued to vibrate against the immobility of the bodies and the natural world around them.

Leonardo took a step forward and felt cold concrete refresh his blistered feet. The wind had dropped. An elongated cloud was fleeing to the east leaving the moon behind, like a reptile that has laid her egg and wants to be far away when it hatches.

Richard stood up, and taking Lucia by the hand helped her to her feet. She was tiny beside him, as if small enough to fit into the palm of his hand.

“We are grateful to you, dancer,” he said. “Now you can go back to your cage.”

Panting, his mouth parched although full of saliva, Leonardo looked at him. There had not been the slightest note of derision in the man’s voice. He turned and hobbled through the surrounding silence to the wagon. No one followed to make sure he went to the cage. He climbed the stepladder, entered, and closed the door. David was watching him in profile.

“It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing.”

He sat down with his back to the partying in the arena. The shouts and the music, the smell of meat, and the crackling of branches thrown on the fire reached him; then he realized the smell of meat was coming from himself. He looked out at the night before him, so inexorable and ancient, and wept tears quite different from the tears he would have once wept.

After that evening, the young people started coming to see the cage where David and Leonardo spent their days. Only Richard could give the order to open it, but that did not stop them from goading Leonardo to dance or prevent them from throwing stones and food at him through the bars. When he saw them coming, he would crouch in a corner or hide behind David, trying to make himself invisible. Sometimes, having tried to provoke him with sticks and stones in the useless hope of getting him to react, the kids would stay there to study him in silence as though Leonardo were the unusual creature and not the elephant, for whom they seemed to feel little or no curiosity. As soon as they were bored, they would go away and Leonardo would be able to emerge from his hideaway to collect the food. It usually turned out to be something his teeth could not cope with: bones, such as the skull of a hare or a badger, or the paws of a wild boar or fallow deer, but sometimes he was lucky and found an onion, some potato peel, or a rabbit skin he could chew for its fat before laying it out to dry.

One night, while he was asleep, they threw a live trout at him. When the youngsters stopped laughing and went back to dance, he watched the fish struggling on the floor, opening and shutting its gills, until he was sure it was dead; he then spent a long time rubbing it on the bars to remove its scales before eating it.

His feet hardly hurt him at all which, according to the doctor who had treated them again and bound them up, was not a good sign. In fact, an extremely hard, black calloused crust had formed under the soles, which allowed him to move about the cage as if in rubber-soled shoes and to cross easily from the side he used as a toilet to the side where he ate and slept beside David.

During the days they spent on the hillside and those passed in a new encampment some thirty kilometers into the valley, Leonardo was able to assemble a more detailed picture of the tribe whose jester he had become. Most of the young people were between fifteen and thirty years old, leaving aside the cripple who was evidently Richard’s trusted right-hand man, and there seemed no hierarchy in the group. All the males had equal access to weapons, drugs, and alcohol, while the females were excluded from the distribution of weapons and never left the camp. There were no fixed relationships, and the females coupled with anyone without preference or exclusion. This could happen in public or in the cars or coach at any time of the day or night. The group of children that Alberto had joined was held in high esteem, especially by Richard, and Leonardo never saw anyone mistreat them or make fun of them. They were involved in the partying and were given alcohol and drugs, but when the older males went out to hunt, they stayed in camp with the girls. One of the youths who had captured them, the dark thickset one, busied himself with skinning the animals after hanging them from a hook that stuck out of the cab of one of the smaller vans. Then the skin and entrails were thrown away and the rest of the animal was impaled on a stake to cook by the fire. A small fiberglass cistern had been installed on another truck for water. This was kept at a certain level by a pump that drew from the river running beside the road or from the streams that carried quantities of water down the hillsides. Even so, Leonardo never saw any of the youngsters drinking from the cistern or using water to wash in. Their only form of bodily care concerned their hair and eyebrows, which the boys shaved every two or three days. Some of the young people had longer hair than others and wore rings and earrings or had metal pins in their ears or other parts of their faces, but this seemed to be a matter for individual choice. The only things that clearly identified members of the tribe were their shaved eyebrows and the colored markings on their cheeks and foreheads. There were no uniforms; they all dressed as they liked and sometimes the boys returned wearing garments they must have found while out plundering. None of them had anywhere to keep their clothes. What they had taken was either left lying around or thrown on the fire, and despite the severity of the weather no one possessed a jacket or any heavy clothing.

The scraps of conversation Leonardo could catch above the thumping beat of the music were nearly always connected with challenges, squabbles, songs, or direct invitations to sex. Their vocabulary was basic, approximate, and stuffed with expletives. Even so, it revealed presence of mind and alertness. It would not be accurate to say they lacked intelligence, but it was as if the electricity had left some parts of their brains to concentrate on areas related to aggressiveness and the pure pursuit of pleasure. There was no distinction for them between wanting to do something and actually doing it; the inconvenient processes of thought had dissolved to make way for untrammeled need.

Leonardo noticed they were incapable of feeling remorse or regret for anything they did, or of remembering what had happened the day before or wondering what would happen the next day. He even began to doubt whether or not they could remember anything of their past or of other people who had once been close to them or of the places they had come from.

Richard seemed to be their only law. Every evening when the hunters laid out their haul of dead animals and knick-knacks on the cloth, he would emerge from his trailer and walk among the young people, talking to them like a father, confessor, or servant.

As the days passed, Leonardo noticed that Richard was beginning to look increasingly disappointed when it was time to examine the booty. On one occasion he went back into the trailer without imparting his usual benediction or handing the cripple the urn with the drug in it. This caused an icy silence to fall over the tribe, and once he was out of sight the youngsters stared in astonishment at the door that had swallowed him up. This made it clear to Leonardo that what Richard really wanted from the raids was not the sort of food and trinkets the boys regularly brought back but gasoline, women, and other prisoners, and he decided that until the boys found him a new girl, Lucia would be safe from the fate of the woman with the shaved head.

The evening the drug was withheld, a brawl broke out and one youth was wounded in the stomach by a knife. The dancing continued but someone went for the doctor, who examined the boy, spread a sheet on the ground, and stitched the wound by the flickering light of the bonfire. It looked to Leonardo as though the boy was weeping during the operation.

That night he asked the doctor where he had been captured.

“Near M.”

“You were living there?”

“No, I was on my way to Austria.”

“With your family?”

“My wife and daughter were already dead. I was on my own.”

The man continued going back and forth to the thicket where he was cutting branches for David.

“Where do they come from?” Leonardo asked.

“Who?”

“These kids.”

“When I first saw them they were wearing swimsuits; I think they must be from the Adriatic coast.”

“And now? Where are we going?”

“Why are you asking these questions?”

“Don’t you want to know yourself?”

“I know where I stand. I won the finger-cutting. I have my place in the group, no one will hurt me. Also, I’m a doctor, and they need a doctor.”

Leonardo looked at the man, with the yellow light of the last flames of the bonfire dancing on him; as always his face was expressionless, yet infinitely sad.

“What’s the finger-cutting?”

The doctor walked off. It seemed to Leonardo that he was away for hours, but it was only a few minutes later when he came back and the morning light had grown no brighter. He threw a last handful of twigs into the cage, then looked at Leonardo.

“I could give you an injection. You won’t feel a thing and tomorrow they’ll find you dead.”

Leonardo shook his head.

“I can’t leave Lucia.”

“Then keep dancing and try to stay alive. There’s nothing else for you.”

“What do you know about Richard?”

“You’re asking meaningless questions.”

“Who was he before he started this madness? That I want to know.”

“You’re not in a position to want anything. You’re full of resentment, drawing conclusions from what you see. But what you’re seeing and judging is only a facade, a necessary evil. Richard is above all this. Respect him. He’s bringing up his children far better than you would have been able to. You would have made them into victims destined for suffering and nothing more. I know because I did the same. Just now they are being tested by fire; they’ll get burned, but it’ll make them stronger. I used to not believe it either, but there’s a logic in it all, a new logic. Your son has understood it, children understand much more quickly than we do. Richard has read this in him, which is why he wants to keep him close. The only person for you to worry about is yourself. It’s not easy for people like you and me to change our skin. We are too old and too firmly locked into what we used to think was right.”

Leonardo shook his head, dismissing these words.

“I’d like you to speak to Alberto and tell him to come to me.”

“Why not call him yourself?”

“I have, but he pretends not to hear.”

“He won’t come, even if I ask him.”

“But ask him all the same.”

“He’ll only come if Richard tells him to.”

“Then tell Richard I’d like to speak to Alberto.”

“No one speaks to Richard unless Richard himself wants it.”

Leonardo leaned back against the bars and looked at David. Since they had started sharing the cage, he had never seen the elephant angry or showing any sign of impatience.

“Do you ever speak to the kids?”

“No.”

“If I’m the only person you can speak to, why is it so difficult for you to do it?”

“Your questions are out of place. They come from a concept of the world that no longer exists. Though being a writer, you must have gotten used to imagining other worlds. That’s what this is.”

“I’m trying to understand what sort of world it is.”

“Understanding belongs to the old world. I also studied and had a home, profession, and family. That wasn’t very long ago, but it no longer makes sense to think about it. These things don’t mean anything anymore. There’s nothing to be said and still less to understand.”

Leonardo nodded.

“Why are we always on the move? What are they looking for?”

The doctor put his hands on the edge of the cage, the left hand with three fingers missing hidden under the other. The stakes facing Leonardo were stuck with black sculptures of desiccated flesh.

“Fuel for the cars,” the doctor said, “and for the generators.”

“Only that?”

“And prisoners, especially women and children. Richard wants them educated according to the new law.”

Leonardo tried to understand whether the man believed what he was saying or was just repeating it automatically, but the doctor’s face was expressionless, his eyes like cold ash.

“What are those bullet holes on the cars?”

“An airplane machine-gunned us. We’d gone too close to the frontier.”

“Is that where Richard’s trying to go? To France?”

The man did not answer. The camp, with its recumbent bodies and stream of coarse smoke from the bonfire, was reflected in his glasses. The wind had begun to shift it to the west.

“What if we run into another gang?”

The man stuck his hands into his jacket pockets.

“If it’s smaller we attack it. If it’s bigger we keep our distance or try to twin with it.”

“Twin with it?”

“Exchange prisoners.”

Leonardo studied the man’s face. The strengthening light was tingeing their faces blue.

“You say you don’t know where your son is. Which means he may be alive. Why don’t you go and look for him? You may find him again.”

The doctor shook his head.

“Do you care about anything at all except David?”

The man took his time before answering.

Finally he said, “No,” then turned and slipped into a pocket of darkness among the trees where the morning light had not yet reached.

He recognized the field beyond the ditch and the safety barrier where they had sat down for a drink and Sergio had met them again. During those two weeks the snow had melted, but the ground was still hard and wintry with a thin layer of ice.

As soon as he heard the squeaking of brakes on the truck, he understood. It took them about ten minutes to get situated, after which the cripple and some twenty youths cut quickly through the field and disappeared into the forest. The music had already been off for a couple of hours. Leonardo had thought the generator must have run out of fuel. Now he knew that was not what had happened.

The first shots rang out an hour later. At first few and far between, then more frequent.

David, hearing them, began to move nervously around the cage. He never did this when the youths went out on a normal hunt, but now, for many hours, explosions could be heard echoing from the hills. He called to the elephant, who came to rest his head against Leonardo’s chest. He scratched under his ears and talked to him for a long time, asking him many questions about his past to distract him and chase away the black images passing through their minds. David curled his trunk around Leonardo and held him close. Neither moved until Leonardo heard the animal’s huge heart slow down so that it was beating in time with his own. Then they sat together with their eyes turned to the hills and waited. The afternoon slipped away and, as the sun sank, darkness emerged from the woods and besieged the road. An opaline mist lifted from the fields.

When the first raiders reappeared, it was already night and they headed for the bonfire at the head of the convoy, which was normally led by a couple of cars used by scouts, the van where the guns were kept, and Richard’s trailer. They were carrying two chests full of cans on their shoulders. The next to arrive had a can of gasoline and another full of a dark liquid that might have been wine or kerosene. A roar of shouts and shots greeted their arrival, but Leonardo did not lean out to see what was happening at the head of the column; he kept his eyes on the forest, from where the cripple and the main party had not yet appeared. He did not have to wait long. They were somewhat spread out, each carrying something: one had an animal that had already been skinned, some had weapons, and some a box or large piece of dried meat. Four of the boys who had originally left the trailer were missing. The cripple was gripping the arm of Salomon, the elder son. There was no sign of Manon or Sergio or their younger son.

Leonardo heard the cries of excitement at the head of the column get louder, followed by a chorus of “Alberto, Alberto, Alberto…”; then the usual music started up again, drowning everything else.

He knelt down, took a piece of David’s dry dung and some straw and mixed them together to make two small balls that he stuffed into his ears, then lay down on the floor and, with the muffled noise filling his head, looked inside himself. He found himself in an empty church, stripped of all trace of the thousands who had once prayed there so earnestly. Vetch had climbed the pillars and water dripping from the roof had formed stalactites of red lime that hung down like scraps of ulcerated flesh. A wooden candelabrum was the only altar fitting. There were no pictures on the walls, only shirts, pants, and dresses tacked up with old nails. There was a door into the sacristy from the aisle to the right. It was open, and a rocking sound emanated from the room.

When he opened his eyes, Leonardo could see shadows projected against the wall of trees that marked the edge of the forest.

“Once people used to read your books, and now you dance for kids and suck bones like a dog.”

“That’s how it is.”

“But why do that?”

“For her.”

“She’s not here.”

“She’ll come back.”

“Are you so sure?”

“I shall dance and suck bones until she comes back, and I shall be here for her.”

He turned his back on the dancing shadows and closed his eyes. The church was dark and he could hear footsteps wandering in the aisles; the footsteps of Manon and Sergio and their child. “I’m here,” he said. “Don’t be afraid.”

In the morning, when everyone was asleep, the cripple opened the door and ushered the little boy into the cage.

“You’ll stay here for a bit,” he said, then went away without a glance at Leonardo or the sleeping elephant. Leonardo looked at the child: he had some sort of soft encrustation in his hair but did not seem to have been injured. But he was clearly very tired. Tired and dirty. Infinitely tired, dirty, and depressed.

“Do you recognize me?”

The boy’s eyes ran over him, but he said nothing.

“I’ve been in your house. With me there was a girl, a boy your age, and a dog. Also a tall gentleman.”

He noticed that Salomon was looking at David. The elephant was sleeping with his head propped on his front feet. He looked like a pious person mumbling prayers into cupped hands.

“Don’t be afraid of him,” he said to reassure the boy. “Sit down, you must be tired.”

The child did not move.

“You can sit by the door. I’ll stay here. Are you thirsty?”

Salomon nodded. Leonardo, without moving from the branches he was leaning against, sent the bottle rolling in his direction. Salomon grabbed it before it stopped. After drinking he stood it on the floor and stared at it with his hands hanging by his sides. He was wearing a pair of jeans, a light pullover with horizontal stripes, and felt slippers. The color of his eyes reminded him of the water of a fjord seen from the top of a Nordic cliff. They were the same shade of blue as his mother’s and required the same strength of character to sustain it. For a couple of hours now a crystalline silence had rested over the whole trailer. The croaking of a crow was deafening.

“Do you really not remember me?”

No answer.

“We had a meal together and you asked me the name of my dog.”

Salomon stepped two paces back until he came up against the wooden wall and let himself slide to the ground. Leonardo realized he would soon be asleep. So as not to disturb him, he turned away to look at the forest. A tired sun was struggling from behind a thick blanket of clouds, as the darkness grudgingly retreated to leave the grass veiled with mother-of-pearl.

“That’s an Indian elephant,” the child said.

Leonardo looked at him. His face was very pale and his hair had been cut pageboy style.

“Are you an expert on elephants?”

“Not really, but I’ve got a book that tells all about them.”

“It must be a book with lots of photographs.”

“Yes, but it has drawings too and a sort of puzzle.”

“His name’s David.”

The child nodded.

“Does he eat those leaves?”

“Yes.”

“It says in my book that elephants are always on the move because they have to eat so much. They have intestines thirty-seven meters long.”

“He doesn’t eat much.”

Salomon studied the animal. In the cold, troubled air the elephant looked as if it were made of slate.

“Is he also here because he tried to escape?” the boy said.

Leonardo touched his nose: the break had healed leaving it crooked and hooked.

“Have you tried to escape?” he asked.

“Yes, but I twisted my ankle.”

“That was very brave of you. But now you should rest.”

The child rubbed his hands together. It looked as if he hoped he might create fire or light that way.

“I’m afraid to fall asleep in case the elephant tramples on me.” He interrupted himself: “Elephants can be aggressive.”

“This one’s very docile.”

“What does ‘docile’ mean?”

“That he’s gentle.”

“Yes, but he doesn’t know me.”

Leonardo studied his hands.

“I’ll stay awake and keep an eye on him, and when he wakes up I’ll tell him who you are.”

They looked at each other for a while in the silence of the new dawn, and then the child closed his eyes and let his chin fall on his chest.

For three days, the shouts and music of partying, lasting until dawn, reached them from the head of the procession of vehicles. During those two days no one, except the doctor, came near the wagon to see how the child was or to annoy Leonardo. Salomon, when not asleep, was content to watch the youngsters coming back from the forest carrying the food, bottles, pans, furniture, and other objects that had once been part of the only home he had ever known.

Watching him, Leonardo wondered where the boy could be hiding what must be a desperate need to be alone and his grief over what had happened. In fact, he never mentioned his parents or brother or referred to their fate. He never asked any questions about the future or showed any sign of missing all the things he had had until the previous day. It was as though nothing had come to him as a surprise.

At dawn, when the doctor came, he woke and ate the food the man brought. Leonardo left the tenderest pieces of meat for Salomon and waited until he had had enough before eating the rest himself. Then Salomon would sit with his back to the wall in silence, except when he suddenly began to talk about animals he knew about, particularly his favorites, which were horses and foxes.

One afternoon he told Leonardo about the leafcutter ants of South America; and how they built nests eight meters deep with a room in the middle big enough for a man to stand upright. He explained that these ants got their name not because they ate leaves but because they cut them and carried them into their nest, where they made them into a bed on which they could grow mushrooms. In fact, they had such a passion for their favorite mushrooms that they not only ate them, but they used their own shit to sow the spores in the nest where they would grow and could then be eaten in comfort and fed to their larvae.

At dawn, with the child still asleep, Leonardo asked the doctor what had happened to his parents. For a while they listened in silence to Salomon’s breathing as he snored through a blocked nose in the way small children do. Then the doctor told Leonardo they had barricaded themselves in their house and the father had killed four youths before he was hit in the neck. Only then had they been able to break down the door. The woman and the younger child had fled to the attic where, judging all was lost, she had shot her son and then herself. When Leonardo asked where Salomon had been at the time, the doctor said he had been found hiding under the trap door to the secret room his father had dug beneath the house as a place for provisions.

In those two days, Salomon came to trust David, though he never went near him except when Leonardo was at his side. The elephant showed himself even more gentle with Salomon, giving short moans of pleasure when the boy’s small hand touched his thick hide, and turning away when the child retired into the corner to attend to his physical needs.

On their last night together in the cage, the child woke Leonardo to say he had had a bad dream.

“A very bad one?”

“The worst I’ve ever had.”

“I expect you’d rather not tell me about it.”

“Better not.”

“Yes, perhaps that’s best.”

Leonardo felt his forehead to see if he was feverish. It was the first time the boy had let himself be touched. His forehead was cool.

“You can go back to sleep. You can’t have two bad dreams in one night.”

“Can I sleep here?”

“Of course you can. Are you cold?”

“Yes, very cold. Will David be good?”

“Of course he will.”

The child lay down beside Leonardo, both with their backs against the elephant’s belly. Leonardo slipped his left arm around Salomon’s shoulders.

“Warmer?”

“Yes, but David has a bad smell.”

“That’s probably me. I haven’t changed my clothes for such a long time.”

“And I haven’t washed for three days. If Mamma knew all hell would break loose.”

“Your mother would understand the situation.”

They fell silent, feeling the bass notes of the music thump against their ribs.

“What have you done to your feet? Why are they black?”

“I’m a dancer. A dancer who sometimes dances on hot coals, but one evening I didn’t concentrate properly and burned myself. But they’re getting better now.”

“Sure?”

“It’s normal for people who dance on hot coals to have black feet. It’s a professional risk, like a tennis player having one arm more muscular than the other.”

“What’s tennis?”

“Have you never seen a tennis match?”

The boy shook his head.

“You will one day, and maybe you’ll even be able to play. Let’s get some sleep now. In a few hours the doctor will be here and bring us something to eat.”

“Can I ask you something else?”

“Of course you can.”

“Where’s your daughter?”

Leonardo looked into the child’s eyes, which were fixed on him.

“When they brought you here, did you talk to a man with long hair and a beard? A man in a long robe?”

“Yes.”

“Can I ask you what he said to you?”

“That I was one of his sons and he would teach me many useful things. That I must love all the people around me because they were my brothers and sisters and apart from that I could do what I liked.”

“Was there a girl with a shaved head with him?”

“You mean bald?”

“Yes, a bald girl.”

“Yes.”

“That’s my daughter.”

“Is she his fiancée?”

“No, she’s not his fiancée.”

The child closed his eyes as though he had decided to go to sleep. Leonardo knew this was not the case and continued to watch him. In the darkness his skin was pearly white, the profile of his nose a work of art.

“Salomon?”

“Yes.”

“I want to say something very important to you. Something you must remember. Will you be able to do that?”

“All right.”

“In a little while they’ll let you join the others. There are some things you must promise me not to do.”

“All right.”

“The first thing is don’t try to escape; if they catch you doing that they could hurt you, and even if you got away you’d have nowhere to go. There are lots of bad people around. OK?”

The boy looked uncertainly at him.

“OK, Salomon?”

“OK.”

“Good. Once you’re out of here they’ll paint your face and shave off your eyebrows with a razor. That will mean you’ve joined the tribe. Let them do it but remember you don’t belong in their tribe. The family you had before, even if it doesn’t exist anymore, will always be your tribe. These people here will make you breathe in from a pouch and give you something to drink, you must pretend to do it but really not do it. Those things can harm you. If you touch them you’ll forget your mamma and your papa and your little brother, and if you forget them there won’t be anyone left to remember them.”

“You’re scaring me.”

Leonardo hugged him.

“Don’t be scared. Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, but stop scaring me.”

“I don’t want to scare you. But listen to and remember what I’m telling you: they’ll put you with other children. One of them is named Alberto. He was the child with me the day we came to your house. He’s two years older than you and has reddish hair. Don’t listen to what he tells you, OK? He and the others do very nasty things and will want you to join in…”

“What kind of nasty things?”

“Nasty things to people and animals. You love animals very much and people too, and you know things like that mustn’t be done. You know your mamma and your papa would never have done such things, and I know you won’t do them either. But don’t run away from the camp, OK? Here you’ll get food and drink and be safe. You must do like people in the theater, you must act.”

“What’s the theater?”

“Never mind, it’s not important. Just pretend to be like the others. You and I and David know you’re not really like the others at all. OK? Shall I repeat what you have to remember?”

“No. Are you pretending too?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Is it difficult?”

“It is at the beginning, but it gets easier. Now let’s get some sleep, OK?”

“OK.”

Leonardo closed his eyes and felt the child snuggle against him. He could hear something moving inside David’s stomach.

“Leonardo?”

He felt his eyes grow moist and kept them shut. Weeks had passed since anyone had called him by name.

“Yes?”

“Are teeth also a professional risk?”

“How do you mean?”

“You said black feet are a professional risk. But must a dancer on hot coals also have broken teeth like you?”

Leonardo smiled.

“It’s not essential, but it helps. Now go to sleep, OK?”

“OK.”

At midday, the cripple came to retrieve the boy and not long after that the whole procession moved off. For several days they drove at walking pace along secondary roads, not stopping until nightfall; the provisions found in Salomon’s homemade hunting expeditions were unnecessary. Sometimes the car sent ahead on reconnaissance came back to warn them they were getting near a village or group of houses. The column would then halt and the music turned off, and a band of about twenty youths would break away to take the place by surprise. They would nearly always come back empty-handed or with garbage that would have to be left behind. The land they were passing through seemed to have been already stripped of everything. Here and there, in the fields, they would come upon the rubble of past harvests, or find some item of agricultural machinery like a relic of a now extinct civilization. Fallow deer, red deer, and wild boar fled from the fields and roadside ditches to seek refuge in the thickets. No thread of smoke cut across the continuous gray of the sky.

In the evening, the procession would be arranged in a circle in a clearing or dry field, and a fire would be laid and lit. Richard would emerge to inspect the booty and talk to his people. He was always alone and Leonardo never managed to see Lucia even through the open door of the trailer.

After he had walked around and listened to each of the young people, Richard would give the cripple the drug to distribute and go back inside. The only people he never looked at, or spoke to, were Leonardo and the bald woman huddled against the ancient Opel, to which she was now tied by a rope a couple of meters long. When they were on the move, she had to walk barefoot on the asphalt, struggling to keep up so as not to be dragged along, while at night she huddled against the trunk of the car for warmth. As the days passed she had lost a lot of weight and her skin had taken on the malarial color of dried clay. When pieces of meat or other food were thrown in her direction she pushed them away with her foot and asked for water, which was almost always brought to her.

Leonardo was not allowed out of the cage, but the youngsters started going near it again to torment him and scoff at him.

At first, he reacted as before by hiding in the most inaccessible corner, but realizing that this merely attracted more and more spectators, he began jumping around, dancing and writhing to the music every time he was asked to. The young people would be amused and egg him on for a few minutes by clapping their hands, and then they would go away after throwing him something to eat as a reward. This is how he got two cans of sardines and one of tuna, which he ate at night, using the oil to massage his feet and face where he was deeply scarred.

When no one was disturbing him, he tried to concentrate on the roads and signposts so as to be able to memorize their movements; it was clear they were heading for the mountains, perhaps in the hope of finding a pass and reaching France, but at the same time they were taking the greatest care to avoid main roads, cities, and towns. At first, Leonardo thought there might be troops of the National Guard around, but he eventually came to the conclusion that Richard was well aware that the main centers of population had already been looted, and so he wanted to search isolated areas in the hope of finding people and fuel, like at the home of Sergio and Manon.

The temperature had dropped and each morning powdery flakes that never quite became snow floated down from the sky. The mountains, when the clouds lifted to reveal them, seemed coated with snow and misery. The cold hit Leonardo hardest during the daytime, when there was no fire to give a little heat and David had eaten the branches he liked to use for shelter. So he pressed himself close against the elephant, and when David defecated, hurried to push his hands and feet into the feces to seek out a little warmth. His sweater had grown stiff with blood and dirt and the seat of his trousers had come apart from so much sitting. He asked the doctor for a blanket but was told no one could bring him anything without orders from Richard.

One day the children came near; there were about ten of them, including Alberto and Salomon. It was the first time he had seen Salomon since he left the cage. Now he was only centimeters away, his face painted green and his eyebrows shaved off, his eyes like ceramic fragments.

The children collected mud from the edge of the road and began throwing it at him in handfuls. Leonardo, as usual, started dancing. Alberto laughed and ran with the others to find more ammunition in the ditch. But Salomon stayed close to the wagon, staring at him.

Leonardo signed to him to go with the others, but he shook his head.

The others came back and continued their attack. He was hit in the throat and wiped himself clean before the mud could slip down inside his sweater. The floorboards creaked as he leaped around.

“Theater, theater, theater,” Leonardo chanted. The children laughed. He winked at Salomon, who unwillingly went to pick up a piece of turf and throw it in Leonardo’s direction without hitting him. The game went on a little longer, then the procession halted and the music was turned off. Knowing what this meant, the children ran excitedly to the head of the column. Salomon stayed a moment longer by the cage, then he ran away too.

Camp was set up nearby, on the asphalted area in front of a sanctuary chapel that must once have been the object of Sunday pilgrimages. On one side were the remains of a hut with a sign saying SOUVENIRS AND PANINI and a powerful jet of water pouring into a basin lined with red tiles. The chapel was white and very small.

The usual fire was laid on the asphalt, but the wood was damp and slow to catch and had to be sprinkled with kerosene. A cold drizzle had started to fall, while the mountain peaks were hidden by amorphous clouds.

The older youths left in the camp collected more wood, inspected the chapel, and wandered around a bit in the open space; then they shut themselves up in the cars and coach with the girls. Two untied the woman with the shaved head. She offered no resistance, and they led her into the cab of the van where the cans of gasoline were kept. The children, left on their own, pulled blazing branches from the bonfire and began fencing with each other, raising showers of sparks that leaped impetuously up into the sky only to be suddenly extinguished like faithless prayers. One or two of the children went up to the cars to watch the bodies cavorting inside on the seats, then ran away laughing. Salomon every so often turned his eyes toward Leonardo. His hair, wet from the rain, was stuck to his head. He looked as if he had just emerged from his mother’s womb. Leonardo put a hand to his lips and smiled at him. He ran off with the rest when Alberto called them to destroy their enemies hidden in the chapel.

The raiding expedition returned at nightfall. Leonardo, who had stuck his hands and feet out of the cage to get them nearer to the fire, first heard a confused sound of shouting, then saw the group appear from the ramp leading up to the space before the chapel.

The young people left in the camp, hearing the shouts, leaped out of the vehicles. The two who had been using the bald girl tied her back to the fender with her trousers still around her ankles and ran to meet the others. Even Richard emerged from his trailer, helped Lucia down the steps, and moved without hurrying toward the raiders who were approaching in a compact group. It was days since Leonardo had seen her; she seemed neither thinner nor suffering, just infinitely distant. He called her name twice, but she continued to follow Richard with tiny steps, as if unsure whether the earth could hold her weight. She was wearing the same blue dress as the last time he saw her and had small and livid round marks on her neck.

The youths came into the open space. In their midst Leonardo could see two men; their faces swollen and bloodstained; he guessed one must be about forty and the other about twenty years older. The older one, thin and curved, was looking around himself with imploring eyes. Leonardo was reminded of a watchmaker, a printer or a manufacturer of dental prostheses; someone who had spent most of his life bent over work that required great patience and love of detail. He could imagine him with a cup of caffé americano permanently on the workbench beside him and a cigarette on the edge of a saucer, reduced to a precarious tube of ash.

But the other man advanced confidently, grimacing with contempt. Three lines tattooed on his shoulder represented a man with a shield in one hand and some terrible weapon in the other. He also had several tribal markings, some letters and a stylized mouse. Both men were in tank tops and underpants, the elder with a red sock on his left foot. Leonardo felt sorry for them, but also felt he must not waste on others pity he would need for himself.

Once in the open space, the group fell back and the two men found themselves face to face with Richard. The elder dropped to his knees and began sobbing softly, but the other smiled when Richard traced the sign of the cross in the air.

“Give them something to drink,” Richard said.

The youths went quiet and one ran to fetch a bottle. He was back in a few seconds, but in the meantime the kneeling man seemed to have aged by ten years. He took the bottle, drank a mouthful, and gave it back, nodding thanks. He had a huge hematoma under his armpit, and his hair, when not stained with blood, was a dull white. In contrast, the tattooed man had a nervous body and recently cut black hair. He was losing a lot of blood from wounds on his face and wrists but seemed completely in control of himself. When the boy offered him the bottle he did not even deign to glance at him.

“A path is decreed for each one of us,” Richard said. “God has brought you on to our path to make clear the direction of your own. His hand can sometimes be harsh; he is a shepherd not afraid to strike his sheep when they depart from the way, but…”

“Just kill us, you bastard, and get it over with,” the tattooed man said, then spat, smearing Richard’s tunic with a red stain.

One of the youths lifted his rifle to hit him with the butt, but Richard gestured to him to stop, and he stared without resentment at the man who had insulted him.

“I see your point,” he said, “but you’ll be surprised what the Lord has chosen for you.” For a moment nothing could be heard but the crackling of the fire and the jet of water striking the basin of the fountain. The youths watched the scene without moving, mouths half open and their breath rising in a cloud toward the gray sky. Lucia, at Richard’s side, stared at the bowed head of the kneeling man. The rain grew heavier.

“Enrico!” Richard called.

The cripple came forward. The prisoners looked at him; the rain gluing his clothes to his stunted body gave him the appearance of a child with a very large head. But his face was that of an adult, keen and ruthless.

“Would you be good enough to read the rules?” Richard asked him.

The cripple pulled a black wallet from his jacket pocket and took out a piece of paper.

“You will sit down at a table,” he read, “facing each other with a knife. One of you will be given two minutes to cut off one of his own fingers. If he fails, he will be killed. If he succeeds, the other will then have two minutes to do the same. The survivor will be the one who cuts off one finger more than the other. If you both cut off all ten of your fingers, you will both live.”

The cripple folded the paper, put it back into his wallet, and slipped the wallet back into his inside pocket. The older man looked up at Richard. He was weeping; Richard smiled at him.

“Have you understood the rules?”

“You filthy fanatic,” the man with black hair said.

Richard nodded benevolently and gave the sign to begin. Three youths unloaded from one of the trucks a table that must have come from a restaurant or some other business premises. Its Formica surface was marked by deep cuts and was stained black. They set it a couple of meters from the bonfire. Night had surrounded the camp, dividing each figure into light and shadow: the brightness of the fire danced warmly on each face, while each back merged with the darkness of the forest.

The two prisoners were untied and made to sit facing each other at the table. The young people settled cross-legged in a circle. Leonardo could see Alberto and Salomon. He could also see the two youths who had captured them. The blond one had his arm around the shoulders of a very thin girl with an aquiline nose and long hair, while the thickset one, who had been involved in the capture of these two new prisoners, was now staring at them with curiosity. The bald girl was huddled under the car out of the rain. Richard blessed the two men one more time, and then, taking Lucia by the hand, went back into the trailer. The cripple had set a small hourglass in the middle of the table beside a knife with a wooden handle. The hourglass was the kind once used for parlor games. Leonardo remembered having one when playing Latin Scrabble with a fellow student. The knife had a curved blade ending in a double point, the type often used for cheese.

The cripple tossed a coin in the air, caught it, and covered it with the palm of his other hand.

“Choose,” he said.

The white-haired man stared at the knife and the hourglass, his head shaken by small jerks that seemed to mean no. Rain was still cutting across the circle of light from the bonfire. Apart from the flickering flames and slowly rising spirals of gray smoke, the whole world seemed to be holding its breath. The tattooed man wiped his forehead to stop the blood still running into his eyes.

“Tails,” he said, in a voice that seemed to come from the far end of a long corridor.

The cripple lifted his hand.

“Heads it is.” He put the coin back in his pocket, turned over the hourglass, and, taking his pistol from his belt, pointed it at the head of the tattooed man, who looked at the other prisoner.

“Can you do it?” the tattooed man asked in a firm voice.

The white-haired man’s eyes were fixed on the knife in the middle of the table while tears continued to fall freely down his badly shaved cheeks.

“Stop crying and look at me.”

The man looked up for an instant, and then he dropped his eyes to the table again. His curved back was racked by sobs.

“Look at me and tell me you will do it.”

“One minute!” the cripple announced.

The tattooed man wiped blood from his eyes with his forearm. He looked at the white head of the other who was staring at his hands abandoned on his knees. A thread of mucus was running down his chin to his stomach.

“Do you want to live, or will they be doing you a favor by killing you?”

The old man shook his head.

“Thirty seconds!” the cripple said.

“All you have to do is cut off one finger. Can’t you do that?”

“Twenty seconds!” the cripple said, cocking his pistol.

“Can’t you do it?” shouted the younger man.

The old man looked up as if, Leonardo thought, in final farewell, like someone saying good-bye to his country or to a woman he knows he will never see again.

“Ten seconds!”

The younger man grabbed the knife and lopped off his own little finger.

The young people exploded in applause.

Putting down the knife, the man looked at his finger lying on the Formica table top. A small pool of blood had already formed around his hand.

“You fool,” he said, looking at the man with white hair.

The cripple picked up the bloodstained knife, wiped it on his trousers, placed it in front of the older man, and turned over the hourglass. Leonardo closed his eyes.

It was already well into the night when they took the tattooed man to the cage. They opened the door and he walked in. Then for a while he stood beside the bars, watching the young people dancing and passing the body of the man with white hair over their heads, like the corpse of an ancient rock idol. Then, when they threw the body on the fire, he went to sit down against the wooden wall, at the exact point where Salomon had huddled when he first came into the cage.

Leonardo watched from the other side of the wagon. The man’s face was thin and lined and his cheekbones prominent, but the general impression he made was still one of compact solidity. In the shifting light of the bonfire his eyes were like wrought iron.

“A doctor will come and treat you,” Leonardo said.

The man did not move. He was sitting with his arms around his knees. The wound where his finger had been was bleeding profusely. A red stain had already formed on the floor.

“Have you played this game too?”

“No,” Leonardo said.

The man swallowed.

“Why are they keeping you here then?”

“To dance.”

“They make you dance?”

Leonardo said nothing. The man seemed to be smiling.

“Was that man your friend?”

“No. I found him hiding in a cellar a few days ago. I should never have taken him with me.”

“Where were you heading?”

“For the coast. They say there are fortified villages there where you can live. All you have to do is pass the quarantine. But we stopped at that house. There was a stove, and we’d found some sunflower seeds. It was a mistake.”

They stopped to listen to the music as it spread over the bodies, the cars, the trucks, the coach, the trailer, the flight of steps, and the facade of the building picked out by the flames from the darkness. Apart from these things, the world was black and inscrutable.

“Where are you from?”

“R.”

“Did you walk from R.?”

The man did not admit it, but Leonardo understood this to have been the case.

“How is it down there?”

“Same as here. Plus deserters from the National Guard who shoot at anything that moves. I had a bicycle, some blankets, a water can, food; they took all of it. On the Apennines I ran into an army camp. They had tanks, trucks, armor, everything, all unable to move. No fuel. They hadn’t been able to communicate with their HQ for months. Every day one or other of the soldiers disappeared, taking his weapons with him.”

Leonardo saw Salomon standing still, a few paces from the bonfire. He was looking at the body of the man with white hair, by now reduced to a blackened puppet. About thirty youngsters were still dancing around the flames; the others had gone to bed. A cold rain was still falling. He looked back at the man with him, who seemed to have dozed off.

“I could tear off a piece of tank top to bind up your finger. You’re losing a lot of blood.”

Without opening his eyes, the man shook his head.

“More to the point, have you got any water?” he said.

“No, but at first light the doctor will bring you some.”

“Who’s the doctor?”

“Someone who got captured like us. I think he must have played the game and is now free to come and go. Maybe you’ll be able to join the tribe in a few days too.”

The man laughed, then coughed, spitting out a black clot. His legs were lying in a dark pool of blood. For Leonardo, the smell of his blood blended with the smell of the body burning on the bonfire and the smell of David sleeping behind him.

“What were you? A teacher? The director of a museum? A journalist?” the man asked.

“I used to teach literature in a university.”

The man laughed again, then wiped his face with his bloody hand.

“After everything they’ve done to you, you should grab the first one who comes anywhere near this cage and strangle him with your own hands. Instead of just sitting there trembling with fear. Don’t you agree that madman must be the Antichrist? The incarnation of evil? He didn’t even have the courage to watch while we were cutting off our fingers. He’s a bastard.”

Leonardo contemplated his own bruised, cold, and blackened feet. When he looked up again the man was dead.

At dawn, taking care not to dirty his shoes, the doctor approached the body and placed a hand on his neck. His wounds were dry. The great patch of blood had reached the middle of the wagon, where it vanished down a wide crack between the floorboards.

“He was a hemophiliac,” the doctor said.

“There’s nothing you can do?”

“Nothing.”

The procession started out again, leaving behind the ashes of the bonfire, which still contained the visible remains of the man with white hair. They continued all day along narrow roads between woods and fields marked by snow, passing ruined houses, a farmers’ union building, and a couple of shops that had already been looted. When several youngsters came to the wagon and Leonardo told them the man was dead, they just threw a couple of stones at the body to see if it would move, then went away. The jolting of the wagon had made the man’s body fall on its side in an entirely unnatural position. Leonardo got to his feet, grasped it under the armpits and dragged it to a clean part of the floor. Then he used a little of his water ration to wash the face. He closed the eyes. Doing this comforted him, like digging Adele’s grave. Maybe this is my vocation: burying the dead, he thought. Then with his finger he traced the man’s tattoo marks: the skin was hard, cold, and smooth, like a Nordic warrior killed in battle, Leonardo thought, or an apocalyptic Old Testament prophet ready to be placed on a pyre of fragrant wood and burned in the middle of the desert. The man’s badly shaved beard looked like gold dust.

It began snowing, but before the snow could settle on the asphalt, two youths with pimpled faces came into the cage, pulled the corpse out, and threw it down at the side of the road. The man’s left foot remained visible above the edge of the ditch, and Leonardo continued to stare at it until it was too far away and everything was absorbed in the whiteness precipitating from the sky.

They spent a few days in a large industrial building waiting for the roads to become usable again; the snowfall had not been heavy, but it was so cold it formed a firm crust the sun could not penetrate.

That evening Leonardo was taken to the fire and, without being forced to, danced to amuse the tribe. Lucia, sitting beside Richard on a sofa, followed his clumsy movements with her mouth half open and her eyes expressionless, and when Richard gave the order for Leonardo to be returned to the cage, she got up and let the man take her back into the trailer, where a light stayed on all night.

The youths resumed hunting, catching mainly hares, dogs, and small wild animals. It was a district of sparse woodland and occasional vineyards; the plain could not be far away. One night Leonardo heard a plane pass overhead. The youths put out what was left of the fire and kept still with their eyes on the ceiling of the building. Then, as the sound of the twin-engine plane disappeared in the distance, they started dancing again but did not relight the fire.

Leaving the warehouse, they found themselves on roads in the foothills searching deserted villages, where they found nothing but a can of motor oil, some bottles of wine, and black potatoes that had spent all winter in the earth. Then, one evening, Leonardo saw three church towers rising in the distance above the considerable expanse of a town with a square castle in the middle.

The next day, they kept to the foothills and skirted around the inhabited area; Richard must have been afraid of something since the youths carried their weapons all day and no one went near the villas they passed. Nightfall found them on a muddy track between fields marked by irrigation ditches and the occasional farm. The sky had been heavy and leaden all day.

Hearing the sound of motors, Leonardo got to his feet in time to see four cars traveling slowly down a parallel road not more than two hundred meters away. As soon as the youths saw the cars, they leaped into the field separating the two tracks and, gun in hand, started running toward the cars. The lead car increased its speed but the others stopped. Eight men got out, all armed with rifles, and immediately dropped to their knees ready to fire. At this the youths, though more numerous, slowed down and stopped.

For a few seconds the two groups studied each other. The field was dark brown and it had just started raining again. The last of the light was falling obliquely from behind the mountains and painting everything an identical violet.

Richard, who had come out of the trailer, called the cripple. The man listened to what his boss had to say, and then he put down his pistol on the hood of one of the cars and began walking toward the men on the other side of the field, who still had their guns trained on the boys. One of them, seeing him approach unarmed with his hands up, slung his rifle over his shoulder and came to meet him. His uniform was reminiscent of the National Guard, but by now it was too dark for Leonardo to see clearly.

The cripple and the other man met in the middle of the field and talked for several minutes without ever raising their hands from their bodies, after which the man turned toward his own people and shouted something that reminded Leonardo of a dog’s bark.

Then two of the soldiers made a woman get out of one of the cars.

All Leonardo could see at that distance was that she was very fat and had a red sweater. They pushed her into the field, where she slipped on the wet ground and fell. Getting back to her feet, she cleaned her pants with altogether incongruous care before moving toward the cripple and the man in the uniform, who were waiting some fifty yards farther ahead. When the group reached them, the cripple turned toward Richard, who nodded. The cripple signed to the woman to follow him and headed for the trailer with the youths.

Walking in the other direction, the man in uniform rejoined his own people on the road. Leonardo saw him get into one of the cars, and then the cars moved off and finally disappeared behind a group of houses blackened by smoke.

The woman was extraordinarily fat. As she crossed the swamp, her buttocks bounced in her tight wet pants, and her enormous breasts hung against her belly, like a cuttlefish with its mass of flesh centered on a single bone. The youths escorting her paid her no attention. They seemed afraid the soldiers might return and, from time to time, cast a wary eye on the group of houses where the cars had vanished.

When they got to the road two boys helped the woman over the ditch. Her black hair had once been bobbed, and she had slightly elongated eyes. Otherwise the lines of her face were coarse and unfinished, though entirely feminine. An insensitive man would have dismissed her as fat and ugly, but a closer look would have made it clear that the first adjective in no way implied the second. Watching her pass close to the cage, Leonardo noticed she had small hands and she was wearing light bowling shoes.

After they had helped her into the coach, the youths went back to their own vehicles and the procession get under way again. Leonardo could hear the engine of the coach getting into gear and the heavy wheels of the wagon groaning under the cage floor. He looked at David. The elephant’s melancholy eyes were fixed on the field where the exchange had taken place.

“I don’t think this woman can take Lucia’s place,” Leonardo said, then he crouched on the branches the elephant had stripped clean the day before, and wept.

They traveled all night. It was the first time they had done so, and Leonardo noticed that only the trucks, the coach, and the Land Rover had their lights on; there was no fuel for the other vehicles, which were all being towed. For this reason their progress had become slower and slower; a man walking quickly would have been able to overtake them without difficulty.

They stopped at dawn in the yard of a large abandoned farmstead. As soon as the bonfire had been lit, the cripple distributed a little canned food, and several dogs that had been killed the day before were skinned and prepared to be cooked. Half the farm’s roof had fallen in, but one part of the building seemed to be in good shape. Still, no one took the trouble to explore. The boys sat around the farmyard strangely silent, showing no interest whatsoever in the fat woman who, tied to one of the roof supports, was watching her new masters with inexplicable serenity.

For a few days now it had been as if some minor melancholy had sometimes disturbed the tribe and made them uneasy. Their nights of partying had become increasingly short and fierce, and when Richard was out of sight in the trailer, brawls constantly broke out. The cripple watched without intervening, but these quarrels would last only a few minutes and end for no apparent reason as suddenly as they had begun. Apart from meat, which was never in short supply, their food was running out. There was no more beer, only wine.

Now when Richard came out of his trailer, some of the young people still ran to surround him, but for the first time about half of them stayed under their covers, their eyes on the flames. It was not raining, but the night had made everything damp and a sterile sun hinted at another day without warmth.

Showing no disappointment in those who were absent, Richard blessed those who were there and talked to them. Leonardo was sure his mind must be working on this new state of affairs and that he was capable of doing this without his face showing any emotion at all. In fact, Richard soon told Enrico to free the captured woman and take her to the wagon for “union.” This order created a ferment of excitement that quickly spread to those who had been keeping to themselves. While the cripple guided the woman to the big wagon and introduced her into the cage, the youngsters gathered around with their faces glued to the bars.

“Look, dancer!” Richard announced in a loud voice for everyone to hear. “We’ve found you a girlfriend so you can have some fun.”

The youngsters continued to make excited noises. Leonardo looked at Richard; he was smiling as serenely as usual, but Leonardo could read something in his expression that inspired contempt rather than fear.

“We’re waiting, dancer,” Richard sneered.

The woman, standing inside the cage door, was watching Leonardo calmly.

He guessed she must be someone who, all her life, had been used to remaining calm in situations that tended to bring the worst out of other people. But there was no sense of her holding anything back; rather, her calmness seemed to take the form of acceptance. The beauty so absent from her body seemed concentrated in the Asian slant of her eyes.

“Enrico,” Richard said, “please be so good as to give our dancer a little encouragement.”

The cripple took his pistol from his belt and fired into the wall just above David’s head. The elephant trumpeted and began tramping nervously around the cage. Leonardo leaped to his feet and he and the woman both pressed themselves against the bars to avoid being crushed. But David soon calmed down. He timidly approached the woman, and his trunk gently explored her hair, arm, and belly. She closed her eyes and let him touch her; face to face they were the same height. When David returned mournfully to his corner, she opened her eyes again and pushed her hair back from her forehead.

“Screw her!” someone shouted.

A stone thudded against Leonardo’s chest with the dead sound of a stick striking an empty barrel. He dropped to his knees, conscious of his heart beating under the hand he pressed against his chest.

“Screw her! Screw her! Screw her!” yelled the young people.

A second pistol shot drowned their voices; it passed over Leonardo’s head and was lost in the farmyard. This time David only walked around on the spot, making the floorboards shake. When Leonardo looked up he saw the woman taking off her pants. She was not wearing underpants. Her flesh had the whiteness of fresh lime, with a tuft of black hair under her belly.

“Screw her! Screw her!”

Leonardo looked at Richard, and this time he saw no mirror image of Christ but just a cunning, inordinately arrogant man of thirty-five. Mediocrity and fear marked him like a drop of oil on a surface of water, and they were a mediocrity and fear with no redeeming qualities whatever. His was a third-rate mind decked in feathers.

“Enrico!” Richard called out irritably.

The cripple pushed his way through the yelling youngsters pressed against the bars of the cage and came as near as he could to where Leonardo was standing. He pointed his pistol between the bars at Leonardo’s head.

“Screw her! Screw her! Screw her!”

Leonardo looked for Salomon among the boys but could not see him. Instead he met the eyes of Alberto, who was staring at him eagerly from the shoulders of the blond youth who had captured them. Under his green paint, he no longer had the face of the child Leonardo had known so much as the snout of a predator used to raiding the lairs of other animals among the bushes. He had pulled his hair back into a ponytail.

“Do what they want,” the woman said, lying down on the floor.

Her calm voice cut through the shouting like a sword slicing through a coat of mail. She was now naked apart from her socks and a flesh-colored bra scarcely able to hold her huge breasts. Beyond the farmyard the hilltops were a vivid white against the railway gray of the sky. Very soon it would begin raining or snowing again.

Leonardo moved toward her.

“I’m so sorry,” he said.

She shook her head to dismiss this as irrelevant. Her eyes were not black but a lively dark brown. He lowered his trousers and lay down on top of her. She smelled of earth and of something long buried. It was not a good smell but one that gave the impression of having existed long before humanity, to have been part of this planet, and many of the creatures living on it, since time immemorial. Leonardo remembered the other women he had slept with: a fellow student, Alessandra, then Clara. The first two thin and supple; the last slender with big breasts. All had light-brown eyes and smelled of paper, tobacco, and dried bark. All had offered him carefully rationed warmth.

Leonardo felt his penis stiffen and slide into the woman. For a moment he lay still, lost in the simplicity of what was happening and the warmth of her belly, and then the floorboards began to thump under the blows of dozens of hands.

“Screw-her-now! Screw-her-now!”

Leonardo rested his chin on the woman’s shoulder and watched the leaves of a holm oak growing near the farm move lightly in the wind. Her breasts pressed against his thin chest at every breath.

“Am I hurting you?” he whispered.

“No.”

He began moving slowly and soon he was standing alone in the middle of a white room waiting for someone. The shouts of the youngsters were no more than a distant hiss and their handclaps the noise of a train that had already passed long ago. The room had no windows; it was square and on the end wall a painting had been hung. This showed a plate and a glass, both empty. Leonardo knew it had a title: “Steady Courage.” It had been painted by the person he was waiting for, but the painter, when he arrived, would not be able to add anything to what Leonardo already knew about it, simply because he already knew all there was to know. So he felt no anxiety as he waited. He might wait hours, months, or years; that did not matter. The room was white, its walls a regular shape and the painting concealed no secrets.

Leonardo felt a spoon scoop the inside of his belly as something escaped from it and traveled far away. Then he lay exhausted, listening to his body and the light scratching of his beard against the woman’s cheek.

The voices of the youngsters gradually diminished, moved off, and fell silent.

Leonardo fastened his pants and went back to sit in the place David had left for him against the wall. They were alone, and the woman was getting dressed.

When she had finished they stayed silent, each staring at their own feet. The only sound was the crackling of the bonfire on which potatoes had been put to boil. The rectangle of sky above the farmyard was an expanse of gray marble that had the same warmth as marble.

David got up, walked around the cage, then flexed his legs and crapped. Leonardo saw the woman smile.

“I’ve never seen an elephant do that,” she said. “They’re so funny!”

Leonardo looked out into the yard. Several of the young people were throwing blankets, clothes, and toys out of the windows of the farmhouse. Others were eating by the fire and still more were asleep. The bald girl, leaning against the coach, was being penetrated from behind by a smallish boy with muscular buttocks. Another was inhaling from a pouch as he waited his turn.

“What’s your name?” the woman asked.

“Leonardo.”

“Well, Leonardo, there’s nothing bad about what we’ve done.”

He looked at her in silence.

“The important thing is to stay alive. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Excellent. Do you think they’ll give us anything to eat?”

“Usually the doctor brings something, but today he hasn’t come.”

“Never mind, we won’t die of hunger. What’s the elephant’s name?”

“David.”

“Can I trust David?”

“Yes.”

The woman lay down on her side with her head supported on her hand and closed her eyes.

“Why don’t you try to get a bit of rest too?” she said.

Leonardo continued to look at her unusual body stretched out on the floor. Soon it seemed utterly familiar to him, as though she had been with him in that prison ever since he first got there. He would not even have been able to say whether she was really fat or not.

“Listen to me, Leonardo,” she said. “Try closing your eyes.”

A few moments later he heard her snoring.

The doctor came toward evening with a bucket of potato peelings among which a few pieces of gray meat could be seen. The woman asked if it was dog meat. The man said he did not know.

“Do you know where we’re heading?” she asked him.

“I’m here to give you food and that’s all,” the doctor said, throwing an armful of bushes on the floor for David. “You mustn’t ask me anything.”

While the man went to and fro carrying branches to the wagon, the woman began eating the potatoes but avoided the meat. Leonardo in contrast took a large chunk of meat and broke it in pieces, using his fingers to do what his teeth could no longer manage. Behind them David’s elastic lips were stripping the branches with a squeaky noise, like new shoes on a rubber floor. When the doctor had finished stacking David’s branches, he filled two buckets with water from a tap at the farm.

Leonardo put several pieces of meat into his mouth and began chewing.

“I think they’re trying to get to France,” he said.

The woman nodded.

“The first people who captured me tried that too, but at the frontier we were shot up by an aircraft. They were kids like this group but not as many, and on the plain they met those National Guard men. A few escaped into the forest and the rest surrendered. The soldiers forced them into a ditch and killed them all. There was another prisoner with me, a very kind elderly man. He had been high school principal. The soldiers killed him too.”

The woman put another piece of potato in her mouth and chewed it slowly.

“Have you always been on your own here?”

Leonardo shook his head.

“There was a man, but he died the same night they captured him.”

The children had pulled two beds out of the house. Alberto was laughing and jumping from one mattress to the other. Leonardo studied his face and gestures. For some days now he had been thinking he had never known any child named Alberto and that the girl in the trailer was not his daughter. Sometimes he felt sure he had left Lucia in her mother’s home eight years ago and had never seen her again. At such moments he experienced something like the serene drowsiness that is said to precede death from frostbite.

“My daughter’s in the trailer,” he told the woman.

She looked at the bald girl huddled against the rear wheel of one of the cars. The girl had walked all day and night without stopping. The remains of her dress barely covered her meager buttocks and her breasts.

“When they find a new girl,” Leonardo said, “this is what’ll happen to Lucia.”

The woman continued to stare at the bald girl; several children were trying to push pieces of wood down the front of her dress. All she did in an attempt to discourage them was to wave her hand.

“It won’t happen to your daughter,” the woman said.

The doctor came back with the water. He put one bucket in the middle of the wagon and took the other to David. Leonardo and the woman began to drink by cupping their hands, then she asked the doctor if he could get them some blankets. The man took the bucket emptied by the elephant and went away.

Once they were alone the woman wanted to drink some more, but Leonardo said it was better to keep some water for the next day. She asked if the elephant would drink it in the night. Leonardo reassured her that he would not. The woman went to urinate in the corner; then sat down with her legs crossed. As night fell, a cold, sharp wind shook the junipers beside the yard. Leonardo studied the dark clouds approaching from the east. During the night, or at the latest the next day, it would snow.

“It’s nearly the end of February,” the woman said.

For a couple of hours they watched the young people dancing, pairing off, and stripping the shutters from the house to keep the fire going. Leonardo read a new fury in their actions that worried him and forced him every so often to look away.

The eyes of the woman, on the other hand, showed no trace of despair or resentment. Her broad, irregular face seemed stretched as if she had long been taking in everything she had seen. Leonardo noticed two black hairs sprouting from a mole under her chin.

“What did you do in the world?” he asked her.

“I was a midwife.”

As soon as the cripple saw Richard and Lucia emerge from the trailer, he jumped down from the roof of the van where he had spent the whole evening and went to meet them, climbing over the young people sitting on the ground.

“Your daughter’s very beautiful,” the woman said.

Leonardo watched Lucia walk as far as the bonfire and sit down on the sofa Richard had ordered to be unloaded from the truck.

He stood up.

“Now I have to go,” he said.

“Evelina?”

“Yes.”

“Are you asleep?”

“No.”

“Will you do something for me?”

“If I can.”

“I’d like you to tell me how I am.”

“In what sense?”

“Tell me what my face and body are like.”

“It’s a bit dark at the moment.”

“Tell me what you saw when it was light.”

“Where shall I start?”

“With my face.”

“OK, it’s thin and hollow and where there’s no beard it’s been affected by the cold. You have a scar on your forehead and a smaller one on your cheekbone. I think you have some teeth missing, I don’t know how many, and your eyes are a very beautiful dark green. But the whites of your eyes are a bit yellow, perhaps from what you eat. Your nose is bent, I can’t remember whether to the left or the right. You have long gray hair that has grown into sort of tails. Your beard’s dark gray, with occasional white hairs. I don’t know what else to say.”

“That’s great. And my body?”

“Tall, with long legs and a very stiff back. When you were lying on me I could tell you weren’t heavy for a man of your height. I could also tell your shoulder has been bound up, and when you walk you hold it higher than the other. One very beautiful thing about you is your hands. In my work I have always paid a lot of attention to hands and I can tell you that yours, even if they are not in good condition now, are extremely shapely. But the first thing I noticed was your feet. At first I thought they were wrapped in rags, but when I realized they were naked I wanted to cry. When you were dancing I wondered how you could possibly do it.”

“Fear’s the only thing that keeps me going.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“Now tell me about my smell.”

“Do you think it’s unpleasant?”

“It must be, I haven’t washed for weeks.”

“When we are alone for a long time without anyone touching us, our smell reverts to what it was when we were born. Rather like a piece of cardboard soaked in milk. It’s not disagreeable. I often came across it in the delivery room, but it was my husband who first drew my attention to it. I’d like to talk to you about him, it’s so long since I had anyone I could do that with.”

“Was he a doctor?”

“A historian of the Enlightenment. When we met he was teaching at the University of Antwerp. He had come to the hospital to see his daughter, who had just given birth. She lived abroad, too, in her case in England, but her water broke two months early while she was at a conference of antiques dealers. Gianni arrived the next day from Germany. He was a very small man of nearly seventy; I was forty at the time. He wanted to speak to me about the birth; we talked briefly in front of the coffee machine, not more than a few minutes. Apart from his politeness, nothing particularly impressed me about that frail man with thick hair. As for me, with my physique, I didn’t think any man could be attracted to me, not even one so much older.

“But a week later a letter addressed to me arrived at the hospital. Just a few lines about a boat trip he’d made the previous Sunday with a university colleague and the man’s wife. I didn’t know whether to answer or what to say. I didn’t write back. A week later a second letter came telling me about a curious event that happened in the last century to the architect who built the Antwerp concert hall. I wondered what on earth this university professor could want from me; he was not young or good-looking, but certainly he was in a position to interest more attractive women. I was confused. I had never been in a serious relationship, only been pestered by a couple of men who were sexually excited by my obesity. This had made me pessimistic and diffident. I thought he must be another of these, but when I showed his letters to a woman friend she said she didn’t think so.

“So I sent him a postcard. He answered, and for a year we wrote to each other once or twice a week. He never suggested meeting, even though he had been divorced many years before and was living alone in a house near the university.

“He had a very sober way of writing, simple and straightforward but filled with constant surprise. He avoided difficult words but didn’t use the simple ones he preferred in quite the same way as most other people. He wrote in tiny capitals, in the kind of writing one might expect from the first person from an uneducated family to have a chance of higher education. And in fact that’s how it was: his father and mother had run a grocery shop in the Lomellina district.

“I bought myself a little chest with three drawers and kept his letters in it beside my bed. I kept a sheet of paper in the kitchen with the titles of the books he talked to me about so I could buy them in the bookstore. One day, talking to a hospital colleague, I realized that a whole day had passed without me thinking once about my unattractive appearance. That evening I wrote to Gianni and said I’d like to meet him. Are you asleep, Leonardo?”

“No. I’m listening. Where did you meet?”

“In Saarbrücken, a little German town near the French border. I don’t know why he chose that place, it wasn’t my idea. More than a year had passed since our first meeting. I imagined us sitting in a café and walking beside the river while we talked about ourselves in the way one would expect in an affectionate relationship between a man who had outlived his physical needs and a woman who had long believed her personal appearance could never encourage any. An alliance of deficient people. But what happened was that we had tea in silence in the station bar, and then we went to one of the two rooms he’d reserved in a small local guest house and spent two days there making love in every imaginable way.

“In the months that followed we went back to writing to each other without ever mentioning what had happened in that bedroom. His letters were light and full of affection but never hinted that he’d like to see me again or do any of the things we had done together again. Then, in April, a few lines arrived in which he asked me to marry him. I answered with a postcard, and three months later we met in front of the registrar. It was our third meeting, and in the meantime I’d arranged to buy us a house and he had applied for his pension.

“In the five years we lived together he continued to talk to me with the same loving kindness and care for my body, as though it was always new to him. This was how he saw everything around him: it was as if he was born again every morning and as if when he put on his pajamas each evening he was dressing for his grave. His steps on the stairs coming down to breakfast would be like those of a boy at the threshold of life. This filled me with joy and an infinite sense of security and desire to have him inside me always.”

When Evelina stopped talking, Leonardo listened to the sounds the night should have produced but they had been trapped by the cold in a compact block of silence. The wind passed silently over the bodies of the young people lying in the farmyard and made the embers of the bonfire glow. Apart from those vermilion fragments of light, and the echo of the woman’s words, the world was a cold shadow with no tomorrow.

“What happened to your husband?”

He had the impression she shrugged her shoulders.

“The kids who captured us realized at once that it would be a bore having to drag him along with them. For several months he’d been having problems with his hip. So they tied him to the kitchen table and threw it into the river near our house. I think they did this because one of them had seen it done in a film. As the current carried him away, Gianni stared up at the sky with the same amazement that he had felt for everything. It was a beautiful sunny day. You’ll think me morbid, but as I watched him drifting away all I could think of was lying naked in bed with him again.”

Leonardo rested his cheek against David’s rough flank and looked at the point in the darkness where he knew the trailer to be. The wind had something minimal and cold in it. Beyond the bars it was perhaps starting to snow but beyond the bars was enormously far away. Great quantities of air and food were moving around inside David’s belly.

“I would like to know which is worse,” Evelina said. “To be raped a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run a Bulgar gauntlet, to be flogged and hanged in an auto-da-fé, to row in a galley, to experience finally all the miseries we all have endured, or simply to stay here with nothing to do?”

They were silent for a while, then he heard her get up, drink from the bucket, and sit down again.

“Do you know the whole thing by heart?” Leonardo asked.

“Only that bit. It has always made me laugh when the old woman talks like that after all they’ve been through. Gianni was crazy about Voltaire. He used to say Candide was the cruelest thing ever written by anyone while laughing.”

One of the boys in the farmyard got to his feet and walked a few steps, then they heard the dull thud of his body hitting the concrete.

“Do you think we’ll die?” he asked her.

Evelina scratched her leg.

“Something like that.”

A week passed during, which it snowed for at least an hour or two every night.

The procession, coming in sight of the town, had veered to the east and begun skirting the approach to the valleys. Leonardo asked Evelina where her home had been, and she pointed to the white mountain hovering above the town and named a small village clinging to its foot.

At night the snow turned the countryside and the roofs of the buildings along the road white, while by day a milky sky presided over the silent progress of the procession. From time to time, the youths would stick rifles out of the windows to shoot at the deer, dogs, and white hares that populated the areas where they parked, then would run and retrieve the carcasses and throw them onto the truck without the procession stopping. Along the main road they passed abandoned cars and empty heavy goods vehicles as well as houses, but the only tracks in the new snow were those they made themselves. The days were getting longer, but the cold still made their breath visible and gripped their hands in its bite.

During the daytime Leonardo and Evelina would cuddle together, stupefied by the rocking of the wagon. The shots would wake Leonardo from dreams in which he was talking to animals and being nourished by their milk. Evelina, in contrast, dreamed about beds too high for her to climb on to. In the evening, the tribe would camp in buildings that had once hosted car dealers and furniture showrooms and gut the animals captured during the day and cook them around the fire. When Leonardo was not called out to dance, he would stay in the cage with Evelina and David. They spent the nights talking, pressed up against the elephant, until the doctor brought them their food at dawn. Mostly they discussed places they had visited in the past and familiar events, but there was always a moment when they remembered that the places they were talking about did not exist anymore and that the people whose faces and actions they were trying to describe were dead. Then they would interrupt themselves and lie in each other’s arms listening in the silence to their own breathing, which deafened them like the squeaking of a bicycle on a dark road.

Two boys had managed to retrieve a can of diesel from the tank of an old combine harvester; but even so, by now the only vehicles still capable of moving under their own steam were the van and the coach. Nearly all the cars had been abandoned, and the young people collected in the coach. Their empty eyes peered out through the windows at the mountains on one side and the desolate and apparently endless plain on the other.

Leonardo felt he could detect for the first time a belief in the young people’s faces that there might be a tomorrow, and that if this was so it was something they could lose. This perception must have seemed to them like an object just dug up from under the ground, something to turn over in their hands in an attempt to understand what it was and who had buried it and why. The effort seemed to make them very tired.

That evening, when the music was switched on and the fire had been lit, they paired off without enthusiasm and after dancing for half an hour fell into a sleep like death, from which no one woke to feed the fire.

Richard seldom appeared. When he did, his face looked as serene and cheerful as ever, even if very pale. Lucia followed him as he passed among the young people, talking to them and blessing them, and she sat with him to watch Leonardo dance. This was the only time the tribe seemed to recover their savage innocence.

“I’ll never be able to get her away from here,” Leonardo said one evening, returning to the cage.

Evelina stroked his cheek.

“Of course you will!”

“How?”

“Don’t underestimate yourself. Soon you’ll be stronger than he is. Perhaps you already are.”

Leonardo looked at her. In the weak moonlight the innocence of her face was enough to send him to sleep. In the afternoon the sky had broken, showing a section of the heavenly vault.

“What will you take with you when you go?” she asked

This seemed an absurd question to Leonardo.

“Lucia, you, David, Salomon, the bald girl, and my exercise book,” he said.

“What exercise book?”

“A book I was writing in. I think it must be in the trailer.”

“And Alberto?”

Leonardo said nothing.

The next day a series of shots broke several windows on the coach, hitting one boy in the throat and wounding another in the arm. The van towing the trailer stopped, and everyone ran for shelter. Only Leonardo and Evelina stayed exposed inside the cage.

The shots had come from a large fortified building perched on a spur half a mile from the road. Dating from the fifteenth, perhaps sixteenth century, it must once have been the seat of some minor feudal lord and was now surrounded by modern villas of shoddy design. When some of the youths fired back, it provoked a burst of return fire, more concentrated this time, that pierced the surface of the coach, the van, and the trailer. Richard, who had gotten out to take shelter with Lucia, called the cripple, who hurried over with his head down. They talked together for about ten minutes, a discussion punctuated by silences during which they stared at the sparse patches of snow on the asphalt. Leonardo knew they were weighing up the pros and cons of attacking the fortress and whether to wait for night or try to negotiate. In the end the cripple got up and came to the cage, after first taking a rifle from one of the boys and tying a white shirt to the barrel. When he opened the door, Leonardo squeezed Evelina’s arm.

“Move,” the cripple said to Evelina from the entrance. The expression on his face was as blank and ferocious as ever.

Evelina turned to Leonardo with a smile.

“Don’t let yourself down. OK?”

“I won’t.”

Leonardo got to his feet and stroked her arm.

“You are dear to me,” he said.

“So are you to me,” she answered; then went to David and rested her head against the elephant’s forehead for a moment before following the cripple out of the cage.

Leonardo watched them make their way up the little road leading to the fortress: the little cripple bent over, with the white shirt hoisted on the barrel of his rifle and Evelina with her bulk enclosed in her dirty trousers and red chenille sweater. As he watched her, Leonardo was aware of the existence of a form of beauty he had never previously known in things. It was a wonder that was not to be found on their surface or even in their depths but that fluttered around them, nourished by a time that was not the present but the recent past or a future soon to come, at any rate not the present, or no longer so.

An hour later the procession came to the first road signs announcing the pass and veered off the main road heading for the valley. The surrounding whiteness was untouched. The few houses on the two still high sides of the valley had been abandoned but were in good condition. There were no signs of fires or wrecking, and everything was steeped in the kind of silence one might expect after a dignified exodus.

Leonardo inhaled the cold air to clean out his lungs.

We’ll never make it to France, he thought, watching the setting sun turn the white snow deep cobalt blue. There’s too much snow and the frontier will be guarded. We shall all die.

None of these thoughts affected his heartbeat in any way at all.

The next day they managed to climb the valley as far as one of the last villages before the pass, but on reaching a hollow cutting where the road forked, they ran into a deep snowdrift out of reach of the sun and had to stop.

They parked the vehicles on a village square, where a century earlier holidaymakers had stayed in a comfortable pale-pink three-story hotel more recently converted into a customs post and then sealed up by the military. On the other side of the square were the civic center, a bar, a haberdasher’s and a furniture store, though all that was left of any of them was their shop signs.

The coach was parked in the middle of the square to form an L with the trailer and the van while the young people scattered around the village, which had a single main street with stone houses, to search for wood and something to eat. It was still early afternoon and several others went to hunt in the forest immediately above the houses. The frontier cannot have been more than twenty kilometers away, but the surrounding mountains were deep in snow and a steady wind was shifting great masses of clouds like a roof over the valley. Leonardo stuck his legs out through the bars to enjoy the warmth of the sun. He had seen Alberto and others head for what had once been a grocery shop with a gas pump next to it. Only two were left to guard the square. The trailer stayed shut. As usual during the day, there was no sign of the doctor. Suddenly he heard someone calling him. He turned and saw Salomon’s face just above the floor of the cage. Leonardo sat down with his back to him so that no one should see him talking to the boy.

“Are you well?”

“Yes,” said the child.

“Do they give you enough to eat?”

“Yes, but when are Mamma and Papa going to come for me?”

Leonardo adjusted his back against the bars.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but I don’t think they will be coming.”

“Not at all?”

“No. We have to try and manage by ourselves.”

Salomon mulled over this idea, staring at the floor deep in excrement and broken branches. Each morning, after the doctor’s visit, Leonardo had once been in the habit of clearing both out of the wagon but had not bothered after Evelina left.“It’s very dirty here,” the child said.

“You’re right, I really must clean the place up.”

The child nodded.

“I’m sorry the lady has gone.”

“So am I, but she’ll be fine where she is now.”

“But she was a bit of company for you.”

“I’ve still got David.”

Salomon was playing with a twig sticking out of the cage; then he snapped it off and let it fall to the ground.

“Alberto has told me some very nasty things about you.”

“What has he said?”

“That you’re worthless and if he’d stayed with you he would’ve died, but that now he’s the children’s leader and Richard loves him very much.”

“You know what to believe and what not to believe.”

Salomon picked up the broken twig and joined it to the branch he had broken it from, fitting the two parts together again. His nails were dirty.

“I don’t want to do any more theater,” he said.

“I know, but you must be patient a little bit longer. OK? Now go away. I don’t want them to see you talking to me.”

“Will you be dancing this evening?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t like it when you dance, but it’s funny too.”

“Just remember I’m dancing to make you laugh. That it’s what I do. OK?”

“OK.”

“Now go away.”

“I don’t know where the others are.”

“Wait for them in the coach. It must be nice and warm behind the windows.”

“There’s a seat covered with blood. Where Giampiero was sitting.”

“Then sit on those steps over there. Close your eyes and think of something nice.”

“Can I think of Mamma, Papa, and Paul?”

“Of course you can.”

“So shall I go?”

“Yes, go now.”

Leonardo heard his footsteps rounding the wagon. As he made his way to the steps, Salomon waved a hand behind his back without turning. The bald girl was lying on the ground taking a little sun on her wasted body. One of her small white breasts was peeping out of her dress.

In the evening it began snowing again and by the next morning twenty centimeters had fallen on the square, transforming it into an unwritten page. The young people had spent the night in the great hall and ground floor of the hotel, where the previous day they had piled clothes, mattresses, stoves, and wood collected from the houses in the village. The place had two glass walls and the stoves had been arranged in such a way that their chimneys led through several broken panes, which had then been resealed with nylon and old curtains. Leonardo had watched through the glass as they ate and then threw themselves onto the mattresses and drifted off into deep sleep.

He had spent all night watching the snow falling without ever wanting to close his eyes. There was no moon, but the square was lit by a photovoltaic street lamp and the snow emerging from the black sky was tinged a deep fluorescent blue that turned to pewter as it settled on the ground. It was not cold, or at least it was not as cold as the night before, when the sky had been full of stars.

In the morning, when he emerged from the trailer, Richard’s face was twisted with rage: now they could go neither forward nor back. They were stuck, under the gray still sky. Looking around himself, he found Leonardo’s eyes staring at him. He held his gaze for a moment, until Lucia appeared with a blanket around her shoulders and both moved pale and trembling toward the hotel. Leonardo realized the trailer’s heating must have failed.

That evening he was taken to the great hall where the mattresses had been pushed aside to free a circle in the middle of the room. The atmosphere was warm and comfortable, but the young people seemed restless and disappointed, and even while Leonardo was dancing some preferred to look out at the snow, which had begun falling again on the parking lot below them.

Richard and Lucia watched the dancing from behind a desk with a black-leather writing surface, and then Richard took Lucia by the hand, and without bestowing his usual blessing on the tribe, climbed the stairs and disappeared to the floor above.

Before the cripple sent him back to the cage, Leonardo had a chance to study the faces of the youngsters. Their old naïve ferocity had given way to something still terrible but more human, and though he did not know their names, he felt that for the first time he could tell them apart. Before leaving the hall he noticed Salomon sitting pretending to smile stupidly at nothing.

Two days later a donkey appeared in the square with her foal. Leonardo saw them emerge from the road leading from the country; they were thin and in very bad condition. Noticing them from the hotel windows, the youngsters ran out and surrounded them; the donkey, who must have been searching for food, let herself be caught without putting up any resistance.

A squabble then broke out between those who wanted to tell Richard and those who wanted to kill the two animals without telling him. During the ensuing brawl Leonardo noticed that the aggressive indifference that had previously characterized their actions was dwindling into petty malice.

The cripple came out, pistol in hand, and fired a shot into the air. Leonardo saw a second-floor curtain move aside and Richard’s face appear behind the glass. Then he opened the window and stared for a while in silence at the panting youngsters in the square. He was bare to the waist, with a few blond hairs on his gaunt chest.

“Only eat the little one,” he directed before closing the window again.

It snowed every day of the following week. Showers that lasted only a few hours but were enough to preserve the depth of snow on the ground and prevent the procession moving forward despite a rise in temperature and the gradual lengthening of the days.

Leonardo waited every evening for the young people to fall asleep; then he went over to Circe and spent a long time sucking her rough little teats. It had not occurred to anyone that the donkey was lactating, and Leonardo tried the keep this little source of nourishment to himself. For her part, Circe seemed happy to be relieved of the burden and stood still while Leonardo massaged her teats to make the milk descend. He called her Circe after a fable he had written for Lucia when she was little, in which a donkey named Circe decided she only had to puff out her cheeks to be able to fly. The other animals on the farm mocked and scorned her, but in the end she succeeded.

One night he woke up to find his thoughts as still as crocodiles under the moon, all motionless below the surface of the water as they waited for their prey to come down to drink. Basic thoughts without frills, stretched taut and ready for action.

This reminded him how much his mind used to be agitated by an infinity of imprecise ideas wriggling about like eels in a bucket. He was ashamed of this busy lack of purpose, but since this guilt too belonged to the past, he let it go.

When the doctor came that morning Leonardo watched him moving from one side of the cage to the other to give food and water to the two animals. Since Circe’s arrival, David would no longer leave his side of the cage. The two had tacitly agreed to divide the available space and limited themselves to exchanging an occasional glance. Leonardo would sleep next to one on one night and the other on the next night. When the doctor had finished, he stroked David and began to leave.

“Push the door to, but don’t close it,” Leonardo told him. The man stopped.

“Do you want to run away?” he said, studying Leonardo’s impassive face.

“No. But I need you to do something else for me.”

The doctor noticed Leonardo was looking at the hatchet he used to cut branches for David.

“What are you hoping to do?”

“Leave it on that window ledge over there,” Leonardo said, using his chin to indicate the bar on the other side of the square.

“You’re mad. You’ll only get yourself killed. And then what’ll happen to your daughter?”

Leonardo looked at the man and the entirely rational expression he always wore on his face.

“Where’s your son?” he asked him.

The man raised an eyebrow.

“What do you mean?”

“One day you told me your wife and daughter were dead but that you don’t know where your son is.”

“That’s true.”

“When did you lose him? Where did it happen?”

The doctor wiped his left hand on his side. A very slow movement. Then he looked through the windows at the several young people circling lazily in the great hall. The sky was overcast but with a strip of lighter clouds stretched across it.

“Who did you play finger-cutting with?” Leonardo asked him.

The man half opened his lips but said nothing. His eyes were very tired.

“You played finger-cutting with your son, didn’t you?”

The doctor shook his head, his face overcome with weariness at this reappearance of something he had loaded with ballast and sent to the bottom of the sea. Then he turned for the door. When he left, Leonardo could hear that he had not bolted it. He got up and stroked David’s head first, then Circe’s.

“This evening,” he whispered to them both.

That afternoon Leonardo slept a calm, restful sleep, of the kind that normally follows rather than precedes an event that may change the course of one’s life.

What woke him was the lighting of the lamp in the square; day had already retreated behind the mountains, though a trace still survived in the blue profiles of the highest peaks. Thawing snow was dripping softly from the roofs.

He looked at the hall where the young people were dozing on the mattresses. They had already cleared a space in the center of the room; soon Richard and Lucia would come down and someone would fetch him to dance.

He got to his feet, pushed open the door left unbolted by the doctor, and climbed down from the wagon.

Crossing the square to the old bar with bare feet was like crossing the middle of an immense space, big enough to walk through for days without ever reaching a destination. This did not dismay him in the least.

He picked up the hatchet left on the window ledge, stuck it into the back of his pants, and started back to the wagon. But before he got there he moved aside from his footprints in the snow and headed for the trailer instead; the door was ajar.

It was like entering the office of a methodical clerk who was able to rest for an hour or two on a camp bed between jobs. There was nothing formal, just a narrow space decorated with pornographic photographs and a large ceiling mirror that reflected a dirty green bedcover. The floor was rubber, and pans on the gas cooker had been used for cooking rice. From an iron hook over the bed hung cords, chains, and other improvised sadomasochistic contraptions, including a machine with rubber tubes designed for milking cows.

Leonardo went to the desk. Propped on its surface were several charcoal sketches and a Bible with a fabric cover. The sketches showed Lucia naked and bound. There were others in a filing cabinet above the desk. Leonardo assumed they probably featured other girls and did not open them.

He found what he was looking for in the second drawer of the desk. He took the exercise book, slipped it into what was left of his back pocket, and left.

Once back in the cage, he closed the door and began waiting. Two lamps fed by an electrical generator feebly lit the hall where the bodies of the youngsters were moving to music that was increasingly drowned by the sounds of the thaw. The mountains were hidden by a black cloak, though it was obvious they were still keeping a watch on everything.

When he saw Richard and Lucia appear at the foot of the stairs, Leonardo took his hands out of his pockets but did not move. Not yet. The dancing stopped, and he watched them circulate among the young people in the hall. Lucia was in a red dress that must have belonged to a larger woman who had been a mother, while Richard was wearing a beige tunic and a wool scarf draped artistically over his shoulders. When he saw Richard have a word with the cripple and sit down at the desk, he knew the moment had come for him to get to his feet.

The boy who had been sent to fetch him saw him approaching the hotel and briefly stopped dead at the door to stare at him in astonishment, as if he were watching the flight of an animal that cannot fly. He was young and blond, with a high forehead and a chin that seemed borrowed from someone else’s face.

When Leonardo entered the room the young people did not move, their eyes fixed on him. The music was far away and the only noise was the sound of the fires burning in the stoves. The air smelled of sweat, thunderstorms, and youth.

He came up to the desk behind which Richard and Lucia were sitting. No one did anything to stop him. Passing among the youngsters, he saw the doctor sitting near an antique stove, Salomon standing on a raised counter, and the bald girl crouched between two boys. During the last month or so her hair had begun to grow again in a confused manner, leaving large bald patches.

When he reached the desk, Leonardo looked first at Lucia, then at Richard, and finally at the cripple standing a couple of paces behind them. He realized this small, deformed, and cruel man had been waiting for this moment from the start.

“What do you want to do, dancer?” Richard said. “Cut off my head?”

Leonardo realized he had pulled the hatchet from his trousers and was grasping it in his right hand. He stared at Richard, who was watching him with amusement, placed his left hand on the desk, and with a neat stroke cut off his own thumb.

Raising his eyes from his hand, Leonardo met the pale face of Richard, who was staring at the amputated thumb as blood began to spread over the desk. Richard’s smile had hardened.

“What are you trying to prove?” he said, avoiding Leonardo’s eye.

Leonardo struck again, chopping off his index and middle fingers.

The two fingers rolled off the desk and fell into Richard’s lap; he leaped back, his tunic stained with little bright-red drops. Leonardo looked into Lucia’s lukewarm eyes and smiled at her, for a moment joining her in the far-off world where she was living. Then he turned to stare at Richard, who looked as colorless and fleshy as a funeral bloom, his lower lip visibly trembling.

Leonardo raised the hatchet a third time and cut off the remaining fingers of his left hand. One fell from the table to the floor, but the little finger swiveled around and ended pointing upward. Leonardo then extricated the hatchet, which had stuck in the wood, and, still grasping it in his fist, lowered it to his side. The young people were paralyzed. He could hear their breath cutting the air like the great strings of a cello reverberating to the tiniest movement.

He looked into Richard’s blue eyes: he had turned white, with red patches appearing on his cheeks. He placed his hands on the arms of his chair and tried to get up but his arms gave way. Leonardo waited patiently. His hand felt as if it was in flames, but he was also conscious of a sense of relief.

“Do you think you can impress…” Richard began, but his words ended in a gurgle.

Leonardo smiled at him, lifted the hatchet again, and brought it down on his left wrist, cutting off the whole hand.

This time the blood spurted everywhere, hitting the cripple, who did not even bother to wipe his face. The sound of splintering bone echoed from the walls like the crash of a falling tree.

Leonardo put the hatchet down on the desk and looked at his severed hand lying in his own blood. Electricity was rising up his arm to form a circuit around his body in which he felt as well protected as he had ever been in his life. It was as if his father and mother were with him, and also his brother who had died at three months and only once had even been mentioned by his mother. A child not him but very like him, who would never now feel alone again. Then he remembered Richard.

He picked up his severed left hand and threw it into Richard’s lap. The man tried to struggle to his feet, but his eyes turned back in his head and he crashed to the ground, hitting his head on the edge of the desk as he fell. Leonardo glanced at the body curled on the floor.

“Come on,” he said to Lucia.

The girl took the hand he held out to her and stood up.

“Salomon,” Leonardo called.

The child joined them and together they headed for the door. No one tried to stop them, and when Leonardo released Lucia to offer his hand to the bald girl on the mattress, the two boys on either side of her moved to let her go.

Once outside they made for the wagon, Leonardo leaving a trail of blood that turned lilac on the snow. The young people, who had followed them onto the square in a line, watched them lead the elephant and the donkey out of the cage like a chorus silently watching the passing of a coffin. Leonardo told Salomon to see to the animals and then he turned back to the hotel.

“Fetch your bag,” he said, stopping in front of the doctor.

The man seemed even older and more resigned among all the adolescent faces.

“You’ll be able to go back later,” Leonardo added, “but for the moment I need you to come with us.”

When the doctor went back into the hotel to fetch his bag, Leonardo looked up toward the full moon and studied the big clouds with fluorescent edges being pulled rather than pushed by the wind toward the valley. He could feel Alberto’s eyes on him and saw the boy standing on a great concrete bowl. Leonardo held his gaze without feeling any need to ask questions of himself, or any indecision faced with Alberto’s hesitation. In the past he would have let other people, circumstances, or timing make up his mind for him as he took refuge behind his characteristic meekness, but that past did not exist anymore, just as the men and women who had inhabited it did not exist anymore. Now everything was terrible and simple, like his warm blood carving its way through the snow.

“The hemorrhage must be stopped,” the doctor said.

He had come out of the hotel with a leather bag, several blankets over his shoulder, and a pair of shoes under his arm.

“Later,” Leonardo said. “First we must get going.”

Reaching the corner of the square with Salomon, Lucia, the bald woman, the doctor, and the two animals, he turned to look back at the young people for the last time. They were standing still where he had left them, bewitched by the blood and cruelty they had witnessed. Among their perfect slender bodies he recognized the deformed shape of the cripple. Under the perpendicular rays of the moon his face was as composed as a funeral mask.

They left the foot of the valley by a lane that seemed likely to lead to a few isolated houses. The doctor had controlled the hemorrhage with a bandage, but Leonardo could feel blood running down his leg again. They had been walking in the snow for hours and needed to find somewhere to rest and light a fire.

After a couple of hairpin bends, the road became less steep and they came to a group of houses around a small church and a little square that would not have been able to provide parking for more than three cars. It was a tiny village that would have been inhabited a century ago but which had then been abandoned before being partly restored by city dwellers looking for a peaceful retreat on weekends.

They took the main thoroughfare, obstructed by compressed snow. Leonardo walked in front, followed by David. At points where the lane narrowed the elephant’s sides rubbed against the walls, and he let out long melancholy sighs. Salomon, the bald woman, and Lucia followed, having taken turns on the donkey the whole way. The doctor brought up the rear. The doors of some houses had been made fast with rusty old padlocks and their glassless windows revealed grain-processing machinery, plows, furniture, old sledges, hay, and wood piled up haphazardly. But the recently reconditioned houses showed clear signs of having been broken into and looted. Leonardo stopped at the end of the village in front of a large building resembling an Alpine chalet in stone with an oddly shaped terrace. The roof of the little loggia was supported by a pillar set with a large blue stone on which someone had carved a cross and the date 1845. In front of the house, level ground stretched to a bank marked by a line of beeches. Beyond these were presumably the road and the river.

“What do you hope to find here?” the doctor asked.

Leonardo examined the half-open door of the house, took off his shoes, and, after placing them neatly on the bottom step, limped toward the door.

They spent the morning on the terrace, faces turned to a weak spring sun that had risen uncertainly as if seeing the world for the first time.

No one, since they left the camp the previous evening, had asked where they were going and when they would find food. Salomon had been the only one to talk during the night. Walking beside Leonardo, he had expounded all he knew about creatures that could see in the dark, explaining how certain deep-sea fish were able to see by polarized light and so could detect their prey even in the darkness of the depths. Now and then Leonardo had turned toward Lucia, but his daughter’s eyes remained remote and blank. The bald woman, whenever she met his gaze, looked down. The doctor, at the back of the procession, contributed only a labored panting.

“They won’t escape, will they?” Salomon asked.

David and Circe were wandering around the field below the house eating the bark of several cherry trees.

“No, they won’t,” Leonardo said.

“Because they’re fond of us?”

“Exactly.”

Salomon looked at the girls and the doctor sleeping on the disjointed boards of the balcony, their hands red and swollen with warmth after the night’s frost. Then he stared at the mountain facing them and the leafless trees punctuating the brilliant white of the snow.

“Yesterday evening I was scared.”

“I know, but that’s over now.”

“Doesn’t it feel sore?”

“No. Are you hungry?”

“A bit.”

“Only a bit?”

“Very hungry.”

Leonardo woke the doctor and together they went down into the field where he showed the doctor how to milk Circe, then they went back and warmed the pot of milk on the stove. The house had been uninhabited for many years, but it was in good shape and despite the fact that others had been there before them, some dishes and cutlery had survived; also a table, a kitchen range, three beds with mattresses and blankets, a sofa, a wardrobe with men’s clothes in it, and a cellar containing a lot of tools. Leonardo and the doctor inspected the house from top to bottom without finding anything to eat, but in the attic they found some firewood and a few bales of hay that would be useful for the animals.

The doctor told Leonardo to sit down, and he began unwrapping his bandage.

“Don’t rest it on the table,” he said when the wound was revealed. Leonardo studied the dark flesh and white bone. His arm felt cold, light, and incomplete, but it was not painful. It just felt as though the limb was filling with air and sooner or later would fly away, detaching itself from his body.

“What’s that?”

The doctor was spreading on the wound a yellow cream from a jar.

“An ointment I’ve made from tobacco. Very basic, but it’ll prevent infection. The best I can do.”

The doctor went to wash his hands at the sink; then he sat down to bind up the stump.

“You’ll have to dress it morning and evening. This is the only bandage I’ve got so try to keep it clean. If it does get dirty, you can make another by cutting up a piece of clothing or a towel, but make sure it’s cotton and that you boil it before use. If there’s no infection, your temperature should return to normal in a couple of days and the wound will begin to heal.”

Leonardo looked out the window. He could see the river and part of the bottom of the valley. The sun, beating all morning on the road, had revealed a few patches of asphalt.

“Do you really want to go back to them?”

The doctor looked at him as though the question was entirely meaningless.

“You only have one hand and no weapons,” he said, knotting the bandage. “The child and the girls can only get in your way. If you’re lucky, someone will kill you all; failing that, you’ll die of hunger.”

The milk began hissing. Leonardo got up and took the pot off the stove using an old towel with a printed picture of Mickey Mouse dressed as a chef, and poured the milk into some containers he had found. There were two cups and a glass, and two metal containers intended for salt and coffee. He offered one to the doctor, who accepted it and put it on the table.

“I don’t care what you think of me,” he said.

Leonardo stared at him for a moment, his eyes calm and lacking in resentment; then he took one of the containers out to the balcony. When he got back to collect the rest and take them to the girls, the man had vanished.

Before dark Leonardo and Salomon checked the houses in the village, gleaning a local map, a parka, some sunflower seeds, a pencil, a little seed oil, a piece of soap, a pack of cards, an old snare, and a handful of sowing potatoes.

On their return, they found the stove had gone out; the house was dark and the girls were asleep in the bed behind the wooden partition. Leonardo and Salomon went down to the cellar, where Leonardo showed the boy how to make an oil lamp using an empty drinks bottle, a piece of rag, and the oil they had found. The boy followed the instructions carefully without getting impatient even when he had difficulty rolling the wick in the right way, and he was finally able to watch the lamp with pride as it lit the low ceiling of the room. Leonardo pocketed the lighter the doctor had left with the ointment.

“Now I feel calm.”

“Why?”

“Because I know when I ask you to do something I can’t do myself, you’ll do it well.”

Salomon looked down. Leonardo placed his hand on the boy’s head. His fair hair was smooth and shone like new grass. His blue eyes collected light, absorbing something from inside himself and releasing it again very slowly.

“I have to ask you one more favor.”

The child looked up.

“Let’s keep to ourselves what we saw in that house.”

“You mean the skeletons?”

“Yes, better not tell the girls about that.”

“I only cried out because it was such a surprise.”

“I know, but it would frighten them.”

Salomon stared at the flame.

“What happened to those people?”

Leonardo had found tufts of hair; the man and woman had died of hunger or cold, and dogs and wolves must have found some way of getting into the house.

“I don’t know,” he said, “but best keep it to ourselves.”

“I’d already decided not to say anything.”

“I can believe that.”

Salomon looked at the refrigerator and the washing machine against the wall. Apart from a pile of planks thrown down in the middle of the room, the cellar was in perfect order. There was a well-stocked tool shelf, a rack for garden tools, and a workbench with a vice and grindstone for working with metals. When he had come in there that morning and seen that equipment and the planks, he had imagined someone dreaming of an imminent flood and seized by the urge to build a barge. Someone who after buying the wood had suddenly become less confident about trusting his dreams.

“I wish Lucia and the other lady would say something,” Salomon said.

Leonardo slid his hand down his face.

“Sometimes people are happier keeping silent.”

“But they will talk in the end, won’t they?”

“It may take time. We must be patient, OK?”

“OK. Will they be happy we found the potatoes?”

“Yes, they’ll be very happy about that.”

They lit the stove and put a pan of water on to boil, then they prepared one of the beds in the upstairs room and left the door open for the heat to rise and warm it. They washed plates and cutlery and cleaned the surface of the dresser; then they put everything they had found on it, which at the moment was their whole fortune.

When the potatoes had boiled, Leonardo went into the bedroom next door and touched the bald woman’s shoulder to wake her. She opened her eyes at once, as if she had only been pretending to be asleep. She looked serious, attentive, and confident, with no trace of the terrified girl Leonardo had led out of the hotel by the hand.

“We’ve found something to eat,” Leonardo said, then interrupted himself and looked at Lucia, who was fast asleep, with her mouth half open and one hand under her cheek. Her breathing was calm and regular.

“Let her sleep,” the woman said. “That’s what she needs at the moment.”

They sat down at the table and the woman peeled the potatoes. She had on a man’s sweater they had found in the wardrobe and a pair of pants rolled above her ankles, but Leonardo noticed that she had not taken off the torn and dirty dress in which she had come. She told them her name was Silvia and asked Salomon his name. The child told her; then they ate in silence.

Salomon occasionally looked at the rope marks on the woman’s wrists and the cold sores on her face. He seemed less impressed by the way her hair had grown back in tufts over her shaved head. Their meal only took a few minutes, and they left two potatoes on a plate for Lucia when she woke up.

“Do you know what I’d like now?” the woman said.

Leonardo shook his head. She smiled, her teeth shaded by an opaque film.

“Some coffee.”

They sat in silence, watching the flame of the lamp bending toward the empty side of the table in the draft from the door. From time to time Salomon closed his eyes and his chin fell on his chest.

“Go to bed now,” Leonardo told him.

The child looked at the stairs; then started playing with a piece of potato peel, shaping it so that it looked like a whale. Leonardo wrapped the base of the lamp in the towel and offered it to Salomon.

“You take it,” he said. “I’ll blow it out when I come up.”

Salomon said goodnight and climbed the stairs to the upper floor. The light he was taking away surrounded him like a cloak. Left in the dark, Leonardo went to open the door of the stove; the fire inside cast light on the walls. He began clearing the table, carrying the plates one at a time to the sink.

“No, I’ll do that,” the woman said, getting up. “You sit down, we haven’t done much to help you today.”

She rinsed the plates and glasses in the sink, then she poured a little of the water used for boiling the potatoes into the two cups and sat down again. Anyone walking in at that moment would have seen a man with thick gray hair and a woman with a badly shaved head sitting facing one another by the weak light of the fire with two cups in front of them, as if about to embark on an existential conversation. But on closer inspection, he would have seen that the man’s face was deeply scarred and that the woman’s hands were damaged and incapable of keeping still for more than a few seconds at a time.

“How old is your daughter?”

“Seventeen.”

The woman stared at her cup.

“Now I’m going to tell you something you might think rather impersonal and insensitive, but it’s the only way I can be useful to you. Would you like to hear it?”

Leonardo nodded.

“I worked as a psychologist with an international organization and traveled in a war zone where rape was used as a weapon for ethnic cleansing. My job was to convince the women to report the rapes and to help organize assistance for them. So I know what I’m talking about.”

The woman took a sip of hot water and put the cup down over a small mark on the table.

“Lucia’s in a state of shock. It often happens to girls who suffer violence, especially if they are young and their ordeal goes on for a long time. The fact that she doesn’t speak or react to external stimuli is part of the picture, but don’t be misled into thinking she isn’t feeling anything: there is certain to be enormous anger inside her. She feels responsible in some way for what has happened to her and hates herself for not having been able to extract herself from it. She has suffered very deep humiliation.”

Leonardo met her eyes without moving a muscle in his face.

“It may take a long time before she emerges from the shell inside which she has closed herself, and it’s even possible she may never emerge from it, or not entirely. All you can do is keep close to her without trying to hurry things on. Act as if you are waiting for her to return from a journey and in the meantime are looking after her home for her. Talk to her, even if she seems not to listen. Touch her hands and feet but not any other part of her body and never hug her however much you want to, because that could make her feel imprisoned. It could even make her unconsciously superimpose you on the image of that man. In any case, it’s likely she can remember little or nothing of what you have been to her and done for her in the past. You mustn’t feel hurt by that; it’s only a defense mechanism. I know you love her very much and that you will know how to do what is right for her.”

“How old are you?”

“Twice your daughter’s age.”

“Have you anyone yourself?”

“No, not any longer.”

Leonardo looked out of the window; the moon had turned the trees to stone.

“We’ll wait until the snow melts, then make for the coast. You could come too.”

The woman got up and put another piece of wood in the stove and then filled a pan with water at the sink and placed it on the hot cast-iron cooking surface.

“Now we’ll have a little warm water to wash in tomorrow morning,” she said.

Leonardo realized his thoughts would stop functioning long before dawn and that there was nothing he could do to stop it.

“Until tomorrow, then,” the woman said.

“Until tomorrow.”

When she withdrew to the other room, Leonardo went to take a little hay to Circe and David, and he talked to them for a long time about what he was afraid might happen.

The elephant and the donkey gave him their full attention, chewing great handfuls of dried grass. A full moon lit the valley and in the silence of the night Leonardo sensed life quivering under the snow as the earth softened and opened.

He urinated.

Then he went up to the bedroom, extinguished the lamp Salomon had placed on the floor well clear of the bed, and lay down beside the little boy who was wheezing lightly like a sleeping rodent. In the dark he felt Salomon’s forehead; it was warm with exhaustion, but he had no fever. On the other hand Leonardo felt himself to be burning hot. He closed his eyes but tried to stay awake so as not to miss any sounds from the floor below.

A few minutes, or perhaps a few hours later, he was awoken by hearing steps. He made his way downstairs without lighting the lamp, but the kitchen was empty and silent. Nor was there any sound from the room where Lucia and Silvia were. He went back to bed and slept.

When he woke again it was light. The room had a small window that was reflected in a mirror on the wall, making it look as if two suns were rising from opposite points of the compass.

Salomon was sleeping curled against him. It was the first time for a very long time that he had smelled a good smell, and he lay staring at the cloudless sky and the outline of the mountains beyond the faded curtains, reflecting that the scent, the color, and the shape were all one. When he delicately extracted his arm from beneath the child’s head he realized it was completely numb from the shoulder down, so he massaged it until he could feel the blood beginning to circulate again and his wound starting to throb inside the bandage. Only then did he get up and head for the stairs.

The first thing he saw when he got down was that the pan was no longer on the stove.

He found it in the bathroom with the woman’s dress and pants. He could smell the cake of soap, which was still on the basin. He picked up the clothes, threw them into the stove, lit it, and went out.

It did not take him long to find her. She had chosen an out-of-the-way spot that Leonardo was certain to find. A solitary holm oak in the middle of a pasture.

By the time Lucia and Salomon woke, Leonardo had already milked Circe.

The child and the girl sat at the table sipping milk from steaming cups. Leonardo rubbed his nails on a sponge at the sink, trying to clean them of earth. Then he joined the others at the table.

“The woman who was with us has gone,” he said. “Her family is not far away, and she wants to join them.”

Salomon looked at the muddy bandage that Leonardo had not yet changed and the scratches on his right hand, lowered his eyes and said nothing. Lucia went on staring at the stove, chewing a potato left over from the night before.

In the afternoon, while they were busy in the cellar, Salomon and Leonardo heard music from the road. They ran to the beeches at the edge of the field and, hiding in the bushes behind the great trees, they watched the familiar procession pass on the main road. The Land Rover was leading, followed by a car they had not seen before, and the coach, towed by a tractor. Most of the youngsters were lying on the roof of the coach or on an agricultural trailer that had been attached to it. The cripple, sitting on the hood of the first car, was wearing a bizarre piece of headgear and inspecting the road ahead. He was holding a pike on the end of which Leonardo recognized Richard’s head, blond hair waving in the wind like a ragged flag.

When the music faded in the distance, Leonardo and Salomon went back to the cellar where they had been struggling with the snare for a couple of hours already, trying to replace its old spring with another one taken from a sofa.

“What was the name of the lady who went away this morning?” Salomon asked.

Leonardo realized that Salomon had not recognized Richard’s head.

“Silvia,” he said. “Now let’s try again.”

He grasped the cord that he had attached to one end of the spring while Salomon tried to fasten a hook to the snap mechanism connected to the framework.

“It’s gone in!” Salomon said at one point.

Leonardo opened his eyes, which he had closed with the effort he was making.

“Good.”

The child placed the trap carefully on the floor. He studied it for a long time: it looked like the jaws of a fish, but also like a great dried flower.

“Will the lady be able to find her family?” he asked.

“Yes,” Leonardo said, not feeling he was telling a lie.

That evening, when the boy was asleep, he went down the stairs to the room where Lucia was. Placing the lamp on the windowsill, he sat down at the foot of the bed. Lucia was staring at the ceiling, a slight smile on her lips. She was still wearing the red dress and had not washed since they arrived.

Leonardo slipped off her shoes, took her little feet in his lap, and began massaging them with his remaining hand. She went on gazing at the ceiling as if her feet belonged to someone else.

“I’ll do this every evening,” he told her, “for as long as I live.”

He stopped talking and massaging her feet because it was dawn. Then he put out the light and, by the feeble light of daybreak, climbed the stairs to bed. Salomon was asleep, but some dream must have disturbed him because his mouth was twisted in a grimace and his hair, usually so neat, was in disorder. Using his fingers as a comb, Leonardo tidied the boy’s hair; then he lay down beside him and shut his eyes.