The Last Man Standing

PART SIX

They walked eastward along beaches that had once echoed with the cries of vacationers and were now desolate and silent. Many of the villages had been raided and set on fire; others seemed intact but lifeless, like cold casts of their former selves. Empty houses, overgrown gardens, harbors without boats. Groups of cats were dozing under cars and in the shade of pittosporum bushes, taking note without interest of the passing humans. No human sound tempered the stillness; only the cries of gulls and crows and the constant lapping of the sea.

It was sunset by the time they came to the section of beach facing the island. Leonardo helped Lucia down from the elephant and went to sit with her on one of the rocks at the end of the stretch of sand. At that point the coast extended into the sea as a rocky promontory, like a hand trying to recapture something it had absentmindedly allowed to escape. The island, a few hundred meters from the shore, seemed naked and unfriendly despite the oblique light of the sun—a triangle of opaline rock with nothing on it but a few shrubs, including broom.

Leonardo looked at it: it seemed sprinkled with lime and looked like a relic from a far distant past. When he turned, he saw Sebastiano heading toward the embankment that carried the road. After a moment his figure vanished into the dark arch of a tunnel.

“Why are you crying?” Leonardo asked.

Salomon, sitting on the donkey, shook his head to indicate it was nothing but went on glowering at the island. He had been silent all day without ever asking who the man leading them was, or where they were going or how long it would take to get there. In a cave where they had stopped for a half hour’s rest he had found a woman’s old handbag and spent the afternoon filling it with crabs he caught on the way. The legs emerging from his shorts were as dry and dark as sticks of licorice. His bright-yellow shoulder-length hair made him look like someone born for running over moors.

“Are you scared?”

The child shrugged and tipped up his nose. The island was all rocky outcrops and seemed to offer no landing place. On the highest point were the circular ruins of an ancient lookout tower, now little more than a pile of stones.

Leonardo reached down to Bauschan’s head. The dog’s hair was rough with salt, his nose cold and damp. When he looked back at Salomon, he realized the child’s eyes and the dog’s were exactly the same blue.

“What do you mean, scared?”

Salomon looked around as if wanting to relate this fear to something visible, then simply slid his hand down a couple of times from his throat to the top of his stomach. The elephant crapped, filling the air with a smell of rotten fruit. The sun had set, removing both the warmth and the ferocity of the day.

“I understand,” Leonardo nodded, “but it won’t happen.”

Salomon looked Leonardo in the eye, and then at the elephant, the island, the dog, and Lucia, who was holding her bump in her hands and glancing back at the stretch of coast they had come along. Leonardo realized the boy’s mind was occupied by one of those thoughts we live with from the moment we are born to the moment we leave the earth. Something to do with finishing a task passed on to us by those who have gone before. He remained dumb to think of the violence and grace involved in all this.

“Now let’s eat,” he said, aware the boy had stopped weeping and that the crisis had passed.

Salomon jumped off the donkey, came up to Leonardo, and emptied his handbag on the ground. After a moment of uncertainty, the crabs began fleeing in all directions. Leonardo grabbed one of the biggest that was about to disappear among the rocks.

“The knife from the basket,” he said.

The boy caught up with the donkey, which was heading for the road, and took a small knife with an arts-and-crafts handle from one of her panniers. David was ripping long sprays of bougainvillea from the embankment with his trunk. This vegetable noise was the only sound in the world. The wind had dropped, silencing the backwash of surf, and the sea just a few meters away was a motionless membrane.

Leonardo opened the crabs and the young people ate their flesh, then Salomon went on a trip around the rocks and came back with some sea snails and limpets. By the time they had finished their meal the sand around them was dotted with mother-of-pearl shells. The smaller crabs, in translucent armor, circulated among the leftovers polishing off what remained.

At this point they saw Sebastiano come out of the tunnel.

He laid a series of round poles on the ground at regular intervals, went back into the tunnel, and a few seconds later the bow of a small rowing boat began to emerge from the darkness. Before Leonardo and Salomon could even get to their feet, the boat had slithered toward the waterline with a thundering echo like a drumroll.

Sebastiano lit an oil lamp in the boat, and while Leonardo and Salomon loaded on the baskets, he collected the poles and carried them back to the tunnel. After a moment of reluctance, the donkey agreed to get into the boat and, as they left the shore, stood gazing ahead like an old sea hand.

The crossing took half an hour, and throughout this time Salomon looked back at the shore where the elephant was staring steadily at the little light from the lamp disappearing toward the island. Leonardo put his arm around the boy’s narrow waist and felt his thin stomach shaken by sobs.

“We’ll find a way,” was all he said.

They landed on gravel at a little bay on the side of the island facing the open sea. A few meters from the shore, with a dexterity that betrayed long experience, Sebastiano pulled in the oars, and letting the boat bounce on the waves, guided it right up to the beach. The donkey got off by herself, and they unloaded the panniers and two large cans of water that Sebastiano had filled. Then Leonardo helped Lucia off and they were on their way.

During the last few months Sebastiano had added to the only hut already on the island, transforming it into a house with three rooms. The room they entered contained four chairs, a table made from a door placed on two tree trunks, a basin, a stove, and three shelves with some dishes and cutlery and a couple of pans. Stretched in a corner, next to a prie-dieu, was an animal hide similar to the one Sebastiano had given Leonardo when they separated. The only furniture in the other two rooms was three lounge chairs.

They drank a little water, pouring it into a bowl from one of the cans that Sebastiano had carried up to the house on his shoulders, after which Lucia retired to the room with a single bed while Leonardo and the boy took the other. The plastic on the beds was hard and smelled of chloroform, so they covered them with the rabbit skins they had sewn together in recent months and lay down. Leonardo had the solar battery with him but did not switch it on.

“Have you ever been on an island before?” he asked the boy.

Salomon thought.

“Yes, but I was very little. They told me about it.”

“Was it a large island?”

“I think so, because we couldn’t even see the sea.”

Leonardo stretched out his hand and passed his fingers through the boy’s hair. Bauschan was lying in the space between the two beds. Leonardo understood from his whimpers that Salomon was stroking him.

“Has it gone now?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“Then go to sleep, we’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.”

“For David?”

“Yes, for David too.”

Lucia’s room was smaller; she had moved the bed against the wall, right under the window. Leonardo sat beside her, listening to her breathing interrupted by little wheezing sounds. A dream. Then he took her left foot and ran his thumb over the sole. He did this many times, then switched to her ankle and the other foot. When he got up to go he felt her lightly touch his hand. She gave him time to understand the meaning of what she had done after such a long absence, then after a minute or two she moved his hand to her belly. Leonardo felt hot firm skin under his fingers, then something press against his palm, like a little dog waking up in a sack.

For the first time he was fully aware of Good. Not like in the past, as something that burns and consumes, but as a fire you can hold in your hand and eat in small portions. A fire containing both hot and cold, both light and dark shadow, and that for this reason is more closely related to humanity than to any other creature. Because, in principle, humanity can never be separated from it, in the same way that the water of the sea, the water of the stream, and the water that forms the clouds intercommunicate and belong together.

When Lucia released his hand he got to his feet and tiptoed to the door.

“Thank you,” he said before leaving the room.

As usual, he only slept for a few hours and at first light went out with Bauschan. It only took him a few steps to realize that the opaline color of the island was not due to salt or the nature of the rock but to a covering of dogs’ bones.

He climbed up to the ruins of the tower from where he could take in the whole handkerchief of land, but he could see no dogs or animal carcasses. Bauschan stayed quietly at his side with no smell to follow. Whatever happened on the island had happened long ago.

Returning to the house, he found Sebastiano busy watering the kitchen garden.

During the months he had been here, he had been cultivating a rectangle of land about fifty paces from the shanty. His garden offered zucchini, tomatoes, melons, and peas and, like the house, was on the part of the island not visible from the mainland.

“Do you know why these are here?” Leonardo asked him, indicating the bones Sebastiano had raked up from his garden and piled in a little white pyramid.

Sebastiano shook his head then emptied the bucket between two lines of tomatoes and went off to the tank where he kept the water. The sun was getting strong enough to define shadows, and from the pines at the highest point of the island came the first chirping of two cicadas.

Leonardo looked back at the settlement on the western coast: in fact there was a fortified town or citadel enclosed within walls and ugly houses built in the previous century leading down to the sea. In the clear morning air he could make out threads of smoke rising from the upper part, already turned to ocher by the sun. During the crossing the night before he had noticed fires on the walls but had said nothing because he did not want to worry the young people.

“Who are those people?” he asked.

Sebastiano went back to watering the garden. Leonardo looked at him and waited for an answer, before realizing none would come because no answer existed.

“Have they ever come looking for you?”

Sebastiano bent down to pull up a tuft of grass from among the carrots and indicated no. Leonardo looked at the house where the youngsters were still asleep. The outside of the shanty had been painted with sea-blue paint, and Sebastiano had covered the windows with large jute sacks now swelling in the wind from the mainland, giving the whole house the appearance of an enormous and complicated wind instrument.

“Thank you so much for all this,” Leonardo said.

In fifteen days they managed to scrape together four empty drums that Leonardo and Sebastiano had found by pushing on as far as a service station on the main road; also about twenty wooden planks retrieved from bathing huts, a few meters of rope, some nails and tar, and two almost complete rolls of adhesive tape.

Each morning, after milking Circe and drinking a cup of milk, they left the donkey to graze on the island and took the boat back to the beach.

David, seeing them arrive, would start turning around on himself and giving long emotional trumpetings.

The first to embrace him would be Salomon, who jumped into the water a few meters from the shore, and then it would be Leonardo’s turn. Sebastiano and Lucia would join in these effusions from a distance, while Bauschan would run between David’s legs as if to demonstrate confidence in the elephant’s slowness and gentleness. Once mutual greetings were over Sebastiano and Leonardo would begin work on the hull and Salomon would concentrate on the octopuses. Lucia would pass the time sitting with her hands on her belly and watching the sparse clouds crossing the blue sky from a little shelter of branches Leonardo had built for her.

Toward midday the two men would take the boat and the rest of the material back to the tunnel so that it would not be too noticeable, and, with the young people and the elephant, would go a little way inland to a stream, about twenty meters from the beach.

Under a roof of birches, holm oaks, and carob trees the water had scooped out a number of pools where David was able to refresh himself and Salomon amused himself by diving from the elephant’s back. Even Lucia, without any warning, one day stripped naked and slid carefully into the water in a more secluded pool, where she spent a long time floating with her eyes half closed and her large belly turned to the sky.

When he had refilled the freshwater cans, Leonardo would go off to inspect the snare he had set the day before. The prey it caught was more sporadic than it had been in the hills and the forest, but he did find a small wild boar and a doe whose meat, when salted, could last them the most of the summer.

Lunch would consist of tomatoes, boiled zucchini, and dried peaches; or an omelet made with gulls’ eggs, which Sebastiano had taught Salomon to search for among the inlets on the island. They never lit a fire and before leaving were careful to cover their traces by collecting every scrap left over from their meal.

Back on the beach, the men would work until sunset. Then everyone except the elephant would get back into the boat, which every day looked more like a clumsy catamaran, and would row back to the island.

“Tomorrow can David come too?” Salomon asked as he watched the gray bulk of the elephant shrink until it was lost in the evening.

“Not yet,” Leonardo would say.

When they got to the island Sebastiano would go up to the house, light the stove, and put on the soup to heat, while Leonardo and the boy fished on the rocks until nightfall. It was then that Salomon would tell his dreams and ask Leonardo to tell his, but Leonardo’s dreams were too obscure for a child, so he would replace them with stories from the vast library of his mind. First he told African stories about man and woman; then the exploits of Achilles, the wiles of Ulysses, the misadventures of Don Quixote, the vengeance of the Count of Monte Cristo, and Ahab’s obsession. Leonardo had to tie the fishing line to the child’s wrist so he would not let the fish slip through his hands. Then they would take home what they had caught to be boiled, cured, or eaten raw. Some of the entrails were given to Bauschan, and some were kept as bait for the next evening’s fishing.

After supper Lucia would withdraw to her bedroom, while Salomon stayed up to play with Bauschan. When the boy said goodnight, the two men were left together. Leonardo would then put out the lamp and set two chairs on the little open space in front of the house, where they would sit in the dark, breathing the smell of smoke that came from the citadel walls where fires would burn all night.

They were good, controlled fires, but even so neither of them wanted to find out who was living there. They felt no unease and no desire to make discoveries, and even if Sebastiano had decided to speak, they would have had nothing to say to each other. In the dark they could hear Circe walking around the house, the gentle motion of the sea and the cries of gulls among the rocks. It was all they had and all they needed.

Before going to bed Leonardo would go to Lucia to massage her feet and place his hand on her belly to feel the movements of the creature she had been carrying so long inside her and which was now almost ready to come out.

If she was not asleep, the girl would keep her eyes fixed on her father in silence, as though the warmth of his hand was a long speech full of good sense she must not lose.

Coming out of Lucia’s bedroom Leonardo would find Sebastiano sitting at the table, busy writing in a narrow script, like oblique rainfall, in the brown exercise book he had given him during the first days.

Hearing him come in, Sebastiano would raise his head.

They would look at each other for a few moments in silence, both nod in greeting, and then Leonardo would go to lie down on his bed next to the boy and the dog.

He had no idea what Sebastiano was writing and he did not want to know. He no longer felt any desire for that act once so familiar to him, in which he had invested so much of himself and which had caused him such agonies in the long years after he had abandoned it. Whatever the reason that had driven him to try to compose what could not be composed, it had gone. The stories inside him would not outlive the beating of his heart. He knew that and it was how he wanted it, and this sense of impermanence would never disturb his sleep.

Two days before the boat was finished, he saw them.

There were three of them, watching from the bridge that linked the two banks of the stream, about a hundred meters up the hillside from the pool. One was a tall man, one a man with red hair, and the third was in shadow.

“There’s someone there,” Leonardo said.

Sebastiano looked up at the bridge, but from the way he quickly looked down again and went on filling the cans, Leonardo realized this could not be the first time he had seen them.

“We have to go,” Leonardo told Salomon, who was swimming with the elephant in the lowest of the pools.

“But it’s early!” the child objected.

“I know, but we must get back to the beach.”

Lucia had gone upstream to bathe in a more secluded and shaded pool. When Leonardo reached her, she was standing on a great rock in the middle of the stream, staring at the men who were watching her from some fifty meters further up. Her face showed no distress. Apart from the milky whiteness of her full breasts and belly, her body was slender and suntanned, and her hair now reached down to her buttocks.

Leonardo called her. She walked to meet him and let him help her on with her dress over her wet skin; then, with the others, and moving more quickly than usual, they set out down the path to the beach.

Halfway there Salomon turned off toward a path leading to an old house with a garden where they had found two peach trees and a fig tree heavy with fruit. Leonardo told him they could not go there today.

“Why not?” the child asked.

“I’ll tell you later, now go with Sebastiano. I have to stop for a moment.”

The child realized this was no time for arguing and ran to join Sebastiano.

Leonardo, left on his own, took the dog under his arm and hid behind a low stone wall from where he could watch the path above. The three men appeared soon afterward, walking unhurriedly in single file. One had white hair; the others were younger but were not boys. They were wearing T-shirts and overalls and knee-length shorts. They had short hair and did not have beards.

When they disappeared behind the trees, Leonardo went back onto the road and quickly reached the beach. When the three men emerged from the tunnel, the boat was already about a hundred meters offshore. Salomon, not yet understanding what had happened, ran to the stern when he saw them; one of the men had gone up to David.

“Leave him alone!” the child shouted.

The man, who was about to stroke the elephant, pulled his hand back. The one with white hair and the other one watched the boat moving away.

“Don’t worry,” Leonardo said. “They won’t hurt him.”

The boy went on staring at them, with big tears running down his cheeks. Sebastiano was rowing for all he was worth. The island was getting nearer. It was a sunny day, but white cumulus clouds were forming above the coast.

As soon as they landed, Salomon ran to the ruins of the tower from where he could see the beach. Leonardo helped Sebastiano carry the water cans to the house, then he joined the boy, who was inspecting the coast with his hand shading his eyes. Leonardo sat down beside him on the stones that had once been the foundation of the tower.

“I don’t want them to take him away!”

Leonardo reassured him: “They won’t.”

He could only see one man; the others had either gone away or were sheltering in the vegetation on the far side of the road. David was standing still, like a huge sandcastle.

“But if they are good people, why did we have to run away?”

Leonardo could think of nothing to say to that.

“Let’s do some fishing,” he said. “Then we’ll come back and see if they’ve gone.”

That evening the child did not ask him to continue the story he had started the day before and sat with his eyes fixed on the point where the fishing line disappeared into the dark water, agitated by the coming storm.

They caught a bass and two bream, which Sebastiano garnished with rosemary and set to boil in a little seawater. While they were eating, it began to rain. Sebastiano put out the basin and several cups to catch the water, then he came back in and they continued to eat in silence. No one said anything about what had happened during the afternoon or what might happen the next day.

When he had finished his supper, Salomon went out.

Leonardo caught up with him halfway up the hill and the two climbed the last bit together. The bones covering the ground seemed to be gradually releasing the light they had stored up during the day. In contrast, once they reached the top the coast seemed black and dense as if molded in wrought iron. Amid the gloom, the fire lit by the three men on the beach shone like a beacon. Even at that distance they could distinguish the figures sitting around the flames. They could imagine David not far off.

“They’re still there,” the boy confirmed.

Leonardo put his hand on Bauschan’s head and stroked it. The wind was driving the clouds inland and, in the half of the sky reflected by the sea, the first stars had appeared.

“David’s fine,” he said. “They’ll be gone tomorrow, you’ll see.”

They went back to the house. Lucia was in bed and Sebastiano was washing up. Leonardo went into the room with the boy.

“Do those men want to hurt us?” Salomon asked as he lay down on his bed.

“I don’t think so.”

“Why are they staying there, then?”

“I don’t know, but tomorrow we’ll bring David here with us,” Leonardo said.

The child stared at him in the dark.

“You’re not telling me lies, are you?”

“No.”

“Sure?”

“Quite sure, but you go to sleep now.”

“But what if they come here?”

“They won’t come here.”

“Maybe they’re good swimmers.”

“They won’t come here.”

As soon as Salomon was asleep, Leonardo went out to sit with Sebastiano, who was looking at the fires on the walls of the fortified town. The sky was clear and a thin slice of moon was suspended a little above the hills. The storm had disturbed the sea and a salty vapor rising from the rocks forced them to close their eyes. Leonardo stroked his stump, feeling conscious of the loss of his hand.

“Let’s go as soon as it gets light,” he said.

Fifty meters from the shore Leonardo signaled to Sebastiano to stop the boat.

Sebastiano took the oars out of the water and the bow pitched to the left, breaking the straight line their journey had maintained until that moment. The three men had gotten up and were waiting in silence. The covers they had slept on were lying abandoned around the fire like open petals around a burning pistil.

Minutes passed in which nothing happened. The elephant was lying on the sand, his belly rising and falling in his sleep. In the quiet moments of the sea’s ebb and flow, Leonardo could hear the animal’s breath and smell the cold stench of his dung, both brought to them on the wind.

Then the oldest man understood; he said something to the other two, who began to go along the beach in the direction of the village. It took half an hour for their figures to disappear around the jetty behind the first houses.

“Get close to the shore,” Leonardo told Sebastiano. “Then go back to the kids.”

The old man was standing waiting for him beside the fire, which by now had gone out. When Leonardo was a few paces from him, he nodded a greeting.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We had no intention of frightening you.”

He was more than seventy, but his short, compact body was in no sense fragile. He had the strength of an olive tree grown in a pot. His black eyes must once have been formidable, but they seemed to have signed a truce with humanity and the world.

“What is it you want?” Leonardo asked him.

The man smiled weakly. “Let’s sit down,” he said.

The three men had left a small saucepan on the embers. The water had gone cold but the man moved it to where the charcoal was still hot, then poured in a powder resembling coffee from a small envelope taken from his pocket. His movements were calm and precise.

“We didn’t recognize you,” the old man said, “but the boy who was here just now, the red-haired one, was certain he wasn’t making a mistake. He said he used to work in the bank where you were a customer.”

Leonardo remembered the young man with freckles who had advised him to accept the fact that he had lost his money. Ever since he had lost all sense of time, the people who had appeared in his life, even those he had only met for a few minutes, inhabited a special place in his mind from where he could recall them without difficulty. It was rather like what had happened to all the stories he had read or listened to.

The old man took a spoon from his pocket and stirred the coffee, on which a thin ivory-colored froth was forming.

“There are more than five hundred of us in the citadel,” he said, “most are from far away. This winter we rescued a lot of people who were dying of starvation on the coast. They’d come hoping to find a boat to take them to France, but all the boats vanished long ago and the border’s guarded by the army. If we hadn’t taken them in they would have died or become victims of the gangs.”

The man broke off to taste a spoonful of the liquid, then he nodded that it was almost ready.

“Inside the walls we have a kitchen garden, an orchard, a dozen cows, chickens, goats, and a small vineyard. There’s also an old furnace and a well we’ve been able to restore to active use, and what we still lack we’re building a little at a time or retrieving from the lower town. Every two or three days we go hunting in the hills. We also have two boats hidden among the newer buildings, but we only use them at night and without lights.”

He put the spoon back in his pocket and took two glasses from the backpack, which must have been his pillow during the night.

“Some time ago a woman who came from the north told us about a man with only one hand who was traveling with an elephant, a horse, and two children. She had never met him but had heard it said that he’d been shut in a cage and had given up his hand to be free. When you arrived we realized it must be you but didn’t recognize you at first. We haven’t many weapons, and we prefer not to use those we do have, so we keep a careful eye on anyone circulating around here. We prefer them to come to us first. That’s why we didn’t approach you earlier.”

The man filled the glasses with the hot dark liquid. He gave one to Leonardo and lifted the other to his own lips. For a while they sat in silence, watching the island slowly emerging from the darkness.

“I worked as a marine biologist in this nature reserve for thirty years,” the man said. “It was I who built the hut you are sleeping in, because I needed somewhere to keep my tools and the instruments I used for surveying.”

He savored a mouthful of coffee then swallowed it.

“Two years ago, when the dogs began to be a problem, someone thought of dumping them here. There was no building big enough to house them and it would have been too costly to exterminate them, so they began sending them here from the whole Riviera. They were brought in cages by the truckload, put in a boat, and winched onto the island. They were given nothing to eat or drink, so they tore each other to pieces. Any that survived mated, producing puppies that were either devoured at birth or hidden by their mothers in some lair until they were strong enough to come out, and themselves start killing.

“It was utter hell, but people said it was better than having the dogs in town or on the beaches. In fact there was no more economical way to get rid of them and dispose of their bodies. There’s a strong current between here and the island, and those that tried to swim back to the mainland were drowned at sea. One day on the beach we found a Labrador that had lost a leg, the only one that made it across. I hid it, but it died a day later.

“I was living on the hillside at that time and at night I couldn’t get any sleep. The dogs snarled and howled incessantly, then they would suddenly stop. They knew that the cages would arrive the next day and wanted to save their strength. In the morning they would all be there on the beach.

“There was the kind of silence that makes your hair stand on end while we were lowering the cages, but as soon as we opened them the inferno would begin again. They would form bands and divide the island between them, but once the weak, the old, and the puppies had been torn to pieces, they would return to fighting among themselves. There was a great deal we could learn from them, if one could face watching them. Homo homini lupus. What happened afterward proved my point. I wish I could have been wrong, but I wasn’t.

“The last to survive was a large white dog from the Maremma district. He went around for days trying to find a lair full of puppies, but there was nothing left on the island. And no more cages would be arriving, because the few dogs left on the coast had fled inland. Then he began to howl. When I went out onto the balcony at night I could see his white shape on the highest point of the island where the old tower was. It was like a kind of singing. Begging for a mate so he could impregnate her and then rip her to pieces. Then he stopped and I realized he must be dead.”

Leonardo looked at the island basking in the fluorescent light rising from the east. Like everywhere else where the ferocity of life had been revealed, it seemed unrelated to the rest of the world. He turned to the old man.

“What’s your name?”

“Clemente.”

“Why did you come looking for me?”

The old man smiled a toothless smile, then took the full glass Leonardo was still holding in his fingers from him, emptied it on the sand and filled it again with the coffee he had been keeping warm in the pan on the ashes.

“We know you are a guardian of stories,” he said, holding out the glass to Leonardo. “We’d like to be able to listen to them.”

In August the days got shorter. In the morning the sky was nearly always clear, but in the afternoon cumulonimbus clouds, as black as great anvils, would bring long and quiet storms in from the sea, which left the world magnificently clean and silent.

Sebastiano had made a Chinese chess set, and while they waited for the rain to stop, he and Salomon would play, moving the pieces according to rules they had tacitly agreed between themselves. Leonardo would sit under a little awning they had built from a piece of Plexiglas and two posts and they would watch Circe and David enjoying the freshness brought by the squalls.

Sometimes, looking down, he noticed he had the palm of his hand turned up, as if holding an invisible book. That made him aware of a small absence, but so slight that he could cure it by moving his hand over Lucia’s belly while she sat beside him with her feet up. Her eyes were fixed on the distance where, Leonardo imagined, she must have spent the long months of her absence and which still guarded her words. It had to be a place where there was no fear and no past and future, because Lucia had come home with her eyes filled with the kind of melancholy that belongs to exiles, the old, and gamblers. Sometimes Bauschan would follow her gaze to the horizon as though he thought she was watching something there, but there were no ships or lights or even land to be seen. Then he would whine with disappointment and Leonardo would take his hand from Lucia’s stomach and caress the dog’s head to reassure him that everything was as it should be.

If in the afternoon the sky did not threaten rain they would take the boat to the beach.

David’s weight had made their journeys longer, but they had added two more oars in the bows so Leonardo and Salomon could help Sebastiano.

When they reached the shore they would hide the boat and climb the path to the bend in the river. There was nothing left on the island for Circe and David to eat, so the elephant would spend the afternoon devouring leaves above the river, while the donkey browsed on grass growing in the shade.

Lucia would bathe in her pool and, further down, Leonardo, Sebastiano, and the boy would wash with a piece of soap, then lie on the rocks to get dry in the gentle afternoon sun. All except Lucia had cut their hair using the blade of a knife.

Anyone seeing them on their way back down to the beach would have imagined them penitent acolytes of some ancient earthly faith that had reverted to ritual ablutions and hair clipping. Salomon usually sat on David and sang songs he made up himself about diving and catching crabs and fish, but which also involved having a bicycle and going to school.

Some days Leonardo stayed behind and watched the boat set out on its way back to the island. Left on his own, he would build a bonfire from the dead bushes that lined the main road; then he would sit on the rocks and wait.

Soon the first lights would appear below the citadel, winding down like a fluorescent serpent toward the sea.

When the men and women got to the beach it would already be night. They would gather in silence around Leonardo, extinguish their lanterns, and sit in silent expectation. The fire would endow their deprived faces with an unqualified beauty and transform their necklaces of tinplate and shells into precious jewels. Most of them had no idea when the stories they were listening to had been written or who had written them, but they intuited, like animals predicting the coming of a storm or an earthquake, that there was mystery in Leonardo’s words, and that the mystery was life pure and simple.

When after an hour or two Leonardo fell silent, at first they would not move, searching in the air for a final echo of his words, then they would slowly get up, thank him with a nod, and take the path back to the citadel. They would leave presents on the sand: baskets of fruit, handkerchiefs, bread, a cigarette lighter, a pen, some rouge, a notepad, a shoelace, a little glass horse, coins, or a cloth made by hand from raw wool. Leonardo would collect everything that could be of use in a bag and then put out the fire and wait for Sebastiano to come with the boat to pick him up.

When he lay down on his bed Salomon was still awake.

“What are those people like?”

“How do you mean?”

“Are they good people?”

“I don’t know.”

“Then why tell them stories?”

“I don’t even know the answer to that.”

The child was silent.

“But we’re not going to stay here, are we?”

“Soon it’ll be cold and we won’t have anything to eat.”

“We can set the snare the way we did before, and we have fishing lines too. And the chicken they’ve given us.”

“We’ll see, Salomon. Now go to sleep.”

Salomon stroked Bauschan, who was lying on the floor between the beds.

“Leonardo?”

“Yes.”

“Are there children up in the fort too?”

“Yes, certainly there are.”

“But older or younger than me?”

“Of all ages, I think.”

“Maybe one day I can go and see them?”

“Of course you can.”

“Even if we don’t go and live there?”

“Even if we stay living here.”

The child turned on his back and looked up at the ceiling.

“What is it?” Leonardo said, noticing he was still scratching his legs.

“I’m not sleepy.”

Leonardo put his hand on the child’s cheek.

“You won’t die until I’m much older, will you?”

“Very much older. Now let’s get some sleep.”

It was halfway through September when Leonardo and Sebastiano went back to the service station where they had found the drums they had used as extra floats for the boat.

During the intervening two months someone had been to the site and many of the utensils from the workshop had vanished, together with a pile of tires and the generator Leonardo had thought too heavy to move. Whoever had taken it must have had access to a horse and cart, which was a sign that people in some inland village were getting themselves organized.

They scraped the floor of the workshop with a spatula to retrieve another canful of oil for the lamp and used a ladle tied to a pole to sound out the bottom of a cistern, something they had not had tools for on their previous visit. They found a body in it, someone who had probably fallen in and been suffocated by the fumes. Pushing it aside with the pole, they managed to fill three bottles with a sticky substance similar to gasoline from the bottom. If they used this sparingly it would light them at night all winter. Then they loaded the donkey with two large rolls of linoleum to help to waterproof the roof and started back.

It was evening when they reached the island. Salomon was waiting on the jetty eager to know at once what they had found. Leonardo showed him the oil and the gas and handed him a little bag of colored chalks he had found under the seat of an old Opel still propped on a ramp in the workshop. Even if there was hardly anything left of the chalks, the boy was very grateful for them.

“Where’s Lucia?” Leonardo asked; she would normally have been sitting on the veranda at that time.

“In her room,” Salomon said. “She hasn’t been out all day.”

Leonardo left the bottles on the beach and hurried to the house. Lucia was lying on her bed, her face and chest covered with sweat. She was holding her belly in her hands, breathing with short regular breaths. Her face was calm and concentrated, and her eyes were fixed on the ceiling as if what she must do had been written there by all the women who had lived on earth before her.

“She’s not ill, is she?” Salomon asked, putting his head around the door.

“Everything’s normal,” Leonardo said. “Go and call Sebastiano.”

While the boy ran to the beach, Leonardo reached under the bed for a large wooden box once intended for quality whisky or cognac, and where for the last few months he had been storing towels and sheets to protect them from dust; then he helped Lucia up, took off the cover stained by the breaking of her waters, spread a clean sheet on the bed, and made her lie down again. She grasped his hand. There was a light in her eyes that seemed to come from some far-off depths, which were filled with the same simplicity as when a flower is ready to break through the earth. Leonardo gave her a smile; she smiled back, her lips tense with effort. Another part of her had returned from that distant land. Sebastiano’s footsteps were at the door.

“Please put on some water to boil,” Leonardo said without turning around.

Sebastiano went away.

“Salomon, come here,” Leonardo said.

The boy took a few steps into the room.

“Sit down and hold her hand.”

The child sat on the edge of the bed and took Lucia’s hand. She was now taking longer breaths.

“Where are you going?” Salomon asked Leonardo.

“To the next room, I’ll be back in a minute.”

In the kitchen, Leonardo asked Sebastiano to wash his right hand for him with soap and clean his nails; then asked Sebastiano to wash his own hands in the same way, because he was going to be needed.

When he got back to Salomon, the boy was exactly where he had left him.

“Now go and take Bauschan with you,” he said. “When I need you, I’ll call you.” Then he sat down beside Lucia and waited.

The little girl was born in the middle of the night and cried the moment she came from her mother’s body. Sebastiano, who had been sitting to one side holding the lantern, helped Leonardo clean the baby and wrap her in a towel; then they passed her to Lucia who hugged her against her full breasts.

“Please go and call Salomon,” Leonardo said.

Darkness took over when Sebastiano left the room with the lantern, and the baby stopped crying. Leonardo listened to the breathing of mother and child. There was no mystery, he realized. Just time and the human beings who pass through time.

The boy returned with Sebastiano and they approached the bed together.

“Would you like to do something very, very important?” Leonardo said.

“Yes,” Salomon answered.

Uncovering the baby, Leonardo took the umbilical cord in his fingers and formed a small loop in it. Sebastiano handed Salomon the knife.

“Put it in here,” Leonardo said.

“Like this?”

“Yes, that’s right. Now cut.”

The child did as he was told and cut the cord, then he lifted the knife in the air. Leonardo took it from him and gave it back to Sebastiano.

“You’ve done a great job.”

“I didn’t hurt her, did I?”

“No. Now go to bed. Sebastiano will go with you.”

An hour later, after Lucia had fallen asleep, Leonardo, who had kept awake until that moment, picked up the baby and took her out of the room. Salomon was lying asleep on the animal skin in the kitchen while Sebastiano, sitting at the table, was filling the last page of the exercise book in his oblique writing. He got up and offered the lamp to Leonardo, who shook his head to show he did not need it.

He climbed to the highest point of the island where the euphorbia was beginning to put out new leaves with the approach of autumn.

When he reached the ruins of the old tower, he sat down on the pile of stones and looked across to the moonlit coast. The air was warm and there was a faint hiss crossing the night, like the overtones of a note sounded centuries ago but still vibrating in a closed room.

Leonardo unwrapped the baby and lifted her on his only hand toward the moon. For an instant she seemed to levitate weightlessly. Then he pulled her back close to him and kissed her forehead; she smelled of newly kneaded dough.

When they got back Lucia was awake. She laid the baby at her side, and by the weak light from the window, watched her agitate her tiny hands until she found the warmth of the breast.

“Papa?” Lucia called when Leonardo had already reached the door.

He turned.

“Is this the world?”

“Yes, my sweet, this is the world.”

In the morning, at first light, two boats left the mainland bringing presents to the island.