The Last Man Standing by Davide Longo Page A

stared at the night through the glass door of the veranda, a fragment of sky in which two very bright stars were shining, and wept for at least a quarter of an hour.
    He remembered the last time he had wept like this, eight years before.
    His relationship with Clara had been going on for several months, but they had never slept together. Leonardo had not felt like taking her with him on his trips to attend conferences and give lectures, and when he was in the city, family demands prevented him being away at night. On this particular occasion, Alessandra had gone to Paris to review an exhibition by an American artist who constructed perpetual-motion machines out of refuse, and Lucia had been excused school for two days to go with her.
    That evening, after dining in Clara’s little apartment, they had gone to bed and Clara had made sure he came on her stomach. Then they had examined the shape of the pool of semen on her belly and invented resemblances as one does with the shapes of clouds. Then she had taken a pen from the bedside table and asked him to draw its outline on her before she went to the bathroom. He continued to lie there gazing at the large rose on the ceiling, meditating on the gift of love this young woman was presenting him with. Then, aware of being in the presence of some form of perfection, he had wept, the way an old man can weep when he recognizes in a child a turn of speech or gesture that had been his own in his youth.
    Leaving the bathroom, Clara had come back to lie down naked beside him, her belly still marked by the ballpoint pen.
    “Shall we always do it?” she had asked.
    Leonardo had said yes.
    The next time he had been on the point of tears had been seven months later, when the polaroid photographs of the drawings had been shown in court by Clara’s lawyer as evidence of the deviant sexual practices to which the well-known writer and university lecturer had subjected the young woman, with the threat of interrupting her career at the university as well as her doctoral degree.
    Leonardo got to his feet and moved slowly toward the bathroom. The sight of himself in the mirror disturbed him.
    There seemed to be new wrinkles around his eyes, and his cheeks had sagged to reveal sharp cheekbones. His body was drying up; soon he would be nothing but a husk, an old man in a world where speed and determination were necessary.
    Why had he not faced those boys? He should have stopped and told them off. They were nothing but badly reared children, and he was a man of fifty who could have been their father.
    In the gentle middle-class world he had inhabited until a few months before, his timidity had always been mistaken for moderation; the mediocre music his instrument played joining with others in an uninspired orchestra, but now everything was changing and there would no longer be any melody for him to harmonize with.
    He rubbed painkilling cream into his back and dried his hair; the weather had changed and he was afraid that the cold air might bring on a migraine; then he put on his pajamas and went to bed.
    Just before he fell asleep he felt for the first time that he was beginning to understand the true dreadfulness of what was happening. It was the beginning of a new age, a naked age that seemed likely to last and whose key word would be “without,” just as the key word of the previous age had been “with.”
    But even the black glue paralyzing his thoughts could not keep him awake.
    On the first Thursday in November a car came into the courtyard, and after making a slow half-moon on the gravel, stopped with its hood toward the way out.
    Leonardo was sitting in one of the armchairs on the veranda with a fleece over his knees. He lowered the book he was reading and watched the woman who got out of the car as though she were merely a couple of hours late, whereas in fact he had not seen his wife for six years.
    Alessandra walked toward him. She was slim and looked hardly any older, yet many things