The Last Man Standing Read Online Free Page B

above it.
    “I’ll give you a rubber glove,” he said. “You can fill it with milk and make a hole with a needle at the end of one finger.”
    “When they stole my she-goat and I had to feed her kids, it worked. It won’t cost you anything to try.”
    “All right,” Leonardo said.
    The dog was sleeping with its back turned away from them, showing the pink skin of its stomach. It had a few light-colored hairs, wet with urine, around the point of its penis. One of its eyes had begun weeping again.
    “I’ve heard there are packs of dogs on the plain that attack people,” Elio said. “I hope he’s not from one of those.”
    “We traveled together a good few hours and he hasn’t attacked me yet,” Leonardo said with a smile.
    Elio shifted his weight to the other foot.
    Leonardo’s home was a modest little farmhouse but on the better side of the hill and secluded. His father had died when he was six and his mother, to make ends meet, had sold the half facing the village to a surgeon from T.
    During his years as a university student, when he came home to see his mother on weekends, Leonardo often traveled with the surgeon’s family, who liked to escape the city in search of a little tranquillity in the hills. The wife, many years younger than her husband, was an intelligent woman who wore high-necked sweaters over her enormous breasts. They had two sons: one was born prematurely and suffered from dyslexia, while the other was a brilliant chess player. When the surgeon was killed in a road accident, his wife no longer felt like making the journey to the house and telephoned Leonardo’s mother to tell her so. Both had wept at great length. Two weeks later the wife had sent a moving company to take away their furniture, and from then on that part of the house stayed empty and unsold.
    Leonardo parked the car under the lime tree, hoisted his duffel onto his shoulder and carefully lifted the still-sleeping dog. On the veranda floor were two letters; no surprise and he did not bother to pick them up. The fridge was empty apart from a small amount of milk left in a glass bottle; he sniffed the milk, and finding it acceptable, poured it, before doing anything else, into the glove, pierced the point of the little finger with a needle, and put it to the puppy’s lips. But the animal ignored it.
    Leonardo sat on the sofa for a while, one hand on the puppy’s hot body, wondering whether rescuing the dog had been wishful thinking. An irrational gesture that had put him at risk and in the end would benefit neither of them.
    He undressed in the bathroom, put his clothes into the washing machine, and looked in the mirror. On his pale chest he had a deep red mark he must have acquired while crawling into the tunnel. He shuddered at the thought of what he had done and for a moment thought he could smell the nauseating stench of the dead puppy and its mother on himself.
    Without waiting for the water to warm up, he got into the shower and roughly scrubbed his body and hair, reflecting, as he had not done for some time, that everything leads to ruin and that in his case this had happened to him in utter solitude. He felt extremely tired, but even more empty and discouraged.
    When he was dry, he put on some periwinkle-blue underpants and went back to the sofa, where the dog was sleeping in the same position as he had been left. The kitchen was equipped in a functional manner. None of the furniture had belonged to his family: he had never cared for
arte povera
, and when he moved away he had sold everything to a junk dealer. He had then bought himself furniture in African teak, basic and without any fancy design. He had added plates, glasses, and other necessary kitchen equipment from the catalog of a department store and had everything delivered.
    At the time he had attributed his choice to his haste to get organized and to the disorder of the time, but when he thought about it he soon convinced himself he would have done the same