The Last Man Standing by Davide Longo

half closing his eyes from time to time like an employer not quite trusting his workforce.
    Elio was wearing shorts and a shirt marked with one or two stains of varnish, while Sebastiano was in a mechanic’s overall that must have belonged to his father. His hands, after three days of work, were white and unmarked. The weather was mild and the sky covered with flat, inconsistent clouds hinting at the blue behind them.
    As they ate, Elio told the story of a man from a nearby village where Leonardo had never been. This man, known to all by the name of Nino Prun, lived in an isolated ruin and several years earlier had bought himself a coffin that he kept in his bedroom. Apart from this eccentricity and a somewhat shabby style of dressing, everyone knew him to be mild, celibate, and reserved.
    Two weeks earlier Nino Prun had gone down to the priest’s housekeeper to arrange for the curate to call on him the following day. Although the woman knew that the man had never been a churchgoer, she passed on the message and the next day the priest climbed up to the man’s house in hopes of a late repentance. Instead he had found Nino Prun in his coffin, stiff, washed, combed, and dressed for burial. All the priest had to do was administer benediction and order the lid to be nailed down. The man had left his few belongings on the dresser in two supermarket bags, one marked with the name of a prostitute from C., who by then had no longer worked for a number of years, and the other with the name of the Association of Alpine Mountaineers.
    They talked of this and other things just as in earlier years when Elio’s shop had been full of customers, and when it was possible to see people in trains and on benches with one of Leonardo’s books in their hands. Sebastiano shifted his eyes from one to the other as he followed the conversation, but it was as if his silence were concealing thoughts unrelated to what was happening around him. A medieval Japanese poet might have described his figure as combining the strength of a centuries-old tree with the ephemeral wonder of a chrysalis.
    “We could try Gallo,” Elio said as they put the dirty plates in the sink.
    They lay resting on the veranda floor for half an hour and then loaded the filled baskets on the trailer and set off for the village. Elio took the driving seat while Leonardo and Sebastiano made room for themselves among the baskets. The air was tepid as the light faded and the smell of the grapes caused them a slight dizziness. Bauschan watched the passing countryside from his owner’s arms. Leonardo wished he could travel like this forever.
    “Guido, if only you and Lapo and I,”
he quoted in a murmur,
“could be enchanted and put into a ship with the winds carrying us across the sea to your heart’s content and mine, so that neither destiny nor any other bad weather could impede us, but that on the contrary, united by a common desire, we would feel an ever-increasing need to keep together.”
    They passed the carabinieri station. The windows were barred, and crocuses and wild spinach were growing from the steps. It was a year now since the men had been either diverted to the National Guard or transferred to a larger base. The nearest of these was at A., but no one was in a position to say whether there were any carabinieri there anymore, since the Land Rover that used to come every two days and park in the village square was no longer showing up.
    When the road divided, they took the route that climbed the hill in gentle curves. The vineyard was at the top of the knoll with its entrance marked by a great red iron gate without any surrounding fence; all around it the vines sloped away like waves in a geometrical sea, to far-off churches and towers still lit by the sun. A clock in the village struck five.
    Elio drove the tractor straight into the courtyard. The two-story house, neat as a biscuit, had its laboratory and cellar in an annex. The balconies on the upper floor were