The Last Man Standing Read Online Free PDF Page A

anyway. Throughout his life the objects he worked with, chose, and gathered around himself had always been a matter of indifference to him.
    He found some crackers in the cupboard and sat down at the table to eat them by the light of the small neon tube above the cooker. The house he had been living in for the last seven years was one that, in the days when architectural magazines still existed, would have been worth photographing. He had had a large window put in facing the vineyard and the veranda where he could sit and enjoy the sunset behind the chain of mountains that closed the horizon like a zipper. On the western side of the house was a strip of meadow, and on the other side of the courtyard was an outhouse, its ground floor kept as a storage area and its upper floor reconditioned to accommodate a dozen people.
    Leonardo finished the crackers and continued to gaze at the night through the great window.
    Maybe better warm, he thought.
    He heated the milk for a few seconds in a small pan, then poured it into the glove again. When he approached the dog with it, he moved his eyes behind closed lids, nothing more. When Leonardo squirted a little milk on his muzzle the puppy instinctively licked himself. Leonardo repeated the action until the dog realized where the milk was coming from and timidly began to suck the rubber finger. In the end they both stretched out exhausted, side by side on the sofa. The clock showed eleven-twenty.
    “Bauschan,” Leonardo said.
    Bauschan was the dog protagonist of a story by Thomas Mann, a story Leonardo could only vaguely remember but which had taught him that familiarity can develop between a man and his dog; something he had never experienced himself, having never had an animal of his own.
    “Beddy-byes now,” Leonardo said, placing the dog on the carpet to prevent him from falling in the night.
    The air on the veranda was chilly. Leonardo picked the two letters up from the floor and glanced at them long enough to recognize the “return to sender” stamp before going back into the house to his bedroom, where he opened the wardrobe and took a box with colored stripes from under his jackets. Lifting the lid, he slid the two letters in on top of the others, which were now almost filling the box to the top. Taking off his bathrobe, he pulled on a pair of white linen trousers and matching shirt then went back into the bathroom to comb his hair in front of the mirror. He cleaned and filed his nails, took the book he had started reading that morning from his bag, and went out.
    He walked around the house to the west side, which had two small windows on the second floor and an arched door. He opened the door with a key he had taken from a nail before leaving the house and went in.
    When he was a child this room had been home to a dozen casks: his father and his grandfather had known every virtue and defect of each cask at least as well as they knew the individual combination of courage, patience, and malice in each of their children.
    His family had been wine producers for many generations, but in his last years his father had given up the work, selling the grapes to some local wine grower. Nevertheless the casks had remained in place until, seven years before, Leonardo had sold them together with the rest of the furnishings of the house. Then he had filled the space, about ten meters by four, with bookshelves he had had custom-made and fixed to the walls by a carpenter. Apart from thousands of books there was nothing but an armchair and a standard lamp on a carpet in the middle of the room. The floor was exactly as Leonardo had found it: earth trodden down so hard that you could not even scratch it with a pointed object.
    Leonardo contemplated his books, which he had missed constantly, almost physically, during the four days he had been away, and then he lit the little standard lamp and sat down in the armchair. Twenty minutes later he had finished the story of Felicité for the umpteenth