And Art – he never went to university.
5
The moment I step inside, I know the house is empty. Empty houses give off a peculiar feeling. It’s not a lack of noise or movement, it is subtler than that; it is the lack of a sense of presence. I can smell old books, and dampness. Tony makes a show of sniffing the air, then proclaims, ‘No rotting bodies. It’s a start.’
Mauro clicks a switch on the wall and, to my slight surprise, the lights do turn on.
The first thing I notice are the books. It’s a small square room, with a table and a couple of straw chairs, and there are books everywhere – on IKEA shelves, against the walls, stacked on the floor, thrown with their spine open on the table. Art got me into most of my favourite writers. Not that I have much time for reading, these days.
‘Art?’ Tony makes one last half-hearted attempt.
‘He’s not in,’ Mauro says.
‘I know,’ says Tony. ‘We should check, just in case.’
I am already moving towards the kitchen, passing under a tufa archway. I have a feeling of temporal displacement: the place is right, the timeline all wrong. The last time I was here I was nineteen, and I was saying goodbye to Art’s mum and dad before leaving for London. We didn’t even speak the same language. I would speak Italian and they would answer in the local dialect, as different from Italian as Welsh is from English. They were kind people, and I liked them much more than I liked my own father. They were aware that their son was not cut from the same cloth as everybody else, but never made a big thing of it. How is it that seventeen years have passed? Surely there is a mistake. They are dead and I am a grown-up who has wasted his best years following pipe dreams, squandering what little talent he had.
There is something wrong in the kitchen.
It is a comparatively large room, where once all the family would gather. Again, there are books everywhere, but that is not what strikes me. What strikes me is the table at the centre, the same table I remember from back then. There is a plate on it, with a fork, a glass and a bottle of wine. The plate is dirty with leftovers of mouldy pasta with cheese and tomato sauce. A fat fly is taking a lazy stroll on its rim. The bottle is half full, but it has been left open, and the wine smells foul. There is wine left in the glass.
This is definitely not like Art. Art would finish his pasta and his wine, then put the cork back in the bottle and do the dishes straight away; you could never accuse him of being tidy, but he is as clean as a cat. Also, he would never waste half a bottle of wine. I hear Mauro and Tony behind me, and I hear them stop. I know they are thinking what I am thinking.
‘Shit,’ Tony says.
He is taking out a green bag of dog food from one of the rickety cupboards. ‘This is tailored dog grub. I know the brand. It’s the same stuff one of my exes gave to his darling fox terrier. It’ll turn your dog into a scholar, an athlete and a politician, and they charge you accordingly.’
Beside the fridge are two shiny metal bowls: one with some water left, the other with dog food leftovers. They are sturdy, good quality, expensive. ‘Since when did Art get a dog?’ I say.
‘And since when does he go on spending sprees?’
‘I’ll go check the rest of the house,’ says Mauro.
I open the fridge: half a salami, some more cheese, two peaches rotten black. Not like Art, not like him at all. I walk to the garden door at the back of the kitchen. I find it unlocked. I open it and a breeze lets the fresh air inside, carrying the familiar scent of marijuana. It brings a smile to my lips. I make out a row of healthy plants at a short distance from the house. Art started growing his own weed as a teenager and, from what he told us, he kept growing it on and off, whenever he had a chance. Clearly, when he got back to Casalfranco he set up a small production line – marijuana grows fast in this climate. In the old days he would hide his pots from his mum and dad. Now he doesn’t need to bother with hiding, or potting for that matter; the plants stand a couple of metres tall, large enough to be visible in the moonlight.
On second thoughts, that’s a hell of a lot of weed for one person.
My smile freezes. I knew that Art had dealt weed, as a side job, in the past. He’d dealt in Turin, Paris and other places, but here? Only the Corona has the right to deal in Casalfranco; it is a fact of life, not up for discussion, no more than the brute force of the sun is, or the change of seasons. However strapped for cash you are, you keep your weed to yourself.
‘Fabio,’ Mauro calls. ‘Come.’
I follow his voice to a door leading into another room. ‘Welcome to the jungle,’ Tony says. ‘The book jungle.’
The room is filled with books: the piles are so high I can’t see the walls. This used to be the living room. There was a TV at the far wall and a sofa in the middle of the room. Now there are only books. Even with the light switched on, it is a dark, foreboding place. Tony’s right – it’s like a jungle. I wouldn’t be surprised to find ink anacondas crawling towards us, and paper monkeys throwing their hardback poo at us.
‘Not to mention the bedroom,’ Tony says, moving to another door. There are no books here, only crumpled sheets on the bed and an open wardrobe full of clothes. The walls are covered in drawing pins and traces of Blu-Tack, with patches of lighter colour, as if someone had been pinning on the walls a sizeable number of papers, left them hanging for a while, and then decided to take them down all at once.
‘Art was collecting clippings on the walls,’ Tony sums it up. ‘All serial-killer style.’
Mauro brings a hand close to a blue dot on the wall, without touching it. ‘We don’t know what he’s doing.’
‘Just kidding,’ Tony says, in a lower voice.
‘Don’t.’
‘I’m not surprised though.’
‘Why?’ I ask.
Tony says, ‘You didn’t come last year. You didn’t see him. Art was… Art, but even more so than usual. A lot more.’
‘Mental health issues?’ I ask.
‘He’s Art. He lives in his own world at the best of times.’
We wander back to the kitchen, where I let myself fall into a chair. With everybody else, I’d take out my phone and check their recent activity on Facebook to see what they have been up to. But Art is not on Facebook, because he doesn’t care for Facebook’s ever-changing privacy policy, thank you very much.
Tony takes out his phone.
‘What are you doing?’ Mauro asks.
‘Calling the Carabinieri.’
‘Why?’
Tony makes an exasperated face. ‘Because Art’s missing and his posh dog is missing as well and we’re worried?’
‘We don’t know Art’s missing.’
‘He’d never leave the house in this state!’
‘It’s not nearly enough to file a missing person’s case.’
His phone still in one hand, Tony touches the back of his neck with the other. ‘We could give the Carabinieri a heads-up…?’
‘Believe me, we don’t want to. For a start, we will have to explain why we thought we could break into Art’s house in the dead of night. We don’t live in Casalfranco any longer, we’re not regularly in touch with Art, and we know nothing about his current life.’
‘We’re mates.’
Mauro shrugs.
I say, ‘Also: the weed.’
‘What weed?’ Tony asks.
‘Art’s got a little plantation outside.’
Mauro goes white, which would be funny if there was anything funny about tonight. ‘A plantation?’
‘Not a plantation plantation. Eight or ten plants. Large plants.’
‘We could dispose of them before we call the Carabinieri,’ Tony says.
I say, ‘And when it turns out we’re panicking over nothing, Art will be delighted about that.’
Before Tony can reply, Mauro pushes, ‘At any rate, are any of you guys a criminal mastermind? Because I’m not. When the Carabinieri start the investigation, I can assure you, they will find out that eight o
r ten plants of marijuana were just made away with. Doesn’t take a genius. We’ll be in shit deeper than you can possibly imagine.’
Tony says, ‘Hold on, what investigation? I’m just saying we should tell the Carabinieri that we’re concerned.’
‘And you think they’re going to leave it at that? Any other person, yeah, but this is Arturo Musiello we’re talking about. The Carabinieri will break into a sweat at the first mention of his name. Journalists will flock to Casalfranco.’
My tired brain takes one or two seconds to make sense of Mauro’s words. When I finally get them, I gape at him. The thing he’s talking about – we never talk about it.
Tony says, in a sombre tone, ‘You mean…’
‘Yeah, I mean that.’
We don’t talk about that, partly because Art doesn’t talk about it, and partly because it’s better this way. I too had boxed up those days in a dark and dusty corner of my mind, where I never go. It still gives me the creeps, twenty-two years later, even though I don’t have a clue what happened. But I knew Art before and I knew Art after, and I swear, he was not the same. I don’t have a clue, and I am not sure I ever wanted to.
6
When I try to explain Salento to Lara, my English girlfriend, I say: Italy is a long peninsula, and Puglia is a peninsula at the end of it. Puglia is a long peninsula, and Salento is the peninsula at the end of it. The world does continue beyond its crystal-clear sea, but it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like Salento is the end of the line, the end of it all. I promise her that one day I’ll show her, if she is so eager. We’ll drive down from London, and she will notice the landscape change, the urban civilisation of Europe and Northern Italy give way to the wilds of the south, and then the real wilds of the real south, this flat, lawless land, where on a bad year people still offer sacrifices to the saints begging them to make it rain, just a little, if they please, just enough for the cattle and the grapes to pull through. And then Lara and I will sit on the beach, and look at the Mediterranean, and she will feel what the locals feel: that this land is indeed finis terrae, the farthest end of the world.
That will happen in summer. I would never bring her here in winter. Winter in Salento makes you wish you were dead, with everything turning cold and bitter and even more hostile than usual. The wind, in particular, behaves like a psychopath. It bites and lashes at you, and when it blows from the sea, it crushes you with the stink of dead fish and a dampness that weighs you down like clothing when you are drowning.
It was winter, and we were fourteen, when something happened to Art.
At that age we weren’t spoilt for choice as to what to do with ourselves on long winter nights, other than watching horror films on telly or going to American Pizza. Our interest in girls was getting to its peak, but the girls our age were too busy with older boys to notice us, so we killed our time, like the other kids in town, walking up and down the main street, soldiering on with the cold seeping through our bones. The struscio, it is called, one of the bits of southern culture none of my English girlfriends ever got. So what do you do? Lara asked me once. You just walk back and forth? She couldn’t believe the answer was yes. You walk back and forth in a small pack, and every now and then you stop and talk to an acquaintance, or play with one of the stray dogs that seem to forever haunt Salento.
Art had got a telescope for Christmas.
It was entry-level, but good quality; his parents had saved for a while to buy it. Art was going through an astronomy phase, and they did what they could to support him, as always. After that, he went through his photography phase, which had such a momentous impact on my own life. Art went through more phases than I care to count, and I guess he still does. It is not that he gets bored with his old toys and shouts ‘Next!’ in a spoiled way. He does get bored, but only once he understands how those toys work (which, admittedly, happens quickly). When he takes a fancy to something new, be it astronomy or pick-up techniques, he gathers all the books, the tools, the knowledge he can put his hands on, he squeezes the juice out of them, and once he is satisfied that he has sucked the topic dry, he moves on. He would say, Specialists stick to one line, but I’m after patterns. I never knew if that made sense. Trying to understand Art has always been frustrating.
Anyway. He had this new telescope and he planned to christen it with the easiest target in the sky, the moon. Finding a bright night in Salento is easy – you just pick a night and it’s almost certainly going to be bright. Art picked the first Saturday after the Christmas holidays. ‘It’s a full moon,’ he said. ‘It’ll be grand.’ He wanted us to be with him. At the time, I didn’t understand why; none of us cared about astronomy. Now I realise that the telescope was the most precious thing Art had ever possessed, and he wanted to share it with us, for all the times we’d pay for his drinks, or his coffee, or cigarettes. None of us were bothered by any of that, not even Mauro, but Art is the sort of person who doesn’t like to be in debt, even if the debt is in his mind.
A normal boy would have just stuck the tripod in the fields behind his house, but not Art. Art had worked out, through some maths that was well beyond my grasp (and might easily be bullshit) that the best moon-gazing spot around Casalfranco was an area a few miles inland. From there, he assured us, the visibility was optimal, and we were bored enough to actually let him drag us there. We brought with us a bottle of wine, tobacco, weed and some food. The weed was a recent discovery. Art hadn’t started growing it yet.
We got there on Mauro and Tony’s Vespas, Art and me riding on the back, awkwardly balancing the telescope. With no helmets, of course, because in the nineties you wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a helmet down here. Tony had been driving a Vespa since he was ten, well before the legal age of fourteen. Mauro had just started and was still thrilled by the novelty of it.
The spot Art had picked was in the back of beyond. The last proper house was a good ten minutes from where we eventually stopped. We had passed by a few dark, solitary huts, blocks of bricks with no heating, electrics or water. Almost nobody lived in those huts anymore. Almost.
We found ourselves in an expanse of scrub – clay-red earth and spiky bushes, criss-crossed by drystone walls marking the boundaries of fields. We were surrounded on all sides by the gnarled silhouettes of olive groves in the distance, as if the trees trapped us in the middle of a secret henge. It was a desolate, unforgiving place.
‘We’re lucky the wind calmed down,’ Mauro commented.
Art whispered, ‘Look at the moon.’
The moon was immense. I am aware this is in part my imagination. Memory is like Alice’s medicines; it makes things bigger and smaller at whim, and that night looms so big that everything is oversized. But part of it is true. By some trick of perspective the moon did look immense, a luminous hole in the night sky. Mauro and Tony left the Vespas at the edge of the unpaved road and we walked on into the open countryside.
There are no marked paths in Salento, no kissing gates or gracious stiles, only drystone walls, with occasional openings in them, either made on purpose or caused by a collapse. This countryside is not made for walks. It ravages you with wind in winter, it burns you down in summer, and the only reason why one would possibly want to walk here is toil – or to follow a crazy friend with a telescope. It had not rained for almost two months, and what little moisture there was in the dirt came from the sea. The moon gave the thirsty land a purple hue. Art had forbidden the use of torches (he said our eyes had to get accustomed to the dark, to make the most of the telescope), so we had to rely on moonlight to negotiate our way between brambles and rocks. It was easier than I thought it would be; I hadn’t realised how bright a full moon can be.
Tony howled.
It made me jump. ‘Fuck you.’
‘Why, don’t you want to call in the werewolves?’
I was uneasy. Without factoring werewolves in, Casalfranco had its share of flesh-and-bone unwholesome characters, and, honestly? That night, in that place, I wasn’t so sure I would count
them out.
‘Here,’ Art said.
We were on a comparatively elevated position. Ahead of us, after miles of scrubland and drystone walls, was a little deserted road, the only sign of the modern world in sight. After that was the sea, moonlit and speckled with waves. Art and I started immediately to assemble the telescope, while Tony and Mauro rolled a joint, opened the wine and got out the food. The joint had been smoked and a new one had been rolled by the time the telescope was ready. It was a stocky white tube on a tripod, with a smaller tube on top of it, and a panoply of wheels.
‘The small tube is the finderscope,’ Art explained. ‘It has a broader field of view than the main body. By rolling this wheel, you see, you align the finderscope with the main body. Then you use the finderscope to find what you want to look at, and only then do you look into the telescope.’
Tony said, ‘The moon is bigger than Mauro’s mum’s ass. Can’t be that difficult to aim at it with the big tube.’
‘Yeah? Here, try without the finderscope.’
Tony plastered his eye on one end of the telescope. He shuffled it around a bit, then said, ‘Okay, I give up.’
Art took his place. ‘An object as big as the moon, you could find it, but it’s quicker with the finderscope.’ He shuffled the telescope towards a clump of olive trees. ‘To align finderscope and telescope, you aim them at a terrestrial object and…’
Art lifted his head, still looking at the olive grove, and frowned.
‘What’s wrong?’ Mauro asked.
‘I thought I saw something.’ Art squinted into the telescope again. ‘A movement.’
‘It’s the weed,’ I said.
Art shook his head and drew back from the telescope. ‘I’ll be right back.’ He started towards the olive grove. ‘You guys stay and watch the gear.’
None of us went with him. Why? I have been asked over and over again. Isn’t it obvious? We were all too scared. Three is company. Two, not so much. Art didn’t mind being alone, but Art was used to living in open countryside. We considered ourselves townies.
The Book of Hidden Things Page 3