I pause, feeling like a Judas. ‘Actually, not so much. I was thinking, I should stay for two or three days, just in case.’
‘I’d say that’s sensible. Do you need me there?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll be all right.’ I am disgusted by my words, as though I were planning on cheating on her, which I am not.
‘Okay then, let’s Skype later.’
‘Yup,’ I say.
We say goodbye, we say I love you, and we end the call.
I sit on a blue Vespa. I told Tony I wanted to rent one for old times’ sake, though the simple truth is I can’t afford a car. I had to rent a helmet too – the days of easy riding are over. I turn the key and the Vespa’s engine purrs. I haven’t heard that sound in fifteen, sixteen years, and it hits me so hard that it sends me flying, not through space, but through time, to travel back to when I was a teenager, to when I knew beyond doubt that I was going to do brilliantly in life, that I had my friends on my side, and I was immortal. I start the Vespa on the large unpaved road, under a blinding sun, alone.
14
The plan was to head to the B&B. Tony would spend the rest of the day arranging a longer leave from the hospital and enjoying some quality time with his parents, Mauro would do the same with his family, and I was going to extend my booking again, Skype Lara, and then pretend to work a little. I am doing a book, in theory – a personal take on non-conventional (by fashion industry standards) beauty. My agent thinks it is well timed, and I hope that he is right, because something needs to rescue my finances and my career from the black hole they are falling into. The Vespa throws the whole plan into the bin. I ask myself, Why?, and I don’t have a better answer than, Because I’m back in the saddle of a Vespa. We think we are in control of our lives, but we aren’t. Most of the time we don’t know what we are doing and, sheeplike, we follow something, call it fate, or the subconscious mind, or the whims of a dumb moped.
The countryside has not changed. There are one or two new houses, and some of the old ones have crumbled, and that’s it. This land hasn’t changed in centuries, and I wonder if there isn’t a magical inertia at work, a long-forgotten curse which makes change, any change, impossible. I pass the house from where we called the Carabinieri twenty-two years ago, and a mile further on I pull over to where we parked our Vespas. The sun is setting, but it is still high enough to trace the contours of the olive trees with razor-sharp clarity. This sort of light simply doesn’t exist in England; even on the brightest days, the English landscape has a mellowness, a misty blurring on the edges which makes features merge into one another. Here, boundaries are defined, and each object is very much itself. That tree is only that tree; it has nothing to do with the earth it grows upon or the rocks surrounding it. This light has no patience for ambiguity. In its way, it is a great backdrop. I should take some pictures for my book, before I leave. Provided I find the right model.
I see the olive grove. I have never gone inside, not once. It is time to do just that. I am thirty-five and the sun is up; I flat-out refuse to be scared. I take off my sunglasses and stick them in the collar of my shirt, and stride towards the grove, the helmet in one hand. Then I get to the tree line and stride no more. The cicadas are chirping madly, and it is only an impression, surely, but when I rest a hand on a tree, their chirping reaches a crescendo.
Sod that.
I enter the grove. I would love to say that to my grown-up eyes the trees look smaller and harmless, but they don’t. They are every bit as threatening as I remembered. Their twisted trunks still make me think of the damned in hell. An eerie drumming will start at any minute, and they will take life and start dancing around me – and I will be their lunch. I wipe sweat from my forehead. You don’t have to believe in ghosts in order to know that some places have an atmosphere, that they retain, if not a memory, at least an echo of what happened in the past. The atmosphere here is gloomy, the low angle of the sun only making the gloom stand out more. What happened that night? How is it possible that we didn’t hear or see anything, in this desolation? And where is Art now? Talking to Carolina has somehow convinced me that the episodes are, indeed, connected, that Art has vanished again, and he has vanished now because he vanished twenty-two years ago. I stop at a big white rock jutting out from the ground. ‘What happened here?’ I say aloud.
The answer is a smell.
It is bittersweet in a way that makes me sick. It brings back to my mind Tony sniffing the air in Art’s house yesterday night, proclaiming, No rotting bodies. But that is exactly what this smell is, a rotting body’s. I hear a different humming on top of the cicadas’. It ties a knot in my belly. It comes from a point ahead of me. I walk deeper into the grove, and I see it.
A body.
From a noose hangs the body of a dog, a shaggy white mongrel. The rope is tied to a sagging branch. The poor creature’s hind paws are swinging a hair’s breadth from the ground, slowly rocking back and forth. I bring a hand to my mouth and hold my breath. I look around, I stretch my ears, but I can’t hear or see anyone. I am alone in this grove, or if I am not, then whoever is hiding is smarter than me. The air is motionless, without the faintest hint of a breeze. Then how is it possible that the dead dog is swaying? The branch on which it hangs is the only thing I see moving.
I hesitate, then move closer. The dog’s fur is matted with spots of mud. His eyes are vacant. One of the spots moves.
I recognise the humming at last: flies. Millions of them are tucking into the corpse, hungry like sharks in a feeding frenzy, so forceful in their assault that they make the body swing. It is them, not mud, matted all over the dead dog’s fur.
Art has a dog. Had a dog?
My lungs give up: I breathe out and in again. The stench is overwhelming. My head spins. To avoid crashing down, I lean on an olive tree, and I close my eyes and catch my breath as I hear the buzz coming closer, the sharks rushing to me, attracted by the smell of my fear.
My phone rings.
15
Seven days after Art disappeared, my doorbell rang.
I don’t have a clear recollection of those days; they are a blur of activities I didn’t particularly care for (talking to the Carabinieri, avoiding the journalists, talking to the Carabinieri again, banding with Tony and Mauro to cuss at the people who were suddenly Art’s best friends and Art’s mentors and Art’s fans). I did them on autopilot. My real energy went into not giving in to the fear that Art was dead. The most difficult part was the allegations that we were responsible. Up to the moment Art returned, the guys and I were suspected. Of what wasn’t clear, until Concetta Pecoraro, a local charlatan who had made a business of talking to the Virgin Mary, declared that Mary had told her that Art was dead, and heavily implied that the three of us got him killed. You would think that nobody could believe this story, and in fact, nobody did. Not openly.
My father, on the other hand, didn’t think for a moment that we had killed Art. He thought that we were covering for him, that Art had run away and we were pretending we didn’t know out of a misplaced sense of friendship. While Art was missing, my father’s was the least dramatic and therefore the least popular theory, but once he came back, everyone in Casalfranco would declare that his had also been their theory all along.
I was nauseated by the freakshow, and worried beyond words for my friend, when, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, my doorbell started ringing. My father was at school for a teachers’ meeting on the topic of Art (there were a lot of such meetings all over town. I didn’t understand their point, and neither, I think, did those who organised them), so I was alone, my head buried in the X-Men. I let the doorbell ring. Whoever it was (journalists, Carabinieri or, the worst of all, do-gooders from church) would soon get bored and be on their way. They didn’t; they just kept pressing.
I put my comic book away and stomped to open the door. ‘Yes,’ I grumbled with bad grace.
‘Hey, man,’ Art said.
I took a step back. For a moment, a very brief moment, I was
terrified. Art was only Art, but his presence there was so unexpected that he was like a monster, like a werewolf. I swallowed and found it in me to say, ‘Art?’
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘What…?’
‘I’m starving.’
In a daze, I followed Art to my own kitchen, where he fished from the fridge some Parma ham and cheese, and stuck them in a piece of ciabatta.
There was something off about him.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘When?’ Art said, his mouth full.
‘Art, you know when.’
‘May I get some milk?’
‘Knock yourself out.’
Art gorged on a carton of milk, then wiped his mouth with a sleeve. He noticed that he still had his coat on. He took it off and placed it on a chair. ‘It’s warm in here.’
‘Art…’
‘I don’t know what to tell you.’
‘You were gone seven days.’
‘Was that seven days?’
‘What happened to you?’
He scratched the nape of his neck, looked at the empty carton, at his sandwich, at his coat on the chair. ‘I ran away from home,’ he said. ‘I should’ve told you guys, but I knew you would have spilled the beans.’
‘What? Why?’
‘I wanted to see if I could outsmart everybody in town. Well, I could.’
I knew there and then that he was lying. He didn’t make the slightest effort to lie convincingly. His voice said, I’m telling you I ran away, and you might buy it or not, but you know what? Frankly, I don’t give a damn. That attitude was, I think, the main reason why everybody was so quick to believe him. They didn’t like Art’s attitude and they didn’t like him, and they were all too happy to brush off his disappearance as a cry for attention. ‘Are you all right?’
Art showed me his sandwich. ‘Now that I’m getting some food, yeah, I’m fine.’
‘Okay then, let’s try it again: what happened?’
‘I ran away from home.’
‘You ran…’ It was such an obvious lie that it made me angry. ‘Fuck you, Art! We’ve been through the mother of all shit-storms because of you.’ I slammed my hand on the kitchen table. ‘What happened?’
He stopped munching then, and looked at me, without really looking at me. His gaze was lost somewhere else. ‘You don’t buy it?’
‘No.’
He shrugged and got back to his sandwich. ‘The town will.’
‘Do you have any idea of what’s happening out there? You’re a nationwide story. Half of the country is convinced we bumped you off, the rest can’t decide if we were covering your ass or you were abducted by aliens. The Carabinieri have given us hell, and the journos, and our families, and the teachers at school. I have a right to know.’
After a pause Art said, ‘Yeah, you do.’
I was going to shout at him again, but I stopped, because I finally realised what was off about him. His clothes. They were the same clothes (the same jeans, the same shoes, the same sweater) he had on when he disappeared, last Saturday. He had spent seven days in them. He should have smelt bad, but he didn’t. His clothes were clean.
‘Art,’ I implored him, ‘what happened to you?’
He said, ‘I don’t know.’
16
Back at the B&B, I throw myself under the shower and wait there until deep canyons open on my fingertips. Tony checked on Art’s place; he told me over the phone that it is still empty, though there are things we need to discuss in person. He sounded upset enough, so I saved the story of the dog in the olive grove. That, too, is the sort of story you tell in person. The dead dog’s stench haunts me. I use up all the shower gel, and the shampoo, but the stench is still with me, as if the dog is hanging in this tiny cabin with flies doing the struscio, back and forth, between us.
What the hell was that? There are plenty of strays around here, and in the not too distant past people would eat dogs when other sources of meat were scarce. I wouldn’t be surprised if that still happened. But hanging one, to leave it to rot? What for? In that particular olive grove, of all.
Art kept a dog.
I don’t want to go there. It might all be a coincidence, but Art taught me not to believe in coincidences. What we call a coincidence, he would say, is a system we don’t understand yet.
It is out of the question that I will stay in tonight. I need fresh air and a drink. The stench still lingers after the shower, and when I close my eyes, I see the dog. I should have taken it down and buried it. It’s only a dog. It has a meaning though, it must have, and that meaning is bothering me.
I am on Skype with Lara. ‘You sure you’re okay?’ she asks.
Her voice brings me back to reality. In moments like this I resent video calls. My generation still remembers the world before cams, when you could hide behind a phone. My generation – already old codgers in our thirties. ‘It’s the heat, and this town.’
‘You can’t stand hot weather, you don’t like your hometown – you’re a faulty type of Southern Italian.’
‘Return me to the factory then.’
‘Nah, I’ll keep you. Out of pity, you know.’
In my darkest moments I think, Yeah, I know. Lara is a web designer employed by one of the major agencies in London, and makes in one month what I make in six (providing they are six good months). At twenty-seven, she has time and options. And she is beautiful, with her ash-blonde hair and her small, slightly pointed ears. She is not model material (too short for the industry, her boobs are slightly irregular, and her attitude in front of the camera just too goofy), but when you snap for enough time, you learn that real beauty is very often not model material. Which is, by the way, the theme of the book I should be working on.
‘Fabio…?’ she says.
‘Sorry, I got distracted.’
‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but when you want to talk, I’m here.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’
Lara blows me a kiss and says, sweetly, ‘Never BS me, darling.’
I am on my feet the moment we close the call. I need to get out of here now, in my sweat-stinking shirt.
A northerly breeze cools down the air, making the night pleasant. The Vespa brings me to Portodimare, whose transformation from a fishing village into a tourist village was completed a few years ago. We used to spend all summer here, back in the day: the beach in the morning, playing table football late into the night, drinking cheap beer that grated our throats, and shoving coins into the last coin-operated, non-ironic jukeboxes this planet would ever see. In high season, Portodimare has shops and stalls open until late, and I am hoping some of them have started the season early, because I need more clothes.
I get lucky, if you can call it that: I find socks, boxers, and two garish t-shirts, one of which I wear immediately. I LIKE BOOZE, it reads, and the two o’s are the bottoms of beer glasses. What a crazy laugh. It is nine-thirty, too early to go back to the B&B. I need drinks, and food.
I stroll to the small piazza where most of the bars are. In my days, this piazza was the picture-postcard perfect rotonda sul mare, a round space with a view of the sea and a small harbour. Now, after a renovation project which bitterly divided the village, harbour and piazza are sleek monstrosities of concrete which a provincial kid would have found hip in the late nineties. None of our hangouts survived the transformation. New ones took their place, identical to the old ones, only without any jukeboxes and with a wider choice of drinks. At the plastic tables of these new bars, new teenagers sit, identical to us. They scare me. They rub my nose in how disposable we all are.
I pick a random bar and sit al fresco. I buy a stale sandwich and a bottle of beer, and light a cigarette. A bunch of teenagers at another table burst into laughter. Their heads form a halo around a phone on which – let me use my telepathic powers – a cat video is playing. I miss my friends. I wish I wasn’t alone tonight. I am still rattled after the dog in the grove. It’s this fuckin
g place, I think for the hundredth time, when I pick up, in the background noise, a voice I know.
The voice halts.
It is an oh shit! moment. I screwed up. I waltzed around as if I were in London, where you are just another face in the crowd, but here, in this network of small towns and villages, every face has a name, and the sheer force of statistics will make you bump into people you know. Also, statistics play dirty.
‘Fabio?’ my father says.
17
My father looms over me. His lips are a thin line, which is the closest he will ever get to crying. He is fifty per cent hurt, fifty per cent furious. I struggle with the desire to recoil – he is not a violent man, but he is a southerner, and boxes on the ear were part and parcel of my education.
‘Fabio,’ Don Alfredo says. ‘Is that you?’ This smirking bastard is the senior priest in Casalfranco, a friend of my father, and a powerful old shit.
I ignore him entirely and look at my father. ‘I guess we should talk.’
We have nothing to talk about! a lesser man would shout. My father nods and turns to his friend. ‘Alfredo, if you’ll excuse us…?’
‘Of course, of course,’ Don Alfredo says. Slightly stooping, with a big nose and a bald lumpy head, he could be a vulture drawn by a Disney artist on a bad trip. He nods a goodbye, which I don’t answer, and makes a show of shifting to the furthest table. The show is useless; I am certain he won’t snoop. He doesn’t need to. My father will tell him everything, either later tonight or in confession.
‘What is he up to?’
‘Who?’ my father says.
He used to be dead set against stock phrases and useless words. Who? Who do you think? ‘Don Alfredo.’
My father sits down, with movements more cautious than I remember. ‘There is some trouble with the Ferragosto procession. We need to organise a few details before the season begins.’
The Ferragosto procession is a procession of ships, held along the coast on the fifteenth of August. The tourist crowd find it oh-so-picturesque. Don Alfredo must want a piece of it.
The Book of Hidden Things Page 6