‘I thought we were over Art’s ravings.’
‘Read it and then we talk.’
We pull over by the roadside on the Litoranea, half a mile or so from the closest bar. We walk to the middle of this lonely stretch of beach. It is eleven pm. My shirt is plastered to my skin, like a superhero costume, to quote Tony. The sand cracks underfoot, and Suicide Sirocco plays its grunge tunes: tall, broad waves leap and break on the shore with beastly roars. Fabio didn’t join us; it hasn’t been a good day for Angelo, and Fabio wants to stay with him. I should be with my family too.
Tony shouts to make himself heard, ‘This girl likes drama.’ He has already forgotten that he is cross with me. ‘The waves! The wind! The beach at night!’
‘Fabio would like it too. It’s a spectacular backdrop for a photoshoot,’ I shout back.
‘What you mean is, a spectacular excuse to make a girl drop her knickers.’
She is late. Local time. The Sirocco slaps my face with tiny drops of seawater. ‘I visited Angelo today.’
‘How is he?’
‘He thought I was Art and told me off for running away from home.’
‘Shit.’
‘When Fabio told him it was me, Angelo’s eyes watered. He apologised and said, Forgive me, son, it is not me, it is this silly Alzheimer’s.’
Tony and I keep looking around, but we don’t see anybody yet. ‘Do you know what Fabio’s planning to do about him?’ Tony asks.
‘He’s not sure. He’s staying in town for a little longer. He’s thinking to ask Lara, his girlfriend, to come down for a few days.’
Tony points at the dunes separating the beach from the road. ‘Look: is that her?’
A dark silhouette is moving in our direction. She’s slim, not very tall, and seems to waver in the wind. I can’t make out her features at first, but when she comes closer, I recognise her, even more beautiful in person than in the pictures.
Silvana glances at me and turns to Tony, with an angry scowl. ‘You didn’t say you’d bring a friend.’
‘He’s Mauro,’ Tony says, as if that explains everything.
Silvana bites her lips, without answering.
‘Was Art your friend?’ I ask.
She says, ‘Why do you talk about him in the past tense?’
‘You know he’s missing, right?’
‘Yes, I fucking well know he’s missing!’ she replies. ‘Why did you want to see me?’
I’m taken aback by the strength of her reaction. Mental issues. Mood swings. Two older men on a beach with her. Why did I ever agree to come?
‘We want to help,’ Tony says.
Silvana scowls. She puts a hand behind her back – and it comes back out again carrying a gun. I can’t say if it’s a big gun or a small one. I can’t say if it’s new or old. I can’t even be sure whether it’s the real deal or a replica. All I can say is that the metal of its barrel is made shiny wet by the Sirocco.
The world slows down and becomes strange. Guns belong to gangster movies, not to my life. I know guns exist, I know the Sacra Corona Unita use them, but I have never had one pointed at me. I have to pee. A shivering, beautiful girl is pointing a gun at me, and I have to pee.
Tony says, ‘Easy.’ He is calm. He handles violence better than any of us. ‘We’re friends.’
‘No, we’re fucking not!’ Silvana yells, waving the gun. ‘It’s too late! Stay away from me! Mind your own business or…’
‘We’re friends, Silvana,’ Tony repeats, in his best soothing voice.
‘FUCK!’ the girl yells.
I don’t see her pulling the trigger, but I hear the explosion, louder than the waves, louder than the wind, louder than my blood pumping through my veins. And I see Silvana’s hand thrust upwards to the sky by the recoil.
And I feel a sudden jolt somewhere in my body, and pain everywhere in my body.
And I feel a gurgling sound rising to my throat.
And
I
…
THE BOOK OF HIDDEN THINGS
A FIELD GUIDE
I
When I was eight years old, I saw my grandmother die. She had been in bed for a week or so. She coughed in prolonged gurgling explosions which seemed to come from a creature only halfway human. By nighttime her noises scared me, as if Grandma were not Grandma anymore, as if she had changed, somehow, into a harpy with talons and claws, and that was her cackling. My mum and dad spent as much time as they could with her – they understood she didn’t have long to live – but that Sunday afternoon they had had to go to Portodimare, to sell the apricots from our trees before they rotted. They left me the doctor’s number, for emergencies.
I had my nose in my books, drinking milk and nibbling the sparsely sugared biscuits my mum used to bake, when Grandma called me. ‘Art,’ she said, between a fit of coughing and the next. I jumped to my feet and ran to see what she wanted.
Her room (it would later become our living room, but I will always think of it as Grandma’s bedroom) was in darkness, with the curtains drawn and the lights turned off. There was a smell of stale sweat, and a whiff of urine and faeces. When Grandma’s coughing fits were particularly bad, she would lose control of her functions for a moment or two.
‘Art,’ she said.
I inched closer. Scary as the sight of her was, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She had aged a hundred years in seven days, like in a fairy tale. I didn’t understand, yet, the very real havoc that time can wreak on a body.
Grandma coughed and shook, with her flimsy metal bed trembling beneath her. The fit went on. I had already turned my back to run to call the doctor, when suddenly the room went quiet. I cautiously turned my head again, to look at the bed. Nothing moved.
‘Grandma?’ I said.
‘Art,’ she said. And then, in a clear voice: ‘Crisci Santu.’
In the three steps it took me to reach the bed, she was gone.
II
Crisci Santu: ‘grow up a saint’ is a common saying among peasant grandmothers in Southern Italy. From their point of view, it is common sense advice. When both your mother and your father toil in the fields, becoming a saint is still a viable option, whereas becoming, for example, a doctor or a lawyer, is not.
But the Catholic doctrine dictates that in order to be made a saint you must be able to work miracles. Only the evidence of miracles is evidence of sainthood. You can lead the most blameless life and still will not qualify if all your actions, however commendable, turn out to be worldly. This means, in practice, that you are a saint only if you can work magic. Such was the wisdom of peasant grandmothers: they knew that only magic can save lowborn children from toil.
III
I am not a Catholic. I can get on with other religions. Buddhists are fine, Hebraism is fascinating, Wicca – the mystifying English cult of the witches – makes a few points I can very well relate to, but Catholicism? A religion based on (male and male only) authority, on notions of pain and blind obedience, which overtly compares its followers to sheep? I am no sheep and I have no patience with self-proclaimed shepherds; I would rather spend eternity in Hell than in a flock. And yet in order to understand the nature of the Salento landscape, the meanings hidden under its sun, we must understand how, and to what extent, the saints came to define it, in rocks, and dirt, and thorns, and lizards.
IV
My friends say that I change my interests as easily as a politician changes their mind. They have a point. I will study baroque this year and learn herbalism the next, but that is not because I am a fickle man, no. It is because we inhabit a vast, extraordinary universe, and I mean to embrace as much of it as I can before I die. Every day that goes by is one less day I have left to live, and every piece of knowledge that I miss is lost forever. My interests do not change, they grow, the pursuits of yesterday seeding those of tomorrow. Take drystone walls; as a child, I became fascinated by them, and that in time led me to my greatest insights into the Hidden Things.
In Salento, drystone walls are every
where. You see them demarcating plots of land, private gardens, or, in their oldest incarnations, as prehistoric town borders. Wherever they are, they do one thing and one thing only: they mark boundaries.
The building technique can be explained in five minutes, and yet it is so essentially precise that it has survived the centuries and the millennia, scarcely changing in time. Or in space – in the Scottish Highlands, with their cold, dismal weather, I found walls built with exactly the same technique as used in Southern Italy, a land of unconquerable sun.
I was attracted to drystone walls in the instinctual way of bright children. I found it fascinating how the walls marked boundaries between different fields, and, in practice, created that difference. How come the land on the right of a wall was exactly the same as the land on the left, and yet, it was different, belonging as it did to another family? How come I was a prince on one side, a trespasser on the other? What happens if I move the wall? I asked my father, at which he laughed and replied, in dialect, nno ppuei spustari lu muru, ‘you can’t move the wall’.
Those words made the wall a thousand times even more magical to my eyes. Before, it was just a pile of jagged rocks, only a little taller than me, and now, it was an eternal barrier, with the power to decide who ruled where. It decided how much food my family would get that year, and therefore how many presents Father Christmas would bring me. Surely there was a great mystery there.
That mystery was revealed to me in the form of an adder.
V
Where there is a drystone wall, so too there are adders; it is a well-known piece of southern lore. But at the age of five I had never seen one. I lived with my family in the deepest countryside, in a smallholding lost in an expanse of fields, with nothing more than a narrow, unpaved lane as a bridge between humankind and my doorstep. I knew perfectly well that adders were plentiful, and yet, I had never seen one.
I knew the rules, of course. My father had impressed them on me. Adders come out when it’s warm. They are shy, but will bite if startled. When you are in adders’ territory, you have to stamp your feet, or beat on the rocks with a stick, so the adders can hear you coming and slither out of the way. If they do bite, my father assured me, you will probably die. (Which is not true. He lied to me in the name of prudence.) To have a chance of survival, you have to tie two tourniquets, one above the bite and one below, then say a particular prayer to San Vito, and then run to ask for help (strictly in this order – the saints, in Dad’s view, were better doctors than mortals). My theoretical knowledge of adders was therefore pretty solid, but no theoretical knowledge is solid enough to endure the blows of reality.
The mystery of the adder was revealed to me one day in July, when not a breath of wind, not a trace of activity, moved the air. It was too hot for birds to sing or leaves to shake. I was the only moving point in the landscape, a child of five traipsing alongside a wall, touching all its rocks, one by one. I had made up a spell. For it to work I had to touch all the rocks in the wall, and then I would own the wall, and its magic powers would be mine. I came to a spot where three rocks of a particularly crooked shape met, forming a black hole in the middle. My hand was resting on one of them, when I felt a movement, a faint vibration transmitting through the rock to my skin. I left my hand there, hypnotised; was that the buzz of magic? I hadn’t really expected my spell to work, but could I dismiss the possibility…?
A grey-brown reptile head snuck out of the hole.
I froze, in wonder, not in fear.
From Dad’s description, and from the pictures on a yellowed Reader’s Digest book I’d studied, I recognised the serpent for what it was, not one of the many harmless snakes peacefully stealing through the countryside, but a real adder, a real danger – the promise of a real adventure.
It was beautiful.
Its head stayed there, amber-eyed and motionless, with that uncanny slice of darkness in the middle of each pupil. I felt as if the adder was the answer to my spell, a spirit I had summoned, and now controlled.
I lowered my head, fascinated by those reptile pupils, and for the briefest moment the adder and I, the spirit and the child, locked eyes. Then I said, ciao.
The adder struck.
It sprang out of the hole, thrusting its lips towards mine, as if it meant to kiss me. Instead it sank its teeth into my right cheek, just shy of my mouth, causing me an intense, stabbing pain. I cried and sprang back, and the adder sprang back too, disappearing into its hole.
I brought my hand to the bite. It was hot, oozing a syrupy mixture of blood and venom. And I thought, how can I tie a tourniquet above and below a bite on a cheek? I would surely die. I turned my back on the wall and ran towards the field where Dad was working.
I didn’t think for a moment to say a prayer to San Vito.
I didn’t pray, even then.
VI
Dad drove me to the hospital, where a tall doctor injected me with an antidote and a heavy dose of telling off. I was soon up on my feet, and on our way back, Dad gave me a box on the ear. ‘Be careful next time,’ he said. At home Mum made me my favourite dishes: pasta with fresh tomatoes, mozzarella and olives, and fried aubergines with olive oil and mint (melanzane alla poverella, they are called – ‘aubergines the poor man’s way’). The stick and the carrot – that was how my parents brought me up.
The next day I went back to the wall. I had learnt my lesson, and I was careful this time, but what had happened had sharpened, rather than killed, my fascination with drystone walls. The walls were crawling with life: spiders and worms hid among the rocks, feral cats slept on the top of them, and the mortally dangerous adder journeyed through them, occasionally making itself visible, to pit its wits against the humans. There was an inordinate amount of life – life I didn’t see, life I didn’t so much as glimpse – happening just beyond the reach of my senses. An entire world of things hidden to me. And if that world existed, how many more could exist? It was a kind of magic, or perhaps, it was magic as such.
That was my first peek into the Hidden Things.
VII
Like the adder, the Hidden Things do not exactly hide from us, they just mind their own business. Like the adder, the Hidden Things are with us at all times, unseen, unheard, stealing through walls, resting under rocks. Like the adder, the Hidden Things do not normally mind us, but will, in some circumstances, bite. And just as with the adder, when they bite it is no good praying to the saints for help. They will not give you any. Because the saints, too, are Hidden Things.
VIII
In Salento there are traces of the saints everywhere. They are as ubiquitous as drystone walls and, sometimes, as secret as adders. Locals hardly notice them anymore, because locals don’t live in the countryside like they used to. Peasants rebranded themselves as farmers, and there are fewer of them, while newly made lawyers and small entrepreneurs drive their SUVs on well-paved roads.
But in this Age of Information, of satnavs and endless connectivity, secrets, far from dying out, are thriving. People drive through the countryside, don’t wander inside it anymore, and the landscape is to them a backdrop, not a context. The folk are losing their connection with the land, and, as a result, new forms of wilderness are arising. Humans leave, so more space for others is left. Far from the sight of the crowds, the adders are taking over. Secret, hidden things, flourish.
Slowly but surely, the culture I was brought up in is dying out, and when a culture dies, it leaves behind a mystery. Think of the Maya, think of the Egyptians, think of what America will be a thousand years from now. And then look at Salento – and you will see.
Small chapels are scattered where you least expect them, unassuming white cubes that have been there for centuries, resisting the wind, the heat, the storms, a place for the faithful to fall on their knees and pray to their jealous God. The countryside is littered with such chapels, and shrines, and statues, and other, less distinct traces of forgotten lore: a spring which quenched San Pietro’s thirst, an olive tree made immortal by S
an Gregorio. This deeply religious part of the world, harsh and scorched by the sun, belongs to the saints. They are junctions between the profane and the sacred, the seen and the unseen. The Hidden Things, if you will, and us. The saints and their places of worship mark the boundary between two different lands – exactly like drystone walls.
IX
When I was fourteen I disappeared for seven days. The Carabinieri and the rest of the townsfolk did their best to find me. Helicopters were deployed. Volunteers combed the countryside. Highly trained dogs were called in from as far away as Trieste. It was all a bit hysterical, but sweet. It was useless, too; when I came back I did it on my own, and at that point all the love I’d received backfired on me. I did not want to reveal what had happened, so I made up the sort of lie that people would want to believe. I said I had run away from home, and I said that with such arrogance, such bravado, that my townsfolk accepted it. I went overnight from victim to villain, and my early success became in their eyes only more proof of my arrogance. My lie, as all good lies, was bait and hook at once and they all bit.
I had my reasons to do that. I’ll leave you to judge whether they were good or not. I promise I will give a truthful account of those seven days, which opened my eyes to the existence of what I am calling the Hidden Things. After so many years, I finally came to understand the message of the adder.
I will tackle my disappearance further on, where it makes sense to do so. First I want to focus not on the event, but on the space where it happened: an ancient olive grove. That was where my friends last saw me.
X
That olive grove is empty of chapels or shrines, but that wasn’t always the case. The grove (it doesn’t have a name on any registry) was bought by the Diocese of Oria, to which Casalfranco belongs, in 1882. Before that, it had been part of the Mazziani family estate. The family still live in the town, and though they are not rich and powerful anymore, their name still carries a weight of sorts. The heir to what little is left of their fortune (an almost barren vineyard and a house in dire need of repair) is a young woman called Carolina. She was at school with me. She is married, with a baby. I wish her luck; the sins of the fathers should not be visited upon the children.
The Book of Hidden Things Page 18