The Book of Hidden Things

by Francesco Dimitri

  I take a long drag, letting the sweet-flavoured smoke travel all the way down to my lungs. I make an appreciative face.

  ‘Any good?’

  I pass Anna the joint. ‘It’s so strong it’s illegal.’

  ‘Weed is illegal,’ she laughs, accepting it.

  ‘This is extra-illegal.’

  She takes a drag and hands me back the joint. ‘You need it more than me.’

  I close my eyes and take another long drag. Art was never a man of compromise. This weed is hard-edged as everything else about him. It kicks me hard and sends me high into space, fuels clarity, heightens my senses. From above here I can see Art, studying different strands of marijuana, cross-pollinating them to create the ultimate strand, one strong enough, strange enough, to keep him interested. Marijuana elevated to an art form. Art, art. There’s a pun. It makes me laugh. We’ve been seeking art! Art is our best friend! A college student would make an art film with that. Art again!

  I turn my head to look at Anna, her lovely shape draped on the bed. I close my eyes again and inhale, deeply happy now the weed is putting my head to rest.

  Or not.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Anna asks.

  I bury my nose in the pillow and inhale again. With my drug-induced super-senses, I pick up a smell, which is not mine, or Anna’s. A stranger’s smell; no, not exactly a stranger’s. I force my head to turn to Anna. Is that a bite mark on her neck?

  ‘Fabio,’ I whisper.

  ‘What…?’

  ‘Did you sleep with Fabio?’

  ‘What? No!’

  The key of her voice, the way she moves her shoulders, defensive, attentive. ‘You slept with Fabio,’ I say, and I pray she will get angry at me for insulting her.

  She lowers her eyes.

  And I…

  …I don’t know what to do. I would jump on my feet and make an exit. Bitch! I would yell. Whore! Or I would weep and say it is my fault, it is all my fault, and beg her not to do it anymore; I will be a better husband. I would, I would, I would – but I am tired. I let my head fall on the pillow, and take one last drag, before smothering the end in a glass of water on the side table. Nothing good could come from Art’s weed. I should have known that.

  ‘You didn’t even take the trouble to change the sheets,’ I say.

  ‘I was more troubled by the fear you might die.’

  ‘Do you love him?’

  ‘I love you.’

  I gasp for air. I feel a pressure, on my chest, as if Fabio was sitting on it, laughing at me and giving me the middle finger. I ask, ‘When was the last time we had sex?’

  ‘Before Christmas.’

  ‘It can’t be that long.’

  ‘It is.’

  I pass a hand across my face. ‘Jesus.’

  ‘I’m not going to lie and tell you I didn’t want to sleep with Fabio. I did want it. I had a great time, too. I thought I would feel bad afterwards, but no. But that doesn’t change what you mean to me.’

  ‘You were fucking one of my best friends while I was risking my life, and you don’t feel bad?’

  ‘Don’t you dare, Mauro! You were doing as you wished, following your ego, ignoring your responsibilities to me. To your children.’

  ‘You slept with another man!’

  ‘So what? It was only sex, and I’ll take sex over death any day of the week. I enjoyed it – yes, I did – and I don’t feel guilty, not in the least. I thought I would, but I don’t. Sex is sex. It doesn’t change… us. I love you, Mauro, you know that, and I know you love me.’

  I scoff. ‘Us has a lot of problems.’

  ‘Some. We can fix them together.’

  ‘How would you feel if I slept with someone else?’

  ‘Try,’ she says, dryly. She means it too.

  ‘This is,’ I say, fighting to keep my voice light, ‘this is the worst apology I have ever heard.’

  ‘I’m not apologising.’

  My body begs me to lie in bed, but my senses are still high, and Fabio’s smell comes at me from all sides, and I have visions of him in bed with Anna, and Anna is not apologising, and I dive into rising tides of paranoia (does Fabio have AIDS? Did he make her pregnant? Does he have a bigger dick than me?). Strong weed and bad news don’t go well together. I stand up slowly. Anna doesn’t ask where I’m going. She said what she had to say, and now she will give me time to digest it. That’s how she rolls.

  I put on a short-sleeved shirt (white linen, one I use for the beach) and walk out of the room. I get a cold beer from the fridge, grab Art’s book, and go out into the garden. I feel calm, not in a mature, let’s-talk-about-this way. Shell-shocked is more like it. It is a cool night – cool enough for me to go back inside to fetch a jumper.

  I slump in a chair, start drinking, and start reading.

  THE BOOK OF HIDDEN THINGS

  CHAPTER 3

  On Trespassing

  I

  I badly wanted to go back. You would too if you had been there. Getting to see the kingdom of Hidden Things only to be exiled is like knowing that the most fabulous party is happening in town, with loose women and men, sweet wine, the best music, and you could get in if only you could find your way there. You can either go out and look for it, or stay home and watch TV. What would you do?

  Crashing the party has been my life mission; it took me all over the world – and some would say that it made me waste my golden years – but I’m convinced that a life spent on an obsession is a life well spent. Give me joy, or give me sorrow, just keep me away from blandness.

  I never stopped hearing the buzz of the party, a ceaseless soft music at the edge of my consciousness, taunting me, calling me. The kingdom of Hidden Things is different from our own, as the sky is different from the land, but I was sure that, as you can fly up in the sky, so there had to be a way to get there. And I was right.

  Finding the way was not easy. I had to work against not only the laws of nature, but its very Constitution. Whereas land and sky are contiguous, we and the Hidden Things are divided, as if, so to speak, a drystone wall were between us. I cannot say whether this ‘wall’ has been put there by some spiteful god or it just is. Be that as it may, it is there, and thus we must climb it. It took me a while to learn how to do that, but once learnt, the system is comparatively easy.

  All you will have to do is follow my instructions. In order to fly a balloon, you need some sturdy fabric, a wicker basket, and a source of hot air. In order to trespass on the kingdom of Hidden Things, you need a unity of Place, Time and Action.

  Let me explain.

  II

  La Madama took me from a specific olive grove. She didn’t take me from home, she didn’t take me from the field where I was messing around with my friends; she lured me to the olive grove and took me from there. Why? The place had to matter somehow.

  In my first, clumsy attempts at trespassing, I simply went back to the olive grove and waited. Nothing happened of course, but I could feel the atmosphere of that particular place in a way that I could not put into words. It was a poetic, not rational, understanding, but an understanding nonetheless.

  Years later I came to see how in some places the Hidden Things come closer to us. Think of a winding country lane, getting now closer, now further away from this or that specific field. I have visited many of these points of closeness; Glastonbury in England is one of them, the island of Crete is another. In Salento they often become places of worship of the saints. A topography of the saints, then, is a topography of Hidden Things. Follow the saints and you will find where to trespass. It is as simple as that.

  III

  It is only possible to trespass at certain times. The seasons change, equinoxes and solstices run after one another, old things die and new things are born; there is a secret rhythm to the Universe, and Time is the name of that rhythm.

  I took my first hints about the importance of Time from astrology. Scholars like Marsilio Ficino and Girolamo Cardano were masters of Time. Tying together
art, science and magic, they gained an amazing understanding of the secret rhythm. A good astrologer can calculate the best month, day, hour and minute to take any action. Some moments are better suited to war, others to love, others yet to study. If you force peaches to grow out of season, they will be almost flavourless. If you rush a relationship, it will end in disaster. Either you dance to the secret rhythm, or it crushes you.

  In the astonishingly complex dance of the stars, some specific alignments only come every once in a while, and it’s only then that you can trespass.

  In order to get on the other side I had to learn how to be both a topographer and an astrologer, to calculate the right Places and Times, where and when the journey was possible. This pamphlet is an exploration of such Places and Times as they occur in Salento, Italy. By using the information in Appendix 1, you can work out the equations yourself, and apply them to any other corner of the world.

  IV

  I still lacked something: a propeller of sorts, the equivalent of hot air in a balloon. At the right Time and Place, it is easier for the Hidden Things to visit us at their pleasure – but how can we get there at our pleasure? How can we climb the drystone wall? I refused to believe that I was condemned to be at the whim of other forces.

  To get my answer I had to piece together a million figments, undergo a million life experiences, and commit, I regret to say, more than a fair share of mistakes, some of which would be truly horrific had they not been made in the name of research. I finally found what I sought thanks to an unlikely source: Concetta Pecoraro, a Casalfranco woman widely considered to be a charlatan. The townsfolk here will remember her name, and some might as well remember that my disappearance as a boy caused, more or less indirectly, her ruin.

  Starting in 1987, Concetta made a flourishing business out of visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary, peddling cliches to the local peasantry. When I disappeared, she announced that the Virgin had revealed to her that I was dead, and implied that my friends had killed me. When I returned alive and well, the locals had to decide who to blame for having lied, Concetta or the Virgin Mary, and they picked Concetta.

  Concetta was without doubt a fraud, but good lies are built upon foundations of truth. Two years ago, shortly after I moved back to Casalfranco, I went to talk to her. Concetta agreed to sell me her story, in exchange for almost all of my savings (little more than 4,000 euros), in cash. When I left her house I was broke, but also the happiest I had been since I was fourteen.

  Concetta had never seen the Virgin Mary, but she had once caught a glimpse of La Madama. It had happened many decades ago, when Concetta was twelve. It was a different time for the south, harsher, crueller. Concetta’s father was a brute of a man, uncivilised and uncouth, quick with his hands and partial to wine. He was, in short, a typical man of his time. Always beware of typical people.

  On a stifling late summer day Concetta was helping her father with the vendemmia, the grape harvest, in the vineyard of a local doctor. It was just a tiny patch of ground, and the responsibility of the vendemmia was entirely on the shoulders of Concetta and her father. Although, in practice, it was on the shoulders of Concetta alone; her father made her do the plucking, while he lounged in the shade of a fig tree, feasting on wine and the figs he picked.

  That summer a change had happened to Concetta; her figure had become fuller, her lips more red. Womanhood had arrived, and that day, as he drank, her father noticed it.

  At around midday (the hour of demoni meridiani), Concetta’s father stood up, tottered over to her, and pinched her bottom. When she recoiled, he made coarse jokes – which I’d rather not report – about her curves. The jokes gave way to more serious words, until the man grabbed his daughter, and pushed her to the ground, shouting at her to stay quiet, obey, and let him do as he wished. He started unbuckling his belt.

  Concetta refused.

  Young, in her prime, and not afraid of work, she was much stronger than her father, and she was not drunk. She kicked him in the shins, and when the drunk man doubled up, she picked herself up, and started hitting him savagely with her fists.

  He did not offer any resistance.

  I will gloss over the gratuitous blow-by-blow account Concetta gave me, cackling like a frog at every word; suffice it to say that she did not stop until her father was on the brink of death. And while she was pounding him, something wondrous happened. Concetta saw the vineyard ‘change’.

  She could not describe how it ‘changed’ – no better than I could ever describe the kingdom of Hidden Things – she only said that it became bigger and ‘taller’. It ‘stretched’ and the colours became brighter, as though ‘the colours were on fire’. A woman passed through, draped in a see-through blue veil. Concetta thought the woman must be the Virgin Mary, for in a corner of that field sat a small shrine to the Virgin, and everybody knows that blue is her colour.

  The woman in blue didn’t lift a finger, either to help Concetta or to hinder her. She just stood there, watching, watching, without the smallest trace of emotion on her face. And when Concetta finally had enough (‘Just because it was hot and I’d been working my ass off all day,’ she remarked, justifying herself for not having beaten her father to death), the woman disappeared, and, with her, the sense of awe was gone from the vineyard.

  Concetta remains convinced to this day that the Virgin Mary appeared to her, to praise her for what she was doing. ‘The Virgin eats no shit,’ Concetta said to me. Years later that encounter would inspire her to start her own seership scam, reckoning that if the Virgin was offended by that, she could come down and speak her mind.

  Strip this story of superstition and you will see that the otherworldly lady was la Madama. I had seen her draped in a sapphire veil, as I told in Chapter Two. I knew exactly which veil that was. La Madama and I had sex on it more than once.

  I came out of Concetta’s house with a precise idea of how to return to the other side. Her story chimed with theories I had been working on. It was only a matter of putting them to the test.

  V

  Life is all about action. Trees take action in growth, animals by feeding or procreating; even thinking, done right, is but a highly sophisticated form of action.

  Action was the fuel I needed. I simply had to go to the right place, at the right time, and make the right action, and I would climb over the wall.

  You see, Concetta had caught a glimpse of la Madama when she had found herself about to commit an outrageous act – killing her own father with her bare hands. By means of this action she opened the gate. To trespass on the side of Hidden Things is to break laws which go far deeper than the normal laws of nature. Trespassing is, and thus requires, a transgression.

  I will leave it to you to figure out the practicalities. For understandable reasons, I cannot spell them out. I strongly advise against whatever mild images of transgression might be coming to your mind; in the best case, a small mischief will allow you a quick peek of the Hidden Things, lifting the veil for a fraction of a second, but more probably it would bring no fruits at all. No – if it does not hurt body and soul, it does not work. A near-kill is good enough – for a girl of twelve.

  The word sacrifice comes from the Latin sacrum facere, ‘to make sacred’. Trespassing is a sacred transgression, and thus it requires important sacrifices. The traveller must be ready, then, to crack many, many eggs, to make this particular omelette.

  FABIO

  1

  What if he is right?

  I lay down the last page and massage my eyes. It’s eight in the morning. The night has gone and I haven’t had any sleep.

  What if Art is right?

  It is a testament to how messed up I am that I even entertain the notion. Art’s book reads like a serial killer’s memoir, a cunning one, who never speaks openly of his kills, but teases you all the way down to his lair. Be ready, then, to crack many, many eggs. What the fuck?

  I walk to the kitchen to find my father having breakfast. ‘Good morning, Fabio,’ he we
lcomes me, uttering each word as if it were a command. He is ordering me to have a good day, while drinking his tea (someone from church once told him it is healthier for his heart than coffee). He has forgotten to take out the teabag; the liquid in his cup is ink-black and Dad doesn’t notice, just as he doesn’t notice the soggy parcel of tea leaves, not even when it floats to his lips and makes some tea drip down his chin and white shirt.

  I can’t stand to look at this. I turn my back and hurry to my room, trying to outrun my reason. I dial Art’s number. He picks up at the second ring.

  ‘Hey, mate,’ he says.

  ‘I’ve read your book.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘You’re out of your mind.’

  ‘Never denied that, but I’m also right.’

  ‘Yeah? Heal my father, then.’

  Silence at the other end. Even in these circumstances, it gives me some pleasure to take Art by surprise. ‘What from?’ he asks.

  ‘Alzheimer’s. Early stages, advancing fast.’

  ‘You should’ve told me immediately.’

  ‘You can heal him, right?’

  ‘I can,’ he says, after a pause.

  I should laugh, but I feel relieved. If someone can work a miracle, it’s Art. I should be ashamed of myself for buying into this sort of superstition.

  Art says, ‘We’ll have to put him to sleep.’

  ‘Sorry?’ I ask.

  ‘The… healing process will require me to take certain actions which Angelo would object to. Strongly. I have to be in a room with him to heal him, but he must not see what I’m doing.’

  ‘Art, I won’t drug my father!’

  ‘I have what we need,’ he rambles on, in all seriousness. ‘The risk of death is very slight, less than 1% if I remember. With Alzheimer’s, it’s 100%.’