The Book of Hidden Things

by Francesco Dimitri

  For a moment, a brief, stupid moment, I think to myself, sure, it makes sense, numbers don’t lie. I will allow Art to drug my father, and then to bring him home (down to that cosy little abattoir?), where Art will take certain actions which Angelo would object to, and then my father will be restored, the same old sharp-witted, tight-arsed man I knew. I’m on the verge of trusting Art with his drugs and his magic and this crazy new world of saints and violence which is his latest obsession, when someone rings at the door. I don’t want my father to open it, in the state he is in.

  ‘Gotta go,’ I say, and terminate the call.

  I go to the door. It’s Mauro.

  ‘Hey,’ I welcome him.

  I see him bunching his fists. I don’t get it. What’s that all about?

  Then I get it.

  ‘Mauro…’ I say, pulling back.

  His arm has already lifted. I try to dodge; I fail.

  Mauro hits me, hard, in the face.

  2

  I let out a cry of pain and Mauro lets one out too. I fall on my shoulder, the impact hurting me more than the jab. I taste blood, and I feel it, viscous, in my mouth and down my nose. Mauro shakes his hand with a grimace. Tony always said, Don’t punch a guy if you don’t know how to. You’ll hurt yourself more than him. Slap him instead. Ah, the good counsel of a friend.

  ‘What seems to be the trouble?’ Angelo says. He stands in the doorway to the living room, his white shirt stained with tea and breadcrumbs.

  ‘He slept with my wife,’ Mauro says.

  My father looks at me, narrows his eyes, and then shakes his head. ‘Will you ever cease to disappoint me?’ he asks. He turns to Mauro. ‘I apologise for my son. I hope you will find it in yourself to pardon him. He is weak, and impressionable. He needs examples the likes of you.’ He makes a brusque gesture of salute with his head, and goes back where he came from.

  My eyes are filling up and I let them fill. Tears merge with the blood running down my nose. Sitting on the floor, like a baby, I start weeping, my body shaking with the sighs. I bury my face in my hands and cry, cry as if Mauro wasn’t here, cry as if I was alone, and I could freely show what a wimp I am, what a little, broken thing I am.

  ‘Hey,’ Mauro says. He rests his other hand, the one he didn’t hit me with, on my shoulder. ‘Hey, man.’

  ‘I’m a fucker,’ I manage to say.

  ‘Can’t argue with that,’ Mauro says.

  3

  ‘Sorry doesn’t cut it.’ I am making liberal use of a tea towel folded around a bunch of ice cubes, pressing it on my nose, on my lips and cheek. Mauro presses another on his hand. He sits on the bed, cross-legged, under a Dragon Ball poster, its colours still bright. When I was hanging that poster on the wall I never thought I’d grow up to be the guy who sleeps with his friend’s wife.

  ‘You always liked Anna,’ he says, ‘and she liked you.’

  I look at his side, where he was shot. Tony’s handiwork has held. ‘She likes me, yes, but she loves you. She told me, even when…’ I let my voice trail off.

  ‘She told me the same. Excuse me if I have my doubts, after she fucked one of my best friends. And excuse me if I doubt what a good friend you are too.’

  ‘I’m not a good friend. I love you, Tony and Art to bits, but I’m a selfish, egotistical wanker, and selfish, egotistical wankers make for very poor friends.’

  ‘Go on, I’m liking this.’

  ‘When I saw Anna, at the shoot, I…’

  ‘Are you in love with her?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘And you slept with her only twice, right?’

  That caught me off guard. ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘Long enough. Only twice?’

  ‘Only twice.’

  Mauro shifts the ice on his hand. ‘She accused me of being selfish.’

  ‘She was…’

  ‘She was right,’ Mauro interrupts me. ‘I don’t mean only for the troubles with Art, no, it started before that. I was obsessing over what I wanted and did not want for my life, and I took for granted that everything was fine with hers. She doesn’t whine like me, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have needs, or problems of her own. I was horrible to my wife. She and you were horrible to me. Let’s call it even and leave it at that.’

  ‘It’s not even,’ I try to joke. ‘You didn’t do anything to me.’

  ‘I just have,’ Mauro says, arranging his face in a grin.

  I am trying to think of a witty reply, when both our mobiles ring at once. A collective text from Tony. He’s giving us access to his Find My Friends app. I’m going somewhere with Michele, he writes. I don’t know where. No reason to sweat, but just in case.

  Mauro and I look at each other. He starts to stand up, moving slowly, so as not to open his wound. ‘I’ve got to see my family,’ he says.

  TONY

  1

  Michele waits for me in Elena’s garden, sipping iced coffee under the scented canopy of the wisteria. Elena told me over the phone that he wanted to talk to me, immediately, but she didn’t say about what. My little sister, the mafiosa. Her presence makes me physically sick.

  I managed no more than an hour of shut-eye last night; I couldn’t wait to begin Art’s book, and once I started, I couldn’t go back to bed. Even though the meat was all in the introduction and in the third chapter, the whole thing must be a hundred thousand words long. Art does ramble a lot. We thought he was far gone, but we hadn’t grasped just how far. Same mistake I made with my sister.

  ‘Didn’t get much sleep?’ Michele greets me.

  ‘I had a PlayStation night.’

  ‘A waste of time, if you ask me.’ Michele stands up. ‘Come, I’ve got something to show you.’

  ‘I just need to pop into the loo, first.’

  It might be Art’s rantings that made me paranoid, but there’s a tension in Michele’s manners. He’s a friend; I don’t have a reason to be afraid. Do I? He’s Corona first, a friend second, and I’m not sure I trust even my own sister anymore. I lock myself into the bathroom and text the guys, just in case. If they’ve read The Book of Hidden Things, they’ll be paranoid too.

  I say ciao to Elena and Rocco and follow Michele to his car. He asks me to ride shotgun, which relaxes me; Rocco told me once that when dangerous guys want to do dangerous things to you, they make you sit in the back, with a huge someone at your side. Only hearsay, Rocco clarified, nothing he knew firsthand. Michele’s car is a blue, unassuming Fiat Punto, the ride an accountant would choose.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I ask.

  ‘To meet Silvana.’ He puts music on, some taranta tunes, and I take the hint and shut up. He lights a cigarette, without offering. We drive beyond the sign that warns tourists they’re leaving Casalfranco, site of ancient history, strong wine and perpetual sunshine, on the road that connects the town to the sea. A little after that we take a left into a lane, and then another, and we stop at a small two-storey house with a shaded porch, almost entirely hidden behind a tall hedge of prickly pears. Their green cladodes reach out to the street, like thorny hands eager to pierce you through.

  A young man with a bleeding heart tattoo on his neck sits on the porch, in a rocking chair, playing with his phone. He wears knuckledusters on both hands. When he sees Michele, he jumps on his feet and opens the front door for us. We enter and go through a bare kitchen and down a short staircase leading to a small cellar, from where come the excited voices of anime characters on TV.

  The only light is a naked bulb dangling from the ceiling. It is a very small room, almost entirely occupied by an ancient TV set on one wall and two wooden chairs. Silvana sits in one of them. The chair is orientated towards the TV, but she’s not really watching, only staring at the screen. In the other chair sits a wiry man in a white vest, skin burned black by the sun, a gun prominently in his lap.

  ‘That’s her gun,’ Michele says. ‘Saverio, her brother, bought it from us years ago. She stole it.’

  Silvana
keeps staring at the TV set. Michele makes a gesture to the wiry man, who turns the TV off. Silvana still doesn’t turn her head, her eyes now on the dead TV set.

  ‘Do you want five minutes with her?’ Michele asks.

  I say, ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘The girl shot your mate. I can give you five minutes with her, but you promise you don’t kill her. And you don’t rape her either,’ he adds, as an afterthought.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘thanks.’

  Michele shrugs. ‘Hey, beauty,’ he calls to Silvana. ‘Smile a little.’

  She still doesn’t look at us. Michele walks to her, calmly, and takes her chin between his thumb and index finger. He forcefully turns her head towards me. ‘Do you remember this man? He’s Art’s friend.’

  ‘Sì,’ Silvana says.

  ‘Tell him what you told me.’

  Silvana shrugs. She jerks her head free of Michele’s grip, in a gesture which makes her long hair wave around her head. She turns her head to look at me. She looks fine, no bruises or anything. These men don’t use more violence than they think necessary; the trick to getting on with them is making yourself scarce before they decide violence is necessary. I have to take this girl out of here. Everything she’s going through is Art’s fault, and ours. We believed Art was in love. Wrong, wrong, always wrong about him. I ask, ‘Is this what you were afraid of?’

  She looks at the ceiling, then at me. ‘I’m afraid of them. The Hidden Things. Those who… came after I killed Sam.’

  ‘Who’s Sam?’

  ‘Sam is my dog.’

  Her dog. ‘Did you leave him hanging in an olive grove?’

  ‘Michele told you.’

  ‘No. Fabio, another friend of mine, saw him before you took him down.’

  She shakes her head. ‘It didn’t work. It wasn’t enough. Art’s gone and I’m not able to follow. He trespassed and left me here, to rot.’ Her words are suddenly brimming with hatred.

  ‘I’m not sure I understand,’ I lie, for Michele’s benefit.

  ‘He trespassed and went to live with the saints.’

  ‘She had Art’s book with her,’ Michele says. ‘The introduction was missing, but the rest was full of notes and underlined passages. You take it seriously, don’t you?’ he says to Silvana.

  ‘Mock me as you like. Every word is true.’

  ‘Why did you kill your dog?’ I ask.

  ‘To trespass! You’ve got to break many, many eggs to make this particular omelette. But it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t. All I did was mess me up.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I didn’t make it to the other side, but I see it now. The Hidden Things, I see them all the time.’ She pauses. ‘And they see me too.’

  ‘Who are they?’

  ‘The saints, and the Virgin, and all the others who live there. They’re angry at me because I see them but I’m not supposed to. It’s either there or here, I can’t be on the border, I can’t sit on the wall, no I can’t, I shouldn’t. They’re angry at me.’ While she talks, she keeps looking beyond my shoulder, as if someone were there. It makes my skin crawl.

  ‘Are they here in this moment?’

  ‘They’re always with Michele. They dance with him.’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Michele says.

  2

  ‘I guess you can let her go,’ I say.

  We’re taking coffee in the field at the back of the house, in the omnipresent humming of cicadas. Prickly pears are the only thing growing in this field, wild, their thorny fruits violet and orange. We are standing up, which is Michele’s way of telling me that my visit is over. He doesn’t answer.

  ‘She’s nuts,’ I press on. ‘Nuts and harmless. I don’t see the point of…’

  Michele looks at me, and I shut my mouth.

  ‘I have a theory,’ he starts.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It’s about bodies. It goes like this: there are easy bodies and difficult bodies. Some bodies might create trouble, so you look for alternative ways to handle the people that are attached to them. Others, they’re no trouble at all. Silvana is an easy body. A lowlife’s daughter, she kills herself with her brother’s gun? Burying the enquiry will be a walk in the park.’

  My heart is pounding. ‘Why should you kill her?’

  ‘I’ve skimmed Art’s book. It is blasphemous. I understand why he didn’t want me to read it. A man, or even a woman, under the influence of that book could make some noise. And around here? We like calm and peace round here. Silvana is alive only because I want to be sure she has nothing else to tell us.’

  ‘She’s a girl. She only needs a cuff on her ear and…’

  ‘Have you seen Art?’

  It takes all I have not to jump. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Word in the street is that Art might be back. They caught a glimpse of him in Casalfranco. Might be my boys being overzealous, might be true. I’m asking you what you think.’

  ‘I think it’s bollocks.’

  ‘Do you?’

  Time slows down. I feel every drop of sweat on my forehead, and I pray that Michele and his saints will believe that I’m sweating because of the heat. ‘Michele, I’m not an idiot. If Art was back and I knew it, I’d have told you.’

  ‘And your friends, are they smart too?’

  ‘Smarter than me.’

  ‘You’re difficult bodies, all three of you, but you must know, Tony, that we’re not afraid of difficult bodies.’

  I say, in my firmer voice, ‘You don’t have to threaten me.’

  ‘Me, threatening Elena’s brother?’ Michele laughs, and pats me on my cheek. ‘You got it all wrong. Relax. I’m Art’s friend too. You remember that, sì? No one will harm him, or any of you guys, if you don’t make it absolutely necessary. We’re all buddies here. Now, there’s buddies higher than me, who, in light of recent events, are dying for a chat with Art, and they’ll want it even more badly after reading his book. They are not inclined to touch a hair on anybody’s head. Let’s keep it that way, shall we? I’m not threatening you, Tony, I’m helping you to see the situation for what it is.’

  ‘I appreciate that,’ I say.

  Michele says, ‘Good for you, son.’

  MAURO

  ‘What’s going on here?’ Tony asked, after a glance at Fabio’s face and then at my hand.

  I didn’t intend to tell him; he will hate Fabio more than I hate him now, probably more than Fabio deserves.

  ‘I slept with Anna,’ Fabio said.

  Tony made a face as if he were expecting a punch line. When it didn’t come, he spat at Fabio’s feet. ‘Scumbag.’

  ‘Later,’ I said.

  We are taking a meandering route through secondary roads and country lanes to make sure nobody is tailing us. Art agreed we need to have a serious chat, and I can’t sit this out, not with a girl’s life at stake; Fabio is having a breakdown, and Tony is too soft when it comes to his mate. Even Anna agreed I couldn’t just ignore it all. ‘Don’t get shot,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t fuck passers-by,’ I replied.

  The guys and I have never been so tense in each other’s company; the car is full of ghosts. I pull in at a small white chapel at the edge of an olive grove, bigger and tamer than the one Art disappeared into. He said that he used this grove to trespass the second time, to prove his theory about the existence of many ‘Places which are right’. I would give half my savings to be able to read between Art’s lines and understand what is really happening. A moped is parked beside the chapel. I wonder if Art rented it or stole it.

  Stop wondering.

  We didn’t come here to hear more of Art’s stories. We are here to convince him to talk to his friends in the Corona. Only he can clean up the mess he created, and save us, and Silvana.

  His head peeps out from the chapel’s door. ‘So you deigned to come,’ he says, in mock seriousness, as I get out of the car.

  ‘Only because we’re all going to die.’

  ‘Not in the kingdom of
the Hidden Things.’

  Tony says, ‘I’m not in the mood.’

  I didn’t know this chapel – not even old folk know all the chapels dotting the countryside. This one is in better shape than most. The outside recently received a fresh coat of paint, and on the inside, on one of the walls, is the painting of a man hugging a book (the golden writing underneath assure the faithful that he is San Gregorio). The artwork is of the quality you would expect from a local chapel, but the room is clean. A vase of fresh flowers is at the saint’s feet, as are a bag of weed, one of tobacco, and a paper with a mixture of the two.

  ‘Isn’t it a bit early for that?’ I say.

  Art taps his index finger on his ear. ‘This world. It’s so loud, after you get used to the Hidden Things, and the music is so crass! I’m better when I tune it down.’ He sits on the floor, his back against the wall, and returns to his task. ‘It’s only until tonight anyway.’

  He is barking mad. Fabio and Tony couldn’t prepare me for his jerking movements, the way he keeps shaking his eyes, the trembling in his hands. He licks the paper. ‘What’s going on with your face?’ he asks Fabio.

  Tony says, ‘Art, this is serious. The Corona has Silvana.’

  ‘Told ya.’

  ‘They’re going to kill her.’

  ‘As if.’ Art brings the joint to his lips and lights it.

  ‘Art…’

  ‘Did Michele give you his easy-bodies-versus-difficult-bodies bullshit?’

  ‘Didn’t seem bullshit to me.’

  ‘It’s not, to an extent. The truth is, all bodies are difficult. The Corona are not as powerful as they make out, nobody is, without magic, and they have none. Michele’s using Silvana to impress you. With me gone, with us gone, he won’t have a reason in the world to harm her.’

  I chose to ignore the magic part. ‘We’re not going anywhere. You are going to Michele, and you are going to talk to him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because that way we’ll all survive.’

  Art offers me the joint. I refuse it, so he passes it to Fabio, who takes it. Art says, ‘Didn’t you read my book?’