The Book of Hidden Things E-Book

Francesco Dimitri

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 465

Beschreibung

From "one of the most significant figures of the last generation of fantasy", comes Francesco Dimitri's debut novel in English, an enthralling and seductive fantasy following four old friends and the secrets they keep.Four old school friends have a pact: to meet up every year in the small town in Puglia they grew up in. Art, the charismatic leader of the group and creator of the pact, insists that the agreement must remain unshakable and enduring. But this year, he never shows up.A visit to his house increases the friends' worry; Art is farming marijuana. In Southern Italy doing that kind of thing can be very dangerous. They can't go to the Carabinieri so must make enquiries of their own. This is how they come across the rumours about Art; bizarre and unbelievable rumours that he miraculously cured the local mafia boss's daughter of terminal leukaemia. And among the chaos of his house, they find a document written by Art, The Book of Hidden Things, which promises to reveal dark secrets and wonders beyond anything previously known.Francesco Dimitri's first novel written in English, following his career as one of the most significant fantasy writers in Italy, will entrance fans of Elena Ferrante, Neil Gaiman and Donna Tartt. Set in the beguiling and seductive landscape of Southern Italy, this story is about friendship and landscape, love and betrayal; above all it is about the nature of mystery itself.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Fabio

Tony

Fabio

Mauro

Fabio

Tony

Fabio

Tony

Fabio

Tony

Mauro

Fabio

Mauro

Fabio

Tony

Mauro

Fabio

Tony

Fabio

Mauro

Fabio

Mauro

Tony

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also Available from Titan Books

“What a joy to have this in English. Francesco Dimitri’s fantastic fantasy novel has everything I like. A sensation of damp shadows moving just out of sight, and a slow, joyful, and mysterious unravelling of events. I can’t recommend it too highly.”

Joe R. Lansdale, author of The Thicket

“Francesco Dimitri’s first novel in English is a wonder and a revelation. Hidden within this gripping, frightening story about an arcane manuscript is a deep, clear-eyed, and compassionate meditation on friendship as it evolves over time. The Book of Hidden Things is fantasy at its best: using magical tropes to illuminate real life.”

Terri Windling, author of The Wood Wife

“The Book of Hidden Things is both a mystery and a map. Follow the clues along the trail in Francesco Dimitri’s dazzling debut and you’ll be ushered into a hidden world of magic, not only within these pages, but also within your own life. Be prepared to be transformed.”

Mark Chadbourn, author of the Age of Misrule series

“What a glorious read! This sun-drenched fantasy is a feast for the senses, reflecting on the value of friendship and what it means to finally grow up. If you loved Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, this book is for you.”

Helen Marshall, author of Gifts for the One Who Comes After

“The Book of Hidden Things shows us that memories are stories that refuse to belong only to the past. Such stories can create places that are both wonderful and dangerous; whether we believe in them or not is up to us.”

Aliya Whiteley, author of The Beauty

“As soon as I read the first lines of The Book of Hidden Things, I felt at home. It is an immersive book, that draws you in and never lets you go. Gripping, ruthless in the way it describes the age of reason, dominated by a mysterious, magical Salento landscape very far from the chocolate box images we are used to. In a word, unmissable.”

Licia Troisi, author of Nihal of the Land of the Wind

“In lesser hands, this blend of detective story, organized crime thriller, and supernatural investigation would feel like a grab bag of plot devices, but Dimitri has created a thrilling spectacle that also manages to point poignantly at the way the landscapes we grow up in shape us in ways even beyond our understanding. A deeply felt look at the idea of home, clothed as a popcorn-worthy page-turner.”

Kirkus, starred review

“An evocative meditation on friendship, adulthood, and the liminal spaces that lie just outside human perception… Dimitri’s beautifully written tale, steeped in nostalgia, folklore, and religion, will enthrall and terrify readers.”

Publishers Weekly

THEBOOKOFHIDDENTHINGS

FRANCESCO DIMITRI

TITANBOOKS

The Book of Hidden Things

Print edition ISBN: 9781785657078

Electronic edition ISBN: 9781785657085

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: July 2018

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© 2018 Francesco Dimitri. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

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For ‘that’ Paola.

When the storm comes you are the eye,When the sun burns you are the shade,When it is all kind of good, well,You are better.

She held herself not in the way of a mortal, but in the shape of an angel, and her voice had a sound which was other than human. A spirit from Heaven, a living Sun, that was what I saw.

Francesco Petrarca, Canzoniere, ‘Sonnet 90’

FABIO

1

Sitting at the table next to me is an elderly German couple. When the waiter recognises my accent, still local despite my best efforts, he winks and says, ‘They’re from Berlin. Moved here last month.’ He is thrilled that someone has taken the trouble to move all the way from Berlin, no less, to dump their bones in this pit. I wonder what the pull of Casalfranco is for them. So what if it is sunny down here? They have sunlamps in Berlin. I glance at the couple; they look happy. Give them time.

No, I don’t like it here. I don’t mean the pizzeria; the pizzeria is fine. I mean this town, this part of the world: Puglia. Oh, I’ll grant you that in this season it hits you with a heady scent of rosemary and lemon and flowering thyme. When I got out of the cab on this warm June night, I had to close my eyes and drink it all in, like sweet wine on a date. But it is a honey trap. Another three weeks and the summer sun will evaporate the scent and burn the land to a cinder, and what little life there is left will have to start a war for the last drops of water left deep underground. I didn’t trust Casalfranco when I was here, and I trust it even less since I got out. This place is feral. I am only back for tonight, for the Pact. And I am unsure, to be honest, if the Pact still stands. It is a miracle it lasted this long.

I am at a corner table; not any table, but the table, our table. It was free straight away. I am alone, surrounded by three empty chairs, wondering if the others will come. In front of me is the wood-fired oven, a cavernous mouth of white stone. A dark-skinned pizzaiolo is working a ball of dough with jerky movements, while another handles a pizza overflowing with Parma ham, rocket and parmesan shavings. I think I know the dark-skinned guy: Guido or Gianni or something like that. I was at school with his second cousin.

I came to American Pizza (their pizza is as Italian as it gets) direct from Brindisi Airport. In the authentic southern tradition, the car I had booked was nowhere to be seen. It took me two hours to get another, so when I finally reached Casalfranco I was twenty minutes late for what had been since time immemorial (or secondary school anyway) the hour of the Pact. I called the B&B to tell them that I would check in after dinner. I had forgotten that being twenty minutes late, in Southern Italy, means being anywhere from ten to thirty minutes early. I forget every time. Art says I do it on purpose, but I don’t think so.

Maybe the Pact has fizzled out.

They will come, I say to myself. They will come. I have been repeating this all the way from the airport. It’s the Pact; they won’t break it. The Pact was Art’s idea – hence the capital P, because Art always puts capitals on words, multiplying their power, transforming them into Words. The Pact is a silly game which I swore I would stop playing last year, and if the boys don’t show up (I am by now almost sure they won’t) I will feel like a complete idiot. I could have put to better use the money I spent on this trip – the flight and the B&B were dirt cheap, but lately for me dirt cheap has become synonymous with stupidly expensive. And yet, here I am.

I am nibbling a bruschetta heavy on garlic, washing it down with what is left of a glass of Primitivo, the strong local red, when I see Mauro enter the pizzeria. So one of them has come after all. With his cream chinos, white shirt and navy-blue jacket, Mauro plays the part of the grown-up with a grace I can only dream of. In keeping with the Pact, I acknowledge his presence with a small nod, as if I see him regularly. He nods back and comes to the table. He’s put on some weight since I saw him two years ago, but he’s got a better haircut. Both things please me.

‘Been waiting long?’ Mauro asks, sitting down.

‘Less than the last time.’

‘Making progress.’

‘Baby steps, Mauro, baby steps.’

He cracks a smile and pours himself a glass of wine. ‘I wasn’t so sure we would see you again.’

‘Neither was I.’

‘When did you fly in?’

‘Just now. I’m here straight from the airport.’

‘You didn’t swing by Angelo?’

‘He doesn’t know I’m in town.’

Mauro undoes his smile. We’ve been friends for too long to hide our feelings, and right now, he feels I’m a jerk. He doesn’t understand my relationship with my father, and I can’t blame him; most of the time, I don’t understand it either.

‘I’m not staying at his,’ I explain. ‘I’ve booked a B&B. I’m leaving tomorrow early in the morning, and I thought it wasn’t worth the hassle to stay with him.’ Stop that. I don’t have to justify myself – I am a grown-up.

‘Say we bump into someone you know and they tell Angelo.’

‘Let’s hope it won’t happen.’

Mauro raises his hands in surrender, and says, ‘I arrived yesterday.’

‘Have you seen Art?’

‘What do you reckon?’

I reckon not: it would feel like a breach of the Pact. Silly as it is, we are serious about it, or have been. Either way, I have let it draw me back to Casalfranco, inexorably, once a year, for seventeen years, with the exception of the last one. What my eighty-year-old widowed father can’t accomplish, the Pact can. I reckon this is our last hurrah; I’ll make the most of it.

‘Art is bonkers,’ says a voice behind my back.

Mauro stands up. ‘Tony!’

I turn my head to see Tony make a bow and a flourish. ‘These days I go by Tony the Mighty.’

Tony is not tall, but he is so muscular and compact, in his sleeveless shirt, you only need a quick glance to decide that you are too tied up right now to mess with him. He always was physically imposing, and a bit of a buffoon too. He was the main reason why bullies, after some half-hearted attempts, gave up on Art – though Art could be scary in his own right. We thought Tony would become, say, a professional boxer, or perhaps an enforcer for the Sacra Corona Unita, Sacred United Crown, the local mafia. He ended up a surgeon, and a good one at that. Some months ago, he managed a particularly difficult heart transplant, which gave him his fifteen minutes of fame. We were often wrong, back then. Take Art, for example. All the expectations we had.

Tony rests a hand on my shoulder. ‘You graced us with your presence, I see.’

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t make it last year.’

‘You will be, man,’ he says, as he sits down.

Mauro tells him, ‘I’ve read of your master stroke.’

‘It was impressive,’ I say, grinning. ‘I mean, I didn’t think you could tell a heart from a kidney.’

Tony says, ‘I got lucky. I happened to be holding a heart in my hands and I tripped and the heart flew up and landed snug in the right place. Only,’ and he lowers his voice, ‘between you and me, I’m not sure it was a human heart I was holding. Could’ve been a dog’s.’

‘As long as it works,’ Mauro says.

‘The fellow isn’t barking. Yet. How are you guys doing, anyway?’

‘Fine,’ Mauro says.

That is an understatement. Mauro is not exactly modest. It is the other way round. His approach is more like, If you don’t know about me, then you can’t afford me. Mauro is a lawyer in Milan, a specialist in taxes and finance. He lives where money lives, and when you live where money lives, a part of that money is bound to come and live with you too.

As for me, ‘Can’t complain,’ I lie.

‘Of course you can’t,’ Mauro says, with a wink. He thinks I’m doing grand, and why shouldn’t he? He doesn’t know, none of them do, and that is fine by me for tonight. Plenty of time tomorrow to face the bucketload of mess I made of my life.

I check my watch. ‘Where’s Art? It’s getting late.’

Tony says, ‘Hey, I just arrived.’

‘Yeah, and you were late even by local time.’

‘Fabio, my dearest friend, are you hungry? ’Cause you’re a bitch when you’re hungry.’

‘I’m kind of peckish,’ I admit. I barely registered the slice of bruschetta I’d already had; southerners can eat, and it is a mortal offence to imply otherwise. Casalfranco has this power, when you step into it. You revert to old habits.

Mauro waves to attract a waiter. ‘Antipasti please,’ he says, ‘while we wait for our friend.’

2

Art has big ears and a big nose, the blackest eyes you have ever seen and bottle-bottom glasses. In the mid-nineties nobody would have considered him attractive; nerd fashion was yet to become a thing. Not that Art was so easily classifiable. His marks were high, his social grace disputable, yet there was something about him – an intensity, a magnetism, for want of a better word – that set him apart from your run-of-the-mill geek. Part of it was that he wasn’t intimidated by girls (or bigger boys, or priests, or professors); it was him who brought Anna into Mauro’s life, when we were fifteen.

Anna and Rita went to the beach at the same spot we did, in Portodimare, a village less than ten miles from Casalfranco. The beach was smooth white sand, fading into water just slightly less clear than air. When tramontana, the northern breeze, blew, the sea was still come una tavola, like a table. Look at it from the seashore, and you would see the sand and rocks on the bottom, with banks of cazzi di Re (King’s cocks, brightly coloured fish) swimming by. They’re so called because, local wisdom has it, the cock of a king has more colours than yours.

We were used to fish, less so girls. We had noticed Anna and Rita; their accent marked them as Milanese, and thus deserving awe. We had no clue how to approach cosmopolitan, sophisticated, world-weary Milanese girls. They had noticed us (out of boredom, I would say) but it was the boys’ job to make the first step. It was a Mexican standoff: we eyed them and they eyed us, and everybody kept their positions, until one day Art said, ‘Enough.’

We had been playing football on the boiling-hot beach, hoping the girls would take heed of our athletic feats. They hadn’t. We had cooled down with a swim, emptied two bottles of ice tea from Mauro’s bag, and now were sitting on the sand, sulking.

‘Yeah,’ I replied, annoyed, ‘because you know what to do.’

Art tilted his head towards me and brought two fingers to his eyes, as if to say, Watch me. He jumped up – and almost tripped over the ball. We chuckled. He was unfazed. He straightened his glasses and walked, in his trunks that were too large for him, to where Anna and Rita were lying on their beach towels. When he got there, he hunkered down beside Rita and asked her, ‘May I bother you one sec?’

Rita scoffed, ‘If you really have to.’

‘I noticed your hands.’

‘My hands?’

Art nodded, and in all seriousness he said, ‘My mum’s a gypsy. She taught me how to read hands.’

‘No way.’

Art laughed. ‘I’m not saying I believe it works.’

‘And why do you want to read my hand?’

Seamlessly, Art took Rita’s right hand into his own. She let him do it. Bending over her like some goblin from a book of fairy tales, Art traced the contour of her palm with the index finger of his left hand. Coming from anybody else, that gesture would have been downright creepy, but Art was so disarming that even I would have fallen for it, and I knew perfectly well that his mum was as much of a gypsy as I was a Swede.

‘Your hands have a special shape,’ Art said. ‘Mum would say it’s the hand of a dreamer. You’re quite a sensitive young woman, aren’t you?’

Rita opened her mouth, amazed. ‘How do you know?’

‘It’s all over here. And look at this line! The line of relationships, can you see it? All windy and dramatic. People just can’t get you; your special sensitivity singles you out from the crowd. You feel lonely at times, even though you’ve got plenty of friends.’

‘That’s… that’s right,’ Rita said.

Then Anna intervened. ‘Bullshitter,’ she said, pushing Art, amused more than annoyed. Art lost his footing and his goblin-like pose, and we all guffawed. It didn’t happen very often that Art was called on his bullshit.

Art laughed too. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘maybe.’ Ice had been broken, his point had been proven, and he had already lost interest. That’s Art, that’s always been Art: easily intrigued, easily bored. He sticks to us, and to the Pact, and that is all the stability he needs in his life.

3

Art doesn’t show up.

We make our way through the antipasti (warm bread, Parma ham, deep-fried calamari, oven-baked mussels, hard cheese, grilled vegetables, and olives – everywhere else it would be a complete meal; here, it is a warm-up), pizza and two bottles of Primitivo wine, and Art still doesn’t show up. Even Mauro looks disappointed, and Mauro is the unflappable one. On the night of the Pact we show up. You might go abroad and get married and become a prince in a foreign land, but on the night of the Pact, you show up. There are no ifs and no buts. That’s the theory – and we carried on the practice for a surprisingly long time. The first time, during our first year of university, none of us were really expecting to find the others, but there we were, all of us. After that it became sort of a game to hold on to the Pact and see who would drop out first.

The longer we respected the Pact, the more important it became to us. Art said, four or five years ago, that we were caught in a well-known psychological loop: you start believing that your actions matter just because they are your actions. The longer you continue doing a thing, the more important it feels, the less you feel you can stop. It’s called cognitive dissonance, he said. Sit at a desk every day and you’ll convince yourself that your job makes a difference, and that you like it, even. Drink a priest’s wine long enough and you’ll be ready to buy that it’s a god’s blood. I asked him if that meant he didn’t believe in the Pact anymore. He answered, I do. I really do.

Last year I broke the spell. I didn’t feel like talking about what was going on in my life, and I didn’t feel like facing Mauro and Tony’s success. I had been unsure whether to tell the others I wasn’t coming, and in the end opted not to, because I knew Tony would complain, and Mauro disapprove, and Art would twist my arm to go after all. I told myself that talking openly of the Pact meant breaking it anyway, and it was better for everybody if I just gave a no-show.

I received a frantic call from Tony’s phone in the course of the night; surely something terrible must have happened. After I made it clear that I was alive and well, Art shouted Traitor! over the phone, laughing, and made me wish I was with them. I was thinking of that Traitor! three days ago, when I resolved, against my better judgement, to come.

Mauro says, ‘And this time it’s Art blanking us. You started it, Fabio.’

‘I was busy.’

‘One is never too busy for the Pact,’ Tony says, in the pretend voice of a professor.

‘How many times will I have to say I’m sorry?’

‘Many. But blanking your mates is like you, it’s not like Art.’

I pick up my phone. ‘Let’s get done with it.’

‘That’s a breach of the Pact.’

‘Tony, the Pact is a children’s game.’

‘So what are you doing here?’

I ignore him and dial Art’s number. My call goes straight to voicemail. ‘His phone’s turned off.’

Mauro gestures the waiter to bring us the bill. ‘He’s staying at his old place, isn’t he?’

Tony says, ‘Yep.’

Nine years ago Art’s dad died, and two years ago his mum too, and at that point Art decided to move back to Casalfranco, from Prague, where he had happened to be at the time. It took all of us aback, considering how profoundly he hated Puglia, and Art offered no explanation to speak of. My secret fear is that it wasn’t an entirely sane choice. He was falling apart by then. When I saw him he was gaunter than ever, and spent most of the night talking of the uniquely fascinating, in his own words, nature of drystone walls.

Mauro says, ‘We should go and check on him.’

‘That’s a huge breach of the Pact,’ Tony says. He’s only half fooling.

‘You said it yourself, this is not like Art.’ Mauro stands up. ‘I’ve got my car parked outside.’

I’m about to object: We’ve been drinking all night, we can’t drive. Then I remember where I am. Not in London, but in Salento, the heel of Italy, where nobody thinks twice about drinking and driving.

We pay our bill – ridiculously cheap – and leave, to find ourselves in a small, circular piazza paved in stone. White houses with flat roofs surround it, and two palm trees sit comfortably in a flower bed at the centre. A rusty drinking fountain stands in one corner. Someone has broken the tap, so the water is gushing out uninterrupted. It is the loudest noise I can hear in the soft southern night. We take a dimly lit alleyway, scaring away a lonely cat. I come here rarely enough not to be used to the architecture anymore, the narrow paths and the ramshackle doors, an odd mash-up of Arabia, Greece, France, and entirely local shabbiness. Casalfranco feels smaller than it is; at a population size of around thirty-five thousand people, it still pretends it is a village. When I was growing up there were no bookshops, no cinemas or theatres. I had to take a one-hour bus trip to get my book fix. A local historian found that all the townsfolk are related to one another. Inbreeding explains a few things about this place.

Mauro’s car is a five-door Ford; nothing flashy, but in mint condition. Tony runs to the right-hand door, crying, ‘Shotgun!’

I find a spot on the back seat between a child’s car seat and a squeaky dragon. ‘Are you here with Anna?’ I ask, as Mauro starts the engine.

‘Children and wife, the whole crew. We decided to make a holiday of it, before the bulk of the tourists arrive.’

Not my problem, thank goodness. I’m flying out of here at five-thirty a.m. The last thing I need is to get stuck in conversation with Anna.

Tony takes out a packet of cigarettes and offers one to me and one to Mauro. We share a silent smoke as Mauro drives out of town and into the countryside. Art’s place lies around six miles south of Casalfranco proper. Each of us could do the journey with our eyes closed, after all the times we travelled it when we were kids.

Art will be fine. When you worry about something (your lover being late, your medical check-up) it almost invariably turns out fine. But the night is spoilt anyway. The Pact is spoilt, and it is all my fault. I know it had to happen, sooner or later, but that doesn’t make it better. The part of me that indulges in self-pity says, You ruined another good thing, Fabio, that’s my boy. A pocket-sized double of myself claps his hands sarcastically in my mind.

The town fades into open countryside, until we find ourselves driving on a narrow, dark road, and I mean dark – with no lampposts, no roadside bars, no hint of electric light whatsoever. The land surrounding us comes into existence only for the fleeting time our headlights touch it, and it is flat as the sea on one of those tramontana days. Vineyards first, the plants all bent, and then thick olive trees, bent too, and twisted. Things that grow here must make do with very little water and too much sun, as well as wind, hailstones and storms. Only the strong survive, and even those come up wizened and scarred. It is a timeless landscape, not in a way I like. It makes me feel very frail.

Mauro turns into a lane, cutting through a new area of vineyards. The grapes, still young, shine under the headlights. They are sided at intervals by the oval shapes of prickly pears, with their colourful fruits already ripening among the thorns. Art comes from a peasant family who have been living for three generations in a house Art’s grandfather built with his own hands. It is a sturdy square building at the end of the lane, a white cube in the middle of nowhere. Back then there was no plumbing or electrics. Art’s dad installed them, but they are not in use right now. The house is pitch black.

‘He’s not home,’ I say.

Mauro pulls up next to a battered old Fiat Panda, which I suppose belongs to Art, and we get out. With the engine killed, the ceaseless song of crickets fills the air.

‘Art!’ Tony shouts. ‘It’s us.’

The crickets make the quiet more striking. A dog barks somewhere far off, but that is all.

‘Fabio’s right. He’s not home,’ Mauro says.

‘What about his car then?’ Tony asks. ‘Art!’ he calls again. He tries the buzzer. Nobody replies.

Mauro says, ‘That’s odd.’

‘It’s possible that he forgot it was today,’ I try.

‘Is it?’ Tony asks.

I shake my head. Art doesn’t believe in forgetting.

Tony says, ‘We should take a look inside. He could be hurt. Or…’

He stops before saying what we all think: high as a kite. We don’t know for sure if Art is using hard drugs, but we have talked about it in the past, and we agree it would make sense. It wouldn’t be all that surprising, considering what he went through – but that, we never talk about.

I lift a ceramic pot (it contained geraniums once, before Art let them wither) sitting just beside the door. Art, and Art’s dad before him, used to hide a spare set of keys beneath it. ‘No joy.’

‘Remember, pal?’ Tony says. ‘I don’t need a key for a crappy lock like this. I haven’t forgotten my old tricks.’ He puts a hand on the flimsy door handle. ‘Oh,’ he says.

The door is open.

4

We formed the Pact in American Pizza seventeen years ago, on the night Art threw his life down the drain. School was over, and we would soon sit our finals. We were all leaving for university: Tony to Rome, Mauro to Milan, and I had set my mind on London, that reservoir of exotic dreams. Art was going to Stanford, California, thanks to an unconditional full scholarship which had been the talk of the town. A scholarship was Art’s only chance to go to a decent university, and when he was pondering where to apply he had thought that he might as well aim high.

He was aware that Stanford wouldn’t give a second look at an application coming from a below-average Italian school, so he embarked on one of his projects: in eight months of ultra-intensive work he wrote and illustrated a two-hundred-page graphic novel based on his own translation from Latin of Lucius Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, a trippy story of magic, shapeshifting, and mystery cults which had been his latest obsession. Art translated the story into English, wrote a script, and made the illustrations, in a style drawing on influences as different as Steve Ditko and Francis Bacon. He packaged and sent the originals to Stanford – he couldn’t pay for full-colour copies. It was an unqualified success; the letter he received back was almost pornographic in its praise. Art’s parents were beyond themselves with pride, and we were too. We were never jealous, I think, of the things Art could do. We knew he existed on a level of his own.

None of us planned to ever come back to Casalfranco. Art and I shared a white-hot hatred for our hometown, Mauro had plans with his by-then-girlfriend Anna (all of them came to pass), and Tony had discovered things about himself that would have made life in Casalfranco highly unpleasant, though it would be some time before he confessed that to us.

Against all odds, my father didn’t flinch at the idea of me leaving town. He was confident it wouldn’t last. ‘You’ll come back,’ he said. That’s what everybody else said too. It was normal for young people to want to go and spend some time away, but invariably, they returned. Ti Casalfrancu sinti, the wise folk would remind you in dialect. You’re from Casalfranco: your birthplace was your destiny, so you better not put on any airs. And it was true that growing up between thirsty soil, King’s cocks and the Corona didn’t equip you very well for the big blue world out there. Casalfranco was like a rubber band: you could stretch it, but sooner or later it would snap you back in place. Of all those in our year at school, only Mauro, Tony and I did get away and stay away. Even Art ended up moving back. It is sad. Unfair too; without his influence, I am not sure the rest of us would have resisted Casalfranco’s gravitational pull.

American Pizza was grim in that distant age before holidaymakers and retirees: a few shabby tables with red-and-white checkered cloths, a faded picture of a local football team, and in the corner a yellowish, sick plant we called Audrey, after The Little Shop of Horrors. It was a dump with an embarrassing provincial name, but their pizza was good. More to the point, it was cheap, the only pizza in town Art could afford.

It began with him saying, ‘I’m not going to Stanford.’

‘You decided to go into fishing instead?’ Tony joked.

‘I’m serious.’

Tony and I exchanged a look. Mauro cleaned his lips of melted mozzarella and said, ‘Are you?’

‘Entirely. Something happened.’

Tony asked, ‘Are your parents okay?’

‘Something good happened.’ Art made a theatrical pause, looked at each of us in turn, then announced, ‘I have a book deal for the graphic novel. Someone in Stanford’s admissions committee has a brother who is an editor. One thing leads to another, he wants to buy it.’

‘Art, this is great!’

‘I know, right?’

Mauro asked, ‘And why is this a reason not to go to Stanford?’

‘They’re paying me an advance. It’s enough to take a year off, with the odd job here and there.’

‘Which is better than a full scholarship at one of the coolest universities in the world because…?’

‘It leaves me more time to pursue my interests.’

A silence followed. We knew Art too well to think he was joking. ‘I hope you thought this through,’ Mauro said.

Art dismissed his words with a gesture. ‘I got the scholarship this time, I can get it again whenever I want. It’s only a gap year, boys. It’s normal in other countries.’

I asked, ‘And where are you going instead?’

‘Turin. There’s two or three libraries I want to check out. And then Volterra. Fascinating town, that one.’

Tony said, ‘Let’s talk again after the finals.’

‘I already wrote to Stanford,’ Art said.

There was another silence, heavier than the first one. Something had happened to Art when we were fourteen, which had left him more damaged than anybody thought, but that was the first time I truly questioned his sanity.

‘I’m leaving. That’s what I wanted,’ he went on. He bit into a slice of pizza and said, with his mouth full, ‘And this is all I’m going to miss about this shitty town.’

‘Casalfranco is not the worst place in the world,’ Mauro said.

‘Don’t be so sure about that,’ I said. ‘This place is a monster sucking the marrow out of your bones.’ We were all grateful for the change of subject.

‘It has good pizza though,’ Tony said.

‘Sure,’ Art conceded. ‘But, honestly? In a year’s time, we’ll see this pizza’s not even that good. We like it because of all the memories we attach to it.’

‘Meaning, we have good memories. Meaning, it’s not all doom and gloom down here in the sticks,’ Tony said.

Art made a brief nod. ‘Not all. I’ll miss the pizza and I’ll miss you guys.’

It wasn’t a thousand years ago, but it was before Facebook, before Skype and before mobile phones became ubiquitous – down south anyway. Distance still mattered.

‘It’s not like we’re never going to meet again,’ Tony said.

‘Actually, yeah, it kind of is,’ Art said. ‘We’re not planning to visit a lot, right? Christmas and summer, if that.’

‘So this is, what, the Last Supper?’

I held in front of me a slice of pizza with anchovies and capers, and said, in a deep voice, ‘“I tell you the truth, one of you will betray me.”’

Art said, ‘We’ll all betray each other. We’ll make new friends.’

‘Girlfriends too, lots and lots of them,’ Tony said. ‘Don’t take it personally, guys, but I’d sell your skin in a heartbeat for the right pair of boobs.’ He cupped his hands on his chest, to make the point clearer. Then he took off a hand. ‘For one boob, too, provided it’s nice enough.’ Tony went to great lengths to hide he was gay, and he succeeded, mostly because it was impossible then for us to think that gay people could walk in our midst. Mauro and I would find out two years later, when Tony came out to us and Elena, his sister, to muster courage before coming out to his parents. Art had known all along, though he never told us.

‘Girlfriends, jobs, don’t get me wrong, it’s all going to be great. But this?’ Art touched the table. ‘This is over. The end of our life as we know it.’

We let his words linger. Art had this way of talking, combining the insight of a wise hermit with the bedside manner of an eight-year-old. There wasn’t a doubt in any of our minds that he was destined for great things.

‘That sucks,’ Mauro said.

I shrugged. ‘There’s nothing we can do about it.’

‘Says who?’ Art asked.

He got on my nerves sometimes. ‘Says the real world…?’

‘Let’s stick our middle finger up to the real world! Let’s keep the dream going.’

I used my chin to point at the owner of American Pizza, who was sitting behind the till, immersed in a black-and-white porn comic book with a vampire on the cover. Jacula, an Italian classic. With his round belly and his overgrown chest and back hair, sprouting from the grimy vests that were his uniform, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was a gorilla (he was known in town as Kong). ‘That dream?’ I said.

Art raised an eyebrow in mock seriousness. ‘I am a man of varied taste. Listen: we’ll make a Pact. Every year on this day, we’re going to meet.’

‘Mate…’ I tried.

‘Ssst!’ Tony said. ‘Let the wise one talk.’

‘Thank you, my friend,’ Art said. ‘As I was saying: we’ll meet once a year, every year. Whatever happens, wherever life will lead us, we’ll meet in this place, on this day, at this time. It doesn’t matter if we never see each other for the rest of the year, or we’re in touch regularly. We’ll never mention the appointment. We’ll never try to cancel it or reschedule it. On the tenth of June, we’ll just come to Casalfranco from whatever corner of the world we happen to be, stroll into American Pizza and take our table, and pretend time never passed. Fuck the real world.’

I could see the idea working, but I could see its problems too. ‘It’ll bind us to Casalfranco.’

‘It’ll bind us to each other,’ Art said. ‘I’m willing to do that. Aren’t you, mate?’

‘What if we’re busy?’

‘Then we un-busy ourselves. It’s a Pact with a capital P – hardcore shit.’

‘It’s awesome,’ Tony said. ‘Deal for me.’

‘Fuck the real world, now and for ever,’ Mauro agreed.

It meant I would have to come back to Casalfranco at least once a year, which I didn’t want to do. But keeping my friends would require effort, and I wanted that, very much. The price was steep but it was worth paying. I, too, agreed to the Pact.

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 or 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.