The Old Drift Page 8

  ‘They’re already bloody cannibals! Curse of Ham.’

  Ham! Ham!

  ‘Shhhh, Paolucci,’ said Lina indulgently. ‘It isn’t true,’ she said to the men. ‘When I was in Rhodesia as a girl, they did not eat men. Other disgusting things – caterpillars, rats. But not men.’

  ‘They eat the enemy’s brain to ward off evil.’ The Colonel turned from the bird cage and grinned. ‘It’s a sacrificial culture.’

  ‘But that’s what we did to them,’ said Federico. ‘We forced them to sacrifice—’

  ‘I always say,’ the Colonel was musing, ‘that the only way to kill a cannibal is to spice him up for the next cannibal. Poison for poison.’ He tipped his whisky glass back with a wink.

  ‘We are the ones who used poison! Mustard-gas bombs, against the Geneva Convention—’

  Poison mustard!

  The Colonel groaned. ‘Your righteous cynicism is extremely distasteful, Federico.’

  But Federico kept talking about the colonies, about the loss of land after the war. L’Impero Italiano was being burned to the ground. ‘They are like embers touched by the winds of change, these uprisings against us.’

  Lina smiled. ‘But France and Belgium and Spain, their empires are falling too.’

  ‘It is always like this,’ said the Colonel. ‘How children fall asleep: slowly, then all at once.’

  ‘The natives are children,’ said Federico. ‘They think they’re at war with Europe, with the Queen. But they’re throwing tantrums. Running their own nations?! Children playing house.’

  ‘Children!’ the Colonel exclaimed. ‘Is that what you would call the Mau Mau?’

  Mau, said the bird. Mau. Mau. Mau.

  ‘You’ve turned my bird into a cat,’ Lina scolded the Colonel. ‘Aren’t you afraid to go back?’ She drifted over to him, carrying a candelabra with only a quarter of the candles lit.

  ‘No, no,’ the Colonel dismissed the air with a flat palm. ‘Those brutes don’t scare me.’

  ‘What are you saying?’ Federico frowned. ‘Going back?’

  ‘Our dear Colonel,’ said Lina sadly. ‘He’s leaving us for Africa. What a misery!’

  Misery!

  ‘I’ve secured a position.’ The Colonel leaned back and laced his fingers. ‘With Fiat.’

  Fiat!

  ‘They have formed a civil engineering unit with Impresit. They are building the biggest dam in the world on the Zambezi river. And in six months, I will be there to oversee it.’

  ‘Six months!’ Federico exclaimed. ‘So soon?’

  ‘Yes, Lina has worked a miracle with her father’s old friends in Northern Rhodesia. So you see, Federico,’ the Colonel smiled, ‘the empire isn’t really dead. Even as we speak, it is rising from the ashes.’

  Ashes! Ashes!

  * * *

  Every night now, Colonel Corsale came knocking. Sibilla would sigh and put on her shift and let him in on her way out. She would sit in the outer dark, letting him and her mother enjoy their little pleasure. Then the Colonel began to arrive earlier in the evening, before Adriana even got home. He’d lounge about, or pace with his rocking limp, regaling Sibilla with stories about hair. He showed her a picture of a Negress with a towering headdress woven out of her lover’s hair. He told Sibilla about Chinese girls in the seventh century who embroidered pictures of the Buddha with their hair, and about the elaborate sculptural poufs Marie Antoinette had worn.

  ‘Don’t you ever wonder,’ he asked once, raking his fingers down the air and trembling them as if to mime rain, ‘why you are this way?’

  ‘No,’ she said curtly.

  ‘Not curious?’ The Colonel cocked his head. ‘Well, I have been corresponding about your condition with Herr Doktor Klein – quite an expert, I met him in ’42 – and he says…’

  Sibilla had no interest in these hairy tales, which always felt like bait. She had grown to despise this bulky man, with his opinions and commands. Spin for me, ragnatela. Talk to me. He even brought the Signora’s bird with him one time, to amuse her. At first, she had been intrigued by the idea of a talking bird. In reality, Paolucci was ugly and loud. Like the Colonel. He was always going on about his African adventures past and future: Kenya and Libya and Rhodesia; the lions and tigers and elephants he planned to kill. His talk stirred her, made her feel staticky. She preferred Federico with his blunt body and borrowed stories, the way he treated her hair as a charm rather than a curiosity. She kept the brothers’ visits secret from each other.

  ‘Isn’t it grand?’ the Colonel would say. ‘To have a little wife hidden in the woods!’

  Sibilla resented his presumption but said nothing. It was as if all those years ago, when he had flattened his palms over her face the better to see her, Colonel Corsale had somehow taken possession of her.

  ‘What if it passes down to your child?’ he asked now, sprawled grotesquely on her bed.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Sibilla snapped. She was seated at the hearth of the cabin, polishing the old spiral-faced watch the Signora had given her mother.

  ‘Don’t you know how it works? There’s you. And a man. And when you kiss…’ he grinned.

  She clucked at his vulgarity. The Colonel started droning on about a man named Mandelbrot, about heredity and genes. Sibilla was curious, especially about what he called ‘the paternal line’, but too anxious to pay attention. She glanced at the door. Federico might arrive any moment. Recently, he had started hectoring her to marry him. Rather than run off, he had said, why not stay in Piedmont, have some children, settle in a small house, some place private of course? Sibilla was irritated by this – she wanted to escape this cabin, not just shift to another.

  ‘…wrote to another friend,’ the Colonel was saying, ‘a scientist. And he believes…’

  Sibilla pictured the brothers staring at each other over the threshold. Often, when she lay beside Federico in the forest, pine needles itching her skin, his hands distracted in her hair, she longed to turn to him and say: ‘You know, your brother comes to see us.’ Or, ‘I met that stupid parrot.’ But confessing the secret would mean confessing how long she had been keeping it.

  ‘…asked for a photo of you,’ the Colonel said. ‘I provided a sketch instead and—’

  ‘A sketch!’ The watch dropped in Sibilla’s lap. ‘How dare you!’ she hissed.

  * * *

  Federico did not come to the cabin every day. If he stayed away too long, he would find Sibilla in a huff, her eyes dim and slightly crossed behind her hair. This short-focus trick bothered him. Her attention was precisely why he came to see her. It was like a hammock – swaying, flexible – where he could rest the thoughts running amok in his head. When her eyes retreated behind her thicket, he drew her out with war stories, his own scant collection, but more often, his brother’s: dark, violent tales that made her eyes return to him. But soon the Colonel would leave for Africa, taking with him his store of stories.

  What could Federico tell Sibilla today? Maybe an anecdote about the Signora’s parrot? He was walking along the switchbacks towards the cabin, enjoying the autumnal bluster. The sun was being fickle: darting into view, shying behind clouds, then announcing itself grandly. The breeze whipped left and right, casting chaos and roving shadows over the valley, as if a giant hand were mussing the fields. Federico ran his own hands over the dry stalks of wheat that had crept outside a fence. Their wispy burrs made him think of feathers and, again, of Paolucci.

  Last night, someone had doused the parrot’s feed in grappa. It had started hopping in circles, rattling off vulgar replays. Puttana! Pompinara! Bring the wine! Bring the whores! Liar! Ashes! Vaffanculo! Federico shook his head and absently broke a stalk of wheat. Spin, ragnatela! Che cazzo! I spit on your father’s grave! I spit on your mother’s cunt! Federico peeled the stalk to clean his teeth as he marched along the switchbacks. Silly beast. Spin, ragnate
la! He stopped, the stalk dangling from his mouth. Spin, ragnatela? But the bird had arrived at Villa Serra the very day that Sibilla had left. How did it know the Colonel’s nickname for her? Federico broke into a trot. How had it echoed his command? Federico began to run.

  * * *

  ‘Che cos’è?’ The Colonel’s moustache lifted with surprise, as if its ends were tied to his eyebrows. He stood up and limped slowly towards her. ‘I’m going to all this trouble to find a cure for you, ragnatela. You could even come with me…’ He paused to light his cigarette. ‘You know,’ he mused, ‘there are others like you in this world.’

  ‘Like me?’ She didn’t recognise her own voice. ‘Where?’

  ‘Ragnatela!’ He swung to face her, blowing smoke in her eyes. ‘I knew you were curious! Don’t you want to know what the doctors call you?’

  Sibilla stood and walked across the cabin, her hair slithering in the cracks of the wooden floor. She placed the watch on the table. ‘I never asked for a doctor. Or a name.’

  ‘Dear ragnatela, we cannot always know what we want…’

  ‘I know what you want!’ Her hair rose, hackle-like. ‘You want to swallow me!’

  They stared at each other. Holding her gaze, the Colonel limped over to the table and reached into his vest pocket for a piece of paper.

  ‘Sibilla.’ Her real name sounded strange in his mouth. He always called her ragnatela. ‘This is who you are.’

  The paper was folded but when he tossed it on the table, it sprang open. Sibilla stared at it a moment. Then she snatched it and ran to the hearth and threw it in the fire. The flames crunched into it. The Colonel wobbled after her and grabbed her arm. He wasn’t trying to save the letter – he had read it, it was gone – he wanted to hurt her. She glared at him, then they both glanced down at his grip on her forearm – her hair had slipped over his wrist. With a grunt, he twisted his hand and seized a rope of it. With his other hand, he spun her roughly – once, twice – into her locks until she was bound inside them. She tried to turn back but he held her fast.

  As the familiar warm smother began, Sibilla heard an unhappy plucking sound, like a broken mandolin. She knew how sharp the Colonel’s knife was, how swift and sure his stroke had been when he had cut her out of her nightly cocoon in the salon. As her breath and consciousness waned, she realised he was using its hooked back instead of its keenest edge, running it slowly down the hairs wrapped around her, playing a warped melody as he decided whether or not to set her free…

  * * *

  Federico knew what was happening the moment he burst through the cabin door. He grappled his brother off Sibilla, then straddled him and punched his face, over and over. When the pain in Federico’s fists finally rose above the one in his chest, he stood up shakily, snatched up the knife on the floor, and stumbled over to Sibilla. He lifted her in his arms. His brother was rolling desultorily side to side, laughing through his bloodied moustache. The Colonel’s fly was still open, the raw pink flesh there like a baby bird’s neck. ‘Take it. Take her,’ he spat between thick, wet chuckles. ‘I got what I wanted.’

  Federico looked down at Sibilla, unconscious in his arms, though her hair was still moving. He carried her outside and laid her carefully in the tomato garden. Then he strode back into the cabin, straddled his brother again, and gutted the pockets of his uniform – slashed them open and took out the Colonel’s identification papers, his wallet, his lighter and cigarettes. Federico spoke fiercely to the bleeding face beneath him, recounting all the things he was taking.

  ‘Your name. Your job. Your honours,’ Federico hissed out his list. ‘Your future.’

  He left only one thing: the hunting knife – in the middle of the Colonel’s chest.

  * * *

  Sibilla woke up outside in the tomato patch. Federico was crouching beside her, pecking her forehead mechanically. The smell of fresh soil bloomed all around them. The cabin door was open. Where was the Colonel? She looked at Federico but he avoided her eyes as he helped her up. He was sweaty, his clothes soiled. He put his arm around her shoulder as he hurried her down the path away from her home. She was shivering. Her hair felt electric.

  As they stumbled along under the blustery bright sky, Federico explained the plan. They would travel by car to Naples and spend the night there. The ship for Suez left in the morning. They would touch down at Aden, Djibouti and Mombasa before they reached Dar es Salaam and travelled overland to Bulawayo. His brother had been talking about the itinerary of his African enterprise for so long that Federico knew it by heart. It was laid out like a destiny. They just had to reach out and take it. A new life! They would have to take precautions, of course. Sibilla would have to shave her face completely, every day. He would have to cut his codino and grow out his moustache. And she would have to call him by a new name. He was no longer Federico. He was ‘Colonel Giuseppe Corsale’.

  Sibilla assented to the plan in a kind of fugue state. Every time she called him by his brother’s name, she saw double, the Colonel’s face floating over Federico’s like a spectre. The further they got from Alba, the closer they got to the dubiously named ‘Federation’ where they were to make their home, the more Sibilla, too, felt like a double of herself. It became a kind of itch under her skin that competed with the real itch over her skin from shaving her hair every day – at least thrice a day – during the journey.

  Concealment was a constant preoccupation. Every door that opened led to yet another close-walled space – a hotel room, a ship cabin, a vehicle, a caboose. Some were less sturdy than others, some better lit, some shook or rolled or dipped, but they were all a suffocation of planes and corners. It seemed that the world was one giant house and Sibilla was trapped inside it, doomed to traverse it – even its vastest oceans – via a series of connected rooms.

  She finally got some fresh air once they reached Tanzania three weeks later. She stepped out onto the balcony of the hotel room in Dar es Salaam. It was night. Without her usual veil of hair, the moon was like stripped bone. The buildings and roads of the city looked clean and institutional under it. Only the smell of smoke and salt, the heat and the sounds – of birds and insects and the sea – told her she was in a new place. She heard a familiar ring: a bicycle bell. She looked down at the road below as a man wheeled by, a temple of bananas on his back. He paused as he met a pedestrian, a man wearing a turban – was he Arab? After a brief chat, they both glanced up at her. Sibilla waved. They did not wave back. She put her hand to her bristling face.

  * * *

  Federico had finally put his military training to use. But even as he’d led a trembling Sibilla away from the cabin, even as he’d designed an escape plan and executed it, an image had niggled his mind. It was like Chinese acupuncture – that subtle, that potent. When he had first rushed into the cabin and seen those two too-familiar bodies entangled, Sibilla’s hair had been slithering and twining around the Colonel’s limbs – as if suffused with desire. The image haunted Federico, mocked him from the mirror in the shape of the moustache he was growing as a disguise. It hovered before him all the way to Africa.

  Between visits to a lethargic Sibilla in their tiny single-portholed cabin, Federico stood on the lower deck and watched this immense, enigmatic continent slip by. Sometimes the African coast seemed featureless, monotonous, blank. Other times, it grinned, drooped, raged. Come! it beckoned. Go! it boomed. The sea obeyed. Beyond the white line of the surf, colossal rainforests loomed, so dark green they were almost black. Grey specks of civilisation were here and there embedded in the gloom, an occasional flag flying to pronounce that the white man had at least landed here. Federico felt the majesty of it, but also the futility. Those settlements, over a century old, had made barely a dent in the untouched expanse of the inner continent. So much for the cause of progress and reason in Africa.

  He realised how mistaken he was when they made their way inland to the Federation – a slow and difficult jour
ney on the southern access road to the dam construction site. The West had arrived in the interior, but it had brought its worst tendencies with it: bureaucracy, venality, banality. The European labourers drank local beer and smoked bush pipes. They hunted for food rather than for sport. They walked around with their shirts off, insulting and ordering and punishing i negri to fluff their egos. The Tonga workers, paid a pittance, were impenetrable, with their opaque skin and broad smiles and nodding deference. The dam workers were altogether as coarse as the paesani who had worked the fields and vineyards in Piedmont and joined the Partisan War. Federico was in the same position he had occupied then as a sixteen-year-old sergeant: anxious that they did not respect him, yet unwilling to stoop to their level.

  While the other head engineers spent their time out on the site, mingling with this hoi polloi, Federico elected to stay in the office all day. This surprised his superiors: they had hired Colonel Corsale under the impression that he enjoyed being outdoors, hunting and fighting. Federico begged off. His old war injury was acting up, he lied, and he even began to fake a slight limp. Plus the sun here in the Gwembe Valley was far more vicious than it had been in Abyssinia, he noted. As rainy season approached, the temperature rose daily to 110°F. The office was smotheringly hot too but Federico swore otherwise.

  He became a living filing cabinet for green folders of blueprints, schedules, orders, receipts, the edges of the pages curling from the humidity, their interiors riddled with holes from the ants. He shuffled and rifled and slid them around energetically, as if building the dam with thin flat slices. Every night, he went home, drank gin and made love to Sibilla to dissolve the clutter to blankness. And every morning, he encased himself in his unnecessary suit and went back to his stacks of paper.