The Old Drift Page 9

  * * *

  The Africans in Siavonga were politer than those in Dar es Salaam, but Sibilla suspected they had no choice about it. The township for the dam labourers was divided into segregated housing. The Italians and the Brits lived at the top of a steep hill, in simple houses that were nevertheless palatial compared to the hovels at the bottom of the hill for the blacks. The other expat wives bonded over trying to do their domestic duties in this rocky, hot wilderness, over having to race with lifted skirts and swinging buckets to beg water from the trucks that wet the road. But as a chief engineer, ‘Colonel Corsale’ had been assigned a maid, a cook and a guard.

  Sibilla had been a servant herself for most of her life, but she was baffled by the African workers, by their mixture of subservience and hauteur. They did not seem bothered by her odd clothing: the loose dresses and shawls she draped over herself to conceal her hair. But whenever she automatically picked up dishes or wiped up spills or reached for a knife to chop vegetables, the young maid, Enela, frowned and lifted her nose. The girl practically snatched the plates and pots from Sibilla’s hands and took offence at any offer of help, as if Sibilla were scolding her by doing her job for her. As the months passed, Sibilla learned not to linger in the kitchen, and to apply her tight-wrung energy to other tasks, like learning how to speak English and be a wife.

  Sibilla and Federico had finally married. Shortly after the diluvial floods in 1957, the dam workers had imported a bell from Italy, set it up in the African church at the top of the hill, built a circular tower around it, and renamed it Santa Barbara. The day before it opened, Sibilla and Federico stood inside the barely dry concrete walls, under an unpainted cross, and exchanged vows before an Italian priest. The rituals felt half-wrought, attenuated by their distance from home. But there was some pomp at least: Federico had persuaded another engineer to bring some silk charmeuse and bridal illusion from abroad; Sibilla had handsewn the one into a dress, the other into a veil.

  She flinched only once, when the priest said the name: ‘Colonel Giuseppe Corsale’. Was that why Federico was marrying her? To seal the deception in a legal document – to make it official? Standing there in that half-built church, Sibilla gazed through her double veil at her double man: Federico, with the false name, gait and moustache of his brother. And she was two Sibillas too: the one twitching uncomfortably in her dress, and the one who swooned under his worshipful hands every night. The one who loved him and the one who was afraid of this man who had both rescued her from death and buried his own brother’s corpse in a tomato patch.

  * * *

  OPERATION NOAH, the memo said. Mrs Makupa, the native woman whom Federico had been training as a secretary, had brought it in. She was tall and thin and dark. Her hands were forever occupied with knitting wool – always black, despite the swelter of this place.

  ‘Who sent this? Smith? Did he say it was urgent?’

  Mrs Makupa shrugged, hands still rotating. Federico waved her off and scanned the memo, which was dated the previous month, September 1958. Now that the dam was nearly complete, the river was flooding earlier than usual in the season. This memo proposed to relocate the wildlife whose habitat was soon to be underwater: lions, leopards, elephants, antelopes, rhinos, zebras, warthogs, even snakes. A Noah’s Ark indeed. Federico shook his head. Disaster had already come – to human life.

  He looked out of the poorly cut window in the concrete wall of the office. It was raining again. In the distance, he could see the dam’s broad curving face topped with a racket of scaffolding, the white plastic pipes like worms. Despite the rain, it was crawling with men, fly-like amongst the beetling machines. It looked like a mammoth corpse, half-dissected or half-rotten. They had already lost so many men to it. Twenty-seven had died in a collapsed tunnel – the survivors living off Coca-Cola and beer for three days. Seventeen had plunged seventy metres into wet concrete when a platform collapsed – this incident had led the Africans to strike until Baldassarini, the site agent, raised their pay to sixpence an hour. During a shuttering, an Italian had looked up at a passing Royal Air Force plane and plunged to his death.

  Then came the floods. Last year, they’d barely had enough time to get out of the way. The men had scrambled to move the machines and to break part of the cofferdam wall to divert the river – but then the water had just seeped in a fault line and flooded it from the inside anyway: a swirling thrusting deluge, red as blood because of the copper in the dust here, a crane they hadn’t managed to move swivelling wildly in the gushing torrents. Bergamosco, a chief engineer, had stood on the banks raging at the Zambezi, yelling puttana! as if Mother Nature were insulting him personally with this hundred-year flood.

  Mrs Makupa came in again and handed Federico another memo without seeming to let off knitting – did she have a third arm in that bundle of black limbs? She waited while he read.

  ‘Smith is here now?’

  Mrs Makupa nodded, still knitting.

  ‘Well, send him in then!’

  * * *

  A few months after their wedding, Federico had surprised Sibilla with a viaggio di nozze.

  ‘The seventh wonder of the world is only 500 kilometres down the river!’

  They stayed in an old colonial hotel, a broad white structure with hammerhead wings and red tile roofing. It was so close to the Victoria Falls you could hear their faint roar in the distance. The lawns were perfect green carpets, the pool an unreal blue. The ceilings were high with slowstirring fans and pristine chandeliers, the churchly doors and windows topped with wooden arches. Sibilla eyed the fringed rugs sceptically – that just made them harder to clean. Black and white photographs lined the corridors, depicting the hotel’s famed history.

  Walking down one of those corridors after a tipsy night at the Rainbow Room bar, rubbing their stubbly faces against each other, Sibilla finally learned the truth about her family. She and Federico were drifting from frame to frame, staring at the photographs, trying to parse the captions in English beneath – neither of them were fluent yet. They were going backwards, so first came the boring conference rooms – ‘Where the Federation’s fate was decided,’ Federico said. Here was a bejewelled woman – Princess Elizabeth in 1947. Here was a sleepy-eyed Indian man – he must be the Maharaja. Here were trolleys carting guests in floppy white hats to the Falls. Here was a train, the original Cape-to-Cairo.

  Federico swayed ahead in his wrinkled suit and paused.

  ‘Sibilla, Sibilla,’ he called urgently. She approached, trying not to scratch her itchy face.

  ‘Look.’ He pointed at the portrait. Sibilla smiled at the man’s vest and hat – so charmingly old-fashioned! Like Alba. She read the caption. The first hotelier. Gavuzzi.

  She frowned. ‘Was that not the name of…?’ She turned to Federico and they shouted out at the same time:

  ‘The Signora!’ she said.

  ‘It’s your grandfather!’ he exclaimed.

  They both laughed and stumbled on down the corridor. But after a moment, Sibilla grabbed her husband’s shoulder and turned him towards her. ‘Wait. What did you say?’

  Nobody had ever told Sibilla that Signora Lina was her aunt, or that the Signora’s brother Giacomo was her father, or that this man – Pietro Gavuzzi, who had apparently run this hotel in the middle of Africa – was her grandfather. Standing frozen before his portrait, trying to see her face in his, staring at the hat on his head, Sibilla was speechless as Federico explained her illegitimate life to her, insisting all the while that he’d assumed that she already knew.

  Only later that night, as she lay with her back to Federico in their fancy hotel bed, did the tears come, the stubble on her face deviating their path. Sibilla didn’t care that her father had abandoned her or that her aunt had made her work as a scullery maid. She didn’t even care that her mother had kept all of this from her. She cared that Federico had known, and that she hadn’t. Of all the torturous sec
rets between them, this was the one she could not brook – her husband had blithely let her believe that she was a bastard child with no past.

  * * *

  ‘What does this have to do with me, Mr Smith? I’m in charge of the dam, not the natives.’

  ‘Yes, of course. We just thought it might help if they could set eyes on it.’

  District Officer Smith was a tall Scotsman with a craggy face and a painstaking manner. He had once told Federico that he came from a family of fishermen, and Federico couldn’t help feeling that it was beneath his dignity to report to him.

  ‘The Tonga see the dam every day,’ Federico shrugged. ‘They certainly hear it.’

  The two men were silent a moment, listening to the fray of construction on the dam: the thudding drills eating away at the rocksolid gorge, the creaking of the cranes, the rumble of the water coming through the diversion tunnel, the pitter of dust against metal, the droning worksongs of the blacks.

  ‘Not all of the Tonga,’ said Smith. ‘These ones from Chipepo do not understand even the basic workings of a dam. They don’t believe their village will be flooded. A demonstration—’

  Federico laughed. ‘Did they not see the riverbanks overflow after the rains last year?’

  ‘The river floods every year, up to a point. They’re quite used to that. But they have not been persuaded that within the next few months, this entire valley will be underwater.’

  ‘Persuaded? The dam is already happening!’ Federico pointed at the scurry of work beyond the window. As if in response, rain spattered feebly against the glass. ‘Why do you not just round them up and move them again?’

  Smith’s pointy chin clenched. This was a sore spot for the British colonial officers. ‘That was a last resort. The black nationalists agitating for independence – you’ve heard of the African National Congress?’

  ‘Sì, I know them,’ Federico snorted. ‘They organised the dam labour strike last year.’

  ‘Well, they told the naïve villagers that if they stayed put, then the dam wouldn’t happen, that we would just give up. Our hands were tied – we had to send in the police.’

  Federico thought the police should have been sent in sooner. Somewhere in the passage from Europe to Africa, from Sergeant to Colonel, he had lost his idealism. Why did the British keep treating the natives like wayward children? They held long indabas, gave them money, took them to parcel out their new land – all to no avail. As if the Tonga, with quills in their noses and clay in their hair, with their topless women who knocked out their front teeth for fashion, weren’t destined to live off the land anyway. What did it matter where that land was?

  * * *

  With Federico at the dam all day, Sibilla had too much time and too few tasks on her hands. These days, when he left for the office after breakfast, she would linger in her robe at the crude wooden dining table and ruminate. Why had he wanted her to keep thinking she was beneath him, like Cinderella? Why had he let her believe that she was of poor birth, that she had no father, that he had saved her from his brother? If even one of them was not true, could she be sure of the rest?

  Young Enela was traipsing in and out of the room, clearing the plates. Sibilla reached into her robe and pulled out the postcard she’d bought at the hotel gift shop. It had become a talisman for her, its edges ribbed with fretting. She stared at in wonder. This was her grandfather, Pietro Gavuzzi (1870–1945), in his jaunty hat and vest. He stood arms akimbo before a crude building with a peaked roof and a wrap-around veranda – the original hotel – beside a giant sign that said VICTORIA FALLS. She had considered inscribing the postcard, sending it to her mother or to the Signora. Dear Aunt Lina…But that was not possible. Sibilla and Federico often lay awake all night calculating how long they could pull off this theft of the Colonel’s life. It was only a matter of time before someone found that corpse in the tomato patch.

  Sibilla turned the postcard over and read the copyright: Percy M. Clark, 1904. She sounded the name out loud. It did not seem Italian.

  ‘Oh-oh, you know that one, Ba Kalaki?’

  Sibilla looked up. Enela was standing next to her, a set of plates balanced on her forearm. She had overhead Sibilla say the name.

  ‘No. Do you know him?’

  ‘Yes, please! Ba Kalaki had a shop those sides at Mosi-oa-Tunya. And my uncle, he was working for him…’ The words faded as the girl waltzed into the kitchen with her tower of dishes.

  The natives here seemed to refer to every male in the community as a father or an uncle or a grandfather. But regardless of his relation to Enela, if this ‘uncle’ of hers had known the man who took the photograph, Mr Clark, maybe he had known Sibilla’s grandfather, too. The maternal line had been severed, but maybe she could trace the paternal line after all. Enela came back into the dining room, wiping her hands down her apron.

  ‘Can you take me to your uncle?’ Sibilla asked.

  ‘To Bashi Bernadetta? Ah-ah? For what?’ But before Sibilla could reply, Enela’s frown released and she abruptly relented. ‘Okay, it’s okay. We can go.’

  An hour later, they were bumping along a dirt road in one of the Impresit vehicles, Sibilla clad in gumboots and swathed in shawls. The driver’s presence seemed to mute Enela. As soon as they got out and began the last stretch to the village on foot, however, she raised the topic of dam displacement. Sibilla knew, from Federico’s scattered remarks, that the Tonga did not want to leave their homes. Enela explained that, while most of the villagers had agreed to go after the police had come, the old people still wished to remain. They had the right, they said, to stay with the dead, even if they would all be drowned when the river flooded.

  ‘The dead?’ Sibilla asked.

  ‘The dead are the spirits,’ said Enela. ‘But we also have the white God. And other gods – the animals. And Nyami Nyami, that is the god that is swimming in the Zambezi…’

  As Enela described this rivergod, with its serpentine body and whirlpool head, Sibilla’s hair bristled under her shawls. She knew the African witch doctors sometimes decorated themselves with raffia. Did the Tonga think she was some kind of fetish, some animal spirit to be worshipped? Sibilla’s suspicion grew when they reached the village, a cluster of mouldy thatched roofs held up by wooden poles, bundled goods here and there, ready to be transported.

  Enela cleared their way through the throng, speaking in Tonga, a heavy language that freighted the air with ceremony. The women, naked but for their string skirts, averted their eyes but the men lay on the ground and rolled side to side, clapping their hands against their thighs as a sign of respect. Sibilla longed to ask them to get up – the rains had already kneaded the ground to red dough – but she refrained, knowing they’d find it condescending.

  A plank was laid over the mud for her to enter one of the huts. An old native man in Western clothes was sitting on a wooden stool – this must be Enela’s uncle. He beamed as Sibilla approached but fumbled over her hand and she realised that he could not see – his eyes had the blueish tinge that Nonna Giovanna’s used to have. Sibilla sat on a stool and Enela introduced her as the wife of the bwana at Kariba. Only then did Sibilla understand that she was here not as a demi-god but because of her husband. The Tonga wanted her to serve as an emissary for the suicidal elders. Enela bowed and crouched out of the hut backwards.

  Sibilla let her shawl fall away with relief – it was hot and fetid in here. The uncle grinned at her. He had no teeth, but she couldn’t tell if this was age, health or Tonga custom – many of the women outside were also missing their front teeth. Rain rustled the thatch roof. A mosquito looped ringingly round. Not for the first time, Sibilla was glad for the protective net of her hair.

  ‘My name is Sibilla Gavuzzi,’ she began.

  ‘Mmmmm!’ The old man clapped and smiled. ‘Me. I am N’gulube.’

  * * *

  ‘They shot them,’ Smith said after a moment. �
��Eight Tonga men died on my watch.’

  Federico looked at him, puzzled. ‘Sì, but the Tonga declared war against your queen!’

  ‘War?’ Smith laughed bitterly. ‘The villagers beat drums and threw rocks. They nailed misspelt manifestos to trees. They marched up and down in bare feet, imitating our police squadron, carrying spears on their shoulders as we carry rifles. Do you know how many spears were thrown? Hundreds! Not one policeman was injured. But eight bullets found their mark in the civilians.’ Smith stood, put his hands in his pockets, and strolled over to the window. ‘I dare say, Colonel, it was quite like Cain and Abel. Brothers murdering brothers.’

  Federico started, then gave a forced chuckle. ‘You think the blacks are our brothers?’

  Smith turned to frown at him. ‘No. The policemen shooting them were natives too.’

  ‘Ah.’ Federico tried to divert the topic from fratricide. ‘Well, if you think a demonstration of the dam will help—’ He was interrupted by the sound of a horn. It came in deafening blasts over the racket of construction and rain. Federico jumped up from his desk and ran to the window.

  ‘The high-water signal!’ he shouted over the din. ‘It’s too soon!’

  But Smith was staring at him, shouting something incomprehensible.

  ‘What?!’

  ‘I thought!’ the Scotsman shouted, pointing down at Federico’s leg. ‘You had! A limp!’

  Federico shrugged, but panic was hammering through his body. The horns were still blasting. There was nothing to see out there – the floods had not yet come – but to distract Smith, he gestured out the window. And as if he had conjured her, there, suddenly, was his wife.