dragged them around the world for a time – the Savoy in London again, the Plaza in Buenos Aires. The Gavuzzi family had finally returned to Piedmont in the early 1920s.
So much migration at such an early age lent the Gavuzzi children a slapdash worldliness. They had money but their education was poor, their manners poorer. When Lina came of age, she married a local governor in Alba and moved into his family estate, Villa Serra. Her younger brother Giacomo never quite settled down. Rootless, restless, he became a professional malingerer. Like the other men in Alba with empty heads and idle hands, Giacomo spent his days drinking and recovering from drink, mostly at his sister’s home, where he knew he would be waited upon in style. That was how he met Adriana, who worked there as a domestic servant. It was not a serious affair and everyone knew Giacomo had left his seed in more than one woman in Alba. Of these, Adriana was the only one who had birthed a baby covered with hair.
Maybe Giacomo Gavuzzi was not to blame. But Adriana vowed that she would not name their daughter, as was customary, after his mother, Ada – not an Italian name, anyway, and too recognisable in a town as small as Alba, and suspiciously like her own name besides. Instead, Adriana named the baby after an oracle card, the kind that you use to read Tarot. She found it at Villa Serra while washing dishes. It was stuck to the base of a wine glass, which she had upturned to pour out the syrupy remainder of Barbera. The card was large and creased and had a sketch of a stout dame in a feathered hat rebuking an aristocratic fellow. In florid script across the top it said Contrarietà and, across the bottom, Dispiacere.
The moment Adriana read it, she felt the sharp knuckly clutch of her first contraction. She gasped a curse and crossed herself. She took a breath and continued to wash dishes as contractions quaked over her until it became clear this was the event she had been anticipating. It was time to head to the house on the outskirts of town where midwives served the less fortunate. As she shuffled towards the back door of the kitchen, Adriana decided – or rather the decision made itself. To name a child Displeasure was obviously to ask for it, so she chose the word on the back of the card. Sibilla.
* * *
Little Sibilla grew up well loved and close-kept. She lived with her mother and grandmother in an old hunting cabin in the woods, which she was not permitted to leave. The cabin was only one small room but for practical reasons, Sibilla slept in her own bed, with a white sheet that grew webbed each night and a pillow that rose with her every morning, her tangles having netted it like a fish. Her hair, as it grew, was thin and straight and dark, a brown that yearned to be black. It gave off warmth and shine and smell – a mixture of the food they ate and the lard soap they used.
By the time she was four, Sibilla had learned the general pattern of her hair’s growth. The hair on her crown and face were the same, as if her scalp simply continued down her forehead and cheeks, skirting the eyes and the lips. The hair on her arms, legs and torso was longer. Every day, it grew until it matched her height – if you suspended it from her body, it would form a sphere. Sibilla had some hairless patches, which she cherished, counting them off every night as she went to sleep, a rosary of mercy: navel, nipples, ears, soles, palms, the spaces between the toes and the fingers. She did not realise it yet but her genitals were bare too.
While Sibilla’s mother was at work, her grandmother took care of her. Giovanna washed Sibilla and fed her, pruned her like a zealous gardener and burned the daily pile of hair outside to fertilise her tomato garden. Giovanna taught Sibilla numbers and letters and everything she knew about what was visible from their one window: the Lanaro river; the hulking Castello di Monticello d’Alba with its square, round and octagonal towers; le Alpi in the distance. Giovanna told her granddaughter stories about Gianduja the peasant, with his tricorn hat, red and brown jacket and his duja of beer, lovely Giacometta always sitting