or needed each other (was there a difference?), the secrets that bound them making their sex feel fraught, as if it were a means of survival. Federico felt the faintest echo of an erection, as far off as a cry over hill and dale. When had his wife stopped wearing perfume? When had she stopped spinning?
A flash of memory: Sibilla on the edge of Kariba Dam, surrounded by a black throng, some foolishness about saving the Tonga, or not saving them – letting them stay and drown? That was the day the floods came, the terrible floods – ’57 or ’58? Federico thought of his dead men. Edmundo who had requested the church bell. Giovanni the foreman. Pietro. He raised his stein to his lips, eyes gazing into the middle distance. Federico’s skin was an empty suit now. He lived elsewhere, in the past, wandering in a ruin of his own making. Why bother being kind in the present?
* * *
Isabella was not a religious person, but she insisted on being married in a church, by a priest. The wedding would thus proceed without the colour and shine that adorns a Hindu bride and groom. No red, no gold, no purple henna. Balaji’s Aunt Pavithra almost spat in his face when he broke the news to her. He had already thwarted years of community matchmaking by choosing this white girl-child. And now they would be forced to endure a white wedding to boot?
‘That is the colour for a widow!’ she cried. ‘Here, at least, a red shawl.’ She pressed it into her nephew’s hands. Balaji refused it.
‘Sincerest apologies, Aunty. But my bride will wear white-white-white,’ he said, not without a smidgen of pride. ‘It is what her father is wishing.’
This was to give the decision an air of authority. But who knows what Isa’s father, the lifelong atheist, would have wished? Perhaps instead of that frothy white apparatus around Isa, the Colonel would have found gilded silks more suitable. Perhaps if he’d had the chance to run his hands presumptuously over Aunt Pavithra’s gold-threaded sari at the wedding, he would have slurred in her gold-riddled ear: ‘Isa should have worn your type of thing! Very exotic.’ But the Colonel never got the chance to bond with his in-law or insult his daughter, because three weeks before the wedding, Simon’s knocks to the study door, pokes to his cheek and shoves to his arm each in turn failed to wake the Colonel from his final sleep. His daily river of gin had reversed and drowned him.
They didn’t postpone the wedding. They couldn’t afford to change those bookings now that they had to pay for a funeral as well. The church service at the Catholic mission for the Colonel was short and only a few people were in attendance: six retired Kariba men, the family, Balaji and the workers. The burial at Leopards Hill cemetery was quick, too, a perfunctory transaction with the ground. Sibilla, a black veil over her hair, watched the groundsmen lower the coffin into its hole as Enela warbled a weepy dirge in Tonga and the priest splattered holy water over it. The Colonel would have hated this, but he’d left no instructions and these were the rituals. Besides, Sibilla thought with a hint of bitterness, he hadn’t let the tribal elders die in Kariba as they wished, either.
Her mind was full of his name, his real name, not the one he’d stolen from his brother. Federico, she thought, Federico, Federico, repeating it with the mechanical exactitude of an insect. Behind the mourning veil and the fall of hair that doubly pixellated her view, Sibilla was settling into a great relief. She finally had permission to set her marriage down. She had loved Federico once, yes, completely. The momentum of that love had carried her all the way to this country only to come to a halt. Sibilla had often recalled their honeymoon at Victoria Falls, too, not with Federico’s dreamy nostalgia but as the moment when their love had stalled in front of that portrait of her grandfather, Pietro Gavuzzi.
Over the years, this betrayal had eaten away at the ties binding her to Federico, wearing the strings down until, one day in 1972, they broke. They had just moved from Siavonga to Lusaka. Federico had started a desk job here and now that they weren’t living out in the bush, Sibilla had finally allowed herself to get pregnant at age thirty-three. She’d been sitting outside on the