the sleeves so it spilled out at the cuffs like the spaventapasseri that scared the birds from the tomato garden. Adriana tutted. What a waste!
She loved this coat: it was woollen and warm and had purple satin lining. Sometimes, in the brief amnesia of waking up, she would catch a glimpse of its insides gleaming from where it hung on the cabin wall and her eyes would slide hungrily along its surface. It reminded her of Giacomo’s slippery inner lip. Had this been her downfall – this desire to touch beautiful things with her hand, her tongue? Maybe it was her arrogance, the idea that she had the right to touch anything at all.
The rain came. Pulling her collar over her head now, Adriana ducked under the cover of the trees, glancing warily at the terraced vineyards above the road. The rain could easily make precipitous mud out of the soil. She thought of the fable Giovanna liked to tell Sibilla, about the villa and the borgo near the Castello di Monticello, how one year the rains were so heavy, the roads had turned to liquid mud that coursed down and seeped into the peasants’ homes, and the rough mud-dwellers and the rich bean-heads had shouted at each other all night until…
Adriana stepped in a puddle. She cursed and crossed herself. As she walked on, water squelching from the hole in the toe, she began to calculate if she could afford the cobbler, her fingers twitching with ghostly enumeration. Everything cost so much these days. The war had swelled the world with want. It had made everything rare and therefore precious.
* * *
Sibilla’s chest was heaving. She wanted to go back inside and wait for Nonna to wake up, but she was afraid to stand up in this fierce wind. Sometimes, hair would flap out from her body and she would slowly reel it back in. After a while, it wasn’t so bad to crouch in the wind, waiting. She examined the blades of grass between her feet, which were different from the wilty clumps her mother had brought inside to show her. The sky was grey now but this outside grass was the greenest green she’d ever seen, and it shivered in the wind like Nonna’s sleeping face.
When the wind finally died down, Sibilla stood and wrapped her hair around her waist, crossing her arms to keep it taut. Then she stepped forward gingerly, trying not to trip over the hairs ambushing her feet, and followed the trail of grass. At first she looked at the ground, but as she gained confidence, she began to look up, to smell and hear more. After a few minutes of walking, she found herself in a grove of tall trees with rough bark and spiky branches. She circled one. It exhaled a peppery scent. She parted the hairs on her face so she could lick its bark.
She only noticed the raindrops pattering the crown of her head when a heavier one struck her there. She looked up and saw three sets of lines crossing each other: her hair, the tree needles, and rain. Again something struck her, this time on her back, then fell to the ground. But if rain was hard, why didn’t the roof of the cabin break, or the window?
‘Mostro! Mostro!
Sibilla looked over her shoulder. Between the tall thick trees of the grove were four shorter skinnier trees. She peered as they melted into stumps and then rapidly grew again, their branches spinning wildly. Her eyes sprang wide as she saw the stones whipping towards her.
* * *
If war had introduced the rich to the panic of an empty stomach, survival had bred a new luxury among the poor. After Signora Lina’s husband had died, when the other servants had left Villa Serra and the rations had begun to run low, she had come to depend entirely on Adriana. Adriana knew how to squeeze the last droplets from a cow’s teat, how to combine them with an egg for a meal, how to make gruel from the grains the Signora had once scattered for the birds. The Signora compensated Adriana for these skills with beautiful, inedible things: the coat with the purple satin lining, the watch with a spiral face that lay on Giovanna’s wrist like a snail, the necklace of bluegreen glass beads that Adriana kept inside her pillow, an oriental vase that held in its belly dust and an awful silence.
This secondhand collection had become