many animals in this house, what with my little Paolucci…’ She turned, already bored with the missing girl, and trotted back to her sotted guests.
Federico stayed. He knelt on the floor of the larder and pulled the hair from the pillow but it caught. He tugged. Aha! It was several hairs, braided together, and tied to a heavy jar on the floor of the larder. From there, it hooked around the corner of the entrance and snaked along the kitchen floor, all the way to the back door – he opened it – and down the steps into the garden, the wintry garden where just a week ago, he and Sibilla had walked and talked together.
Federico was too drunk to pursue the thread that night. But the next morning, he picked it up and followed it out through the creaky garden gate. He discovered that the braid, or rather the series of braids – Sibilla had cleverly knotted them end to end – continued into the distance, wrapped around tree stumps and posts, as the road switched up and back, climbing the hill to the forest.
* * *
Being trapped in the cabin made Sibilla’s hair restive. It undulated like gracile tentacles, and sometimes pythoned around her when she wasn’t paying attention. She knew it wasn’t out to destroy her, though. It protected her, kept her from coming undone, formed a roped arena for the spinning she had discovered inside her in the Signora’s salon. If that inner whorl was a tornado, her hair was the vault of the sky – it held her to a horizon. But as her days of confinement dragged on, the tension between inner force and outer constraint grew. Waiting made it worse. Anticipation was an enchantment: every creak was a footstep, every birdcall a greeting.
Her mother’s arrival each night was a terrible deflation. Adriana would stomp in complaining about her job. She had become obsessed with the Signora’s bird: a luxury too far! An animal that ate human food! And gave nothing back but noise and shit! Sibilla said nothing. She just nodded and served the meal she had cooked for them and washed their bowls. But her silence gentled as the evening went on. It was almost companionable when they went to bed. By that point in the night, Adriana’s empty chatter had come to seem soothing, a kind of company, like sitting by a babbling brook. It was a version of family better than most.
* * *
Longing for a better coat, Federico doggedly tracked the trail of hair through the snow, from tree to sapling to fence post to rock. Between these poles, the braided line hung suspended, fallen snow clinging to it in little triangles like the banners of a medieval battle – all white, all surrender. Sometimes he would lose the thread under a snowdrift. Then he would find it again and chuckle. He was so charmed by the trick of it – though in truth he was half-charmed by his own charm. He had always loved a quest, the sparkle it sprinkles on a mystery.
Federico had lost his faith in the church as an adolescent, the moment that he had compared what he knew of sex with what he had been told about God. A little while later, he lost his faith in war. When he was a boy, war had seemed like the only way out of a standstill life in the landed gentry. As the youngest son of a titleless nobile, he was too rich to work, too poor to play. The military seemed ideal: a balance of work and play. But with a myth for an older brother – the Colonel always away in Abyssinia or Libya – Federico had developed a rather abstract image of war: an exalted space of pure momentum; a blur of racing legs and spinning wheels; fire and smoke curling across a map.
Then, on 10 October 1944, nearly eight years after Mussolini joined the Axis, 2,000 members of the Allied resistance came down from the hills of Piedmont. They swept through Alba, retaking the puppet government of Salo and establishing a Partisan Republic. The bells of the town’s nine churches quarrelled clamorously. The townspeople stood in the streets, applauding with fervour or fear. The Partisans marched through in their motley outfits, gathering whores and cars and petrol, knocking on the doors of registered army officers and emerging with guns and gear – Federico recognised the insignia of black and yellow frogs from