his brother’s old uniform. Drunk on courage, he signed up as a badogliani the next day. He was only sixteen years old but because of his education, he was promptly promoted to the rank of sergeant.
It turned out that, in practice, being a soldier resisting the Nazis meant late-night foot patrols, dull days of shooting practice, and a great deal of waste: good soil ploughed up by bullets from the machine guns, casings strewn everywhere like the husks of seeds. Farms and houses were taken over by lazy, uncouth men, the buildings reverting to wood and stone, the men to animals. There were shallow graves everywhere – any step you took was as liable to land on a corpse’s hand as in a pile of shit. Worst of all was the stink of futility. After just twenty-three days of occupation, the Fascists took the city back from the Partisans and held it until the Armistice the following year.
Federico felt distraught, listless. He had not served, he had only waited. There was nothing to do once the war was over but commiserate with his older brother, who had been injured in brave but minor fashion in the second Abyssinian campaign. Upon his return to Alba, Colonel Corsale had dabbled at farming and local politics, but it suited him better to spend his days limping through the forest shooting for sport and his nights telling old war stories at Signora Lina’s parties. When Federico pitched up at Villa Serra after the Armistice was announced on the radio, his brother opened the door in full regalia and gave him a slow salute.
‘Welcome to Limbo!’ the Colonel cried, clapping Federico on the back. ‘It’s even worse than Inferno.’
The parties at Villa Serra were indeed depressing. In a rage of boredom, Federico often found himself prodding his brother to argue with him. Federico wanted to talk about the war, the ideals it had gestated, the deformed monsters it had birthed – like the colonies, which were now roiling with revolution, intent on independence. But the Colonel just laughed at these philosophical questions. He had long ago decided that the world was only tolerable if you could find the humour in it. Federico glared at him bitterly. How could you laugh when glory had proven a mutter? When democracy was stillborn?
The broken promises of the church, the Partisans, the war: Federico had become a man always sighing in the ruins. Though it be a melancholy song, a sigh is a song all the same. It was not that he had lost his faith entirely but rather that he had been blessed with a dolorous faith – a faith premised on loss, and thus endlessly renewable. When he had first seen the hairy girl spin in the Signora’s salon, he had felt his ribs stretch near to splintering. The Colonel had muttered something crude in his ear of course, but Federico had just waved him off and watched.
The girl’s tresses dove and fluttered as they whipped around her, her pale form gleaming under the smog of hair. And when she stopped and her hair kept going, when it bound her so tight that it smothered her, when his brother cut her loose and raised her like Lazarus from his bindings, and when he himself wiped the blood from her back – then Federico Corsale knew faith again. It flooded him now, as he reached the top of a hill, and saw a thread of her hair vanish under the door of an old hunting cabin.
* * *
Sibilla was sitting on the floor, her eyes closed, listening for the sound of her inner spin, its whir like the throaty coo of a dove. A knock on the door lifted her to her feet before her eyes were even open. She raced to it and shouted instructions and waited while he found the key in the tomato garden and unlocked the door. They stood facing each other across the threshold. She was grinning at him, choked with joy. The Sergeant, measled with snowflakes, shivered happily at the sight of her, or maybe at his own sense of triumph. ‘I found you!’ he kept saying as she led him inside and sat him on a chair by the hearth and fixed him a cup of chicory coffee.
He sipped and talked and talked and sipped, giving her a detailed account of his discovery of her absence, and the trail of hair, and his journey through the snow. His mouth was like