an automa. She sat on the floor and watched it open and close for some time. Then, to their mutual surprise, she interrupted. She told him her version of things, about how at first, locked in that dark, smelly larder, she had plucked out her hair, one strand at a time. How she had found an old knife under a sack of polenta and sawed wretched swathes of hair off herself, her skin flaming red then cooling white. She’d had to twist her arm over her shoulder to sever the hairs from her back. But she had made sure to pull out enough to braid into a firm thread. She had spooled it into a ball and trailed it from her pocket as her mother dragged her back to this cabin where, if he hadn’t come, she would have been trapped forever…
The Sergeant’s mouth was open, his eyes wide. Sibilla was breathing so heavily that her hair pulsed with it. The fire smacked its lips. The Sergeant smiled.
‘Certo,’ he said. On the journey here, he lied, he had wondered how she had managed to make such a long thread for him to follow. But he had decided that she must have used the cut hair from the garden – the hair in the ground, remember? Sibilla did remember, and she said so, and smiled at him, relieved that he remembered too. She wasn’t a fool after all.
‘And how is Villa Serra?’ she asked shyly.
‘Oh. Well. There is a terrible bird that my brother gave to Lina. It talks and you—’
‘It talks?’
‘It says what you teach it,’ he laughed. ‘Lina, of course, has neglected its training…’
He removed his jacket as the fire warmed his bones, freeing his arms to gesticulate as he told her all about the social intricacies of the salon at Villa Serra. She slumped and examined her hands.
‘…going on and on about the damned babies in—’
‘Babies?’ She looked up.
‘My brother, the Colonel, was boasting,’ he scoffed. ‘That in Africa they would string up babies over a long fire.’
‘Dio, that’s terrible,’ said Sibilla, her eyes alight with revulsion.
Federico nodded seriously. ‘And they would sit there and just watch them burn.’
‘I cannot believe Italians would do such a thing,’ she said.
‘No, no!’ Federico clucked. ‘The natives!’ His disgust soon found a new object. ‘Even after we brought them our “God” and our “civilised ways”. It is an abomination what we did to the ascari, to make them fight their own brothers…’
‘Ascari?’
‘Black soldiers,’ he murmured. ‘War is a nightmare, Sibilla,’ he said, gazing solemnly out of the window. ‘It is a sickness, no matter the colour of the hand that grips the weapon.’
‘What kind of weapon?’
‘Guns, sicuro.’ He frowned. ‘In Africa they use assegai.’ He glanced at her. ‘I’ve heard.’
Her eyes glowed behind her hair like eggs in a nest. ‘What is an assegai?’
Thus began a coincidence of four lips. In the beginning, those lips opened and shut across the room as Federico and Sibilla chatted. As the weeks passed and Federico continued to visit, they moved closer together until one day, those lips were opening and closing up against each other, silently, urgently. They mouthed blindly, spoke in tongues, each scandalised by the other’s willingness to go further. Her hair writhed and knotted, tangled between them. Once, she tugged away from him and whispered: ‘Does it repulse you?’
Federico’s lips were still mouthing the air. He closed them and opened his eyes. ‘What?
‘My hair. Does it—’
Federico pulled her to him and kissed the top of her head. She nestled into his shoulder and her hair seemed to soften, as well.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk about the plan.’
‘What plan?’ Federico murmured into her skull, his voice humming through the bone.
‘To leave this place.’
* * *
One night a few months later, Sibilla woke to the sound of the key scraping the lock. It was still dark but on the verge of dawn, that briefest spell when even the insects are asleep. The cabin door opened and Sibilla heard her mother curse as she tripped over the doorsill. Sibilla turned onto her other side. Then she heard more sounds: a snort, feet stumbling, whispers, a glugging bottle, the hollow whistle of lips across its mouth. It sounded like two people, laughing at each other, hushing each other, laughing at the hushing and hushing the laughter and so on. A stupid game: the cabin was too small for secrets. Sibilla sat up.
‘I can hear you,’ she said.
Her mother squealed. The man buried his guffaw in