Sibilla tossed the coat aside and stepped barefoot into the water. Her hairs puckered its surface, drifted drowsily. Federico took off his boots to join her. They smiled at their underwater feet. Then he leapt onto the bank.
‘Che cos’è?!’ Sibilla asked. ‘A snake?’
A school of fishes. She could feel them biting her ankles too now. Federico was already putting his boots back on, grumbling about the dangers of barefootedness. She looked down at the translucent creatures swarming her feet, darting in and out of the tangles of her hair. Were they hungry? No. Biting is just an expression of curiosity for those without hands. But she had the feeling that, left to their own devices, they might nibble her to the bone.
Sibilla shuddered off her footmaidens and stepped out of the creek. She spread the coat out and sat, waiting for Federico to stop talking. Finally, he looked at her. She looked at him. Her hair trembled.
As is usual for the first time between a man and a woman, the woman was dissatisfied, the man satisfied too soon. Federico rolled onto his back. Sibilla’s hand was still on his wrist and his pulse ticked faintly, erratically, like cooling metal. They lay there for a while on her mother’s coat, in the seep of his semen and the creep of the gloaming, looking up at the trees above nuzzling their leafy heads.
‘Try again?’ she whispered, and he did.
1956
Ding dong, said the bird.
The brothers Corsale were in the Signora’s salon. The other guests had not yet arrived. The Colonel was sitting in his velvet chair, poking into the grey parrot’s cage as it hopped about, squawking its echoes. Lina stood by the fire, pouring drinks into tumblers on the mantel. Federico was pacing furiously, his ponytail swinging like a whip as he speechified.
‘The Italians forced the Africans to fight one another. And for what? For ideals utterly beyond their comprehension. The native has no notion of empire or democracy or the future.’
‘No sense of time at all,’ the Colonel muttered. ‘Kaffirs are always bloody late.’
Bloody, bloody! said the bird.
‘You’ve missed the point!’ Federico exclaimed. ‘Abyssinia was meant to be our greatest achievement. To take Fort Ual-Ual was one thing. But when we used the ascari for the invasion, we lost our souls, our dignity. We set them on each other like…like cannibals.’
‘They’re already bloody cannibals! Curse of Ham.’
Ham! Ham!
‘Shhhh, Paolucci,’ said Lina indulgently. ‘It isn’t true,’ she said to the men. ‘When I was in Rhodesia as a girl, they did not eat men. Other disgusting things – caterpillars, rats. But not men.’
‘They eat the enemy’s brain to ward off evil.’ The Colonel turned from the bird cage and grinned. ‘It’s a sacrificial culture.’
‘But that’s what we did to them,’ said Federico. ‘We forced them to sacrifice—’
‘I always say,’ the Colonel was musing, ‘that the only way to kill a cannibal is to spice him up for the next cannibal. Poison for poison.’ He tipped his whisky glass back with a wink.
‘We are the ones who used poison! Mustard-gas bombs, against the Geneva Convention—’
Poison mustard!
The Colonel groaned. ‘Your righteous cynicism is extremely distasteful, Federico.’
But Federico kept talking about the colonies, about the loss of land after the war. L’Impero Italiano was being burned to the ground. ‘They are like embers touched by the winds of change, these uprisings against us.’
Lina smiled. ‘But France and Belgium and Spain, their empires are falling too.’
‘It is always like this,’ said the Colonel. ‘How children fall asleep: slowly, then all at once.’
‘The natives are children,’ said Federico. ‘They think they’re at war with Europe, with the Queen. But they’re throwing tantrums. Running their own nations?! Children playing house.’
‘Children!’ the Colonel exclaimed. ‘Is that what you would call the Mau Mau?’
Mau, said the bird. Mau. Mau. Mau.
‘You’ve turned my bird into a cat,’ Lina scolded the Colonel. ‘Aren’t you afraid to go back?’ She drifted over to him, carrying a candelabra with only a quarter of the candles lit.
‘No, no,’ the Colonel dismissed the air with a flat palm. ‘Those brutes don’t scare me.’
‘What are you saying?’ Federico frowned. ‘Going back?’
‘Our dear Colonel,’ said Lina sadly. ‘He’s leaving us for Africa. What a misery!’
Misery!
‘I’ve secured a position.’ The Colonel leaned back and laced his fingers. ‘With Fiat.’
Fiat!
‘They have formed a civil engineering unit with Impresit. They are building the biggest dam in the world on the Zambezi river. And in six months, I will be there to oversee it.’
‘Six months!’ Federico exclaimed. ‘So soon?’
‘Yes, Lina has worked