a miracle with her father’s old friends in Northern Rhodesia. So you see, Federico,’ the Colonel smiled, ‘the empire isn’t really dead. Even as we speak, it is rising from the ashes.’
Ashes! Ashes!
* * *
Every night now, Colonel Corsale came knocking. Sibilla would sigh and put on her shift and let him in on her way out. She would sit in the outer dark, letting him and her mother enjoy their little pleasure. Then the Colonel began to arrive earlier in the evening, before Adriana even got home. He’d lounge about, or pace with his rocking limp, regaling Sibilla with stories about hair. He showed her a picture of a Negress with a towering headdress woven out of her lover’s hair. He told Sibilla about Chinese girls in the seventh century who embroidered pictures of the Buddha with their hair, and about the elaborate sculptural poufs Marie Antoinette had worn.
‘Don’t you ever wonder,’ he asked once, raking his fingers down the air and trembling them as if to mime rain, ‘why you are this way?’
‘No,’ she said curtly.
‘Not curious?’ The Colonel cocked his head. ‘Well, I have been corresponding about your condition with Herr Doktor Klein – quite an expert, I met him in ’42 – and he says…’
Sibilla had no interest in these hairy tales, which always felt like bait. She had grown to despise this bulky man, with his opinions and commands. Spin for me, ragnatela. Talk to me. He even brought the Signora’s bird with him one time, to amuse her. At first, she had been intrigued by the idea of a talking bird. In reality, Paolucci was ugly and loud. Like the Colonel. He was always going on about his African adventures past and future: Kenya and Libya and Rhodesia; the lions and tigers and elephants he planned to kill. His talk stirred her, made her feel staticky. She preferred Federico with his blunt body and borrowed stories, the way he treated her hair as a charm rather than a curiosity. She kept the brothers’ visits secret from each other.
‘Isn’t it grand?’ the Colonel would say. ‘To have a little wife hidden in the woods!’
Sibilla resented his presumption but said nothing. It was as if all those years ago, when he had flattened his palms over her face the better to see her, Colonel Corsale had somehow taken possession of her.
‘What if it passes down to your child?’ he asked now, sprawled grotesquely on her bed.
‘What do you mean?’ Sibilla snapped. She was seated at the hearth of the cabin, polishing the old spiral-faced watch the Signora had given her mother.
‘Don’t you know how it works? There’s you. And a man. And when you kiss…’ he grinned.
She clucked at his vulgarity. The Colonel started droning on about a man named Mandelbrot, about heredity and genes. Sibilla was curious, especially about what he called ‘the paternal line’, but too anxious to pay attention. She glanced at the door. Federico might arrive any moment. Recently, he had started hectoring her to marry him. Rather than run off, he had said, why not stay in Piedmont, have some children, settle in a small house, some place private of course? Sibilla was irritated by this – she wanted to escape this cabin, not just shift to another.
‘…wrote to another friend,’ the Colonel was saying, ‘a scientist. And he believes…’
Sibilla pictured the brothers staring at each other over the threshold. Often, when she lay beside Federico in the forest, pine needles itching her skin, his hands distracted in her hair, she longed to turn to him and say: ‘You know, your brother comes to see us.’ Or, ‘I met that stupid parrot.’ But confessing the secret would mean confessing how long she had been keeping it.
‘…asked for a photo of you,’ the Colonel said. ‘I provided a sketch instead and—’
‘A sketch!’ The watch dropped in Sibilla’s lap. ‘How dare you!’ she hissed.
* * *
Federico did not come to the cabin every day. If he stayed away too long, he would find Sibilla in a huff, her eyes dim and slightly crossed behind her hair. This short-focus trick bothered him. Her attention was precisely why he came to see her. It was like a hammock – swaying, flexible – where he could rest the thoughts running amok in his head. When her eyes retreated behind her thicket, he drew her out with war stories, his own scant collection, but more often, his brother’s: dark, violent tales that made her eyes return