thick, wet chuckles. ‘I got what I wanted.’
Federico looked down at Sibilla, unconscious in his arms, though her hair was still moving. He carried her outside and laid her carefully in the tomato garden. Then he strode back into the cabin, straddled his brother again, and gutted the pockets of his uniform – slashed them open and took out the Colonel’s identification papers, his wallet, his lighter and cigarettes. Federico spoke fiercely to the bleeding face beneath him, recounting all the things he was taking.
‘Your name. Your job. Your honours,’ Federico hissed out his list. ‘Your future.’
He left only one thing: the hunting knife – in the middle of the Colonel’s chest.
* * *
Sibilla woke up outside in the tomato patch. Federico was crouching beside her, pecking her forehead mechanically. The smell of fresh soil bloomed all around them. The cabin door was open. Where was the Colonel? She looked at Federico but he avoided her eyes as he helped her up. He was sweaty, his clothes soiled. He put his arm around her shoulder as he hurried her down the path away from her home. She was shivering. Her hair felt electric.
As they stumbled along under the blustery bright sky, Federico explained the plan. They would travel by car to Naples and spend the night there. The ship for Suez left in the morning. They would touch down at Aden, Djibouti and Mombasa before they reached Dar es Salaam and travelled overland to Bulawayo. His brother had been talking about the itinerary of his African enterprise for so long that Federico knew it by heart. It was laid out like a destiny. They just had to reach out and take it. A new life! They would have to take precautions, of course. Sibilla would have to shave her face completely, every day. He would have to cut his codino and grow out his moustache. And she would have to call him by a new name. He was no longer Federico. He was ‘Colonel Giuseppe Corsale’.
Sibilla assented to the plan in a kind of fugue state. Every time she called him by his brother’s name, she saw double, the Colonel’s face floating over Federico’s like a spectre. The further they got from Alba, the closer they got to the dubiously named ‘Federation’ where they were to make their home, the more Sibilla, too, felt like a double of herself. It became a kind of itch under her skin that competed with the real itch over her skin from shaving her hair every day – at least thrice a day – during the journey.
Concealment was a constant preoccupation. Every door that opened led to yet another close-walled space – a hotel room, a ship cabin, a vehicle, a caboose. Some were less sturdy than others, some better lit, some shook or rolled or dipped, but they were all a suffocation of planes and corners. It seemed that the world was one giant house and Sibilla was trapped inside it, doomed to traverse it – even its vastest oceans – via a series of connected rooms.
She finally got some fresh air once they reached Tanzania three weeks later. She stepped out onto the balcony of the hotel room in Dar es Salaam. It was night. Without her usual veil of hair, the moon was like stripped bone. The buildings and roads of the city looked clean and institutional under it. Only the smell of smoke and salt, the heat and the sounds – of birds and insects and the sea – told her she was in a new place. She heard a familiar ring: a bicycle bell. She looked down at the road below as a man wheeled by, a temple of bananas on his back. He paused as he met a pedestrian, a man wearing a turban – was he Arab? After a brief chat, they both glanced up at her. Sibilla waved. They did not wave back. She put her hand to her bristling face.
* * *
Federico had finally put his military training to use. But even as he’d led a trembling Sibilla away from the cabin, even as he’d designed an escape plan and executed it, an image had niggled his mind. It was like Chinese acupuncture – that subtle, that potent. When he had first rushed into the cabin and seen those two too-familiar bodies entangled, Sibilla’s hair had been slithering and twining around the Colonel’s limbs – as if suffused with desire. The image haunted Federico, mocked