him from the mirror in the shape of the moustache he was growing as a disguise. It hovered before him all the way to Africa.
Between visits to a lethargic Sibilla in their tiny single-portholed cabin, Federico stood on the lower deck and watched this immense, enigmatic continent slip by. Sometimes the African coast seemed featureless, monotonous, blank. Other times, it grinned, drooped, raged. Come! it beckoned. Go! it boomed. The sea obeyed. Beyond the white line of the surf, colossal rainforests loomed, so dark green they were almost black. Grey specks of civilisation were here and there embedded in the gloom, an occasional flag flying to pronounce that the white man had at least landed here. Federico felt the majesty of it, but also the futility. Those settlements, over a century old, had made barely a dent in the untouched expanse of the inner continent. So much for the cause of progress and reason in Africa.
He realised how mistaken he was when they made their way inland to the Federation – a slow and difficult journey on the southern access road to the dam construction site. The West had arrived in the interior, but it had brought its worst tendencies with it: bureaucracy, venality, banality. The European labourers drank local beer and smoked bush pipes. They hunted for food rather than for sport. They walked around with their shirts off, insulting and ordering and punishing i negri to fluff their egos. The Tonga workers, paid a pittance, were impenetrable, with their opaque skin and broad smiles and nodding deference. The dam workers were altogether as coarse as the paesani who had worked the fields and vineyards in Piedmont and joined the Partisan War. Federico was in the same position he had occupied then as a sixteen-year-old sergeant: anxious that they did not respect him, yet unwilling to stoop to their level.
While the other head engineers spent their time out on the site, mingling with this hoi polloi, Federico elected to stay in the office all day. This surprised his superiors: they had hired Colonel Corsale under the impression that he enjoyed being outdoors, hunting and fighting. Federico begged off. His old war injury was acting up, he lied, and he even began to fake a slight limp. Plus the sun here in the Gwembe Valley was far more vicious than it had been in Abyssinia, he noted. As rainy season approached, the temperature rose daily to 110°F. The office was smotheringly hot too but Federico swore otherwise.
He became a living filing cabinet for green folders of blueprints, schedules, orders, receipts, the edges of the pages curling from the humidity, their interiors riddled with holes from the ants. He shuffled and rifled and slid them around energetically, as if building the dam with thin flat slices. Every night, he went home, drank gin and made love to Sibilla to dissolve the clutter to blankness. And every morning, he encased himself in his unnecessary suit and went back to his stacks of paper.
* * *
The Africans in Siavonga were politer than those in Dar es Salaam, but Sibilla suspected they had no choice about it. The township for the dam labourers was divided into segregated housing. The Italians and the Brits lived at the top of a steep hill, in simple houses that were nevertheless palatial compared to the hovels at the bottom of the hill for the blacks. The other expat wives bonded over trying to do their domestic duties in this rocky, hot wilderness, over having to race with lifted skirts and swinging buckets to beg water from the trucks that wet the road. But as a chief engineer, ‘Colonel Corsale’ had been assigned a maid, a cook and a guard.
Sibilla had been a servant herself for most of her life, but she was baffled by the African workers, by their mixture of subservience and hauteur. They did not seem bothered by her odd clothing: the loose dresses and shawls she draped over herself to conceal her hair. But whenever she automatically picked up dishes or wiped up spills or reached for a knife to chop vegetables, the young maid, Enela, frowned and lifted her nose. The girl practically snatched the plates and pots from Sibilla’s hands and took offence at any offer of help, as if Sibilla were scolding her by doing her job for her. As the months passed, Sibilla learned not to linger in the kitchen, and to apply her tight-wrung energy to other tasks, like