learning how to speak English and be a wife.
Sibilla and Federico had finally married. Shortly after the diluvial floods in 1957, the dam workers had imported a bell from Italy, set it up in the African church at the top of the hill, built a circular tower around it, and renamed it Santa Barbara. The day before it opened, Sibilla and Federico stood inside the barely dry concrete walls, under an unpainted cross, and exchanged vows before an Italian priest. The rituals felt half-wrought, attenuated by their distance from home. But there was some pomp at least: Federico had persuaded another engineer to bring some silk charmeuse and bridal illusion from abroad; Sibilla had handsewn the one into a dress, the other into a veil.
She flinched only once, when the priest said the name: ‘Colonel Giuseppe Corsale’. Was that why Federico was marrying her? To seal the deception in a legal document – to make it official? Standing there in that half-built church, Sibilla gazed through her double veil at her double man: Federico, with the false name, gait and moustache of his brother. And she was two Sibillas too: the one twitching uncomfortably in her dress, and the one who swooned under his worshipful hands every night. The one who loved him and the one who was afraid of this man who had both rescued her from death and buried his own brother’s corpse in a tomato patch.
* * *
OPERATION NOAH, the memo said. Mrs Makupa, the native woman whom Federico had been training as a secretary, had brought it in. She was tall and thin and dark. Her hands were forever occupied with knitting wool – always black, despite the swelter of this place.
‘Who sent this? Smith? Did he say it was urgent?’
Mrs Makupa shrugged, hands still rotating. Federico waved her off and scanned the memo, which was dated the previous month, September 1958. Now that the dam was nearly complete, the river was flooding earlier than usual in the season. This memo proposed to relocate the wildlife whose habitat was soon to be underwater: lions, leopards, elephants, antelopes, rhinos, zebras, warthogs, even snakes. A Noah’s Ark indeed. Federico shook his head. Disaster had already come – to human life.
He looked out of the poorly cut window in the concrete wall of the office. It was raining again. In the distance, he could see the dam’s broad curving face topped with a racket of scaffolding, the white plastic pipes like worms. Despite the rain, it was crawling with men, fly-like amongst the beetling machines. It looked like a mammoth corpse, half-dissected or half-rotten. They had already lost so many men to it. Twenty-seven had died in a collapsed tunnel – the survivors living off Coca-Cola and beer for three days. Seventeen had plunged seventy metres into wet concrete when a platform collapsed – this incident had led the Africans to strike until Baldassarini, the site agent, raised their pay to sixpence an hour. During a shuttering, an Italian had looked up at a passing Royal Air Force plane and plunged to his death.
Then came the floods. Last year, they’d barely had enough time to get out of the way. The men had scrambled to move the machines and to break part of the cofferdam wall to divert the river – but then the water had just seeped in a fault line and flooded it from the inside anyway: a swirling thrusting deluge, red as blood because of the copper in the dust here, a crane they hadn’t managed to move swivelling wildly in the gushing torrents. Bergamosco, a chief engineer, had stood on the banks raging at the Zambezi, yelling puttana! as if Mother Nature were insulting him personally with this hundred-year flood.
Mrs Makupa came in again and handed Federico another memo without seeming to let off knitting – did she have a third arm in that bundle of black limbs? She waited while he read.
‘Smith is here now?’
Mrs Makupa nodded, still knitting.
‘Well, send him in then!’
* * *
A few months after their wedding, Federico had surprised Sibilla with a viaggio di nozze.
‘The seventh wonder of the world is only 500 kilometres down the river!’
They stayed in an old colonial hotel, a broad white structure with hammerhead wings and red tile roofing. It was so close to the Victoria Falls you could hear their faint roar in the distance. The lawns were perfect green carpets, the pool an unreal blue. The ceilings were high with slowstirring fans