roof or build a great dam to contain it – you’re cupping an amniotic crib for us. We doomed the Panama Canal twice this way – the Chagres river flooded its banks and swamped you with all sorts of fevers. So of course we know the secrets of the biggest man-made lake in the world.
The tale of a place is the tale of its water, and Kariba Dam is no exception. The bantu wished to dam the Kafue but the bazungu chose the Zambezi instead.
‘We’re making a dam,’ they told the Tonga. ‘A kariba, a trap for the river.’
‘You can’t trap a river,’ the Tonga replied, ‘much less the mighty Zambezi, which is ruled by a god with the head of a fish and the tail of a snake. Nyami Nyami will undo your work.’
Omens unheeded, the bazungu proceeded with their foolish and damnable plan. They rescued the animals – ‘Operation Noah’ – then drove the Tonga off in tightly packed lorries. The people were banished from their homes to a land with no marshes, no river – the soil full of lead, the wood full of smoke, the ground as hard as a rock. Nyami Nyami’s curse had barely begun.
The dam half-built, the fat rains came, and the Zambezi rose up and charged. It knocked the dam aside and swallowed some workers. The Tonga said, ‘Nyami Nyami is hungry.’ They killed a black calf and threw it in the river and the bodies washed up where it vanished. The feckless bazungu continued building the dam. When the flood came again, it lifted four men, plastered them to the dam like insects. The concrete was wet; the workers were dead; in the end, they built the dam around them. Strange tomb!
Now listen close to the first of our lessons: Federico did this too with his love for his wife; he swallowed her up in his faith. Yet he denied this same choice to the elders of the Tonga: the relief of total belief. No drowning for the natives, Federico declared, Sibilla’s intercession be damned. This, and his betrayal – one secret too many – would sever their bond completely. You cannot contain the manifold fury of a people, a river, a woman!
Agnes
1962
Once upon a time in a faraway land, there was a princess and she played tennis because that was all she knew and she was very good, she was the best in all of southern England, minor newspapers characterising her style of play with words usually reserved for ornithology or engineering, and she received many gifts – there were trophies and cloth ribbons that rivalled the ornaments and jewellery she grew up with, prizes that paid for more vases and necklaces than she could possibly fill with flowers and throats – when one day, out of the blue, out of the clear blue sky, which she made herself gaze at until she could make out its colour every day up to the very end, she went blind, her vision bleeding away in droplets of sight over seven months until she couldn’t see anything at all and that was the end of the princess’s dreams – she knew she would never win Wimbledon, never celebrate on camera.
And so she spent her days in her castle, dressed in wool trousers and jerseys, eating half a cold dinner in the dining room, walking the corridors, the echoes alone persuading her that the walls still existed, stalking the parapets and slumping up and down stairs, she repeated words from the shiny reviews of old tennis matches, singing a sad song to herself, until finally spring came – the heat in the air, the heady smell of blossoms, birdsong loud enough to wake you.
One day, she put on her tennis shoes, tightened her racket strings, and began to collect them, gathering as many dreams as possible – the old tennis balls from their hidden places around the castle, from under the sofa and behind the fridge, above and between books, all the nooks where they had been abandoned to wither and soften like kiwis. She made her way to the Grand Court, her white stick tapping the starkest soundtrack as she walked along the stone path to the unkempt lawn. She inhaled deeply and she began to dance – she rolled her shoulders, plucked a ball from the bag at her feet, tossed it in the air, and waited for it to rise…remember gravity…and fall into the rushing swing of her racket, because although