The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  After the short-lived Partisan occupation, the Fascists retook Alba and they too invited themselves into the villas for hot food and clean women. Being forced to serve as a hostess once again – for the other side this time – revived Lina’s spirits. She had no political convictions to speak of so she gladly took in the well-heeled Fascists, who lavished her with finery and flattery. When the war ended, she kept on throwing parties at Villa Serra. It was a way to forget. Four years on, Signora Lina lived solely for the taste of whisky and the pleasure of watching strangers desultorily destroy her home every night. Adriana patiently set about resurrecting it every morning, righting overturned furniture, wiping wet puddles, scraping dry ones. Life would have gone on this way if the Signora had not, with a casual remark, upset the balance.

  Adriana was cleaning the parlour one morning while Lina swanned around, lazily hunting for a cigarette, the bottom edge of her green robe sending toppled wine glasses rolling in circles.

  ‘You,’ said the Signora, pausing her perambulation to peer curiously at her maid. ‘You do not smile any more?’

  Adriana was tugging open a burgundy curtain and she hid her sigh under the humming cloth and the rattling rail. She considered. When had she last smiled?

  ‘Your job is the same. You clean.’ The Signora picked up a dirty fork from a table and carried it to another. ‘My job is the same. I make things for you to clean.’ She picked up a dirty plate from the second table and carried it to the first. ‘It is a good system, sì?’

  ‘Sì, Signora.’ Adriana thought of the rotting duck she’d found in the toilet earlier, the line of ants investigating it, joining one by one a tiny floating raft of their dead comrades.

  ‘So.’ The Signora plopped herself in an armchair. ‘More mopping, less moping.’

  ‘Sì, Signora.’ Adriana knelt to wash the window.

  ‘You are looking fat as well.’ The Signora’s voice sharpened: ‘Did you have a baby?’

  ‘Sì—’ Adriana paused. Her lower lip folded into her mouth.

  Sibilla was now nine years old. It was one thing to pretend the girl was not a Gavuzzi but…The Signora was now murmuring a string of old grievances – that her husband had been killed by those rough men and…Adriana’s arm mechanically wiped the window as she looked out at the valley. It was furry with forest and blocked with houses, half erased by mist. She thought of Sibilla’s eyebrows, which were darker than the rest of the hair on her forehead and the exact same shape as Giacomo’s – and the Signora’s, for that matter. Adriana lowered her arm and closed her eyes. Was it possible that the Signora didn’t know that Sibilla even existed? Unconsciously, Adriana swayed forward and her forehead hit the window with a small thud.

  ‘Oh!’ said the Signora with surprise.

  Adriana opened her mouth to speak but a broken cry came out instead. She began to sob.

  ‘Oh,’ said the Signora with irritation.

  Adriana hastened to apologise but the Signora was already on her feet and stalking from the room, the sweeping train of her robe knocking over a bowl of hazelnuts. There was no room in Villa Serra for anyone else’s grief. Adriana wept anyway, fiercely, freely, relishing the privacy. When she wiped her eyes and blinked around, noon had filled the room.

  Adriana jumped up and cleaned the rest of the parlour. She finished with the writing desk, polishing it until its scratches were scattered needles of shine. Then she searched in its drawers for pen and paper and wrote a note.

  My most beloved Signora,

  Yes I did have a baby she has nine years but she is un-formed not a child of the Lord Almighty Our Saviour so I do not smile but my behaviour distressed you I did see so I beg of you to let me remain in your employ.

  Yours in obedience,

  Adriana

  Adriana stared at the note, then folded it several times, trying to make it as unobtrusive as possible, but the more she folded, the thicker and stupider it seemed. Finally, a paper-cut finger in her mouth, she backed away from the damp lump dumbly reflecting itself on the desk.

  * * *

  As for the un-formed herself, Sibilla had begun her day as usual. She woke to the sound of her grandmother’s snores and to the sight of a blur that slowly crystallised into a thicket. She got out of bed, stepping out of nets of hair, then wrapped it around her waist and rustled over to the hearth. Her mother had made breakfast before leaving for the Signora’s. Sibilla sat down and tucked the hair from her face behind her ears. She took mincing bites of her porridge to avoid swallowing any hair and stared out the window. It was…raining? Sibilla peered and blew upward – a waft of breath would lift her hair and grant her a better glimpse.

  Sibilla had observed hair on other people. Nonna had kinky white curls that crept outward from her head when it rained, haloing her frowning face. And Mama got hairier when she washed their clothes, the fuzz on her arms darkening with that first plunge into water. This was reassuring. They have hair too, Sibilla thought. Mine is just longer. But Sibilla didn’t like her hair. It felt like a part of her but also apart from her. Which was what Nonna had said when Sibilla had asked where babies come from. This was more helpful than what Mama had said, which was ‘You don’t want to know.’

  But Sibilla did want to know. She wanted to know everything. Over time, she had learned to put together the things she already knew, to see how they fit. Like: Mama didn’t smile and she worked all the time. Or: Nonna couldn’t see well and Sibilla couldn’t see well, but not for the same reason. Or: there were day dangers and night dangers and both came from outside. But Sibilla still yearned to go outside, more than anything. She asked Nonna every day if she could, hoping her pleas would one day slip between the widening cracks in the old woman’s mind.

  Today, for example, Sibilla wanted to know if it was in fact raining out there. She turned to ask but Nonna was still asleep, eyebrows raised in faint surprise, wrinkles ashiver with every whistling snore. Sibilla pushed porridge around her plate. Her grandmother didn’t usually sleep in this late. But last night, Nonna and Mama had had a seething fight. Sibilla had woken to them whisper-shouting across the room. It seemed that Nonna thought Sibilla ought to spend more time outside; Mama thought this was too risky. Danger, danger, growing girl, sun and air, never ever, don’t you know, of course I know – the voices rose and rose and broke – you have no idea what they would do to her…

  Sibilla looked through her hair darkly, putting some things together. Outside the house was the same as inside the house, just not as safe. But if Nonna thought she could go outside, it couldn’t be that dangerous…Sibilla found herself at the door of the cabin, as if transported. She stared at its rough surface. The key turned (a click, a glance backward). The handle turned (a creak, another glance). The door swung open. Sibilla and the world met for the first time.

  * * *

  Villa Serra was ripe with the smell of conquered rot. Adriana gathered her coat, her bag and her thoughts. These last, as usual, were of her daughter – she sometimes felt as if Sibilla was still inside her and she often dreamt of the birth: the midwives pulling the baby out, the long black threads from which it hung like a puppet slowly lengthening…Adriana shuddered and shook off the image as she locked the back door and stomped heavily down the steps – she was fat. When had that happened?

  Outside Villa Serra, the trees had started to tantrum, shaking their bushy heads – a storm was coming. Adriana cursed quietly, touching her fingers to her head and each of her breasts in turn. She never cursed out loud, only under her breath, and she always made the sign of the cross to nullify it. She’d been doing this since she was a girl but nobody had ever noticed it before Giacomo.

  She had been working at Villa Serra for a few weeks when she first ran into him at the butcher’s. Giacomo had been leaning against the pole of the stall, smoking. Adriana greeted him with the deference due to the Signora’s brother, and though he greeted her ba
ck, she saw a vagueness in his eyes – there were many young maids at Villa Serra before the war. She began to haggle with the butcher over a rind of meat. When he refused to lower his price, Adriana cursed softly, her pursed fingers dabbing her forehead and chest. Giacomo noticed and laughed.

  ‘This is very charming,’ he slurred at her from his lazy lean. That was the beginning.

  The end came months later and it was wretched. It was the usual story: Giacomo drifted away; Adriana tried to keep him. She even resorted to spells, each more desperate than the last. She wrote his name on a slip of paper and put it under a rock. She collected his semen, baked it in a cake and ate it. She stood between a candle and a wall and spoke an incantation to her shadow: all other women are like mud, I am as beautiful as the moon. She plucked out her hair and stole his and braided it together.

  Adriana didn’t like to remember this last piece of sorcery: secretly culling the strands from his comb when he was in the other room, her hairline retreating to pale cul-de-sacs, the gentle braid of love turning to a ball of fur in her pocket. Worst of all was the horror in his eyes when he found it – which turned into a kind of peaceable regret when she confessed to him that she was pregnant.

  ‘You cannot leave me,’ she whispered, gripping his arm. ‘You cannot leave your child!’

  His eyebrows rose, then lowered. ‘What child?’ He turned away and lit a cigarette.

  * * *

  Sibilla paused on the threshold of the cabin, looking at the sky. It was a piercing blue with a few lowhanging clouds, each edged with the blaze of the sun. She was mainly struck by how big the sky was. It didn’t seem that big from the inside. The wind stroked the hair on her face, then tickled her, then suddenly snuck around and blew at her from behind, raising the hairs on her body until they were streaming in front of her. She stood stock-still, arms locked at her sides, as her hairs flurried ahead, tugging at her, pulling her trotting along until she was outside the house.

  She could see so far! To the right was Nonna’s tomato garden: knobs of red and yellow and green flesh dangling from vines. To the left was the valley: terraced villas and tangles of hazel trees in the distance. The sun spun its fingers through the clouds. As if beckoned, Sibilla stepped forward. And as if in reply, the door swung shut behind her. She spun around and pulled its handle but it stayed shut – it needed to be pushed from this side. But how was she to know that, having never been on the other side of the door – of any door – before?

  Sibilla groaned and pulled to no avail. Above her, the sun curled its fingers back inside a cloud and darkness fell over the valley. She turned around with frustration and found herself in the midst of a cyclone. Spiralling gusts sent hair whipping back and forth, under and around her. She squatted down, gathering to her naked body what hairs she could.

  * * *

  As Adriana reached the switchbacks in the road to the forest, she pulled her collar high against the wind. The Signora had given her this coat. Adriana would probably pass it down to Sibilla someday and they would have to string the girl’s hair through the sleeves so it spilled out at the cuffs like the spaventapasseri that scared the birds from the tomato garden. Adriana tutted. What a waste!

  She loved this coat: it was woollen and warm and had purple satin lining. Sometimes, in the brief amnesia of waking up, she would catch a glimpse of its insides gleaming from where it hung on the cabin wall and her eyes would slide hungrily along its surface. It reminded her of Giacomo’s slippery inner lip. Had this been her downfall – this desire to touch beautiful things with her hand, her tongue? Maybe it was her arrogance, the idea that she had the right to touch anything at all.

  The rain came. Pulling her collar over her head now, Adriana ducked under the cover of the trees, glancing warily at the terraced vineyards above the road. The rain could easily make precipitous mud out of the soil. She thought of the fable Giovanna liked to tell Sibilla, about the villa and the borgo near the Castello di Monticello, how one year the rains were so heavy, the roads had turned to liquid mud that coursed down and seeped into the peasants’ homes, and the rough mud-dwellers and the rich bean-heads had shouted at each other all night until…

  Adriana stepped in a puddle. She cursed and crossed herself. As she walked on, water squelching from the hole in the toe, she began to calculate if she could afford the cobbler, her fingers twitching with ghostly enumeration. Everything cost so much these days. The war had swelled the world with want. It had made everything rare and therefore precious.

  * * *

  Sibilla’s chest was heaving. She wanted to go back inside and wait for Nonna to wake up, but she was afraid to stand up in this fierce wind. Sometimes, hair would flap out from her body and she would slowly reel it back in. After a while, it wasn’t so bad to crouch in the wind, waiting. She examined the blades of grass between her feet, which were different from the wilty clumps her mother had brought inside to show her. The sky was grey now but this outside grass was the greenest green she’d ever seen, and it shivered in the wind like Nonna’s sleeping face.

  When the wind finally died down, Sibilla stood and wrapped her hair around her waist, crossing her arms to keep it taut. Then she stepped forward gingerly, trying not to trip over the hairs ambushing her feet, and followed the trail of grass. At first she looked at the ground, but as she gained confidence, she began to look up, to smell and hear more. After a few minutes of walking, she found herself in a grove of tall trees with rough bark and spiky branches. She circled one. It exhaled a peppery scent. She parted the hairs on her face so she could lick its bark.

  She only noticed the raindrops pattering the crown of her head when a heavier one struck her there. She looked up and saw three sets of lines crossing each other: her hair, the tree needles, and rain. Again something struck her, this time on her back, then fell to the ground. But if rain was hard, why didn’t the roof of the cabin break, or the window?

  ‘Mostro! Mostro!

  Sibilla looked over her shoulder. Between the tall thick trees of the grove were four shorter skinnier trees. She peered as they melted into stumps and then rapidly grew again, their branches spinning wildly. Her eyes sprang wide as she saw the stones whipping towards her.

  * * *

  If war had introduced the rich to the panic of an empty stomach, survival had bred a new luxury among the poor. After Signora Lina’s husband had died, when the other servants had left Villa Serra and the rations had begun to run low, she had come to depend entirely on Adriana. Adriana knew how to squeeze the last droplets from a cow’s teat, how to combine them with an egg for a meal, how to make gruel from the grains the Signora had once scattered for the birds. The Signora compensated Adriana for these skills with beautiful, inedible things: the coat with the purple satin lining, the watch with a spiral face that lay on Giovanna’s wrist like a snail, the necklace of bluegreen glass beads that Adriana kept inside her pillow, an oriental vase that held in its belly dust and an awful silence.

  This secondhand collection had become stained and chipped over the years but Adriana kept them stored in her mind with their original shape and integrity. She sometimes played a game in her mind, in which she would have to choose one of these objects over another, or over all the rest, or over a member of her family. Of course, Adriana would never really relinquish a person for a thing. It was just an amusement. But this gesto di bilancia arose more often these days, beyond her will, almost the inevitable punctuation to her thoughts when she was alone.

  Once, in exchange for four baked roots, Signora Lina had handed Adriana a lump wrapped in wax paper. Adriana only dared unwrap it at home. Giovanna stood beside her, peering at Adriana’s hands. Little Sibilla stood beneath them both, sniffing upward, hair pulsing into her nostrils. Adriana peeled open the paper, the scent of spice and lavender pouring out, and after a pause, they all reached for it, six hands clashing. It tumbled to the floor, denting itself there. Sibilla, closest to the groun
d, grabbed for it but couldn’t get a grip – it caked the hair on her hands and sprang away again. Adriana swooped down with a tsk and picked it up as gently as she would an egg.

  ‘Non sai come tenere le cose belle,’ she snapped. ‘You don’t know how to hold nice things.’

  * * *

  ‘Mostro!’ the boys shouted and bent to pick up more stones.

  Sibilla turned and ran, wincing as hair caught under her tread. The wind sent strands down her throat as she panted and she could barely see, but she could tell that she was running downhill and that the ground was softening. Her feet abruptly went ice cold and wet. She gasped and hopped backwards and turned. The boys were walking towards her. She knew they were boys but stared at their clothes with curiosity – she had only seen trousers and vests in a picture book of Gianduja. Two of the boys were carrying big branches. They stopped a few feet away from her. One boy’s branch lost a piece of bark and it fell in the leaves with a rustle. Sibilla willed herself to stop shaking.

  ‘Mostro,’ one boy said again and the others laughed, their breath feathering the air.

  Then she realised that she wasn’t the only one shaking – they were, too, their laughter was shaking. They are feeling what I am feeling, she thought, and just then her hair began to rise.