The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  When we arrived at Victoria Falls Town some months later, I learned I had once again been taken for a Johnny the Mug – the bloke I had hired to keep my shop and home had sold my belongings out from under me. I never caught the rascal. I was brought to tears by the kindness of my lenders. All but one – he knows who he is – forgave my debts.

  Dear Kate had to build us a home from the ground up, from the very dust. My hutment was her hutment, misfortune be damned. At night, she curled close to me as the hyenas made the nights hideous with unremittent howling. One ached to hear them take two bars rest. Kate even shared my vigils when a leopard stole our chickens – we sat up, our nerves taut as banjo strings, hardly breathing until I shot the beast, fat as a stall-fed pig. Mostly she darned while I fished.

  Once a week, we took a canoe across to Livingstone for a night out. Old Mopane had moved his trading company there and opened a bar and a couple of hotels. He always knew how to take advantage of a situation, even on shifting grounds. On our way to dinner or dancing, Kate and I would walk by his bar, and I’d peek in. The same old story: all classes from barrister to bricklayer tossing for drinks at the bar, singing raucous songs, and many a man laid out on benches. Naturally, I missed it, but ah, I was no longer a bachelor, roaming wide and handsome. I was a family man now, knee-halted and married – and happy! We were expecting, you see.

  The great event drew near, preparations were made, and out popped a boy with a lovely head of black hair. He lived only a few minutes. Kate was nigh swallowed in grief. We kept tame guinea fowl in our yard and she often mistook their calls for his cry. We buried ‘Jimmy’ in the grounds of the Victoria Falls Hotel, there being no consecrated land. But remarks were made that touched us on the raw – I won’t say who made them – so we reburied ‘Jimmy’ in our garden.

  A year later, another child came early. There was a terrific storm that night, thunder trundling across the sky and a torrential downpour – seven inches in six hours! Staying dry was impossible: the thatch was an open net, the floor an ankle-deep swamp. Kate was feverish, I furious with anxiety. Time stomped on, heavy-footed. Well, the medico knew his job; my worry just made him seem slow. This time it was a girl. But we have two sons now, one named Victor to record our association with the Falls.

  * * *

  With my curios and pictorial postcards, the shop did a roaring trade, and as the years passed, the flood of excursionists put us on a fair footing. I saw an opportunity and started some transport companies: canoe, cart, trolley, rickshaw. The Victoria Falls Hotel stole each of those ideas straight from my pocket! The Rhodesian Railway Company owned it now and management was an excitable Welshman, always fuming about. I liked to smoke my pipe in his office to fumigate him further – to my detriment. When I refused to lower my price of a half-crown per head, he bought the rickshaw company out from under me! They still have the gall to sell my guidebook in the hotel giftshop. I do seem plagued by the unpunishable crimes of others.

  But luck comes with lawlessness, too, and I did finally earn my due. In 1907, a shooting club was formed at Victoria Falls Town. Government issued us rifles and ammunition at a cut rate and the prize was a silver cup for the best score over six months. Some of the shooters got wanderlust; others gave up or left; at the end of six months, I was the only one competing. I beat the top score in a rather amusing fashion. One afternoon, I was out hunting pheasants and I spotted a pig moving through the bush. Up went my barrel, and I let him have it. There was a yell, and a nigger jumped up in the air and disappeared. Here was my ‘pig’! I saw at once what was what. The boy had been sent to cut grass but he had been loitering in a donga, or ditch. Fearing I’d report him, he had cut for it, stooping low to escape notice, but not quite low enough – just about as low as the back of a young pig.

  I found the boy unconscious, a crowd already standing around. I patched him up and sent for a doctor and set off for home. I soon became aware that a pair of native police constables were walking behind me.

  ‘What the blazes are you on about?’ I demanded. ‘We were told to bring you in to the police station,’ came the stilted reply.

  This got my goat. Native police are never sent to take in a white. Had they no respect?

  ‘You had better get,’ I yelled, ‘unless you want to get shot too!’

  They got. Naturally, I reported to the colonial police myself. By the greatest of good fortune, I was not asked to produce my shooting licence – I didn’t have one! Anyway, the boy suffered no great damage. Native hide is thick and the shot hadn’t penetrated any vitals. The medic didn’t even bother to remove the shrapnel embedded in the skin of his back, which left a pimply sort of rash. There followed months of ribbing me, however. ‘Who shot the pig? What’s the price of pork?’ As it turned out, by the strangest coincidence, the native’s name was ‘N’gulubu’, which means none other than ‘pig’!

  Skip ahead two years, and a native boy walks through my front gate. All a-grin. Familiar.

  ‘Go round the back!’ I shout – natives were not allowed to use the front entrance.

  He stays where he is, grinning to the wind like a numbskull. It’s the village idiot, I realise. The one the Italian girl, Lina, had struck down in the dining room. Imagine this:

  ‘I’m N’gulubu,’ says he and turns around to show me the Braille in his back.

  ‘Oh, are you?’ says I. ‘Well, here’s ten bob for you.’

  Off he goes, fit as a fiddle and just as merry. Everyone was satisfied. Certainly I was: I had peppered a nig for ten bob – and got a shooting cup for it! It just goes to show – if I hadn’t been down with the shakes in the first place, I’d have never snatched Gavuzzi’s wig, Lina would have never struck that boy, he wouldn’t have misjudged his crouch, and I’d have nabbed neither pig nor prize!

  * * *

  Every manner of visitor has braved the establishment of ‘Mr Percy M. Clark, ARPS, FRGS, FRES’, the oldest curio shop at Victoria Falls. Colonel Frank Rhodes and I talked long hours about his father, whose funeral procession I had photographed. In 1916, I was appointed official photographer to Lord Buxton and two future governors: Sir Cecil Rodwell of Southern Rhodesia and Sir Herbert Stanley of Northern Rhodesia – the two lands were finally divvied up. Sir Stewart Gore-Browne paid us many a visit – a strange man, and too free with the blacks by a mile, but our hospitality was well worth it: he helped us find sponsors for the children’s education in England. I don’t know if they will return, but Africa is in their blood.

  I have seen this continent pass into dire civilisation. Where once one might hump one’s blankets and step into the unknown, there’s no unknown no more, as they say. Where once one might tramp toilsomely to gain a few meagre miles a day, now the motor car speeds by and the aeroplane growls overhead. Months stride past in an hour. There is no romance left here. I have seen moving pictures of the once shy and unapproachable Pigmy tribes of the Congo riding around in lorries. This new Africa may be of interest to those who frequent the closer-packed, noisier places in the world. But a greater, more profound noise rings in my ears just across from where I write – the Victoria Falls still keeps her vast and unchanging glory.

  As for The Old Drift, which once had the dignity of a place on the map – well, it has been swallowed by swamp. I have chosen to put down roots at Victoria Falls Town, and here I will rot. But I still visit the old stomping grounds across the Zambesi now and again. All that remains is the cemetery: a dozen tumbled-down gravemarkers in the bush, dated between 1898 and 1908, some of the inscriptions eaten away by rain. It is a queer thing to wander the stones and call the roll of the dead and think on those poor crumbling sods. I read their names as warning shots:

  Georges Mercier! John Neil Wilson! Alexander Findlay! Ernest Collins! Miss E. Elliott! Samuel Thomas Alexander! David Smith! Unknown! Unknown! Unknown! Unknown! Unknown! Unknown! Unknown! Unknown! Unknown! Unknown! Unknown! Unknown! Unknown! Unknown!

&nbs
p; Miles south of Livingstone’s final abode, above the Falls he renamed for his queen, just before the river takes its furious plunge, lie the stillest waters of the Zambezi and the stilled bodies of those who dared settle there. Ah, Ye Olde Drifte! Over the years, it went from passage to place and eventually gave way to a grave. This is where we live: on the tip of the tongue of the air, full of secrets – black fever, marsh fever, tertian ague – and more than eager to squeal them.

  And who are we? Thin troubadours, the bare ruinous choir, a chorus of gossipy mites. Uncanny the singing that comes from certain husks. Neither gods nor ghosts nor spirits nor sprites, we’re the effect of an elementary principle: with enough time, a swarm will evolve a conscience. Thus we’ve woven a worldly wily web, contrived a hive mind, if you will. Spindle bodies strung in a net of spacetime. Interested. Hmming along.

  We’ve been needling you for centuries untold. Or perhaps we should say centuries told: you certainly love your stories. Your earliest tales were of animals, of course, beastly fables carved into cave walls. Well, it’s time to turn the fables, we say, time for us to tell you what we know. A swarm is but a loose net of knots. We hang, an elastic severalty. Our song is the same: the notes we sing, like a plaintive erhu, form a weird and coordinate harmony.

  All together at once is how a swarm sees but you humans go beginning to end. And so we recount each act in its turn: pace by pace, cause and effect, each and every flutter and tumble. Be patient and listen, no hurries, no worries, point by point, we outline the doctrine: to err is human, and that is your doom and delight. Even frivolous fairy tales come from fae, from fata (‘the Fates’), fatum (Fate), ‘the destiny which they have spoken’.

  You have now heard the note of one Percy M. Clark, a wanderer, a brute, a cad, the forefather who started it all. He called himself an Old Drifter but he didn’t learn our lesson – his hand grasped a tad too tight. A slip and a clutch, a cry and a fall, and one child strikes another. That tiny chaos, like one of our wings, sets in motion the unwitting cycle: it will spiral across families for generations to come, spurring Fate’s furious cataract…

  I

  The Grandmothers

  Sibilla

  1939

  At first, they didn’t know. It was disguised by the motley silt of the womb, those red strands marbling the white scud of the vernix, and they were distracted by the baby’s cries and the task of severing the twisty blue link to its mother. The midwives passed the baby to its grandmother, whose name was Giovanna. She held it, noted that it was female, and used her pinkie to swipe a cross into its grimy forehead. Only then did Giovanna peer closer – what’s this? Hair. Long, dark, sticky swirls of hair all over the stippled skin of her first and only granddaughter.

  The midwives were still circling the mother’s shipwrecked body, tending to her, murmuring like the sea, the child’s cries like that same sea breaking. Giovanna swaddled the baby in elaborate folds and handed the burden to its bearer. The mother, whose name was Adriana, looked down at the hairy little face and promptly fainted. Giovanna grabbed the baby just before it tumbled off the bed. The midwives laughed. Such drama! The wool would fall out. The whelp had just forgotten to eat it in the womb.

  Adriana woke to firm entreaties that she breastfeed. She took the baby into her arms. The hair seemed to have already grown longer and darker. Through it, she could just about see a purple hole opening and closing, letting out a mewling sound. Fine. Go on. Her fingers wrangled with the baby’s lips over the nipple until it latched. The baby sucked noisily. The hair on its face shivered with the pulse of its mouth and Adriana stroked it, crying softly at its warmth.

  Giovanna and Adriana bundled the baby up, bundled it home, and kept it there. They waited. But despite the midwives’ promises, the hair didn’t fall out or wipe away. So they began to cut it, Giovanna with great avidity, Adriana with cowed carefulness. It grew back thick and fast, as if unravelling from the knot in the belly or the cowlick on the chest, a dark drain into which Adriana’s eyes often spiralled as she breastfed, wondering who or what was to blame for this curse.

  * * *

  The child’s father was a man named Giacomo Gavuzzi and there were reasons to suspect that he carried hectic blood. In 1888, his father, a hotelier named Pietro Gavuzzi, had sailed from Italy to England to learn the trade. He’d picked up a wife in London and carted her off, pregnant, to the middle of Africa in 1899. Lina was born on the way, in the middle of the Kalahari. Giacomo was born six years later. After stints at the Grand Hotel Bulawayo and then at the Victoria Falls Hotel, Pietro had hoisted them all up again and dragged them around the world for a time – the Savoy in London again, the Plaza in Buenos Aires. The Gavuzzi family had finally returned to Piedmont in the early 1920s.

  So much migration at such an early age lent the Gavuzzi children a slapdash worldliness. They had money but their education was poor, their manners poorer. When Lina came of age, she married a local governor in Alba and moved into his family estate, Villa Serra. Her younger brother Giacomo never quite settled down. Rootless, restless, he became a professional malingerer. Like the other men in Alba with empty heads and idle hands, Giacomo spent his days drinking and recovering from drink, mostly at his sister’s home, where he knew he would be waited upon in style. That was how he met Adriana, who worked there as a domestic servant. It was not a serious affair and everyone knew Giacomo had left his seed in more than one woman in Alba. Of these, Adriana was the only one who had birthed a baby covered with hair.

  Maybe Giacomo Gavuzzi was not to blame. But Adriana vowed that she would not name their daughter, as was customary, after his mother, Ada – not an Italian name, anyway, and too recognisable in a town as small as Alba, and suspiciously like her own name besides. Instead, Adriana named the baby after an oracle card, the kind that you use to read Tarot. She found it at Villa Serra while washing dishes. It was stuck to the base of a wine glass, which she had upturned to pour out the syrupy remainder of Barbera. The card was large and creased and had a sketch of a stout dame in a feathered hat rebuking an aristocratic fellow. In florid script across the top it said Contrarietà and, across the bottom, Dispiacere.

  The moment Adriana read it, she felt the sharp knuckly clutch of her first contraction. She gasped a curse and crossed herself. She took a breath and continued to wash dishes as contractions quaked over her until it became clear this was the event she had been anticipating. It was time to head to the house on the outskirts of town where midwives served the less fortunate. As she shuffled towards the back door of the kitchen, Adriana decided – or rather the decision made itself. To name a child Displeasure was obviously to ask for it, so she chose the word on the back of the card. Sibilla.

  * * *

  Little Sibilla grew up well loved and close-kept. She lived with her mother and grandmother in an old hunting cabin in the woods, which she was not permitted to leave. The cabin was only one small room but for practical reasons, Sibilla slept in her own bed, with a white sheet that grew webbed each night and a pillow that rose with her every morning, her tangles having netted it like a fish. Her hair, as it grew, was thin and straight and dark, a brown that yearned to be black. It gave off warmth and shine and smell – a mixture of the food they ate and the lard soap they used.

  By the time she was four, Sibilla had learned the general pattern of her hair’s growth. The hair on her crown and face were the same, as if her scalp simply continued down her forehead and cheeks, skirting the eyes and the lips. The hair on her arms, legs and torso was longer. Every day, it grew until it matched her height – if you suspended it from her body, it would form a sphere. Sibilla had some hairless patches, which she cherished, counting them off every night as she went to sleep, a rosary of mercy: navel, nipples, ears, soles, palms, the spaces between the toes and the fingers. She did not realise it yet but her genitals were bare too.

  While Sibilla’s mother was at work, her grandmother took care of her. Giovanna was
hed Sibilla and fed her, pruned her like a zealous gardener and burned the daily pile of hair outside to fertilise her tomato garden. Giovanna taught Sibilla numbers and letters and everything she knew about what was visible from their one window: the Lanaro river; the hulking Castello di Monticello d’Alba with its square, round and octagonal towers; le Alpi in the distance. Giovanna told her granddaughter stories about Gianduja the peasant, with his tricorn hat, red and brown jacket and his duja of beer, lovely Giacometta always sitting on his knee.

  As Giovanna aged and her mind and eyes began to cloud, she often forgot to cut Sibilla’s hair. Instead, she would place her granddaughter on the floor between her knees and oil and comb and braid her hair for hours on end, humming folk songs. Sometimes, she would part paths into the overall scalp and string the hairs out to the furniture to make a web, Sibilla a placid spider in the midst of it. When Adriana found them like this, she would glare sulkily at them and proceed to make their meagre dinner. ‘Games,’ she would mutter with longing and disgust.

  * * *

  Towards the end of the war, a resistance army swept into Alba and formed a Partisan Republic against Mussolini. The Partisans – paesani and defected soldiers – took over the wealthier homes and during a drunken brawl at Villa Serra, Signora Lina’s husband ended up skewered on the tip of a dagger. Lina fell into a terrible, self-consuming grief. The domestici drifted away – all but Adriana. She needed the pay and she felt attached to the family: Giacomo wouldn’t admit it, and Lina never mentioned it, but little Sibilla had Gavuzzi blood. So Adriana continued to clean at Villa Serra and to care for Signora Lina until the widow climbed out of her mourning.