The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  Isabella had been a sweet, cheerful baby. But she had grown into a sulky, haughty creature, neither Italian nor Zambian, and disdainful of both. Sibilla couldn’t help but feel there was something pointed about the choice of a wigmongerer for a fiancé. Yes, an in-betweener like Isabella herself. But a man who made his money off the scalps of strangers?! Sibilla bristled at this more than at Balaji’s age or ethnicity, though she knew Isabella was daring her parents by asking for their approval of an older Indian man. Everyone knew how the Colonel treated brown people and black people, despite his staunch humanism and liberal pretensions.

  Sibilla had fought with her husband about this practically since they’d arrived in this country, from the moment she had tried to be an emissary for the Tonga villagers before the floods at Kariba. His callous dismissal of them, those old people who simply wished to drown with their gods, had made her see him in a new light. She had never tried to leave him – they shared too many secrets. What could she do without his protection? Where could she go? But Sibilla’s marriage had long felt like a handbag that she had neglected to empty out, that she still carried around even though she kept her money, handkerchief and comb elsewhere on her person.

  Perhaps it was just as well that Isabella had found this strong, capable man to take care of her. The girl was so helplessly subject to her whims and grudges. She hadn’t been bright enough to make it into university, and now she skulked around Lusaka with nothing to do, and seemed to blame everybody else for it. Sibilla looked through the scrim of her hair at Isabella knotting her fingers, at Balaji bullying the silence, at the Colonel snoring in ginny slumber. Well, if the old man couldn’t be bothered to stay sober long enough to pass his contemptuous judgment on this marriage, on his head be it. Sibilla stood and clasped her hands.

  ‘You will make wonderful spouses,’ she said to the couple, only half-believing it to be true.

  Isa smiled cautiously, her gaze darting between her dozing father and her doting suitor. Balaji stood too, rattling off promises to take care of Isa ‘forever-and-ever’, his head wobbling solicitously. Sibilla walked him to the door, his apologies and thanks dribbling behind him in triplicate.

  * * *

  Isabella Corsale, pallid, skittish and tense, strode through the house in a wedding dress. She had found it in the back of her mother’s closet, behind the rainbow of boubous that Sibilla always wore to cover her hair. Isa had tried the dress on immediately, batting at the layers of frangible lace, holding her breath to zip it over her ribcage, plucking at the loose shoulders and rotating the twisted sleeves. It was perfect. She was rustling down the corridor to examine it in the full-length mirror in her room when a cleared throat stopped her in her tracks. She turned towards the open door of the study.

  ‘The dress itself is good,’ said her father, crossing his arms over his round belly so that his shoulders were level with his earlobes. ‘Whether it suits you is another question altogether.’

  It looked suspiciously like her father had been lying in wait for her. He was sitting in his study, but his chair faced the open door to the corridor, his haunches spilling out on either side of his seat, a fat ankle resting on his knee. Isa looked past him into the room. No books, no shelves, no desk for the chair. The only other piece of furniture in there was the sunken, rumpled bed where he lay from morning to night, sipping from his stein, swallowing his daily river of gin only to piss it out again in the loo next door.

  Sometimes, that river would return more abruptly, in a spastic waterfall from his mouth that Simon would have to mop up. This was technically an inside-the-house job and should have fallen to Enela. But, ‘Awe. Nakana. I’ve refused,’ the old maid would protest like a spoiled child, unwilling to touch any part of a muzungu who no longer bothered with bathing and reeked of fermented sugars. That smell lingered in the threshold now, hanging in the air with his pronouncements.

  ‘This dress looks too bright,’ he mused. ‘Is white even a suitable colour for you?’

  ‘Why are you so full of poison?’ Isa cried, then turned and swept off down the corridor.

  * * *

  The Colonel had been making digs like this ever since Isa and Balaji had announced their engagement. He had missed his chance to express outright disapproval of the match, and this was his only way to let his feelings out. Those feelings were not kind. The Colonel had retired a decade earlier, after the North Power Cavern of Kariba Dam was complete and management had been ‘Zambianised’, which meant that most of the positions had been given to native Africans. He had resented being displaced by those men, most of whom he had trained himself. He had handed them all the technical knowledge about engineering that he had garnered over years of experience, and they had repaid him by pushing him out!

  What did those idiots know of the delicate balance of stone and water? What did they know about watching your own work, your own men, get dashed to pieces by the terrible force of the Zambezi? Eighty-six labourers had died building Kariba Dam! Their names were still engraved in the wall at the Church of Santa Barbara. A worthy martyrdom for the largest hydroelectric dam in the world. The Colonel was still mighty proud of that dam, even if the country had robbed him of even that old man’s prerogative: gloating.

  Retirement had worked its peculiar lethargic magic on Federico. His wife had weaned him from her bed years ago. The servants treated him like a chore. His daughter pitied him though she had barely graduated from secondary school, had no job prospects, and was about to marry some wog trader. Federico had even given up on entertaining expats – no more parties for him to laugh or snooze or slosh his way through. Nowadays, he just lay around, festering in memories. These were mostly of Sibilla.

  Sometimes he remembered her in the old country, the young girl who had spun in Signora Lina’s parlour, who had plucked his heart and made him a murderer. Sometimes he remembered her here, when it was still an oddly shaped colonial territory in the middle of Africa, their wedding day in Siavonga: the Church of Santa Barbara redolent of fresh concrete, Sibilla’s hair covered with the white tulle layers she’d sewn by hand, the very wedding dress which their daughter had just been flaunting. It was too white on Isa, Federico thought, patting under his chair for his stein. Not because she wasn’t a virgin, though he doubted that she was. But because on her it looked nothing like the sensuous, smoky grey it had made layered over Sibilla’s hair. He had noticed that its wrists were yellow now too – Sibilla’s perfume must have stained them all those years ago. He could almost smell it: citrus, gardenia, a hint of something earthy.

  He thought of their honeymoon at the Victoria Falls Hotel – the tremendous roar of the water around them like static. They had loved each other desperately then, or needed each other (was there a difference?), the secrets that bound them making their sex feel fraught, as if it were a means of survival. Federico felt the faintest echo of an erection, as far off as a cry over hill and dale. When had his wife stopped wearing perfume? When had she stopped spinning?

  A flash of memory: Sibilla on the edge of Kariba Dam, surrounded by a black throng, some foolishness about saving the Tonga, or not saving them – letting them stay and drown? That was the day the floods came, the terrible floods – ’57 or ’58? Federico thought of his dead men. Edmundo who had requested the church bell. Giovanni the foreman. Pietro. He raised his stein to his lips, eyes gazing into the middle distance. Federico’s skin was an empty suit now. He lived elsewhere, in the past, wandering in a ruin of his own making. Why bother being kind in the present?

  * * *

  Isabella was not a religious person, but she insisted on being married in a church, by a priest. The wedding would thus proceed without the colour and shine that adorns a Hindu bride and groom. No red, no gold, no purple henna. Balaji’s Aunt Pavithra almost spat in his face when he broke the news to her. He had already thwarted years of community matchmaking by choosing this white girl-child. And now they would be forced to endure a whit
e wedding to boot?

  ‘That is the colour for a widow!’ she cried. ‘Here, at least, a red shawl.’ She pressed it into her nephew’s hands. Balaji refused it.

  ‘Sincerest apologies, Aunty. But my bride will wear white-white-white,’ he said, not without a smidgen of pride. ‘It is what her father is wishing.’

  This was to give the decision an air of authority. But who knows what Isa’s father, the lifelong atheist, would have wished? Perhaps instead of that frothy white apparatus around Isa, the Colonel would have found gilded silks more suitable. Perhaps if he’d had the chance to run his hands presumptuously over Aunt Pavithra’s gold-threaded sari at the wedding, he would have slurred in her gold-riddled ear: ‘Isa should have worn your type of thing! Very exotic.’ But the Colonel never got the chance to bond with his in-law or insult his daughter, because three weeks before the wedding, Simon’s knocks to the study door, pokes to his cheek and shoves to his arm each in turn failed to wake the Colonel from his final sleep. His daily river of gin had reversed and drowned him.

  They didn’t postpone the wedding. They couldn’t afford to change those bookings now that they had to pay for a funeral as well. The church service at the Catholic mission for the Colonel was short and only a few people were in attendance: six retired Kariba men, the family, Balaji and the workers. The burial at Leopards Hill cemetery was quick, too, a perfunctory transaction with the ground. Sibilla, a black veil over her hair, watched the groundsmen lower the coffin into its hole as Enela warbled a weepy dirge in Tonga and the priest splattered holy water over it. The Colonel would have hated this, but he’d left no instructions and these were the rituals. Besides, Sibilla thought with a hint of bitterness, he hadn’t let the tribal elders die in Kariba as they wished, either.

  Her mind was full of his name, his real name, not the one he’d stolen from his brother. Federico, she thought, Federico, Federico, repeating it with the mechanical exactitude of an insect. Behind the mourning veil and the fall of hair that doubly pixellated her view, Sibilla was settling into a great relief. She finally had permission to set her marriage down. She had loved Federico once, yes, completely. The momentum of that love had carried her all the way to this country only to come to a halt. Sibilla had often recalled their honeymoon at Victoria Falls, too, not with Federico’s dreamy nostalgia but as the moment when their love had stalled in front of that portrait of her grandfather, Pietro Gavuzzi.

  Over the years, this betrayal had eaten away at the ties binding her to Federico, wearing the strings down until, one day in 1972, they broke. They had just moved from Siavonga to Lusaka. Federico had started a desk job here and now that they weren’t living out in the bush, Sibilla had finally allowed herself to get pregnant at age thirty-three. She’d been sitting outside on the veranda of their new home in Longacres, hunched over her big belly to shave the hair on her feet so that she could paint her toenails. And out of the corner of her eye, she had caught Federico looking at her from a window, his mouth open, his eyes narrow.

  Before he saw her see him, before his face crinkled into a smile, Sibilla had felt three things at once. One was déjà vu: the threads of time went slack and two moments pressed against each other like cat’s-cradle palms. The second was embarrassment: she thought she had been unseen in her awkward crouch over her belly. The third was an epiphany: she realised that her husband’s love for her had absolutely nothing to do with her, that it never had. It was as indifferent to her as his brother’s had been. This is not so strange. Love often turns out to be a test and a confirmation of separateness. Around then, Sibilla had started sleeping in another bedroom. She simply no longer wished to touch him.

  No, Sibilla did not mourn Federico’s death and only later would she come to mourn the loss of him over the years, the sense of something familiar receding millimetre by millimetre, like a warm bath draining around you. At the funeral, she felt sad only for Isabella, who had not been ready for him to die. Sibilla reached out and put her hand on her daughter’s jolting shoulder. Isabella, in too-tall, too-shiny heels and an ill-fitting dress, was weeping ferociously. Her fiancé stood on the other side of her, offering her his big hand, which she alternated between gripping tightly and rejecting outright. Sibilla watched him endure. Balaji could do no right by Isabella Corsale. He would learn that soon enough.

  Sibilla had decided that she liked her new son-in-law, or in any case, that she could tolerate him. She would be moving with Isabella into his home in Kamwala after the wedding, to help take care of the grandchildren to come. The house in Longacres that had come with the Colonel’s sinecure with Kariba Dam was too large for a widow anyway. In truth, Sibilla wouldn’t have stayed even if she could afford it. She wanted nothing to do with that house, or the stolen job – the stolen life – that had paid for it. She was done with mercenary secrets.

  * * *

  The day before the wedding, Sibilla ran into Balaji outside Isa’s childhood bedroom. He was closing the door, shutting off the racket of sobs within.

  ‘Sorry-sorry, just dropping off jalebi. Our Bella is not well—’ A muffled cry came from behind the door. Balaji looked distraught, a giant child who has lost his toy. ‘She is crying the whole day—’

  ‘Balaji,’ Sibilla cut in.

  ‘Yes, Madam?’

  ‘Will you cut my hair, as you do in your town? I wish to go to your wedding without a veil.’ She hadn’t planned this request, but she realised now that she’d been harbouring the idea ever since he had first told them about the temple and the barbers and the carpet of wet hair on the floor.

  ‘Are you sure, Madam?’ he asked with his rolling nod.

  ‘Isabella, she cuts it,’ Sibilla explained. ‘Or what do you say? Trim. Since she was small, she trims it.’ She swept her hands over her face and neck. ‘Could you trim for me? For the funeral – I mean, for the wedding.’

  ‘As you wish.’ Balaji bowed solemnly.

  She led him out to the veranda. It was one of Lusaka’s contrarian June days, when the sun is fire and the shade is ice. The lawn, bracketed by its low white wall, was patchy, already thirsty for rain. The fruitless guava tree juddered pitifully in the wind. Sibilla sat under the lip of the veranda, her tufty feet stretched out to reach the sunlight. Beside her was a small table that Enela had set out with scissors and razors and a bowl of hot water, its steam diagonal and hesitant in the wind.

  Balaji fingered the instruments, then chose a pair of scissors. First, he cropped great swathes of hair from Sibilla’s head and face. When he had got it down to a staticky afro, he wet the halo and carefully snipped it into commas that fell onto the embroidered chest of her boubou. Finally, he picked up a razor and deftly scraped the remaining bristle. They were close enough to inhale each other’s breath, absorbed in the ritual. The fretful wind dried the cut hair, gusted it around their ankles. They did not see the grey eyes looking out through the bedroom window, bright with covetous tears.

  * * *

  The wedding day was windy, too. The clouds looked buffeted and thin. As the hours passed, Isa’s white dress picked up so much red dust it was almost the colour of a sari anyway. The wedding guests looked stifled in their dark suits and pastel dresses. Only Aunt Pavithra had held out and worn a glorious navy, gold and green sari. When she accidentally dropped the silk pallu draped over her torso, unveiling the delicious folds of her belly, she looked like a recently fed python, both substantial and exquisite. The older women envied her peaceably – at their age, another woman’s beauty was no threat and indulging a little envy is a wedding pastime.

  Isa herself was brimming with it. She had never cared much for the idea of marriage, which seemed too long and ongoing to comprehend fully, but she had always longed for a wedding: an event, a spectacle surrounding her, emanating from her. The church was cold, the priest spoke too slowly, the pews creaked as if they were in the overdecorated hull of a ship. Balaji kept clearing his throat as if he were about to cry.
But Isa felt triumphant and calm and spellbinding. All eyes were on her. The priest pronounced them man and wife. Balaji crumpled his moustache against her nose. The audience applauded as they walked back up the aisle together and waited outside the church for the receiving line.

  Only as the guests filed past to shake hands did Isa see that their eyes were wet with grief, downcast with pity – those eyes belonged not to her but to the Colonel, whose own eyes were buried under this red dust, though not yet dust themselves. Sibilla’s envy shifted from her mother to her father – not for his death but what it had brought him: unanimous attention. Tears slipped down Isa’s cheeks. The wind dried them to salt. Her guests inched past, whispering congratulations and condolences. In a fury of deprivation, she took their naked hands in her gloved ones, spitting red dust with her thanks.

  * * *

  Perhaps because Isa and Balaji first met in a shop, haggling became the pattern for their relationship. If one went up, the other went down, as if they sat on either end of a restless scale, never quite on par, but thrilled with the tilt of it. Thus, he had determined where they would go for their honeymoon – Victoria Falls, like her parents – but she had decided that they would wait until they got there to have sex.

  But then the long uncomfortable drive south tired her out: Great North Road was cratered with potholes and around sunset there was an accident, and though they waited for an hour for help to come, it eventually got dark and so they gave up and left money with a young boy to sit with the injured man and pay the hospital fees. Nothing too disastrous, but by the time Balaji and Isa finally arrived in Livingstone that night, their hotel had given their reservation away. The only room available was at JollyBoys, a new backpackers’ lodge. They checked into a double – Balaji shoved the two single beds together – and went straight to sleep.