The silence and the din.
You were just a girl.
You remember your mother, after work, absorbed in her two everyday worlds: books and sewing.
With the thimble or the reading, it was all stealth.
Other times, the whole house shook shaken by that endearing rattle of the sewing machine or the typewriter.
Always, the gesture of concentration.
Thread the thread in the eye of the needle, fix the eyes on the strands of the lines.
Years later, you would read Carmen Martín Gaite in
The Never-ending Story
: “Getting to count is like starting to sew;
it is going one stitch after another, be they hemstitches or memories ”.
Braiding wool or letters, those parallel gestures tied worlds together.
In many languages, "text", "texture" and "textile" are words that share the same origin.
The metaphor of weaving is constant in verbal creation: we embroider a speech, we string together ideas, we spin words, we concoct plans, we rack our brains, we unravel tangles, our stories have a plot, a knot and an outcome.
The name of the ancient bards of the Homeric poems —rapsodas— meant "song-darners."
In the oldest stories of humanity we find the trace of remote weavers.
Greek mythology tells of the tragic victory of Arachne, a woman who composed wonderful stories on the blank pages of the canvas.
His works were so beautiful that nymphs came to admire them.
Proud of her skill, she challenged Athena to an embroidery tournament.
The goddess represented in her tapestry the Olympian deities in all their majesty;
the irreverent Arachne ridiculed Father Zeus himself in his clumsy love affairs: Europa, Danae and others.
Humiliated by the impudence and skill of the young woman, Athena vowed revenge and Arachne, terrified, hanged herself.
Then the goddess transformed her into a spider that, stubbornly, extracted from her own body a thread with which to create very delicate lace.
Centuries later, in
The Arabian Nights
, Sherezade would say: "The world is like a spider web, behind whose fragility nothingness lurks."
In traditional cultures, fabrics hold meanings, memories, symbols, messages: they are scriptures.
The Incas used quipus - strings with fringes of different colors and thickness - to preserve laws or legends.
His books were written with knots and threads, in a code reminiscent of the abacus.
In the 16th century, the Spaniards, anxious about texts that were incomprehensible to them, ordered that the quipus be destroyed.
Only a few hundred have been saved, still enigmatic and indecipherable today.
The conquest eradicated that very original alphabet of thread, a language of networks, sequences and links that seems to anticipate the language of computer programming.
From the pre-Columbian world, the backstrap loom did survive, symbolically linking the act of weaving with childbirth.
It is tied like an umbilical cord to a tree, and the body that supports it is rocked by moving the shuttle through rhythmic contractions.
Childbirth, like creation, requires the gestures of a seamstress: a cord is cut, the mother's tears are sewn, and the navel becomes our first knot.
As Remedios Varo dreamed in her Mexican painting
Embroidering the Earth's Mantle
, the world was — perhaps — engendered by women who spoke and wove.
An intimate warp intertwines weaving, writing and motherhood.
In
The Flower of My Secret
, by Pedro Almodóvar, the camera portrays the protagonist, Leo, through the typewriter, and her face can be seen behind the lattice of the keys.
After a suicide attempt, the novelist returns to her hometown to regain her health.
Wrapped up by her mother, her fragile body is drawn behind a lace curtain.
Little by little, she feels her joy and desire to write reborn, sitting in the sun with the neighbors, listening to their anecdotes and songs, while her expert hands work on the lace and the musical rattle of the bobbins resounds.
The hubbub of that tapestry of threads and words brings him back to life.
In sewing, as in writing, there is no need to stitch without thread.