The threads of the heart, p.1
The Threads of the Heart, page 1
Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2007 by Éditions Gallimard, Paris
First publication 2012 by Europa Editions
Translation by Howard Curtis
Original Title: Le coeur cousu
Translation copyright © 2012 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
Cover photo © Caryn Drexl / Arcangel Images
ISBN 9781609451066
Carole Martinez
THE THREADS OF THE HEART
Translated from the French
by Howard Curtis
To Françoise Martinez and Laurent Amiot
Prologue
My name is Soledad.
I was born in this land where bodies dry up, with dead arms incapable of embracing and large, useless hands.
Before my mother found a wall behind which to give birth to me, she swallowed so much sand that it got in my blood.
My skin conceals a long hourglass that can never run dry.
If you stood me naked in the sun and looked through me, you might see the sand endlessly crossing my body.
The crossing
One day, all this sand will have to return to the desert.
When I was born, my mother read my future solitude.
I cannot give, cannot take, never could, never will.
It was written in the palms of my hands, in my stubborn refusal to breathe, to open myself to the tainted air from outside, in my desire to withstand the world that was circling around me like a young dog, trying to enter through every cavity.
Despite my efforts, the air got in, and I screamed.
Up until that point, nothing had succeeded in slowing down my mother’s walking. She was a stubborn woman, a woman who had been lost on a gamble, and nothing had been able to overcome her stubbornness. Nothing, not exhaustion, not the sea, not the sands.
Nobody will ever tell us how long our crossing lasted, how many nights these children had to sleep upright, walking behind their mother!
I grew without any attention on her part, clinging to her womb in order not to come out along with all the water she was losing on the road. I struggled to continue the journey, not to interrupt it.
The old Moorish woman who stopped my mother and touched her belly and murmured, “Ahabpsi!” as if raising a wall, and who, armed only with a hand and a word, stood up alone against my mother’s fierce desire to continue on her way—heavy as she was with a child long overdue, she was determined to keep walking, even though she had already walked more than was possible and felt incapable of walking any more—the old Arab woman, her hennaed hands redder than the desert, the woman who became for us the end of the world, the end of the journey, our shelter, that woman also read my solitude in my palms, even though she could not read.
Her eyes at once entered my mother’s womb and her hands searched for me. She gathered me from deep inside the body where I lay hidden, deep inside that flesh that had forgotten me in order to keep on walking, and, after freeing me of it, she sensed that my hands would be of no use to me, that it was as if I had given up on them at birth.
Without understanding each other, they gave me, each in her own language, the same first name. “Soledad” said my mother, without even looking at me. And, like an echo, the old woman answered, “Wahida.”
And neither of these two women could read.
For a long time, my eldest sister, Anita, refused to accept what was written in my hands, written in my name. And she waited. She waited for a man to change my name and for my fingers to relent.
I remember a time when the young men of the Marabout district would linger outside our house in the hope of seeing me pass.
Nonchalantly leaning up against the housefronts, alone or sometimes in groups, they would lie in wait for me in the alleyways and fall silent at my approach.
I wasn’t really beautiful, at least not like my sister Clara, but I had, apparently, an unusual grace that pinned them to the walls.
The young men would confide in my sisters, begging them to plead their case, and my sisters would repeat these confidences with a touch of derision, describing to me the ridiculous symptoms of their love, their stammering, their languid looks. And we would laugh.
But then I would think of their erect members straining at their pants, and I would be torn between laughter and disgust.
I had the choice, I had no father to force a marriage on me. Only Anita, the eldest, could have exerted her authority over me.
She never did.
She waited, constantly postponing her own wedding night.
Bound by a promise that had kept her husband from her bed for fifteen years: “We’ll marry off all four of them first . . . ”
One day, unable to make up my mind which of these unremarkable creatures I should belong to, I dropped the old black shawl bequeathed to me by my mother, and vowed that whoever picked it up I would take for my husband.
It was autumn.
For a time, I stared at that dark patch on the ocher ground, that pool of black fabric lying motionless at my feet.
Then they all came and swooped on it.
Motionless in the noon sun, I waited for the dust to settle again and for a hand to extricate itself from that tangle of suitors. But once the cloud had dispersed, all that remained of my sweethearts was a bit of hair, a few teeth, and long scraps of black cloth left behind in the battle.
The square was empty and the shawl torn to pieces.
With my hands, I scrabbled in the dust of the red desert, searching for the piece of material where my mother’s name was embroidered.
Frasquita Carasco.
Mother never learned to write, except with the needle. Every piece of her handiwork bore a word of love embedded in the fabric.
The name was intact. I slipped the scrap of material under my skirt and joined my eldest sister Anita, who was sitting with the other women amid the wet linen.
In the shade of the wash house, the heat dozed.
I stood there for a moment behind my sister, watching her beautiful storyteller’s hands waving against the wooden plank, cracking in the soapy water. Suddenly, doubtless sensing my gaze on her back, she turned and smiled at me mechanically, wiping the backs of her hands on the bright apron, dappled with water and light, that she had draped around her waist.
Her companions in the wash house pricked up their ears above their wooden basins. The thumping of the laundry bats became muted, and they even brought out the brushes that rubbed the linen in a long, stifled murmur, stirring the slightly dirty foam.
“I’ll never marry,” I confessed to her. “I sent my suitors packing.”
“And how did you go about that?” she asked with a laugh.
“I dropped my shawl. They fought over it and tore it.”
“Your terrible mourning shawl! They’ll get you brighter ones. They’ll all find the money to buy them or they’ll steal them from their sisters.”
“Did my son also trail after you?” María yelled as she wrung the collar of a man’s shirt, its milky juice trickling down her thick forearms.
“I don’t know. They were fighting so hard, all I saw was the dust.”
My indifference had offended the women. The rhythmic thumping of the laundry bats resumed, the sheets were beaten more violently in the water, and the pace increased until their arms grew weary and the rhythm was broken.
“Look at her!” Manuela screamed hoarsely. “Another one who takes after her mother! Get your sister married off, Anita! She won’t be wiggling her behind in front of anything in pants when she has a man in the house to stop her!”
“It certainly won’t be your husband, Anita, who’ll give that hussy the thrashing she deserves!” María went on. “A poor lad who’s so little of a man, he hasn’t even managed to give you a child in fifteen years of marriage!”
“The slut doesn’t even have a father, so why is she so fussy?” came a third voice.
My sister laughed heartily. Nothing could mar the joy that had clung to her since her wedding.
The women lost their tempers and accused me of bewitching their sons, their brothers, their fathers, and so on.
Anita was amused at their jealousy. Among the husbands, she knew some who must surely have been involved in that fight. “Take a look at the bruises and marks on the bodies of your men! They’ll come home after dark quite ashamed to have had a good thrashing, but clutching a piece of black cloth to their hearts!”
María, the hunchback, came and planted herself in front of my sister, hands on hips. She looked at her from deep within the dark wells that gouged her face. Far down in those depths, something lackluster was trying to shine.
“Your mother’s dead, and that’s a good thing! You still have the dresses, but one day they’ll burn the dresses and shawls she bequeathed you, because they’re full of evil spells! They’ll tear them from your bodies and if they can’t get them off, they’ll burn you along wi
“Have you forgotten that wedding dress my mother made you to hide your hump, the dress you haven’t even paid for?” my sister retorted. “Without that dress, you’d never have been able to have your son. Because your wedding night was the only time your husband ever mounted you, wasn’t it?”
“The devil’s dress! It was devoured by moths the day your witch of a mother died. Devoured! I had to throw it on the fire, it was full of worms!”
“Nonsense! Old wives’ tales! And you, Manuela, you were heavily pregnant when Juan married you in church. Without my mother, you and he would never have managed to stop tongues wagging! You hadn’t left your house for two months because you didn’t want people to notice what was growing in your belly and only my mother could make it seem as if you were still a virgin! Without the beautiful wedding dress she’d worn out her eyes making you with pieces of cloth lying around your house, you wouldn’t have been able to prevent a scandal!”
“I was concerned with my appearance in those days, I didn’t pay attention. But it wasn’t Christian to get something like that from little pieces of material. Four years later, when my little boy died, I cried a lot. And then I took out the dress to have a look . . . and took fright. It was all coming to pieces! And the shine on the material that could have been taken for satin had vanished! It was just a lot of soiled dishcloths stuck together!”
The women all started yelling at the same time.
In the midst of the swirling water, the shouting and screaming, the thumping of the laundry bats and the flapping of the sheets, at the heart of that echoing hysteria where Spanish with touches of Arabic and Italian was mixed with French, I managed to murmur to my sister what I had been repeating endlessly to myself on the way to the wash house:
“Anita, I want to stay unmarried. You don’t have to wait anymore for the last of your sisters to marry. Go, make your own children! My mother called me solitude, and I want to live up to the name. I free you from your promise. I will never marry.”
Anita understood, and from then on I had no more sweethearts.
My youth perished that day, in a death rattle of torn fabric.
It was autumn.
The signs came all at once.
That very evening, I dried up. My skin became cracked and furrowed. My features sagged, and I knew that I had nothing more to fear from time.
My face was torn to shreds in one night by the shadow of the years to come. My body shriveled like old paper left in the sun. I went to sleep with the soft, smooth skin of a twenty-year-old and awoke in an old woman’s body. I became a mother to my older sisters, a grandmother to my nephews and nieces.
It is almost touching, that ravaged face that comes to you suddenly, that weary heaviness, those trenches under the eyes, those traces of a fight lost in your absence, while you slept.
By the end of that night, I was exhausted. But I still recognized myself, recognized that little old lady looking at me in the mirror and smiling.
I suppose I was also spared the long death agony of the tissues, the little daily deaths, the radiance that gradually fades away, the slow caress of time.
I mourned my extinguished beauty, I mourned the color that had gone from my eyes. There was still water left in this great dry body. Tears rushed to fill my hollows. The salt and the season made all the folds red.
You can get used to living in an old woman’s body.
If only there were no more trees!
Autumn here bathes whatever it can in blood.
The world has gone on without me. I have watched as all of Anita’s children were born and grew up, and I still clutter up her house. I have lived alone, smiling, in the middle of a great crush of nephews and nieces, in a splendid uproar surrounded by desert.
I have waited patiently, knowing there was nothing more to wait for.
I am still afraid of this solitude that came to me at the same time as life, this emptiness that erodes me from within, that swells and spreads like the desert, echoing with dead voices.
My mother made me her living tomb. I contain her as she contained me, and nothing will ever bloom in my belly but her needle.
I will have to go down into the pit, where time twists and turns, where the severed threads are lying.
This morning, I at last opened the box that each of my sisters has opened before me, and in it found a big exercise book, some ink and a pen.
So I waited a while longer. I waited for night to fall and the house to be dark and empty. I waited for the hour when I could at last write.
I sat down in the gloom of the kitchen and lit the oil lamp above the big wooden table. It illumined the carcasses of pans and the old dishcloths and gradually revived the smells of food. I settled at this table and opened my exercise book, smoothing its large, white, slightly rough pages, and the words came.
Tonight the desire to write overwhelmed me.
So here I am, sitting at the table, looking at my nocturnal writing, and I know that this writing will blacken the time I have left, that I will eclipse this great paper sun with the scratching of my pen. I have ink even if I have no more tears. Nothing more to mourn. Nothing more to hope for, except the end of the exercise book. Nothing more to live for, except these nights filled with paper in a deserted kitchen.
Between two of the pages, I have slipped the piece of the shawl with which I used to adorn my shoulders in the days when I had lovers.
The embroidered name releases my mother’s scent.
After all these years, it still lingers in the weave of the cloth.
That was all she kept of the crossing, that scar in the smell: the imprint of the fields she walked through, the olive trees at night, the orange trees in blossom, the narcissi carpeting the mountain like white sugar. Odors of stones, dry earth, salt, sand. My mother was made up of so many aromas, all mixed together. When I was a child, as soon as she let me approach, I would travel secretly in her hair, trying to imagine the places contained in those blue locks.
A scent and the flash of a needle in your fingers: that’s what they have retained of you.
That smell imbued the fabrics that passed through your hands. The brides kept your perfume on their bodies until the morning after their wedding night.
The rumor soon spread that the dresses made by Frasquita Carasco from the Marabout district worked on men like love potions.
Every honeymoon in the area was filled with your scent. Hundreds of white dresses, as they fell, flooded the bridal chambers with blackbirds and brigands and caves and forests and sands and waves, all torn from our journey. In your time, the sea beat against the wooden beds, while the lovers, tossed about by the current, left knots in their sheets as their only wake.
It seems to me we all emerged from your body of wood. Branches born of you alone. Sometimes, I like to think that your long hands merely caught a few dandelion seeds in passing, and that my father was nothing but seed blowing in the wind, a faint breath in the hollow of your palm.
I must write to you so that you can disappear, so that everything can melt into the desert, so that we can sleep at last, motionless and serene, without fearing that we will lose sight of your figure torn by the wind, the sun and the stones of the road.
Oh, mother, I have to bring a buried world back up from the depths in order to put your name and face and smell on it, in order to lose the needle and forget that longed-for kiss you never gave me!
I must kill you so that I can die . . . at last.
My luminous exercise book will be the great window through which the monsters that haunt us will escape, one by one.
To the desert!
Book One
One Shore
The first blood
On the patio, old Francisca was scrubbing her daughter’s shift and sheet in the wooden basin.
Frasquita Carasco, my mother, then a very young girl, stood waiting, naked, on that night at the height of summer, trying with a flannel to stem the blood that was streaking her thighs.
