The Threads of the Heart

By Carole Martinez and Howard Curtis

A nineteenth century Spanish seamstress flees her village for Morocco in a novel with “a magical realist aspect . . . An epic sweep and a richness of characterization” (The Independent).
 
They say Frasquita is a healer with occult powers; that perhaps she is even a sorceress. Indeed, she has a remarkable gift, one that has been passed down to the women in her family for generations. From mere rags, she can create gowns and other garments so magnificent, so alive, that they mask any defect or deformity. They bestow a blinding beauty on whoever wears them.
 
But Frasquita’s gift makes others in her small Andalusian village jealous. And when her gambling husband brings misfortune on their family, Frasquita travels across southern Spain and into Africa with her five children in tow. Her exile becomes a quest for a better life, and a way to free her daughters from the fate of her family of sorcerers.
 
“Like the beautiful frescoes of García Márquez, this novel is a marvelous and lyrical fairytale bursting with colorful characters” —La Revue Littéraire Des Copines

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781609451066

Carole Martinez

Author Carole Martinez, a former actress and photographer, currently teaches French in a middle school in Issy-les-Moulineaux. She began writing during her maternity leave in 2005.

Book preview

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 with them! The devil won’t protect you then!

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.

The red-stained water lapped around the old woman’s words. From now on, you will bleed every month. When Holy Week comes, I’ll initiate you. Go back to bed now, and don’t ruin your other shift!

Frasquita covered her straw mattress with the hessian sheet her mother had given her and lay down in the silence of the night.

Even though the blood was flowing, she did not feel the slightest pain. Would she still be bleeding when she woke up? What if she emptied completely during her sleep like a cracked pitcher? Her thighs already looked so white . . . She preferred not to sleep, to feel herself die . . .

The dawn shook her. So, she was still alive!

Through her little window, she could already make out the other houses below in Santavela, slightly pink in the timid caress of a new sun that would gradually become more confident. Soon they would have to hold their breaths, live on their reserves of coolness, and remain hidden behind the whitewashed stone until late afternoon. Only then would they be able to enjoy the light of the dying sun, to watch it impale itself on a horizon as sharp and dry as a blade and disappear slowly behind the great knife of the mountains, turned blood-red in an enormous death rattle of colors. Then the night would glide from east to west, black, almost moth-eaten in places, and a breath might perhaps come to stir the burning air, a breath laden with wet, salty aromas. The whole village would start to dream of that vast stretch of water, blue from all the skies reflected in it, whose outbursts, rages and beauty had been described to them by the few travelers who had strayed onto the winding lanes that led to Santavela.

Frasquita, my mother, looked at the forest of loose stones and dry trees that surrounded her world and thought how good it was to be alive, even here, and although her blood continued flowing, her only anxiety now was that she might stain herself.

Don’t eat figs or blackberries during your period, it’ll show on your face. Take care not to touch meat during that week, or hair will grow on your chin! Don’t drink this, don’t touch that: there was no lack of advice.

Of course, it didn’t kill you, but life had been simpler before.

During the eight months that preceded Lent, Frasquita was unable, despite all her efforts, to escape her mother’s perceptive eye: her mother could sense the blood coming even before the first drop appeared, and she would immediately come running, brandishing the latest taboos gleaned in the past three weeks from every old hag in the village.

What Frasquita dreaded above all was the first night of her period. Then, without fail, her mother would come into her room in the dead of night, throw a blanket over her shoulders, and lead her to a field of stones where, whatever the season, she would wash her, muttering mysterious prayers as she did so.

And the next day she had to do her share as if everything was normal: wake up at dawn to milk the goats, take the milk to the neighbors, make the bread, do the housework, then set off through the hills with the animals and find them something to graze on in the middle of all those stones. All the while, of course, avoiding eating the best that nature could offer because everything that seemed good in normal times suddenly turned deadly when the blood flowed.

Unlike the other girls she talked to on the hills, who would announce to all and sundry that they were now women, Frasquita hated her new condition: all she could see in it was the inconvenience, and she would happily have stayed a child.

But nobody ever mentioned nightly prayers or initiations during Holy Week. Frasquita had not forgotten her mother’s words on the night of the first blood and she sensed that she was to say nothing about it to anyone.

In whom could she have confided anyway?

She was an only daughter. Her mother’s family had been decimated by a mysterious illness, along with half the village, and, at the age of forty-five, Francisca, her mother, who had become resigned to the idea that she would never have children, had suddenly, against all expectation, seen her belly swell.

Mother and daughter seemed inseparable, as if bound together by the miracle of that belated birth. For a long time, they had advanced side by side at the same pace along the lanes. At first, Francisca had adjusted her step to her daughter’s, then Frasquita’s strides had grown much longer until her mother could not keep up and the child had to submit to the limitations of the weary body walking beside her. Young as she was, Frasquita knew she was too frail to withstand the eyes of the village alone, and as for her mother, she had to keep her child by her side or she might have doubted her very existence.

Their bodies would move, driven by the same current, and it was impossible to say which of the two was imposing her movement on the other.

Frasquita did not betray her mother’s eccentricities. The questions stayed with her, and accumulated.

From the first day of Lent, the future initiate was fed exclusively on unleavened bread, milk and fruit. She left the house only to attend Sunday mass. The tiny olivewood cross that she clutched in her right hand as soon as she walked out the door of her house and the small angular stones with which her mother decorated her shoes gave her the appearance of a saint.

Thanks to all this ritual and mystery, Frasquita finally got caught up in the game. It was of no consequence to her that the soles of her feet hurt, nor did she mind the closed shutters in her room, or the darkness, or the silence in which her mother shut her away, she was focused on that ultimate goal, that initiation that would make her a woman. She could almost touch it, and she prayed to God and the Virgin with a fervor increased tenfold by fasting and solitude. There were even days when she felt certain that Mary and her Son were present at her side. Overcome with a kind of ecstasy, she would throw herself to her knees, wild-eyed. In those blessed moments when it seemed to her that the room was suddenly filled with their presence, Frasquita would disappear into the prayers she offered up to them with the fervor of a twelve-year-old child who has been starved for several weeks. Entirely contained within those words she had learned, those poems recited and offered, she was nothing more than lips absorbed in something unfathomable.

Then her heart would beat at the same rhythm as the world that suddenly filled her dark little room. It entered in procession through the slits in the shutters, through the cracks in the walls. It spilled into the closed space of the bedroom, gathered in it, pressed in on her from all sides. She felt it beating in her ribcage, throbbing behind her eyelids. First came the sky, with its winds and clouds, then the mountains paraded past, one after the other, like the pearls of a necklace that had been thrown in under her door, then came the high sea, which made the walls warp like blotting paper. The whole of creation would gather around her, within her, and she would become the sky, the mountains and the sea. She would come to the world and the world would come to her.

But then her mother would open the door and everything would disappear.

On the night of Holy Tuesday, Frasquita is asleep, exhausted from too much waiting.

Her mother stands erect in the darkness by her daughter’s bed. She throws cooking salt as she chants. There is a strong smell of garlic. Her bony hands move above the young face already swollen with sleep. The dreams flee. The white fingers move over her features. The voice squeals suddenly in the black dryness of the night.

A stillborn cry.

They must not wake father. Silence.

Her mother’s gestures become more rapid.

Frasquita is torn between laughter and fear. But she does not laugh, and she follows her mother’s small figure out into the night. Barefoot, steps weighed down by the silence. Their shadows follow lightly after them.

They both walk along the path leading to the cemetery. As soon as they are surrounded by graves, Francisca starts praying again. Her voice flows out of her like water, in great gushes. It rises to her mouth and overflows. There is always more to spit out.

A woman screams, and a half-undressed couple who have come there to be out of earshot of the living and enjoy the silence of the dead run off as fast as their legs will carry them. Frasquita shudders as her mother addresses her female ancestors, her voice and language no longer recognizable.

Two black headbands suddenly appear in her mother’s empty hands.

I have to blindfold you now. All the prayers you are about to hear, you will have to remember. They come from before the first book, and are passed down from mother to daughter. They can only be taught during Holy Week. You will have to learn them all, and, in your turn, you will bequeath them to those of your daughters who will show themselves worthy. These prayers cannot be written or thought. They are said aloud. That is the secret. You will accompany some of them with gestures I will teach you later.

Frasquita is blindfolded and her mother makes her turn around several times. She has lost her bearings. The ground falls away. She feels dizzy. Her eyes search for the light. She wants to run away.

Then a voice rises in the night. Not her mother’s.

A voice that seems to come from the bowels of the earth, a voice from beyond the grave, a huge voice that whispers, at once close and distant, at once outside Frasquita and beneath her skin, at once clear and muted. She will have to repeat everything. Remember everything. She has only four nights to absorb a body of knowledge that goes back a thousand years.

Terrified, Frasquita does as she is told. In the darkness, she repeats what is whispered to her and the heavy words batter her, imprint themselves on her as she says them.

During that first night, my mother learned by heart prayers to shade the head from the sun, prayers for cut skin, for burned skin, for sick eyes, prayers for warts, prayers to get to sleep, and so on. For every small human misery, there was a prayer.

There were fewer prayers on the second night, and she found them harder to understand, utter and retain. They were prayers to cure people of the evil eye and protect them from spirits, from the white lady, from the creatures of the night.

On the third night, the voice taught her two prayers so complicated, so hermetic, that Frasquita could not even grasp who they were addressed to. She did what she could to utter these inarticulate, almost inexpressible sounds. A mysterious language filled her mouth like a thick substance that she had to chew for a long time. As she said the words, it seemed to her that there was a strange flavor flooding her palate and tickling her taste buds.

These were incantations to make the damned rise like cakes, to build bridges between the worlds, to open graves, to restart what is finished.

Finally, on the last night, the now-familiar voice emerging from the shadows gave her a gift.

You now know how to cure the small ills of the body with the help of the saints, you know how to free souls with the help of the one who is called Mary here, but who has many other names, and I have taught you to hear the laments and lessons of the dead. But take care! You will have to employ your power sparingly. You will be able to use the prayers of the first night whenever you see fit, but those of the second night, if you do not want to lose them, you will have to use only when a stranger asks for your help and it will be of no advantage to your family. As for the invocations of the third night, those that summon spirits, they can only be used once every hundred years. As soon as you utter one, you will forget it. But beware, appealing to the other world is not without its dangers: the dead are not always benevolent and these last incantations have a will of their own. Remember that there are living words that burn the minds that they possess. I am entrusting you with this box. You must only open it in nine months’ time, nine months to the day, not before. If you do not resist the temptation, you will lose everything I have taught you until now, just as your mother lost it before you. Farewell.

The box

Even as a child, Frasquita had liked to sit in a corner and sew. It had not taken long for her mother to notice the girl’s surprising speed and dexterity with the needle. She laughed to see the child replacing a button or mending a cuff with such extreme meticulousness.

Frasquita had started out by darning the seats of pants, and from one pair of pants to the next the trajectory of the thread had become more confident, the stitches finer, her hand movements faster, and her eye sharper.

During the Lent when she was initiated, she had been deprived of her sewing. That in itself had been a great sacrifice. So, immediately after Easter, she got back to work with renewed ardor.

In her mending, Frasquita had so far tried to imitate the weave of the material, to reconstruct it, and she succeeded so well in this that her work became invisible. Her father would search in vain for some trace of wear and tear on the knees or in the crotch of his