CHAPTER 1
Clorinda
Tocopilla, 2001
Clorinda exhaled heavily and watched as the taut strands cut her breath into thin slices. The wooden hand loom was braced in primitive blocks so it leaned slightly away from her. She tied a knot around the last nail and sat back to scan the result of her efforts.
The warp stared back at her, its vertical lines submitting themselves to the crazy idea that she would make something of them. Knotted together across her ambitious three square metre wooden frame, the threads were strangers to one another. They were disenfranchised scarves and sweaters that had been reduced to random lengths of yarn of various colours and textures. They cringed at their forced intimacy. Imagine the atrocity of genteel red English wool united against its will with loutish brown llama yarn and in turn, the loud protests of these coarse yarns raging against the weakness of such refined threads. Clorinda’s indiscriminate fingers had tied them tightly together and then drawn them up and down around the metal posts that restrained them. These silent stringed prisoners quivered with tension, if not with a certain bizarre and perverted excitement. They were the foundation of her ‘life’s work.’
Clorinda dared to lightly caress the woollen strings. Her hands were rough and gnarled for a young woman who wasn’t yet 28 years old, and her nails were ragged and broken but when she touched her precious yarns, her fingers became graceful ballerinas that danced across the bows of so many violins. Clorinda’s olive complexion was somewhat lighter than the other locals who were a heavy mixture of altiplano Quechua native with Spanish blood. But her eyes were black diamonds that glinted from within the shadows between her brows and high cheekbones. They darted crazily as one thing or another caught her interest and then like a cat, she focused single-mindedly on the object that was her prey before pouncing and playing with it in her mind.
Clorinda had thin, unremarkable lips and when they parted to form one of her infrequent smiles, a full set of teeth, somewhat yellow but still all there, was displayed in straight rows, top and bottom. Her sleek black hair was cropped just above her shoulders with bangs that ended in a straight line barely covering her eyebrows, a rare style for a Latina woman. She was influenced by photos she had seen of Joan of Arc and didn’t care what anyone thought about it because somewhere in her own mind she too was a heroine directed by an inner voice. Clorinda’s trademark characteristic was her ‘calendar’ wardrobe – an eclectic collection of clothes she designed and sewed herself, outlandish outfits that fell into one of seven themes according to the days of the week.
She sat up straight, which for Clorinda was still decidedly hunched, a habit her spine had developed from bending over her fabric treasures and, as a young girl, skulking around school yards spying on the groups from which she had been excluded. Today was Saturday so she dressed in one of her semi-full skirts – a patchwork of yellow floral print and green jungle motif, and she complemented it with a green and orange striped cotton pull-over. Since she had stricken Wednesdays from her calendar, she re-assigned her traditional Wednesday flower and scarf accessories to Saturdays, meaning she was permitted this yellow and orange polyester bandana around her head. Her ears protruded from under the bandana, parting her hair around them and assigning her an attribute akin to a perky feminine monkey.
She leaned forward, closed her eyes, and touched a line of fine grey alpaca wool with her tongue several times. She was careful not to lick it as she did with cotton or silk garments because that would leave little beads of saliva on the wool, something she didn’t want to do. Rather she simply wanted to identify it for certain. It tasted like the sweater of the old man across the street who had died last week. The flavour stabbed to her heart and she sat silently praying for the wind to come and carry away the pain.
She thought about him at the cemetery. Three weeks ago the old man’s coffin had been pushed deep into the hollow concrete niche, scratching roughly along the bottom until the end with his head brusquely collided with the back wall. The cemetery worker unceremoniously heaved a concrete block across the opening and with a fresh cement mixture he sealed the old man and his coffin into darkness with only Clorinda as witness.
Clorinda had stroked his name, Orlando del Transito Ortega de Riveras, with red house paint onto a board that she ripped from his patio and she leaned it against the cement seal of his tomb. His name revealed nothing about him and his date of birth was unknown, or at least no one took the trouble to research it. And it didn’t make much sense to note the date of his ending if his beginning was a mystery. Clorinda had placed a single yellow daisy and Señor Ortega’s stylish black fountain pen on the ledge beside it. She blessed herself and asked God to please ensure that no one would steal the pen. To help God in his vigilance, she reached up and carefully wedged the pen into the wet cement just behind the name board and repositioned the daisy in front. Only she would know about the pen, she and God and Señor Ortega, just as it had been when he was alive.
Inside his coffin, Señor Ortega wore his British wool sweater and Italian-made trousers. Only a week earlier, he had stopped wearing his finest alpaca wool vest because he had donated it to Clorinda. –What do I need this vest for?– he said to her. – I won’t be invited anywhere these days.– Obviously his burial, which he knew was imminent, was not going to be very elegant. He knew he would not attract a crowd of townspeople to say goodbye to him. He would not feel one hand after another, planting a kiss on the top of his coffin as he was carried past a steady stream of inconsolable onlookers. He wouldn’t hear anyone say, “Go with God” or “I’ll miss you, my old friend.”
The day of his funeral, Clorinda wore her special frock, the one made with deep turquoise, blue and purple satin patches joined so the light reflected the various deliberate angles of the nap. It was Señor Ortega’s favourite dress. She started sewing it the day after she first saw him and finished it only six months ago. It took a long time to come across just the right garment swatches and she considered herself blessed to have found them at all.
Now Clorinda studied the soft grey threads of the vest that were stretched up and down on the frame in front of her. It, like the old man’s life, had unravelled in the most unexpected of circumstances. The vest gave her far more yarn than she needed to finish the warp. She would use the rest to weave across itself. She imagined a large grey, nonuniform area. It would be the base for Señor Ortega’s patch on the world.
She stared at a grey and red knot near the bottom right corner of the frame. This is where she tied the yarn from her favourite red sweater to Señor Ortega’s grey. – This, Señor Ortega, is where you end – she thought. She followed the grey yarn upwards and let her eyes scan the rest of the threads to find where his life might begin. Her eyes stopped and focused on the knot that joined him to a string of rough ochre llama wool.
She stretched her legs out in front of herself, dropped her arms, fell back into her wooden chair and squinted her eyes until the coloured threads blurred into one solid canvas. She had hopes that images would magically emerge from the warp, especially at the point where her red joined Señor Ortega’s grey. But they didn’t. It is Señor Ortega who should be red – she thought – his life was much more vibrant than mine.
She reached into the plastic bag on the floor beside her and drew out a short piece of the grey wool from Señor Ortega’s vest. She would allow herself this luxury. And as she pulled the strand of wool across her tongue she tasted a bit of his life. It was a foreign flavour that both saddened and excited her, arousing great curiosity.
She stood up, short piece of wool still in hand, and walked out of her patio and across the street where she planted herself in front of Señor Ortega’s abandoned house.
She remained there frozen, just two metres from his front door, staring at the dark windows, dragging the short piece of grey wool back and forth across her tongue like a bow over a violin. The sound that she heard was the emptiness from Señor Ortega himself.
