NEEDLE

Starlings, crickets, a white silence, a vowel that decides to fly out of a sentence and crashes into the whitewashed walls and the floor of terracotta tiles. Sounds. The sky like a sheet. When I am deposited on the balcony and open my eyes, the sky doesn’t stop moving. I try to grasp it, but can’t. I am distracted by a fly, the distant barks of a dog – woof, woof – the delicate movement of the plants Felisa grows on the balcony. Nothing is still: it must be because of restless time lurking stealthily inside things.

What can it be that frightens me and makes me laugh, I wonder. That sound only I can hear, that wakes me and forces me to be a wolf and search, search everywhere, with pricked up ears. The others can’t hear it, I know because they don’t flinch. Or it could be that they are used to it, to that sound coming from the other side of the street, scaling walls, perforating the table legs and coursing down the swollen veins that clamber up Felisa’s legs. I don’t know what it is. It’s a faint beating sound or the rubbing together of two metal spheres. When Felisa sits down to her embroidery, I can sometimes make out the interrupted sound the needle makes as it pierces the linen fibres or the wounded ‘ah!’ of the silk the needle crosses with the soft impulse of the skill of the embroideress’ finger. Later, peacefully, the threads slide down the cloth in a long, monotonous sentence, ceasing to be inoffensive fibres in order to turn into magnificent embroidery. The thread enjoys passing through the eye of the needle, succumbing to it, the great guide, the leveller of virgin paths, and then resting in the new and delightful circumstance of being the petal of a flower, the feather of a bird, a link in the double hemstitch of a tablecloth.

Thanks to Felisa’s skill, the vulgarity of a thread wound around the stomach of a wooden bobbin acquires the status of beauty.