The House of Embroiderers

La casa de bordados
Salvadora Medina Onrubia


It’s a small shop decorated with dark papers. Dark wood, blue curtains, two or three cushions make it comfortable for the women who prefer to do their shopping in this discreet and almost elegant environment. The old Jewish widow dressed in black, who is the owner there, understands her business well.


It also sells useful work items, lace, silk flowers, stockings, gloves. She has a salesgirl to help her. She’s an insignificant girl, neither ugly, nor pretty, without the freshness of youth, and without precise forms beneath her simple black salesgirl’s uniform.


Obligated to be in that dark room all day, to always smile, to make herself seem happy in order to squeeze one more cent from clients under the watchful stare of the Jewish owner, her personality is a blur.


In the free moments when there are no people in the shop, she sews or knits. She raises a corner of the curtain and feels the light’s rays. She always works with her head leaning on one shoulder. Her pulled-back silky brown hair reveals her pale, wide forehead and the imperceptible Mona Lisa smile on her lips.


She bears an extraordinarily close resemblance to La Gioconda.


I am sure her boyfriend tells her this all the time and that it’s because of this that he’s in love with her.


Her boyfriend must be a poet. Or painter. He wears a wide hat, a black scarf and his hair in a mane. He’s very tall, very thin, has feverish eyes and the hands of a man. Every afternoon he waits for her on the corner, or leans against a tree almost in front of my house. When she comes out, they sink arm-in-arm into the tree-lined street.


I know that the modesty of her classic smile looks with sadness at the stately garden, the flowery castle, the sumptuous cars, the suits and the hats of the yard that faces her. That she thinks about the tragic poverty of her bohemian boyfriend …
Life: You are blind. Blind as the blindfolded child. And crazy. More crazy than Aeschylus the Immortal. And you distribute your gifts accordingly.


Bibí says it …how very much she’d like to sing and dance, raising her paws above the scaffold and above the orchestras of the theaters filled with lights and people applauding her … And Gloria? Gloria Brena who has so much talent, so much talent. And me? How many things you gave me that I didn’t want, that I didn’t need.


Among them, my multi-faced soul that likes everything and holds onto nothing; the curse that all, all of my desires become living things in my hands.


Life: I’ve only wanted a simple and modest soul, a small, dark, laborious life, a sad and thoughtful smile, a poor, very poor, bohemian boyfriend who loves me very much … Who recites feverish verses by the light of the stars; verses that I don’t understand …


Life, among so many things, so many things that you gave me, humility never came.