Blue by Prophète Emmelie

Author:Prophète, Emmelie
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Published: 2022-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

XV

My mother’s heart makes the same sound as her sewing machine, which I have known my whole life. It’s older than my brothers and me. Its brand is a woman’s first name: Linda. It has always looked like a museum piece. All of my little-girl dresses came from beneath her magical needles that broke sometimes. I’ve seen many women from this family sitting behind that machine, which makes an ancient mechanical noise like Maman’s heart, like the heart of all women who have been poorly loved.

Odile sat behind that machine once; it’s the only clear image I have of her in my memory, sewing who knows what and singing a very popular, very sexist song by some compas band. Her face was serene. She was already living partly in North America and partly on the island. That gave her a kind of superiority. She had plans.

The room was filled with all sorts of objects, ugly, motley, useless. It was so crowded it was hard to move around. These sisters had nothing in common except for a physical resemblance, and their way of always acquiescing to the badly brought-up men who were their husbands. They had no heroes, no models. They were mothers. The word was synonymous with servitude and self-sacrifice.

They were together that day, all three of them, these daughters of the blue province. Their three lives gathered together in one room weren’t enough to make a story. They knew of no other drink but coffee. Coffee in different cups. As different as they were themselves. Masked, veiled in coffee black, they would have been magnificent as widows, lit up by all sorts of temptations, besieged by desires, unfamiliar shivers running through them. They would keep sealed in silence all trespasses, all those acts that cannot be transformed into words, so private and illegal and tender are they.

The rumble of the sewing machine filled the room. Its motor belt running fast. It was dark and magnificent and almost enviable in its mechanical life, turning out shoddy products. It could have sewn nice ones, but a sewing machine doesn’t dream alone. One by one, they put their feet on the pedal, and the long line began stretching away, the thread of dashes on the cloth joining the pieces of fabric together.

It was a kind of magic. They were happy with the results, cutting with the pretty pair of silver-plated scissors that were also older than any of the family’s children. That pair of scissors cut paper, too, unbeknown to my mother, who would have been furious if she’d seen us using her treasure for that. Children weren’t supposed to touch the sewing machine, or the scissors.

I’ve seen sewing machines that looked like the ones belonging to other women in the quarter, but none ever looked like Linda or had a woman’s name like hers. She wasn’t the most beautiful, but she was unique. She had been built to withstand time, like her owner, to watch others pass through and go away, even the youngest ones.

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