Cross-Stitch by Jazmina Barrera

Author:Jazmina Barrera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Two Lines Press

After thirty minutes of wandering around the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection of Greek and Roman sculpture, admiring the realism and strength of its women and old men, with Dalia telling me half the story of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and then half of his Heroides, we realized that all the sculptures we’d been looking at were Victorian replicas. We felt dumb. The statues suddenly appeared too polished, too bright, false. We left the room and walked for a while until we came across Tippoo’s Tiger, a wooden mechanical device made in India depicting a tiger savaging a European soldier, who is lying face-up on the ground. The soldier’s hand touches the tiger’s face, and it almost looks as though they are lovers. The label told the story of how Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore, commissioned the piece in memory of a tiger that ate the son of a powerful Englishman, and it was made in the same year as Blake wrote his poem “The Tyger.” I mentioned to Dalia that I’d once dreamed I met Blake and heard him recite “The Tyger.” She nodded and said drily that I’d told her that before. I was embarrassed, but the feeling passed when she started to speak with warmth and enthusiasm again and, taking my arm, wondered how it must have felt to see that mechanical tiger in action in the nineteenth century. It would have been something like seeing a Japanese robot nowadays, I replied. Dalia retorted that robots didn’t impress her. So, how about watching a 3D movie or seeing a hologram? Yes, those were impressive: IMAX movies made her deliciously dizzy; she liked them as much as roller coasters. You’re so right, I agreed, even though roller coasters terrify me.

I used the pretext of finding the bathroom to suggest we each go our separate ways for an hour, but the truth was that I wanted to visit the gift store to buy a few trinkets. I purchased a mirror ring, some red glass earrings, and a book about ghost cats, all of which I secreted in my backpack. Dalia went to the textile and costume collection: a crazy mix of brocades, silks, and stories, she told me on the way home. I felt silly about missing all that; I hadn’t even realized that any such section existed. On the screen of her camera, she showed me the photos she’d taken of fabrics and dresses from all over the world, embroidered with hundreds of different stitches and designs. She had spectacular images of huge embroidery samplers, and we made a plan to meet up when we got back to Mexico to select and try to copy some of the designs onto our own samplers. I asked if there had been any xmanikté, but she hadn’t noticed. Then she showed me photos of something I found deeply unsettling: a Chinese technique called moxiu, dating from around the seventh century, when women used to embroider representations of the Buddha in hair to demonstrate their piety.

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