The Lace Maker – Part 1: Needle and Thread

"You cannot copy it," said Luca. "You can only understand it."

Chiara looked at the antique lace laid across the table: a panel of cream-coloured threads, fine as spiders' silk, worked in a pattern of waves and flowers. A piece the size of her palm was missing. She was thirty-one, a textile restorer from Milan, here on the lagoon island of Burano to repair it for a museum. The windows of the little workshop looked onto a canal, bright with painted houses in pink and blue and yellow.

"I have a magnifier."

"A magnifier will tell you what. It will not tell you why."

He was thirty-four, slim, dark-haired, quietly handsome, in a linen shirt with rolled sleeves. His grandmother had been the last great lace maker on the island. He had learned from her as a boy, and had hardly spoken of it since. His hands, resting on the table, were long and still.

"Sit," he said. "I'll show you."

She sat. He placed a pillow and a needle in front of her and gave her a thread. His fingers closed over hers, guiding the needle in a tiny loop. "One stitch. Then the next. The pattern grows from the hand."

She tried. Her stitches were clumsy and tight. He unpicked them gently and said, "Again." For three days she sat at the table in the sunny window, learning, while the canal glittered outside and the fishing boats puttered by. On the fourth day, her stitches came clean.

"There," murmured Luca.

"It's like breathing."

"Yes."

They worked in companionable silence. In the evenings they ate fish and polenta in a tiny trattoria by the water, sharing a carafe of white wine. He told her about his grandmother's songs, the way she hummed while she worked. She told him about her mother's dressmaking, the pins in her mouth.

"Can I ask you something?" said Chiara.

"Yes."

"Why did you stop making lace?"

"Because there was no one to make it with," said Luca, simply.

"Green?" she said, a thread, a shutter.

"Green," said Luca, with a shy smile. "Very green. Come. The light is good."

Continue the story: Part 2 – The Missing Piece.