Belinda, “Collection Automne/Hiver 2004/04″, 2003

It isn’t every day you embroider yourself.

Marie Darrieussecq, 2003
Translated by Ian Monk

It isn’t every day you embroider yourself. It’s something rather out of the ordinary. You need a big event. Well, that year, it was my sister who was getting married. And, as though picking up the thread from her lead, I met my future husband at her wedding. As I was to be her bridesmaid, I’d tried out a huge quantity of frocks, but the prettiest one was so short that I had to dress up my legs a bit. It was light and summery ­ the wedding was to take place on July 10th. In my family, embroidery is seen as rather old hat. For instance, my mother is the sort who confuses piercing and mutilation, embroidery and arranged marriages. She has absolutely no time for the comeback of embroidery. So I didn’t know who to turn to. There are specialised establishments, where you can also get your legs waxed, as well as your panty line and armpits, or else have your eyebrows and lashes dyed. But the few friends I knew who had had embroidery done were never happy with result. The thread was thick, the pattern vulgar and the colours too flashy.

So I said to myself: why not try your own hand?

My mother, grandmother and great-grandmother have all been gifted embroiderers. It’s a sort of family tradition that begins with alphabets at school. That’s how they used to teach girls to write. They rammed French down their throats and forbade them to speak the old language. They were given sloughed-off eel or snake skin to practice on and embroidered A,B,C,D until they could spell their names and end up writing out “Saint Michael’s Boarding School, Ciboure”. I’ve had several of such alphabets framed and hung in my study. I write, in French, under their patronage. The skins have dried out a little, but there are now modern techniques to make them last longer. And their beautiful red thread is still in perfect condition.

My great-grandmother is dead, of course. We’re long-lived in this family, but there are limits. Apparently, she was a bit of a sauce, not above embroidering a suspender belt under her skirts. And don’t forget that, at the time, revealing an ankle was seen as a come-on. I reckon my great-grandmother would have loved to embroider my legs and see me like that in the wedding photos. She would have taken a wicked delight in displaying them on the mantelpiece. When I was little, she used to admire how slender my legs were, and say that in comparison all the other girls (my sister included) didn’t have pins but tree-trunks, as she put it.

As for my grandmother, she’s still with us, but I couldn’t see myself asking her for help, and especially not for the wedding of her other granddaughter. My grandmother embroiders only her hands, like old peasant women do, and always with the same discreet brownish-red paisley pattern. When my sloughing started and my mother let me get my ears embroidered and wear a little make-up, my grandmother was shocked because I was still so young.

So there was just my mother. She also had produced plenty of alphabets when at school. But I didn’t dare ask her. I’d have felt weird if she’d touched me so closely. I mean, would you ask your own mother to remove your body hair for instance? When my sloughing started, my mother didn’t want to have anything more to do with me physically. I had to handle the situation myself, and she left me alone. My sister was already grown-up, and I could always ask her for any details about hygiene and so on. From that time on, my mother considered that she had no little girls any more, only adolescents, strangers under her roof. She must already have sensed that her own sloughing days were numbered.

Mine started very early. I didn’t know what was happening to me. Such matters were never discussed in our house. My skin started coming away from my chest. By the second day, I could slip my hand completely beneath it. My breasts were still tiny, but I was already sloughing. It was in September, at the beginning of the school year. The weather was extremely hot, but I hid myself in a roll-neck sweater. When my thighs began to peel as well, all around my nearly hairless sex, I concealed them in a pair of jeans. But then my hands started. At my school desk, I peeled off entire stretches of my skin until I bled, pulling them as far as possible so as to get it over with. I spent hours rolling them up in my fingers. I no longer listened to the teacher. I had not time for anything else. What scared me was the thought that my face might start sloughing too. I was so ignorant. I watched my female teachers and wondered: are they sloughing right now like me? Are we all the same? In the end, it was my sister who gave me the necessary practical advice. Then, after a few days, the sloughing stopped quite naturally.

Once I’d come to terms with how early I was, I started to take a look round at the others: the hair sprouting on the boys’ bodies and the skin peeling off the girls. I was amazed at how many of them didn’t seem to mind making a spectacle of their metamorphoses. One of the more daring girls in the class even got a heart embroidered on her shoulder made from her boyfriend’s brand new body hair. She was suspended for two days and told not to come back looking like that again, but for me she was a heroine. After all, I kept wrapping myself when sloughing, and every month was an ordeal. The base of my belly also started sloughing naturally, which was painful, as is often the case for young girls. The blood on those scraps of flesh revolted me and it was years before I’d accept to make love while sloughing.

So, as you can imagine, I carefully calculated which day I should embroider my legs, so that the thread would still be firmly in place for my sister’s wedding. Sloughed skin around an embroidery is never very attractive, even if the thread has been put in deeply enough to last several months. I find it looks slovenly. Now that embroidery’s back in fashion, I think it looks particularly good on pregnant women, because of course they have no problem of skin peeling around the threads. My sister was getting married because she was pregnant. It would be wrong to reduce the entire situation to that fact, but let’s just say that it provided her with a pretext. She had a marvellous piece of embroidery done on her belly, made of elastic thread which expands as the baby grows. She chose a traditional colour and pattern in homage to our great-grandmother: a beautiful dark red forming a roseate leaf whose tip rose up between her breasts. Wonderful. Her white dress was cut in a translucent material, so that the embroidery could be seen through it, as people do nowadays. My sister has never cared less what our mother or grandmother might think. I admire her guts. Of course, when you have the means to go to a high-class embroiderer’s, then why hesitate? I’d also heard that her best friend, who was to be her witness, was going to have her neck and even her cleavage embroidered with a display of vegetation, made of pearled cotton leaves and stalks of gold thread.

I couldn’t bear the thought of going to one of the neighbourhood centres. Nor could I ask my sister for money. So, like they did in the old days, I practised using some untreated pig’s hide, which I bought at the butcher’s. I pencilled on some patterns, and then began. Within a few days, I managed to get what I wanted: a traditionally inspired paisley pattern, but with tints of pink, mauve, violet, ivory and aniseed.

For amateur embroiderers like me, the main difficulty is not to pull the thread too tight. It’s a natural temptation, but a little elasticity must be left to allow for the movement of the muscles. Otherwise, it puckers up, is uncomfortable when you walk or sit down, and produces unsightly folds. The weather was extremely hot that early July, and when I came home in the evening, I undressed with delight, sat down on the rug and quietly stitched in the fading daylight. July evenings are long, but I no longer felt lonely. I finished both legs, just as I wanted, a week before the wedding, so that the bruising around the stitches had time to go down and fade. On the morning of the big day, my legs were smooth, with just a few needle-pricks still visible. The embroidery looked great.

Although I have extremely regular cycles, I had to start sloughing on the day of my sister’s wedding, in spite of all my calculations. She’d hardly pronounced the words ³I do², when my skin started to peel. The first part to go was the area around my embroideries, as though it was doing it on purpose. It all happened so fast, I just had time to borrow a horsehair brush from a girlfriend to rub myself down in the bathroom. The sloughing was so heavy that I had to go back every couple of hours, despite the fact that usually a good rub in the morning is enough for me to hold out until evening. I felt like crying. My short dress now looked ridiculous, and my legs were all red from the friction, with the embroidery starting to come away in places. I’ll spare you the details.

It’s a well known fact that weddings lead to other weddings. I don’t know if it was really my embroidery that first caught my future husband’s eye. But I do know that what drew me to him was the way he looked at my skin. I don’t mean the moment when he asked me to dance. When, very quickly, he started moving his legs in time with mine and told me what lovely ones I had, legs I mean, and how much the embroidery suited me. No. I’m talking about the moment behind the barn when he kissed me and slipped his hand on to my back. Before I’d even had time to react, I felt my skin rise up around my shoulders. I was terribly embarrassed, but he kept going, further and further down towards the small of my back…. How good it felt, how lovely…. My new skin beneath had the softness of a mucous membrane, pink and fresh, and his fingers were setting my nerve-ends alight. “How smooth you are…. how soft,” he whispered. I thought I’d better apologise. “It’s the time of the month,” I muttered. He laughed: “Yes, I know, I can feel you’re sloughing.” Hearing a man’s voice pronounce those words so simply moved me to the core. “And you don’t find it disgusting?” I murmured. He stepped back slightly. I was afraid that he was about to go. But he put his hand behind my neck and moved his face close to mine. “You’re a woman” he said, “you’re a woman, and I want you.”