Spotlight: The Curse of the Flores Women by Angélica Lopes and Zoë Perry (Translator)
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In this haunting novel about the enduring bonds of womanhood, a young girl weaves together the truth behind her family history and the secrets that resonate through generations.
Eighteen-year-old Alice Ribeiro is constantly fighting―against the status quo, female oppression in Brazil, and even her own mother. But when a family veil is passed down to her, Alice is compelled to fight for the rights of all womankind while also uncovering the hidden history of the women in her family.
Seven generations ago, the small town of Bom Retiro shunned the Flores women because of a “curse” that rendered them unlucky in love. With no men on the horizon to take care of them, the women learned the art of lacemaking to build lives of their own. But their peace was soon threatened by forces beyond any woman’s control.
Excerpt
Text copyright © 2024 by Angélica Lopes, Published by Amazon Crossing
It was always an act of rebellion, albeit invisible.
We knew there was a risk in what we were doing, and perhaps it was precisely the danger of being found out—small at first, barely evident to anyone’s eyes, intertwined with the threads of patterns we flaunted so discreetly on our lace handkerchiefs and veils—that emboldened us to take even greater risks.
We weren’t all related, but we were united by the art of transforming thread and woven tape into lace. Here, on this patch of land where minor details matter more than big events, where the red clay ground is as cracked and lined as my Tia Firmina’s face—both sculpted by time and sorrow—where the fate of women is cut-and-dried, like the imperfect reverse side of the only story woven exclusively by our own desire and determination: lace. No other path wholly belonged to us.
My friend Vitorina was the one responsible for making us the keepers of this knowledge, when she stood at the top of a ladder and spied the secret that had come all the way from the capital.
“What are you doing up there, girl?” Hildinha asked when she saw her daughter lurking at the eaves above the guest room.
“Leave me be, Mother. I’m trying to learn something that will be of great value.”
Thanks to Vitorina’s curiosity, the lace technique that had adorned altars in Europe for centuries, a cloistered secret, known only to nuns inside convents in big cities, made its way to our little town, Bom Retiro.
A matter of chance, a loose thread of fate, brought by the cousin of a cousin of another cousin of Vitorina’s, who, after her secret was stolen, never forgave my friend for her disloyalty.
The girl worked as a kitchen maid inside a very strict convent. After several years of good service, she’d earned the nuns’ trust, and they taught her the art of lacemaking. At first, still unsure they could trust her, the nuns only taught her the basic stitches. It was only later, after observing the strength of the girl’s character and considering her worthy, that they showed her the more elaborate ones.
Vitorina’s distant cousin had a “knack for lace,” as they used to say, and knew how to be discreet, an indispensable quality for the keepers of that secret. When the girl announced that she was going to visit relatives in the countryside for the holidays, the nuns warned her:
“If you’re going to make lace when you’re back home, stay out of sight.”
Always respectful of her superiors, the girl obeyed their orders. To keep her promise, made before the saints, that cousin of a cousin of another cousin of Vitorina’s only made lace when she was alone in the guest room, with just a yellow tallow candle to light her work.
But at the top of a ladder, determined to find out what her cousin was doing in that room with the windows shut in the midday sun, Vitorina was watching.
She watched so closely that she was able to memorize her every move.
Hunched over a cylindrical pillow, her guest plaited threads into designs made up of all kinds of stitches: buttonhole, broom, tower, rib. Spider, moon, popcorn.
Sunset, lovers stitch, and—my favorite—the bottom of the basket stitch, which enchanted me not so much for its shape, but for its name, which seemed to offer both a threat and a promise. An unknown, unexplored place that could hold fortune or hardship, where you might equally find a silver coin or a scorpion, something only revealed to those with the courage to take risks and stick their hand inside.
Of course, the stitches weren’t actually called that back then. They arrived here in the Pajeú River Valley with foreign names, names we never learned. But, as we became familiar with them, we were able to identify their similarities with things in the world, baptizing them one by one, as if we’d always owned them.
In the afternoons I spent hunched over my pillow, I tried to imagine what name I might give a stitch if I happened to come up with one of my own. Not that I had such ambition. But, in a moment of carelessness, the needle might get tangled in the thread, go where it shouldn’t, and voilà: a new stitch is born.
It would be the first stitch created in this hot country, and not in the foreign land from where the first ones came, an ocean away from the Sertão, brought over by nuns and spied by Vitorina from the top of a ladder.
Creek stitch, dew stitch, dawn stitch.
Those were the names I had secretly chosen to christen my first stitch, which might never be invented. Son of the high-altitude Caatinga, the region where Lampião was also born, who, back then, in the year of grace of 1918, was just starting his life of crime, and of whom we would only hear about in Bom Retiro years later. A rambunctious story about men, so different from our story, that took place almost imperceptibly, between silences and whispers.
I always believed that when I laid eyes on my newly created stitch, I’d know exactly what to call it. Just like mothers do with their children. Those who don’t risk giving their offspring a name that wasn’t meant to be. You choose Nonato in honor of his grandfather, but the boy insists on looking like a Casemiro for the rest of his life. Hence the abundance of nicknames in the world. After all, things choose their names, not us.
As soon as the cousin of a cousin of another of Vitorina’s cousins returned to the convent, the secret Vitorina spied from the eaves was passed on to anyone willing to learn. In no time, a small group of women, myself included, began to meet daily to make fine tablecloths, doilies, placemats, and napkins.
It didn’t take long for one of our pieces to make its way to the capital, a gift offered to a lady from a good family, who showed our work to another lady from a good family, who, in turn, over shortbreads and afternoon tea, showed it to another lady from a good family.
“See how perfect it is? It’s from some backwater near Serra Talhada, but it looks like it was made in Europe. Do you think there’s any way to place an order?”
Orders were quickly made.
When ladies from good families show an interest in something, someone always seizes the opportunity to take a cut.
Weeks later, a gentleman in a dark suit arrived in our town, sweating more than the local men who worked the land, announcing his intention to buy our work at a good price, for us and for him.
Tia Firmina was responsible for dealing with the man. Because she was the oldest of the group and because she didn’t have children to steal her time, she could devote herself to taking orders and bookkeeping and then sharing the earnings equally among us.
“If not for me, this guy would be putting one over on all of you. He tried to get a formal tablecloth for a pittance. What a bunch of malarkey! Lucky I’m here to defend our interests,” she boasted.
When the first coins brought by the man in the dark suit were placed on the table, we were so engrossed admiring them that the moment seemed to go on forever.
It was like they didn’t belong to us. Like museum pieces, with a sign that says “Do Not Touch” beneath them.
“All that’s ours?” Vitorina asked, as if she couldn’t believe it.
Until then, lacemaking was just a pastime for us, something to do on sultry afternoons. Some of us made lace for ourselves, creating gowns for balls that would never take place in our little town. Others made bedspreads for hope chests for marriages yet to be arranged.
The exception was Tia Firmina, who devoted her time to making her own burial shroud.
“I shall enter Heaven with the elegance Our Lord Jesus Christ deserves,” she announced, seeming a bit too anxious for a moment everyone tends to want to defer.
As far as we knew, money was the exclusive affair of the men, who worked the land and tended the cattle. Be they bosses, landowners, or cattle owners. Be they laborers, henchmen, or peddlers. Be they our husbands, fathers, or brothers. The money was always theirs.
We women were just the ones who cleared the table for them or ordered other women to clear the table for them. It was these men’s names, recorded on our birth and marriage certificates, that determined our place in the world. It was like that with most, except with my family.
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Angélica Lopes is a novelist, screenwriter, and journalist from Rio de Janeiro with over twenty years of experience in writing fiction. Her dramatic vein came from writing Brazilian soap operas, known worldwide for attracting millions of viewers daily. She is also an award-winning author of YA novels and has written scripts for cinema, TV series, and comedy shows. The Curse of the Flores Women is her first adult novel and was sold for translation in France and Italy even before being published in her native Brazil.
Zoë Perry has translated the work of several contemporary Brazilian authors, including Emilio Fraia, Ana Paula Maia, Juliana Leite, Clara Drummond, Veronica Stigger, and Carol Bensimon. Her translations have appeared in the Paris Review, the New Yorker, Granta, Astra, n+1, and the New York Times. Perry’s translation of Ana Paula Maia’s Of Cattle and Men was awarded an English PEN grant, and she received a PEN/Heim grant for her translation of Veronica Stigger’s Opisanie swiata (Desription of the World). She is currently based in Miami.
