Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells (22 page)

The directions to Sant’Antioco read like something from a fairy story: drive down the road lined with prickly pear trees, go past the flock of pink flamingos and carry on over the bridge leading to a little island. There you will find the only people in the world who still pluck tufts of hair from giant seashells and weave them into fine golden cloth.

Bumbling along in the Fiat Cinquecento I hired at the airport, I slow down to catch a glimpse of the orange and yellow houses clustered on the hillside, overlooking an outrageous blue sea that I am told is the hiding place of Noble Pen Shells. I had come to meet the women who hold on to the secrets of sea-silk, and uncover what truths I could about this most mythical of fabrics.

At the top of the hill, above narrow cobbled streets, there is a high wall surrounding an open courtyard and a small, stone building where grapes were once processed and made into wine. Now the space is home to a collection of tools and machinery that have been used in Sant’Antioco over the last few centuries. This is the Museo Etnografico, run by a local cooperative called Archeotur whose members are committed to making sure past lives and traditions are not lost in the melee of modern life and that people don’t forget how things used to be. Preserved in this modest space is an archive of local trades, of bread-making, cheese-making, shoe-making, barrel-making and the dyeing and weaving of local fibres including sea-silk.

Waiting to welcome me in is Archeotur’s director, Ignazio Marrocu, a smiling man with a silver moustache and bright pink shirt. He immediately whisks me over to a cluster of Noble Pen Shells, standing tall and empty in a glass tank of sand. He pulls one out and hands it to me. The shell is at least 50 centimetres (20 inches) long, and surprisingly heavy. At the open end, the part that would have stuck up above the seabed, the pen shell is covered in the twisting white casements of tube worms and dried strands of seaweed; the lower section tapers to a point, and is scaly like reptilian skin.

Next, Ignazio brings out a knotty tangle of threads embedded with tiny seashells and blades of seagrass, like the ginger beard of an old man of the sea, flecked with his dinner. This is the byssus from a pen shell in its raw, untreated state. He then places in my hand a tuft of soft golden fibres that gleam in the sunshine. This is clean and carded byssus, ready to be spun. This is sea-silk.

The museum has a large display board covered in photographs of sea-silk weavers of the past. One black and white picture depicts four young women sitting in a row wearing headscarves, long dresses and aprons; one has a basket on her knee, filled with a tangle of byssus; the other three have wooden spindles and are in the process of twisting the fibres into threads.

Another photograph, this one in colour, shows an old lady wearing big round glasses, a white headscarf and a blue dress. Like the girls in the older picture she is busy spinning sea-silk. This, Ignazio tells me, is Efisia Murroni, who died in 2013 shortly after her hundredth birthday. She had learnt how to weave sea-silk from Italo Diana who ran a studio in Sant’Antioco, weaving traditional Sardinian designs and textiles until his death in 1959.

Surrounding the photograph of Efisia are pictures of Italo’s work. There is a woven hat and jacket for a toddler, a wide knitted scarf with golden tassels and an embroidered tapestry, as tall as the women holding it up. The intricate
design has a pair of horses (or possibly unicorns), and a pair of birds that look like fancy turkeys. Around them is a border of other animals, and a row of people holding hands. In the centre is a rather confused patch of stitches, one that tells a story of how the piece was made.

Italo wove and embroidered this piece in the 1930s for the occasion of Benito Mussolini’s visit to the nearby town of Carbonia. It was a new town, built around a coal mine (
carbone
meaning ‘coal’ in Italian), and the streets were laid out in the shape of the egomaniac Mussolini’s face. The central piece of the tapestry had originally been the words ‘Il Duce’, but this embroidered tribute to fascism was later covered over with new stitches.

Italo’s skills have been passed on via Efisia not to her daughter, who didn’t want to learn, but to two other women from Sant’Antioco. Several years ago, Assuntina and Giuseppina Pes became interested in the town’s traditions of weaving sea-silk, and Efisia agreed to teach them.

The Pes sisters arrive at the museum, after dropping off their children at school, and greet me with smiles and cheek kisses. They are keen to show me their sea-silk skills, so we jump into an aged BMW driven by Giustino, one of Archeotur’s enthusiastic volunteers, who knows English better than I do Italian. We zoom off to the outskirts of Sant’Antioco and pull up to a little house guarded by a friendly, yowling cat.

Assuntina opens the door and ushers us into her home, where bright sunshine pours into a room crammed with two large weaving looms draped in skeins of brightly coloured wool. The walls are decorated with weavings and embroideries of traditional Sardinian motifs. She leads us downstairs into a smaller, darker room and brings out a large plastic Ferrero Rocher chocolate box packed with plastic bags; she then lays a small collection of byssus out on the
table. Together, Assuntina and Giuseppina set about showing me the stages involved in making sea-silk.

The first piece is byssus after it’s been soaked for hours in seawater, then freshwater (at this point it hasn’t changed too much), and it is beginning to be transformed, with the sandy, shelly debris picked out. Assuntina opens a red cardboard box with a puff of fibres inside that resemble auburn human hair. She grabs a handful and combs them over and over, teasing them with a fearsomely spiky comb. It reminds me of the painful brushing of my tangly, curly hair each morning before school.

Now, she takes out a wooden spindle, the kind used to spin cotton, wool and linen threads. It looks like a mushroom with a long, narrowing stalk and a small hook on top. She attaches a clump of combed byssus fibres to the hook and sets it spinning. I watch as the spindle spins and twists the byssus into a thread that wraps around the stick. Assuntina deftly feeds the growing thread with more fibres, making it look easy, but I know it isn’t.

In a few minutes she spins a metre or more of thread. It is fairly thick and woolly, but soft to the touch. She tells me that the threads can be soaked in lemon juice to give them a brighter colour. One of their intricate embroideries features a pair of birds gazing at each other, beak to beak. They are sewn onto white linen with byssus of two different shades, one a deep bronze, the other pale gold.

As well as using sea-silk as an embroidery thread, it can be woven into fabric. A tiny tabletop loom comes out and Giuseppina shows me a narrow sea-silk tie in progress. I imagine their grandfathers dressed up in ties like this for church on Sundays. With her fingers nimbly darting this way and that, Giuseppina runs the golden-brown weft thread across the warp and pats them into place, making one more row of fluffy cloth.

No one will wear this tie, and it may never be finished, because new byssus fibres are very hard to come by these
days. At the museum, Ignazio had demonstrated for me a metal tool with a long wooden handle that was used to wrench pen shells up from the shallow seabed, a few feet deep, but that is no longer allowed. Since 1992 there has been a blanket ban on harvesting Noble Pen Shells.

Along with seahorses, otters, seals and more than 200 other European species, Noble Pen Shells are protected throughout their ranges under EU law. Scientific advisors declared that pen shells are threatened by pollution and the destruction of seagrass beds where many of them live. Pen shells are easily crushed and torn away by boat anchors and fishing gear; also, divers were collecting them not for their byssus but to make the shells into gaudy home decorations, lampshades and the like. Now it is a criminal offence to deliberately harm or kill a Noble Pen Shell.

With the pen shells protected, Assuntina and Giuseppina see no way to obtain sea-silk, but it’s something they seem calmly resigned to. It’s clear they would both like to preserve the skills passed on to them from Efisia and Italo, but all they have is a dwindling collection of old byssus fibres handed on to them. Occasionally a local fisherman will find a dead pen shell and give it to the women to use. Even so, their byssus stock is small, and sea-silk is becoming rarer and more precious than ever.

The Pes sisters are not alone in continuing the traditions of sea-silk. Patricia, another member of Archeotur, has come with us to watch them at work and in a lull in the conversation she smiles and softly says something in Italian. Giustino translates for me. ‘She says her grandmother weaves sea-silk too.’

We all say goodbye and Giustino drops me off in town, where I pay a visit to another of Sant’Antioco’s sea-silk weavers, one who has something the Pes sisters and Patricia’s grandmother don’t have: a ready supply of new byssus.

I step into the cool, dim interior of the Museo del Bisso – the Byssus Museum – and instantly feel as if I have walked into the fairy tale that my journey to the island had promised. This vaulted stone room was once the town’s grain store and is now a shrine of sorts to sea-silk as well as to the woman who calls herself the last surviving maestro of sea-silk, Chiara Vigo.

The walls are lined with glass cabinets containing a myriad of puzzling objects; a bronze sculpture of a pen shell (far bigger than the real thing) stands on the floor; there are giant portraits of Chiara, and a huge undersea diorama of fish and shells and mermaids. A small congregation sits in hushed silence on chairs lined up in front of Chiara’s table, where she is busy at work.

A great deal of mysticism surrounds spinning and weaving, especially female weavers. Sleeping Beauty fell into a deep sleep after pricking her finger on a spinning wheel. Alfred Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, based on Arthurian legends and depicted in many Pre-Raphaelite paintings, was under a curse that meant she couldn’t gaze directly at the real world but could only weave the ‘half shadows’ she saw reflected in a mirror. In Roman and Greek mythology, a trio of goddesses would spin, measure and cut the threads of life. Legends around the world bestow great power, wisdom and magic on women who weave. I find a seat in the Museo del Bisso, next to Rebecca who has come to help translate for me, and I can’t help thinking this place endeavours to channel those same time-worn enchantments.

Illuminated by a bright table lamp, Chiara is carrying out the same meticulous steps of combing and spinning the byssus threads that I saw at the Pes sisters’ house, though Chiara adds her own particular twists to the proceedings. While Chiara works on her strand of sea-silk she tells a stream of stories. She tells her onlookers about the ancient origins of sea-silk in the Middle East, 10,000 years ago; she tells of sea-silk in the Bible, and the source of King
Solomon’s shining robes; she tells of her personal oath sworn to the sea.

Chiara plays a game I imagine she repeats many times a day, asking me to hold out my hand and close my eyes. I feel nothing and open my eyes to see a weightless cloud of sea-silk threads sitting on my palm.

Now picking up a wooden spindle, she begins to twist the fibres together, and while she does she sings a song. I don’t ask Rebecca to interpret the words of the Italian sea shanty but I listen to the tune, and Chiara smiles a twinkling smile at her transfixed crowd as the byssus spins round and round. Someone in the audience joins in with a few lines of the song.

When the pile of byssus fibres have all been twisted into one long thread, Chiara unwinds the spindle and brings out a white plastic cup half full of a pale yellow liquid. She explains this is a special mixture – a secret recipe – of lemon juice plus extracts from a dozen different seaweeds and the juice of another large Sardinian fruit. Chiara dunks the byssus thread into the liquid then draws it out, squeezing and dabbing it gently with a tissue. Then for the first time she starts pulling the ends of the thread apart and she gazes into the small crowd, her eyes telling us all ‘and as if by magic …’. The byssus is quite stretchy and elastic.