The Unfinished Cloth

About this book

Ines Quispe, thirty three, weaves the finest cloth in the valley of Qellwa and has never once woven the kind that matters most, because that kind stopped before she was born. The valley cloth, the great manta of her great grandmother's line, recorded Qellwa's years the old way, band by band in a pattern language of the mountains: the flood year, the good harvest, the road's arrival, each event fixed in figures only the weavers could read. In the hungriest winter of the old times it was sold to a collector for the price of the village's survival, and the pattern language, with nothing left to record, began to die. Only Mama Asunta, eighty eight, still reads it entire.