INTRODUCTION
Knitting the Patterns of Love, Politics, and Economics
A headband, a light blue headband, was the first thing I knitted. I must have been six or seven years old when I picked up my first needles, under the supervision of my grandmother. If I close my eyes, I can still see, in the golden patina of my most precious memories, the two of us. We are sitting so close; her elbow is underneath mine, her large body warming my left side. I am excited. Somehow, I understand that this is a rite of passage, a tiny little step on my journey to becoming an adult, a woman, and I am eager to perform it. I am also nervous. I am pressing the yarn between my fingers with all my strength, as if in fear it will escape. My grandmother looks at me, smiles, and removes the yarn from my hand. Then she gently tucks one needle under my right arm, wraps my left hand around the other one, puts the yarn back in my right hand, and begins guiding me. Relax, she whispers, do not pull the yarn too much or too little, let it be your friend, let it dance around the needles.
And so my love story with knitting began. I learned the times tables, memorized poems, and recited the rosary while knitting with my grandmother. Purls and stitches became numbers, words of beautiful sentences, Holy Marys and Our Fathers, all intertwined inside the magic fabric of our love. They connected her life to mine so that she could transmit her wisdom, so that her teachings could carry on guiding me forever in between stitches. Later on, in my twenties, as a passionate member of the feminist movement, I shared that insight with the traumatized women who sought help from our organization. Holding my needles and yarn, knitting the clothes I wore, I welcomed them to our consciousness-raising meetings.
My grandmother was born in 1900. She was fourteen when World War I broke out, eighteen when she met my grandfather, thirty-nine when World War II started, fifty-five when I was born, and fifty-nine when her husband died. She had witnessed the devastation of war not once but twice, endured Fascism, joined the Italian resistance, and seen the birth of the Italian democracy. She was a living history book I never grew tired of reading.
Her stories were amazing—scary, sad, and happy at the same time—but above all, they were real. She shared them with me while we knitted together. I was fascinated to hear about how the world had plunged into a global conflict and how her brothers and future husband had marched to the front to fight an evil enemy. There was such pride in her voice, a pride that blurred the horrors of the trenches, the cold, the mud, the hunger, the rats. She never tried to hide from me the terror of war, the inhumanity of the war front, but she put them in the context of the unpredictable patterns of life and politics. War was like a very, very difficult sequence of stitches. You could not skip one move; you had to tackle each one with courage and determination. I am thankful for her realism because it made me understand that peace is not a given and that if you want to protect it, you have to be an active member of society.
So in between purling and stitching, I fell in love with politics.
Naturally, in her stories my grandfather was the biggest hero. He fought in the Alps, in the Carso near the Austrian border, one of the toughest fronts of World War I. There, in the trenches, he met one of my grandmother’s brothers, and they became good friends, so close that they shared the garments she had knit for her brother to wear at the front: the vests, socks, caps, scarves, and even long johns and sweaters that they wore under their uniforms in the freezing winter in the Dolomites.
In 1917, during an enemy attack, my grandmother’s brother was killed and my grandfather was seriously injured. When he finally recovered, the war was over. He decided to go to Rome to visit the family of his dead friend and to thank the mysterious woman who had kept him warm in the trenches. He brought her back the pair of thick, colorful striped socks he was wearing when a German grenade hit him, the only item remaining of those she had sent. He apologized to her for the bloodstains on them, which would not come out in the wash. She knew who he was from her brother’s letters, but what she did not know is that while she had fallen in love with him while knitting warm garments, he had fallen in love with her while wearing them.
Knitting is an act of love, my grandmother used to say, perhaps to downplay in my eyes the uniqueness of her love story. She did not like to feel exceptional, to stand out. She was a woman born at the beginning of the twentieth century; she had a specific place in society that demanded modesty, one she accepted without question. But with me, she could escape the female cage of her social status and open up her brilliant mind. On the wings of our needles, we flew high above the world to a special place that nobody knew.
I imagined it as a cozy knitted igloo in the middle of the North
Pole.
There, in the emptiness of a sea of ice, we were free and warm and we could reinvent the world.
“Have I told you the true version of Sleeping Beauty?” she asked me one day as we were knitting a baby blanket for my cousin together. I looked at her with wide eyes, full of excitement, and shook my head. “If you remember,” she began, “when Aurora was born, seven fairies were chosen to be her godmothers, but the king and queen forgot one, the oldest, because they thought she was dead.
“At Aurora’s christening, to everyone’s horror, the old fairy suddenly appeared. She was very, very angry. Instead of bringing a gift, she cursed the baby: at the age of sixteen, she foretold, Aurora would prick her finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel and die. Fortunately, the seventh fairy had still to offer her gift. She could not reverse the evil spell. However, she could mitigate it: Aurora would not die, but fall asleep for one hundred years until awakened by the kiss of a prince.”
We both stopped knitting. I was so excited about what was coming next and my grandmother was so engaged in the rewriting of one of the most popular fairy tales that we had to rest our hands from directing the dance of the yarn around the needles.
“So?” I said.
“So,” she continued, resuming her knitting, “to try to save his daughter from the terrible curse, the king ordered the people to destroy every spindle and spinning wheel in the kingdom in a gigantic bonfire. This was a huge mistake. The kingdom where
Aurora was born was well known everywhere for its fine wool, silk, and beautiful knitted garments. People came from everywhere to purchase them and to trade with the kingdom. This was such a good and profitable business that most of the population earned their living in the wool and silk industries. The prohibition on spinning destroyed both, with terrible consequences for the kingdom’s economy: Shepherds could not sell their wool and had to stop keeping their herds; silkworms were left unattended and died; knitters did not have access to yarns and stopped knitting.
People grew cold and poor. As the years passed, a sense of bitterness plagued the kingdom; people began to resent the king for banning spinning. They lost trust in the community and took to stealing from each other what little they had left. The kingdom that at Aurora’s birth was happy, rich, and friendly was, at her sixteenth birthday, a resentful, miserable, and freezing-cold place.
“Kept locked inside the castle to protect her from her destiny, Aurora did not know what was happening in the kingdom. She also had no idea she was the cause of such a transformation, as the king and the queen had prohibited everyone from telling her about the curse. The day of her sixteenth birthday, when she came upon an old lady in a little-used room in the castle, spinning wool and transforming it into yarn, she was immediately fascinated by such a metamorphosis and asked to try it herself.
“As she accidentally pricked her finger and the first drop of her blood spilled, staining the yarn, Aurora fell asleep. Distraught, the king and the queen placed their daughter on her bed in her chamber, covered her with their most precious knitted blanket, put a pink hat on her head to keep her warm, kissed her goodbye, and left the kingdom with heavy hearts. By the time Aurora woke up, they would be dead, and what would happen to their daughter then? The fairy godmother who had mitigated the curse had an idea: the kingdom had become a cold, broken-down village populated by desperate, unfriendly people; the countryside was bare because farmers had stopped farming; the woods were thick because nobody had been cutting trees; and soon whatever good was left in people would disappear. She could not leave Aurora in such a place for a hundred years. And so the fairy godmother cast a new spell. She put everyone to sleep, froze the kingdom, and made the forest trees grow so high that they hid the castle, leaving Aurora and the people to their long sleep.
“A hundred years passed without anyone approaching the kingdom, until a young prince, fascinated by the legends about a vanished kingdom that had produced the finest wool and silk garments in the world, decided to search for it. He traveled for years, all over the continent, until he met a very, very old man who guided him to the kingdom. That old man told him the legend of the sleeping princess.
“When the prince finally reached the castle, he looked for the room where Aurora was sleeping. As soon as he saw her, he fell in love. Overcome, he kissed her and broke the curse. Aurora and the prince soon married, and together they revived the wool and silk business of the kingdom, making it once more the finest producer in the world. The pink hat, in particular, was such a big hit that they decided to use it as the logo of their products. People prospered and were happy again,” concluded my smiling grandmother.
And this is how I fell in love with economics while knitting. Purl and stitch, stitch and purl, was also my laboratory for life. Each time I made a mistake, my grandmother told me to evaluate it: Can it be fixed without undoing some of the knitting, or does it require drastic action? Mistakes must be addressed and solved, she repeated, because they will grow bigger and bigger as the knitting progresses. They will not disappear; on the contrary, they will stand out against the perfection of the rest of the work, and to fix them, you will need to undo so much more.
I wish I had followed her teaching when I saw the first signs of my husband’s erratic behavior, small omens of his personal problems. A hole had appeared in the pattern of my marriage. I could not close it by picking up the missing stitches; to fix it, I had to undo my knitting. I knew this, but I chose to ignore it and kept purling and stitching in the hope that it would vanish—until the hole became so visible, so upsetting, that it overshadowed the beauty of my work.
A good knitter always has the courage to undo her work to fix a big mistake. A good knitter knows that everything can be mended as long as there is yarn and needles in her hands and courage in her heart to go back and start all over. A good knitter has wisdom.
I am not a good knitter. I am an okay knitter striving to get better and failing to do so rather often. But I am not a quitter. Having finally unraveled my marriage, I know that if I keep purling and stitching, remembering the teaching of my grandmother and of all the women before her who passed on their wisdom through the knitting needles, the pattern of my life will eventually improve.
I also know that I am not alone, not even in my personal difficulties. A magic yarn links all of us through time and space—all we need to do is pick it up and start knitting.
Copyright © 2020 by Loretta Napoleoni. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
