THE SHIRT FROM 1800s

THE SHIRT FROM 1800s

It was so long that she not only hadn’t worn it, but she hadn’t even picked it up when, one night she dreamed of wearing just that shirt. In the ( her) dream she opened a door halfway ____maybe the door was that of the living room, maybe that of her parents’ bedroom____and, while she stood in the open half of the door, she could see herself , as if in a mirror, with that shirt on. Her mother too, who(m) she didn’t see, had to see her, because( since) she said to her : “NO, that shirt is no good. You can’t wear that shirt” “ Oh, and WHY?” She asked. Dania remembered in the dream something that had happened in reality ( in her awaking life). Even her father, on the few occasions when she, as a young woman, had gone out with him, he didn’t want her to wear that shirt.  Now her father was dead ___but she knew this, she said this to herself when she was awake, thinking back to her dream. The answer her mother had given to her WHY?__ why it’s not okay for me  to wear this shirt?___, in her dream, had frozen her. “ That is not the shirt to wear to die” Her mother had said, and her voice had resounded as a condemnation and also as a threat.

“ Ouch, but what are you saying? WHY should I wear the shirt it takes to die?” She, Dania had asked, terrified and dismayed . But it had been silence. Her mother had not answered , and she had had the feeling she ( her mother) was no longer in the room from which she could see her, and the shirt she was wearing.   But THAT SHIRT…why both her father and her mother had never been able to bear her wearing it? Instead she, Dania, liked that shirt, even if it was not at all  a sought-after item of clothing, nor for how it was made, nor for the quality of the fabric. So she had often worn it, above all when she was young. It was the shirt of her father’s grandfather, who had lived with them in the last years of his life. Dania  had seen that shirt only after her great- grandfather’s death, when it was ( had been) pulled out of a chest together other items of clothing that no one wore since a long time. Ah, when that old worm-eaten wooden chest was  (had been ) opened, the  pungent, even slightly intoxicating smell of mothballs had given her the feeling of a past time that had been locked up , and kept under lock and key for long, to subtract it from the unstoppable flow of time, and that now, all of a sudden, was releasing out, mingling  with the air of the present. Yes, the smell of mothballs became ( was) the smell of the past. Dania remembered that the women of her house ___ her mother, her grandmother, and her aunts and great aunts ___ wanted to throw that shirt away, in the garbage. She instead had insisted to keep that shirt and had always wore it willingly. Probably it was a shirt that her great- grandfather , called Grandpa Oswald, had worn when he was young, at the end of the 19^th century, and that later he had stopped wearing because shirts like that were no more worn even before the middle of the 900.

That shirt, of rather rough, if not downright rough cotton, although she, Dania had worn it often, and for a long time, therefore it had been washed a lot of times, it was still in good condition, it could still be worn. It was of a very pale yellow, almost white which, as far as Dania knew, had to be the color of the cotton cloth ( fabric) as it turned out after weaving, and neither the cotton nor the fabric had been dyed.   That her great-grandfather’s shirt was from a past,  remote time , when people cared less about the comfort of what they wore, especially if it was clothing to wear on holidays, you could understand ( could see) it , more than anything else, from the buttoning and the buttons. The front of the shirt was not divided into two halves, as they were, the shirts that were worn already, at least, since the second half of the twentieth century, but it had an opening on the chest, with only three buttons ( and three buttonholes, of course). At the bottom of the two sides of this opening___ the SHOOT ___there were two folds, which gave a certain looseness, a slightly refined or characteristic appearance to that shirt. It had a small collar and high cuffs. And, here, the other detail that reveled the belonging to a past time of that shirt they were, the buttons, which were small, made of MOTHER-of-PEARL.

Now, mother-of - pearl buttons for ( on) a shirt of a non-precious fabric like that, when already in the last decades of the 1900s mother-of –pearl buttons had disappeared from clothing even of a certain value, they told clearly of another world, of another time.  That was the shirt which a young sharecropper farmer of the late 19^th wore when he went to Mass on Sunday.

Dania had never seen that shirt worn by her father’s grandfather, she didn’t never know it existed as far as he, Grandpa Oswald had been ( was) alive. He had died in his bed after turning ninety. His bedroom was ( had been) in the old part of the house, the one that had been built in the 19^th century. It was a wide room which was located after the corridor that connected the part of the house built in the 900 with the older one, dating back to the 800.  The bedroom of great-grandfather Oswald was accessed going down three steps. It had the beams on the ceiling. Even if it was wide, that room had a small window which however, above all in the morning, flooded it with light, perhaps because its floor was a little hollow, as if it were a basin.

The very pale yellow of that old shirt evoked to her, Dania, the violet stains she had noticed on the hands of her great-grandfather Oswald  the day before his death. She, Dania, then was a child of nine years, but when she saw those violets stains on his hands, she felt that great-grandfather Oswald was going to die.

Grandpa Oswald had been the first dead she, as a child, had seen. But, despite the sadness, the discouragement she had felt in that first face to face with death,  Dania had slept for a long time, when she was a young woman , in the bed where her great-grandfather had died. Since being in that room gave her a sense of peace. Later that bed, which was old, had been thrown away. But that room, with the beams on the ceiling, the hallow floor, and the small window from which so much light came in, almost a concentrate of light, it was still there. Dania, after dreaming her mother who did not want she was wearing that shirt, she put the old shirt on again and she went there, in that room where Grandpa Oswald had died, in the oldest part of the house. Dania stood in the centre of the room. It was late afternoon , and the light coming through ( from) the window had or, at least she looked like it had, a veil of violet, right like the violet of the stains that had appeared on Grandpa Oswald’s hands that distant day.