A DARK THING‘What we need here is a pleat,’ Antonio’s mother said.
Having stood up, she fixed a pin to the side of the pseudo-Polish woman’s flower-patterned dress. She took a step back, took a better look, then, opening her hands in a gesture of valediction, she said: ‘Voilà qui est fait!’
‘You’re an artist, my dear lady,’ the dressmaker said, vexed. Just as Antonio’s mother had so happily intuited, all one needed was a pleat. ‘I can’t even see straight anymore!’
She laid her fingers upon her eyes: the gestures were merely rhetorical, as though she were illustrating her words.
‘The hems appear to have been stitched hastily, watch out for the smaller one, it’s coming undone.’
The pseudo-Polish woman looked beyond the mirror at Antonio, who, having sunk into an armchair, and having dis
