Tunic

I was woven sideways. People never guess that. You look at me hanging flat, taller than I am wide, and assume my weaver started at the hem and worked up to the neck. Not so. My warp threads run across my body from side to side, and I came off the loom as one long piece of cloth, turned on its side, then folded at the shoulders and stitched up the sides, with holes left at the top for the arms. The slit for the head was made on the loom itself, as the weaving went, without cutting a thread.

Look at my face, then, the way you would read a page. A grid, row on row of small squares in red, gold and a sage green, set like a chequerboard. In half the squares, an eight-pointed star, white or red, its points sharp. In the others, a little stacked figure of triangles, which scholars read as a fish. Star, fish, star, fish, all the way down to the red fringe at my hem. The weave is tapestry, the threads packed so tight that the pattern sits in the cloth like a mosaic in a floor.

My shape is the Inka shape. In the decades before the Spanish came, the Inka state used fine tunics like me as a kind of currency of honour: they were controlled, given and received, a sign that the wearer stood in a certain relation to the empire. But my stars and fish are not from Cusco. They belong to the highlands around Chuquibamba, in the Arequipa region of southern Peru, where those designs had long been at home.

So I am a meeting of two things. The men of Chuquibamba usually wore ponchos. A man who put me on was wearing his own valley’s patterns cut to the empire’s measure, which probably means he had some part in running the province for the Inka. I fitted him at the knee.

I was made sometime between 1460 and 1540, of camelid hair and cotton. I do not remember his name. I remember his shoulders, which were broad, and the way the slit lay open at his collarbone when he turned his head to answer someone.

In New York I hang alone, arms empty.