I want to tell you something I rarely say about my own work: this book exists twice.
Between Silk and Secrets was first written in Portuguese — the language I think in when I
am thinking about desire, about families that keep things, about houses that know more than
the people inside them. It had a different title then. It lived for a while on my desk as
something I was not entirely sure I was finished with, because the books I care about most
tend to resist being finished. They keep insisting there is one more thing to add, one more
layer to uncover, one more sentence that is almost right but not quite.
The decision to translate it was not purely practical. I wanted to know what the story would
say in another language — whether it would hold, whether the atmosphere would survive the
crossing, whether Helena and Tomás would still be themselves when the words around them
changed. Translation is not transcription. It is a second act of writing, one that forces
you to ask, for every sentence: what is this actually doing? Not what does it mean — what
does it do?
Some scenes became quieter in English. Some became sharper. There is a passage in the
penultimate chapter — a letter read aloud in a room that has been waiting for it — that I
rewrote four times before I found the version that did what the Portuguese had done. I am
still not entirely sure it does. I have made my peace with not being sure.
The story itself is about a woman who restores paintings for a living. Her name is Helena
Valença, and she is very good at what she does — which is to say she is very good at
recognising what has been concealed and why. When she is commissioned to examine a missing
portrait at a private estate, she expects the ordinary archaeology of a wealthy family's
discomfort with its own history. She does not expect the investigation to still be alive.
What I kept coming back to, as I wrote it, was the relationship between concealment and
care. The family at the centre of Between Silk and Secrets did not erase Clara Monteiro
Villar out of cruelty — or not only out of cruelty. They erased her out of the particular
tenderness that certain kinds of people extend to their own comfort. They loved their version
of events. They were careful with it. They maintained it across decades with the same
attention a restorer gives a canvas.
Helena understands this better than she would like to.
Tomás understands it better than he admits.
The desire between them develops slowly and with full awareness of its complications, because
that is the only kind of desire I find interesting to write — the kind where the people
involved can see exactly what is happening and choose it anyway, knowing what it will cost.
The painting, when it is finally restored and returned to the wall where it was always meant
to be, changes nothing that can be legally documented. It changes everything that matters
about how a story ends.
That is what I was trying to say. I believe the English version of the novel says it. I
believe the Portuguese version said it too, in its own way, in its own light.
You are reading the one that came second. I think it is the better of the two, in the way
that second drafts are usually better — because they already know what they are.
Manuela
