As she does every week, María López de Delgado, has chosen her toquilla. The firm green stalk pass through her expert hands one after the other. With a knife, she makes a notch in the middle of the stalk and frees the stretched- out, soft, pale leaves; these she separates from the veins, filaments and other thick parts, already mature, which have to be thrown away.
There remains no more than a sheaf of silky “ribbons” held together by a small piece of stalk. These are boiled in large earthen ware pots for about twenty minutes, then dried in the wind, away from the rays of the sun for one or two days. At this point, Maria’s house disappears for a time behind a huge curtain of vegetable matter. The “cogollos”, which are hung on ropes, dance in the wind, and the ribbons begin their process of retraction. They roll up upon themselves, to the point where they form perfectly cylindrical shafts, blond and fine, which Maria watches over tirelessly. She shakes them so as to separate them properly, because if they happened to dry too close to each other they could stick together, and would then be unusable.
