My grandfather had a saying. Le mani ricordano ciò che la testa dimentica. The hands remember what the head forgets. I did not understand him until I was nearly forty.
Our workshop is in a small street in Scandicci, just outside Florence, which is the place leather goes to become itself. There are tanneries here older than most countries. The air, in certain weeks of the year, smells like nothing else on earth. Oak and smoke and something faintly animal, the ghost of the thing that used to live in what we now hold.
I was born in this smell. I learned to walk with offcuts of vegetable-tanned calf in my mouth, the way another child might have had a teething ring. My first memory is of my grandfather’s bench: the heavy iron awl, the bone folder yellowed by sixty years of use, the wooden mallet that he had inherited from his grandfather and which had a groove worn into its handle from a hundred years of one family’s grip.
I left, of course. Every craftsman’s son leaves. I went to Milan and worked for a fashion house whose name I will not write here. I made things very quickly, for very little money, that were sold for very large amounts to people who did not know what they were buying. I lasted three years. I came home with my tail between my legs and asked my grandfather if there was still a place for me at his bench.
He looked at me for a long time. Then he said: “Solo se hai imparato cos’è il tempo.” Only if you have learned what time is.
Time is the difference between an object and a possession. Between a thing you bought and a thing that knows you.
At Torero we do not rush. This is our central, almost religious, conviction. A wallet takes two days. A belt, a week. A larger piece can take a month or more, and most of that month is waiting. Waiting for a layer of wax to dry, for a saddle-stitched seam to settle, for the leather to decide it is ready to be folded the way you intend to fold it. Leather has opinions. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not spent enough time with it.
I am older now than my grandfather was when he taught me. My own son has not yet decided whether to come to the bench, and I will not push him. The bench, like the leather, will wait.
But I will tell you what I tell every apprentice on his first day: you will make mistakes. They will become the most beautiful parts of the object. The crooked stitch you fixed at midnight, the edge you burnished one too many times until it shone like a chestnut: these are the places where the object stops being something you made and starts being something you remember making. And the customer, somehow, can always feel them. They run their thumb along the seam without knowing why, and they feel the night you spent there.
The hands remember. The hands always remember. And if we do our work slowly enough, with enough silence and enough respect, the object remembers too, and so, eventually, does whoever is lucky enough to carry it.
