The Seamstress (8 page)
The old man looked shocked. “He runs the land from that mountain”—he pointed before them, to the blue shadow in the distance—“and beyond. Taquaritinga and Frei Miguelinho. He runs it all.”
“He may own it,” the soldier said, suddenly stern, “but the law runs it. The state of Pernambuco runs it.”
Their chaperone looked down and nodded. Emília felt a surge of annoyance. If they had ridden in the colonel’s Ford, would they have been chastised like this? If she had Professor Célio beside her instead of an old farmhand, would they have been bothered?
“All right,” the soldier said, motioning with his rifle, pointing it up the road. “Be on your way. But be alert. The Hawk’s in the area.”
Their chaperone froze for an instant, his hat curled tightly in his hands, then thanked the soldier. He grabbed the mules’ reins and shouted for the animals to move. Emília felt a shiver. She held tightly to her saddle horn.
Everyone knew his story. At eighteen, the Hawk had become a cangaceiro when he killed the famous Colonel Bartolomeu of Serra Negra in his own study, bypassing the colonel’s capangas and gutting him with his own letter opener. Citizens from Rio Branco later dubbed him “the Hawk” after a raid on their town, where he’d cut out his victims’ eyes with the point of his knife. There was a bird in the arid countryside below Taquaritinga—the caracará—a type of hawk that swooped down and ate the eyes and tongues of baby goats and calves. Aunt Sofia, like many other mothers in town, used the hawk as a way to keep Emília and Luzia from roaming too far from home.
Caracará,
Aunt Sofia used to sing in her deep, scratchy voice,
looks for children who aren’t wise. When he catches them alone, he plucks out their eyes!
It was said that the Hawk wore a collection of his victims’ dried eyeballs around his neck. It was said that he was enormous, with blond hair and blue eyes, like some ancient Dutch soldier. Some said he was thick, squat, and dark, like an Indian. Some said he was the devil himself. Padre Otto tried to dispel this particular myth. The devil, he warned, would not have such an obvious guise. “Satan is no outlaw,” the priest said. “He is a trickster, a charmer. He doesn’t bear weapons but gifts, making us mistake shadows for substance, the kingdom of heaven for the pleasures of earth.”
Emília twisted in her saddle and stared back at the soldiers, feeling sorry for them suddenly, with their bright uniforms and old gun. Easy prey. She looked at Luzia, sitting tall on the mule beside her. Her sister lifted her Victrola arm. The locked elbow jutted at an awkward angle. She cupped her hand over her dark brows and stared at the horizon.
8
When they reached Taquaritinga, the air became cooler, lighter. The summer’s last cicadas buzzed weakly. Birds twittered. In the market, the last vendors took apart their stalls. People stared at the darkening horizon, hoping for rain.
Their chaperone stopped the mules in front of the colonel’s white mansion. The old man had tried to speed up the animals, hoping to shorten their trip up the mountain. But the mules plodded stubbornly up the trail, hastening only at the sound of the crop, then slowing again. The mules did not care if the Hawk was hiding among the rocks or behind the brush. Their old chaperone, however, held fast to his knife holster. Emília and Luzia flicked their heads toward every scuttling lizard, every low-flying bird. When they finally arrived, Emília’s head ached. The saddle horn had chafed her hip. Her good dress was covered in dust. Only a note from Professor Célio would cheer her mood; she’d have to wait another month before he slipped a reply into her hands.
She and Luzia thanked their chaperone and left him and the mules at the colonel’s gate. They walked through the town square, which was empty except for a few engaged couples strolling hand in hand. Their chaperones—old women thumbing rosaries—shuffled closely behind the couples. Emília limped beside her sister, her feet swelling against the leather straps of her hand-me-down shoes. Still, she would not take them off.
“I saw you,” Luzia whispered, staring upward, as if speaking to the sky. “I saw you pass him a note.”
“Who?”
“Please, Mília. My machine is across from yours.”
Emília shifted her sewing bag from one shoulder to the other. “He’s going to take me away,” she said. “We’re going to São Paulo.”
Luzia stopped walking. Her breath was quick, her eyes wide. Emília felt a surge of giddiness in knowing that she could disconcert her sister.
“Has he told you that?” Luzia asked.
“He’s discreet. Cultured men never boldly state their intentions.”
“What if his intentions are bad?” Luzia said, her stance wide, her arms cocked on her hips, her chest puffed out like a rooster ready for a fight. She spoke loudly. Emília hushed her.
“You sound just like Tia,” Emília whispered. “Professor Célio is a gentleman. He doesn’t have to tell me. I can feel it.”
“If he’s a gentleman, why doesn’t he visit the house? Why doesn’t he ask Tia’s permission to court you?”
“It’s a long trip to Taquaritinga,” Emília said. Her face felt hot. She’d thought of the possibility, but felt a rush of shame each time she pictured Professor Célio walking on the dirt floor of their kitchen, watching Aunt Sofia fry manioc pancakes and enduring Luzia’s bullying stare. Emília shuddered. Then she lied. “He offered to visit,” she said. “I told him not to take the trouble.”
“Why?” Luzia asked.
Emília forced a laugh. “In São Paulo they have ten-story buildings, Luzia! They have parks and apartment houses and trolley cars. What would he think of this?” She spread her hands wide, as if trying to fit the entire town in her reach.
“What does it matter?” Luzia asked.
“It matters to a cultured person.”
“How would you know?” Luzia said.
Emília’s throat tightened. Heat prickled her cheeks. Luzia regarded her with a pitying stare, as if she sensed things Emília could not. Emília was sick of that stare. Luzia’s long body and crooked arm set her apart, giving her a freedom Emília would never know. Victrola had no marriage hopes. No reputation to preserve. Victrola was an oddity, free from gossip or judgment. Free to act as she pleased, to say what she pleased, without consequences. Emília had no such luxuries. Ever since she was a child, Aunt Sofia and others had warned her time and again—“Remember your beginnings.” They said it kindly, as if doling out sacred advice. They said it to save her embarrassment and hurt.
Remember your beginnings,
they said, and Emília knew what was behind those words: remember the orange stains on your feet, the sewing calluses on your fingertips, the ugly cloth of your dresses. Remember that you are the daughter of a coffee picker and the town drunk. Remember that you can have your
Fon Fon
s and entertain your dreams and ideas, but in the end they will do more harm than good. You may forget your beginnings, but no one else will.
“I hate you,” Emília said.
She turned away from Luzia and walked fast, hoping to elude her sister’s long strides. Her feet throbbed. Her eyes stung. It didn’t matter if her shoes hurt, or if her hair was strange. She had Professor Célio. And someday he would take her to a real city, with streetlights and trolley cars and restaurants. She had never been to a restaurant. He would take her to a city where people knew how to read and write, where they signed their names with real ink pens instead of pressing their fingers on a blotter and stamping documents with an illiterate’s thumbprint. A city where there were no droughts in the summer or floods in the winter; where water tamely flowed through pipes and sewers. She imagined her house—a place with tile floors and a gas stove. She imagined her revenge—how she would leave Luzia there, among the goats and gossips and toothless men. And one day, Emília would return to find Luzia old and lonely. She would take her sister out of Taquaritinga and back to her tiled home, to a place where no one would call her Victrola ever again. And Luzia would finally see that all of Emília’s magazines and perfumes, her notecards, her homemade hats and ill-fitting shoes were not silly things at all, but small steps, necessary steps, on her way to a better place.
1
I
t was still dark. Birds clustered in the wooden rafters. Luzia lit a candle and entered the small closet beside the pantry. There, she lit several candles using the one in her hand. The little room glowed orange with light. The painted eyes of saints stared at her from their altar. Hardened wax, like petrified tears, dripped down the lace doilies that lined the shelves. Candle smoke swirled upward and exited through two small holes in the roof tiles, all of them black with soot.
Luzia knelt. Her knees fell comfortably into the indentations in the dirt floor, left there from years of prayers. She had come to the saints’ closet every morning since she was eleven. Aunt Sofia believed that the saints had mustered their powers to revive Luzia after her fall from the mango tree. Luzia hadn’t asked for the saints’ help, but was required to show gratitude. Especially to Saint Expedito, who, Aunt Sofia and Padre Otto agreed, had lived up to his fame as the patron of just and urgent causes. In return for bringing her back from near death, Luzia owed Expedito an offering on her eighteenth birthday. When a saint demanded a sign of thanks from a woman, she could not give food or money or anything material. She had to give something of great personal value; to most women, this meant their hair. Luzia had not cut hers since falling from the mango tree. Her hair hung thick and brown, nearly hitting her waist. When she turned eighteen, she would have to sever her braid and take it to church, placing it on Expedito’s altar. After that, perhaps she could style her hair in a daring bob, like her sister. Luzia rolled the rosary beads in her hands. She shook her head; she would look ridiculous. Still, the offering had to be made.
She wasn’t sure if she believed in the powers of the saints, and often thought them vain for requiring so much attention. But she liked the fact that they had once been people—they’d believed, suffered, and been rewarded. If the reward was granted for their suffering or for their faith, Luzia could never be sure. As a child, she’d asked Padre Otto. In response, he’d handed her a leather-bound book on the saints’ lives and deaths. Early on he’d believed, like some others in town, that although her locked arm restricted her from marriage, it made her a candidate for a higher vocation; there were fine convents in Garanhuns and Recife. Luzia did not want to become a nun, but she liked reading the priest’s musty books while the rest of her classmates went to recess. Page by page she’d sifted through the saints’ lives and learned that they were not the painted figurines that sat meekly on her wax-covered altar, but real people. Santa Inês was just a girl when she was sold to a brothel and burned at the stake. Santa Rita de Cássia had been quartered, her flesh cut off bit by bit—first the fingers, then the wrists, then the arms. Santa Dorothea the Beautiful’s naked body was branded with hot irons. Santa Luzia’s eyes had been plucked from her head by the point of a pagan’s knife. Throughout their suffering, the book said, the saints had prayed for their souls and not for their poor bodies. Luzia admired their resolve, but she didn’t believe it.
She recalled her own accident—not the fall itself, but the dreadful feeling of tipping backward, of losing her balance and realizing that there was no invisible hand, no guardian angel to catch her. There were only tree limbs, and then darkness. When she awoke she saw Aunt Sofia’s face and felt a pain so great she believed she was floating away. It grew worse when the encanadeira arrived and snapped her flopping arm right side up. Luzia heard a terrible ringing in her ears. Then she fainted. They forced her arm between paletas: two long wooden sticks on either side of her forearm tied together with cloth and held in place by a sling around her neck. The broken joint ached. It burned, pinched, shot waves of heat and stinging jolts up her arm. Luzia sweated. She shuddered. Many nights she could not sleep. She knelt in the saints’ closet and sent up long and fervent pleas, made childish bargains and countless offerings, all for her arm. But beneath the paletas the joint slowly hardened. When they took off the wooden sticks, Luzia’s elbow was locked, the bone petrified into place.
The encanadeira said there was still hope. She used a special tape and measured every inch of Luzia’s body, as if fitting her for her burial gown. After she made her measurements, the encanadeira knelt and prayed for Jesus to stretch the arm straight. She gave them a concoction of herbs and butter, ordering Luzia to rub it into her elbow three times a day, to grease the bone, as if it were a cog in a machine. By then the pain had dulled to a constant, prickling presence, like needles lodged beneath her skin. So when Padre Otto’s large leather book said that the saints forgot their pain and disregarded their bodies, Luzia had slapped it shut. She no longer wanted to read during recess. She no longer wanted to attend the church school, where the children had renamed her Victrola. She felt something hard and bitter, like the pit of a pitomba fruit, lodge in her chest. Every so often this pit cracked open, releasing a terrible heat that bubbled and rose, overflowing like milk in a pan. Luzia stomped on bean plants. She kicked her schoolmates’ shins. She ripped Aunt Sofia’s dahlias from their thin stems. She pinched Emília’s lovely brown arms until they were dotted with blue. She did not feel anger but despair, and she wanted the world to feel it, too. Soon, Padre Otto stopped lending her books. He stopped describing the lovely convent courtyards lined with roses and herbs. Victrola, it seemed, was not meant for the religious life.
With time, her temper calmed, but its fame remained. Her arm did not grow straight but her body did. As she got taller and taller, Aunt Sofia insisted that the encanadeira had miscalculated, that her prayers had stretched the bones in Luzia’s legs instead of her arms. The women in town whispered—it was a shame that she and Emília had no brother to look after them. A house filled with females was a pitiful thing. As they grew older, Aunt Sofia became strict with Emília, keeping her indoors and away from trouble. Girls were only worth their ability to stay untouched. This wasn’t a concern for Luzia; she was already spoiled. Who, the townswomen asked, laughing, would be desperate enough to touch Victrola? So Luzia could roam where she pleased. After her morning prayers in the saints’ closet, she took long walks. Before the sun rose, Luzia wandered the dark town and the mountainside farms. She liked the quiet and the cool morning air. She liked feeling as if she was the only person alive.
Luzia rolled the rosary in her palms. The candles’ heat warmed her face. She stared at the figurines before her. There was São Francisco, with two birds in his outstretched hands. There was São Bento in a purple cape; São Brás, with a red ribbon tied around his neck; and São Benedito, his face so black that his eyes looked round and startled. There was Santo Expedito, his shield upheld, his soldier’s armor crookedly painted on his body, his lips red and full. The saints’ faces seemed too womanly to her, too childlike and soft. She knew Emília thought them beautiful in their delicateness, like Professor Célio.
Luzia didn’t like the sewing instructor. Not because of his trimmed beard or his bleached shirts. Luzia respected his cleanliness; she knew it took effort. It was impossible to find a barber and difficult to scrub away the stubborn dust that found its way into every piece of clothing’s fibers, making even the whitest shirts dingy and yellow. It was brave really, in their world of farmers and vaqueiros, for a common man to dress like a colonel. What Luzia disliked was the way the sewing teacher flicked loose threads from his desk, as if disgusted by them. He had a terrible habit of tapping his foot and sighing when a pupil couldn’t replace the metal bobbin in her machine. He feared staining his trousers with oil, so if a machine creaked he gave the oil tin one quick squirt and backed away, letting his pupil wipe up any mess. He thought himself above teaching stitches—he was a technician and not a tailor, he often emphasized—so he opened the Singer manual and showed them pictures of ponto à jour and picot borders, then went to his desk and let them figure it out for themselves. But when it came to the machines he was long-winded and attentive, clicking latches up and down, winding and unwinding the thread bobbins, making the students step back as he worked, as if the machine were a dangerous mystery and not just metal and wood.
On the first day of class, he had stared at Luzia’s arm and in a booming, gallant voice asked if she would like assistance. Luzia declined, then turned to her sister. “He must be a terrible teacher if they sent him here and not to a real city,” she said loudly, making Emília blush. After that, the instructor let her be. That was how Luzia wanted it.
Perhaps she should have let him help her. Perhaps she should have acted clumsy and helpless, occupying his time so that he couldn’t pay attention to Emília. Still, Emília would have caught his eye, even if it meant forcing herself into his field of vision.
Emília knew how to move her face, how to control her expressions to get what she wanted. Luzia had seen her practicing in her little mirror, opening and narrowing her large brown eyes. Each time Professor Célio slipped her a note, Emília palmed it and kept her eyes on her work, looking concentrated and serious, giving the professor only a shy hint of a smile. With the cloth vendors at the market, Emília pouted and furrowed her brow until they gave her a good price. With Dona Conceição she was reverent and wide-eyed. With her former suitors—the scared farm boys who sat nervously in Aunt Sofia’s kitchen—Emília curled her thick upper lip into a sneer. It was only before sleep, when Luzia and Emília whispered to each other, telling stories and secrets, that Emília’s expressions were not studied. In the candlelight, Emília looked like the photograph of their mother, but her stare was not frightened or unsure. It was keen. Stubborn. “God help the man who marries you,” Aunt Sofia often joked during Emília’s tirades. “He’ll think he’s getting sugar, but he’s really getting rapadura!” They bought the brown blocks once a month, shaving slivers into their coffee and cornmeal. The rapadura smelled of molasses and attracted bees. But for all of its sweetness, the block was as hard as stone, known to break teeth and bend knives. Emília’s will was just as firm. One day, she would move to Recife or even São Paulo.
Luzia felt a pang of jealousy. She wrapped her rosary tightly between her fingers. The beads pinched her palms.
She did not want her sister’s beauty. It would be tiresome to style her hair and worry over dresses. But Luzia envied the opportunity that beauty offered. Emília talked of becoming a typist or a salesgirl in the city. Luzia would have liked to apply for such jobs, but there was little chance for her to get outside work. Sometimes, when they whispered in bed and Emília confided her plans, Luzia wanted to say,
Take me with you
. She never did. She did not really want to live in a city. Luzia loved Aunt Sofia’s house. She loved feeding the cranky guinea hens, tending the dahlias, and taking her long morning walks before the sun rose. Still, she felt a thrilling jolt at the thought of escaping, of becoming anyone but Victrola.
The smoke in the saints’ closet made Luzia’s eyes sting. A drop of candle wax fell on her forearm. She pulled back and rubbed the red circle it made on her skin. Luzia closed her eyes. She prayed for Aunt Sofia’s health. She prayed for Emília’s happiness, but not with the sewing instructor. When it came time to pray for herself, Luzia wasn’t sure what to ask for. Her life seemed foggy and uneventful, like a childhood she would never leave behind.
She stared at the center of the saints’ altar. There was the Virgin Mother, her hands outstretched and her face rubbed clean of soot. Her head was bowed. Her eyes were lifted, not demurely, but knowingly, as if saying,
My love is great but do not try my patience
.
Luzia quickly finished her prayers. She blew out the saints’ candles and left the closet. In the pantry, she felt along the shelves until she found a slab of sun-dried beef. She sliced off a small chunk and dropped it in her dress pocket. Then she unlatched the kitchen door and made her way into the dark garden.
2
Aunt Sofia called the hours before twelve “the mouth of the night.” Decent people went to bed after sunset—only drunks and dogs wandered in night’s mouth. Anyone else silly enough to do so risked being consumed; by what, Luzia was never sure. Perhaps by spirits or drink or thieves. Or by the night itself. Before midnight there was a chorus of sounds: the buzz of crickets, the soft hoots of frogs, the howls of mutts. After midnight was the first owl’s cry, then the second. And after that, there was silence.
Luzia took her walks during this early morning quiet. Frogs went back into their holes. Dogs returned from their adventures and dozed on stoops. There was only the soft rustle of banana palms and the sound of her steps. Whitewashed houses, like hers, glowed blue in the moonlight. Clay houses were dark gray. Window shutters were closed. Doors were bolted. Birdcages hung from the houses’ eaves, where rats could not reach them. Some cages were covered in cloth, shielding the birds from the night air. Other, less careful owners left their cages uncovered and the birds inside puffed their feathers and stuck their heads beneath their wings. There were large brown sabiás cramped into their cages and fed malagueta peppers to improve their singing. There were wild finches with red-tipped wings. There were fighting canaries, trained to peck out each other’s eyes.
Recently, the caged birds had been disappearing. There was a thief. Some believed it was a sprite—the copper-skinned caipora said to be born with backward feet so you could never track him. Others blamed the boys who had originally caught and sold the birds, believing they were releasing them and reselling them in the market. There had been a fight recently when a farmer saw his sabiá for sale. Some owners had resolved to put their birds indoors, but the animals made noise, hopping about and pecking at the houses’ clay walls. Others had tied their dogs beneath the birds’ cages and wired the reed doors shut.
