The Seamstress (81 page)

Seeing this, Ponta Fina stood. Luzia tried to drag him back down but her good arm hung limp and useless from her side. Ponta aimed and fired, then stopped. For an instant, his wide-cheeked and childlike face looked mesmerized by the faraway ticking. Then his body jolted and swayed, as if moving in a frightening dance.

Luzia aimed into the hills and held down the trigger of her gun. The parabellum clicked weakly. Its cartridge was empty and Luzia couldn’t reload with only her bent arm. She heard whoops in the hills and then footsteps coming toward the gully. Luzia pressed herself into the dirt. Those soldiers would disgrace her. They would measure her. Her arm throbbed. Her heart drummed as quickly as the endless ticking of that gun. It was fast, too fast. She was dizzy. If she did not take a breath, her fear would explode into panic.

She felt for the measuring tape in her pocket. It was tangled and dirty, but its numbers had not faded. Luzia closed her eyes. Long ago, Emília had given her another warning: do not climb that old mango tree, do not lean too far back in its branches. Everyone believed the fall had been an accident, that Luzia had been startled by that angry neighbor. She’d never contradicted them. But Luzia knew—had always known—that she’d made a choice. She’d let go of the limb above her not out of fear but out of curiosity. She’d wanted to see if she could balance, if she could hold on. She’d wanted to test herself. Coming to the edge was frightening, but the moment she’d tipped over there were no more choices to make, no more limbs to grasp. There was only the fall.

Luzia rose. The measuring tape dropped from her hand. She pulled Antônio’s punhal from her waist belt. The knife was heavy, its handle cold. Luzia advanced, climbing the gulley’s edge, lifting her legs high so her feet wouldn’t sink into the sand. Near her ear she felt a warm rush of air. It made a soft and high-pitched sound, like a whisper. She strained to hear it. A great force hit her shoulder, another hit her thigh. She heard another whisper, then another. Each bullet was a voice: Aunt Sofia correcting her sewing; the encanadeira wrapping her arm and telling her she would recover; Emília, sharing a secret in bed; the murmur of water covering Luzia’s head when she’d tried to escape from the cangaceiros; Antônio’s voice during their first shooting lessons, his breath hot on her ear. She heard Eronildes’ elderly maid telling her to push. She heard her boy’s first, hiccupping sobs. She heard colonels and their whispered bargains. She heard soldiers, informants, and Blue Party women. She heard voices she did not recognize, voices she’d never known. Voices she’d silenced.

Luzia’s crooked arm whipped backward. With each whisper came a thump, like an extra heartbeat, and then a searing pain. Her entire body seemed to be burning from the inside out. She tried to move forward but each whisper pushed her back, and back, and back until she felt as if she was falling from a great height.

Luzia remembered the sensation from her childhood. As a girl she’d felt heavy, her body dragging her to the ground beneath the mango tree. Now Luzia felt light. Her locked arm felt loose. All of the burdens she carried—pistol, cartridge belt, knives, gold chains, binoculars, bullets—fell away. The sky above her was dark and boundless. She felt small in the face of it, and afraid. But she recalled those birds she’d released so long ago and how, after she’d opened their doors, they always hesitated at the edges of their cages. Then they flew.

June 23, 1935

I
n one of her many letters, Lindalva said that the English language had no masculine or feminine. Verbs were the same for men and for women. Objects, too, were neutral. “This is the beauty of English,” Lindalva wrote, “its equality.” After reading this letter, Emília paid attention to such things in her own language. Doors, beds, kitchens, and houses were all feminine. Cars, telephones, newspapers, and ships were masculine. The ocean—o mar—was also masculine, but the more she studied it from the ship’s deck, the more Emília was sure it had been labeled the wrong sex. After two weeks aboard the
Siqueira Campos,
Emília saw how quickly the ocean changed: some days it was deep blue and so calm it seemed as though the ship’s hull was slicing through glass; other days the sea was gray and rough, its waves slamming against the ship and tossing it from side to side. When this happened, Emília and Expedito stayed in their tiny cabin with its furniture bolted to the floor and vomited into designated “sick buckets.”

“Mãe,” Expedito whispered, his body heavy and hot in Emília’s arms, “the ocean’s mean today.”

Emília nodded and wiped his brow. The buckets were collected by cheerful young porters and dumped into the ocean. “Feed the fishes!” one male passenger liked to yell each time the sick buckets were emptied. Some passengers didn’t have time to reach their cabins and were sick over the side of the boat, with everyone watching. Many of these passengers—their faces pallid and their suits and dresses stained by their own vomit—cursed the ocean. Emília did not. When she leaned against the ship’s rail and studied the water, she was both frightened and mesmerized. One passenger said that the moon controlled the tides, that it was responsible for the push and pull of the waves. Emília chose not to believe this. She preferred to think that the ocean’s foul moods were caused by some secret suffering within its depths, by a loss people would never understand.

During the past five months, before she’d left Recife, there were times when Emília had wanted everyone around her to suffer, to feel as terrible as she was feeling. She’d yelled and broken anything within reach, scaring Expedito. The maids cursed her. Dona Dulce called her intolerable. The Coelhos’ doctor called it nervousness and postdated grief over Degas. He’d prescribed sleeping medicine. In the weeks after Dr. Duarte received the criminal specimen he’d always wanted, Emília retreated to her room, unable to lift herself from bed. Sleep became her only comfort. When she looked back on those months—which hadn’t felt like months at all, but like one oppressive and neverending day in her room with the curtains drawn so she couldn’t tell morning from night—Emília recalled straining to hear the hushed conversations of doctors outside her door. She recalled Expedito sneaking into her bed and sleeping beside her, his body warm against her own. She recalled her eyes, swollen into slits, the lashes crusted and sticky. She’d stopped dabbing away her tears with a handkerchief, just as she’d stopped brushing her hair and changing into fresh nightdresses. She’d liked the smell of herself—stale, sweaty, slightly yeasty—and did not want to wash it away. She’d secretly hoped her dirty skin would harden and crack like dried clay. That it, and her bones, would break into a fine powder that could be blown from the room by the breeze of Dr. Duarte’s electric fans.

Emília did not break apart; instead, she’d gotten out of bed, dressed, and bought two tickets on the
Siqueira Campos
. Days later she and Expedito were on their way to New York.

The boat was crowded. Emília and Expedito had a second-class cabin and were confined to one deck. Their accommodations were not as bad as third class, which was deep inside the boat, or as luxurious as first class, which had the use of the entire upper deck. Emília wasn’t willing to splurge for first-class tickets; she had to keep her savings intact. She didn’t want to rely completely on Lindalva and the baroness.

In her letters, Lindalva said New York City was an island. That it had more automobiles on the streets than any city in Brazil. That its buildings were so tall, they made São Paulo look like a provincial town. Emília imagined the city but knew it would be nothing like the pictures she created in her head. She’d learned not to have explicit expectations of places or of people—they always turned out differently than one imagined. She’d learned a few English phrases from Lindalva’s letters and from Degas’ records. The language was choppy and stern sounding. Whenever she tried to speak it, Emília had to force her tongue to move in different directions, and even then there were sounds she could not make:
ch, th,
and
r
’s were especially hard. Despite its difficulties, Emília was grateful to the strange language. It had saved her—or Degas’ records had.

A few weeks before, Emília had believed she would never leave her bed. The electric fans—placed in each corner of her room in order to air it out—made so much noise that they drowned out the sounds of the Coelho house and the city. Everything sounded muddled and dull. One night, however, Emília heard a clear voice.

“A great seamstress must be brave,” it said.

This was Aunt Sofia’s rule, but the woman’s voice didn’t belong to Emília’s aunt. It was a young voice, loud and forceful. Emília heaved herself from bed. It was the middle of the night but she searched for the voice, looking in her closet, under her bed, and up and down the dark hallway. Finally, she walked into Degas’ old room. Everything there was intact. The Victrola sat in the corner with its crooked arm bent upward. Emília moved toward the wooden box. She hit it hard. Punched it right where the name “Victrola” was painted in gold lettering. Tears clouded Emília’s vision. How could she mourn a person she didn’t understand, a person who had done terrible things? Her knuckles ached. Behind all of the strange titles—Victrola, the Seamstress, the criminal, the specimen—there would always be one familiar name: Luzia. Emília hit the box again, harder this time. The needle fell. The machine began to play the record on its rotating base.

“How are you?” a woman’s voice said, startling Emília.

“I am fine,” another woman replied, then commanded in Portuguese: “Repeat!”

There was silence. “Repeat!” she ordered again.

“I am fine,” Emília said.

“Repeat!”

“I am fine,” she called out. “I am fine.”

Emília listened to the record all night, playing it over and over. Before dawn, she went into the Coelhos’ pink bathroom and took a bath. Emília combed her hair and put on a dress. Over it she wore a bolero jacket, made heavy by the money sewn into its lining. Emília opened the suitcase she’d packed months before for her trip into the countryside, a trip she’d waited too long to take. Because of her hesitation, the trip became unnecessary and Emília’s warning about the Bergmanns useless. Emília rearranged the clothes inside the suitcase and stuffed her jewelry box and Communion portrait between them. Quietly, she and Expedito walked out of the Coelhos’ front gate and into the city.

At Recife’s port, she purchased two tickets on a boat headed to New York City. So she wouldn’t lose her courage, Emília chose the first boat leaving that morning. At the telegraph station near the departure area, she sent Lindalva the ship’s name and arrival date. As they left the harbor, Emília held tightly to Expedito’s hand, afraid he would slip through the deck’s rails. People at the port waved and signaled to their loved ones with handkerchiefs. The ship’s passengers waved back. Expedito stared at Emília with a pleading look in his eyes. She nodded. The boy smiled and moved his arm back and forth, waving good-bye to strangers. Emília kept her hands at her side. She was happy to leave, happy to take Expedito to a place where no one would call him a “drought baby,” or worse. In New York, they would have no past, no relatives, no connection to the countryside. There would be no talk of the Seamstress and her cangaceiros, or of the widths and circumferences of their heads.

Even if Emília had taken her trip to the countryside immediately after Degas’ funeral, it would have come too late. Both Dr. Duarte and Dr. Eronildes had lied—the Bergmanns had arrived earlier than they’d announced. Just as Degas had warned, Eronildes had canceled with Emília, saying the meeting was too dangerous. At the time, she hadn’t been worried. Emília had already sent the measuring tape via Eronildes and she’d trusted that Luzia would understand its message. She’d trusted that the Seamstress would not appear at any meeting Eronildes had set with her.

Soldiers gave interviews to the
Diário
after the ambush. Dr. Eronildes Epifano, they said, had telegrammed the capital and informed the government of the upcoming meeting with the Seamstress. A brigade secretly stationed itself on the doctor’s land. The Bergmanns were waiting there, shipped by barge along the Old Chico. The soldiers had little time to practice shooting with the new weapons but it didn’t matter; the gun would guarantee their success. Troops nicknamed the Bergmann “the better Seamstress” because when it fired there was no loud pop. Instead there was a continuous shudder, like that of a Singer sewing machine, and the bullets made dozens of perfect holes in everything—walls, trees, men—as if pricking them over and over with a needle.

The soldiers hid themselves in the hills above the cangaceiros’ campground and planned to attack at sunrise, when there was enough light to see clearly. Until then they watched the cangaceiros eat, sing, and sleep. There were only fifteen men and women in the bandit group, which was a deep disappointment to the soldiers. Luckily, the Seamstress was among them. The government soldiers—some as young as fourteen—all saw her. In the
Diário
’s articles, troops described the infamous cangaceira as tall and crooked armed, with scraggly hair and a hunched back. Some laughed and said she was as skinny as a starving donkey. Others said she was green eyed and forbidding, like the scrub’s extinct panthers. The troops were required to stay awake. They could not speak or move. When their captain wasn’t looking, several soldiers lit cigarettes and smoked while they watched the cangaceiro encampment. In the dying embers of the camp’s fire, they saw her. The Seamstress stood at the edge of camp and stared at the hills. Before they could extinguish their cigarettes, the Seamstress was walking toward them.

“It was the strangest thing,” a soldier told the newspapers. “It was like she knew.”

When the Seamstress took another step forward, one of the youngest soldiers accidentally squeezed the trigger of his new Bergmann. “I didn’t realize it would go off so easily,” he said in his interview. “But it was a blessing it did.”

A “blessing,” a “stroke of luck,” a “sign that Gomes would prevail,” that’s how soldiers and government officials termed the unintentionally early attack. If they’d waited, the soldiers might have been overtaken by another group of cangaceiros hidden in the hills alongside them. The Seamstress had known about the ambush and had tried to trap the soldiers before they could trap her. There were dozens of reports speculating as to how she could have known. Many blamed Dr. Eronildes, saying he had been on her side all along. No one would know for certain though. Once troops had exterminated both groups of cangaceiros, they’d gone to Eronildes’ ranch house and found him in his study. His back was arched, his eyes wide, his body stiff on the floor. An empty vial of strychnine sat on his desk.

At night, in their cabin aboard the
Siqueira Campos,
Emília opened her jewelry box. Expedito watched her. She showed him the penknife and then the Communion portrait.

“You see that girl,” she said, pointing to Luzia’s blurry image. “That’s your Mãe.”

Expedito pressed his finger to the glass, leaving a greasy print over Emília’s childhood figure. “Who’s that?” he asked.

“That’s your other Mãe,” she said. “You are lucky enough to have two.”

“Where is she?” he asked, moving his finger back to Luzia.

The boat rocked beneath them. Emília’s stomach knotted, the saliva in her mouth grew warm. She reached for the sick bucket. Expedito patted her back, mimicking her actions when he was sick. Emília wiped her mouth. The smell of the bucket’s contents rose and made her feel sicker.

“Stay in bed,” she said to Expedito. “Be a good boy.”

Emília lifted the bucket and opened the cabin door. Outside there was a strong breeze. It made her shiver. She hung the bucket near the door for the porters to pick up. Emília took a deep breath. Seasickness didn’t bother her; she saw it as a release. It was as if she were ridding her body of the guilt that had lodged there, like an illness invisible to all but Emília. She looked in the circular cabin window and saw Expedito sitting obediently on the bed, his eyes fixed on the door. He would stay like that all night if necessary, waiting for her.

After the Bergmann ambush, the cangaceiros’ heads were placed in kerosene tins and carried to Recife. On the way, the soldiers stopped for cheering crowds, taking the heads from their kerosene baths and setting them on church steps for photographs. Rocks were slipped under their chins to steady them. These photographs became important later, when the troops arrived in Recife. Amid the confusion of taking the heads in and out of their tins, they’d been exposed to air and began to puff and lose their shape. The troops had not labeled the kerosene tins. They did not know who was who, could not tell women from men. Upon their arrival in Recife, some heads were missing, particularly the one belonging to the Hawk. Dr. Duarte was furious. An expedition team slogged through the rains that inundated the countryside and returned to the ambush site to collect the bodies. Rains had filled the dry gulley where the cangaceiros had hidden. The bones had been carried into the São Francisco River and washed away.

There were rumors that the Hawk was still alive. People said that he’d escaped the ambush and had left the Northeast. Some said he’d bought a ranch in Minas. Some said he’d changed his looks and become an army captain, or an actor, or a simple family man. Disappearance was more interesting than death. Despite the soldiers’ negligence, the cangaceiros’ skulls were not spoiled by air and time. Bone retained its shape. Dr. Duarte’s highly anticipated measurements of the cangaceiros’ craniums appeared on the front page of the
Diário de Pernambuco
, and they would cast the first serious doubts on his science. In order to identify the Seamstress, Dr. Duarte looked for a specimen with short hair and green eyes. When he found one that fit these criteria, he labeled and measured her. The Seamstress’s skull revealed that she was a brachycephalo. She was ordinary, like Emília. Like any other woman.