The Seamstress (10 page)

The rings, rifles, and half-moon hats had instantly given them away as cangaceiros. The Hawk’s group was rumored to be in the area; Luzia had heard stories of that cangaceiro leader. He was supposed to be tall, muscular, handsome. The scarred man was none of those things.

At the house, she slipped through the front door. Luzia heard Aunt Sofia shuffling in the kitchen. There was the clang of a pan, the sizzle of butter, the soft crackle of manioc flour poured into the hot skillet. Above her, Luzia heard sharp clinks, like a thousand pins falling onto the roof tiles. She shivered. Her dress was soaked. Her hair hung, heavy and wet, down her back.

In the narrow hall, Emília emerged from their bedroom. Her hair was curled. Her dress was ironed. She caught sight of her sister. Luzia pressed her finger to her mouth. Their aunt would ask a dozen questions that she did not want to answer. Emília rushed to her side.

“You’re late for breskfast,” Emília hissed. “Tia was worried. Have you caused trouble?” Emília looked toward her azulões. The birds hopped from rung to rung of the cage. She sighed, then looked back at Luzia. Her voice softened. “Your skirt is covered in mud.”

“I fell,” Luzia choked out.

Emília moved toward her. Her arms were warm, her hair perfumed. Luzia felt the moisture of her dress soaking into her sister’s clean frock. She tried to back away from the embrace but Emília held her firmly.

“Come,” Emília whispered. “Let’s get you changed before Tia has an attack.”

In the kitchen, Aunt Sofia padded around the stove. Her feet were as flat and wide as the metal base of the enxada they used to dig in the garden. She lifted manioc hotcakes gingerly from the griddle, folding them into white half-moons and wiping them with butter. The cakes were warm and dry in Luzia’s mouth. She left most of them on her plate; it took too much effort to chew. Outside, the rain subsided. The dahlias bowed their heads with the weight of their own petals.

They spent the day in a flurry of chores. Aunt Sofia swept beneath the beds. Emília and Luzia shook out their capim grass mattresses and laid them in the sun. They beat dust from the esteiras that lay across the bed boards, protecting their mattresses from snagging on the rough wood. They swept the brick floor, scrubbed the kitchen table and stone counter with a solution of oranges and vinegar, aired the bed linens, and wrapped cloths around their noses before pouring lye into the clay-lined hole in the outhouse. Luzia lagged behind. Emília prodded her, joked, sang. Luzia smiled at her sister’s efforts, but could not push away her thoughts. The men on the ridge were cangaceiros. Should she have warned the colonel? Should she have told Padre Otto? She wanted to take Emília aside and tell her. But what would she say? Luzia rehearsed the words in her mind:
Today I met a man with half a face. He wore a dozen rings. He stuffed a round-handled knife into his belt. There was a boy on one side of him and a man on the other. He threatened me and then he let me go.

It sounded like a dream. A lie. She’d been relieved when he released her. “Go,” he’d said, flicking his hand in the air as if shooing away a bug or a bad thought. But in her relief there was also disappointment. When she’d emerged from that porch, the men had lowered their guns, widened their eyes, and lifted their heads to face her. They had not seen Victrola, but someone else. For an instant Luzia felt a power she could not name. Then, with the flick of his hand, it had disappeared.

It was late afternoon by the time they began to clean the kitchen. Luzia placed the rapadura too close to the cook fire and it melted into a sticky mess. She tripped on a stool. She dropped a dish.

“You’re sick,” Aunt Sofia proclaimed, pressing her chapped hand to Luzia’s forehead. “No more morning walks. No more wandering about. You think I don’t know your habits, but I do.”

Luzia was about to protest when a knock rattled the back door.

“Who is it?” Aunt Sofia said.

“Sofia!” a shrill voice yelled. “Let me in! Before the hooligans catch me!”

It was Dona Chaves. Aunt Sofia disliked their neighbor because she wore heeled shoes.
Who does she think she is?
Sofia snorted each time Dona Maria Chaves wrung out laundry or fed her chickens in her heeled sandals. According to Aunt Sofia, heeled shoes were reserved for church, and even then, only a discreet heel was appropriate. Day-to-day use of heeled shoes, Sofia often lectured, was something for Dona Conceição, and not for people like Dona Chaves, a saddle-maker’s wife. Luzia undid the bolts on the door and lifted away the wooden crossbar.

Dona Chaves scurried inside. She opened her mouth but no words came. The loose flap of skin under her chin trembled and swayed with each deep breath. Finally, her hand fluttered over her chest and she gasped, “Cangaceiros!”

Emília led her to the kitchen table. Luzia grabbed a tin mug and dunked it into one of the water jugs. She held the mug to their neighbor’s lips and Dona Chaves gulped so fast that a small line of water ran from the side of her wrinkled mouth and down her chin.

“They killed both of the colonel’s capangas,” she sputtered after handing the mug back to Luzia. “They caught one capanga on the road. Such a young man! Gutted.” She breathed in again. “Slashed open, from here”—Dona Chaves pointed a wrinkled finger to her neck—“to here.” She crisscrossed the finger down her chest to the bottom of her stomach, then shook her head. “And his eyes were missing, cut out of his head!”

Luzia’s grip loosened on the tin mug. It tipped, dribbling water along her wrist. Luzia took a breath and set the mug down. “Did you see it?” she asked.

Dona Chaves looked up, startled. “God help me if I did!”

“Then how do you know it’s true?” Luzia asked. Emília hushed her.

“They kidnapped Mr. Chaves, Victrola,” Dona Chaves replied, her voice cracking.

“I’m sorry,” Luzia said, sitting beside their neighbor. On her upper lip Dona Chaves had a large mole that looked like a black bean. When she spoke, the mole bobbed up and down and Luzia had the urge to take a napkin and brush it off, as if Dona Chaves were a small child, a messy eater.

“They found him hiding under his stand,” their neighbor continued. “They sequestered him to fix their hats and sandals!”

Mr. Chaves worked with leather. He spent most of his time curing hides and crafting saddles commissioned by the colonel. Mr. Chaves spent weeks burning designs into the leather, adding rivets and decorative buckles, extra cushioning on the seat, and tiny braided sections on the bit and bridle. Only the colonel could afford such things. Most days, Mr. Chaves stood at a small stand at the edge of the outdoor market and repaired people’s worn alpercata sandals—nailing new straps onto the hard leather bases and adding fat strips of rubber to the soles.

“They told me he was trembling when they led him away!” Dona Chaves held a handkerchief to her eyes even though she was not crying. Aunt Sofia stood beside her.

“My kitchen is a mess.” Dona Chaves gulped. “I hid all the chickens inside.”

Aunt Sofia patted Dona Chaves’s back.

“Did they take anyone else?” Emília asked. Their neighbor nodded and held on to the edge of the table, a gesture Luzia recognized from Dona Chaves’s weekly visits. She performed this dramatic pause each time she delivered some bit of gossip—the butcher’s broken love affair, how Dona Ester’s prize pumpkin was stolen right off the vine, how Severino Santos stole manure from his neighbor, scooping it right out from under their shared fence, and how his neighbor responded by killing Severino’s dog with a ball of poison wrapped in goat meat. Dona Chaves informed them that she had crept from house to house that afternoon; that was how she’d heard of her husband’s abduction. “There were two visiting soldiers. They’re killed, strung up in the square,” Dona Chaves informed them. “
He
won’t allow anyone to touch them.
He
will kill anyone who tries to bury them.”

“Who?” Emília asked.

“The Hawk!” Dona Chaves whispered, as if the dreaded cangaceiro was in the other room. Aunt Sofia crossed herself. The soldiers, Dona Chaves informed them, had been part of a group sent from Caruaru to patrol smaller towns in the region. The rumor was that they were set to reunite with their battalion the next day. “What will happen when they don’t show up?” Dona Chaves asked. “I’ll tell you what: the monkeys will track them here. They’ll invade.”

Luzia’s mouth felt dry. She could not look at her sister or her aunt. Their town hadn’t been invaded by troops or cangaceiros in Luzia’s lifetime. They didn’t owe this safety to the current Colonel Pereira, who was a businessman and not a fighter. They’d had such a long stint of peace because Taquaritinga was a mountain town, making it hard to reach. Thieves wanted merchandise or money, soldiers wanted entertainment, and cangaceiros wanted all of those things. Taquaritinga had no lucrative ranches, no large shops or dance halls; for many, the long hike up its precarious mountain trail was not worth the effort. Unless they wanted water. During the dry months, water and food were the town’s most precious commodities, but these things were readily available in the farms along the mountainside. Often, travelers went unnoticed in the hills. This made the town forget about outside threats and focus on its own petty rivalries, its family fights, its small scandals. Only the colonel’s two capangas carried pistols; everyone else was content with their sharp peixeiras and a few rusted hunting rifles that shot small chumbo pellets. They would be no match for a group of cangaceiros.

Shame settled, heavy and sour, in Luzia’s belly. It tightened the tendons in her neck. It made her ears burn. If she had spoken earlier, Padre Otto could have rung the church bells in alarm. People could have prepared. Luzia hadn’t thought of the consequences of her silence. She’d wanted to keep her encounter with the cangaceiros to herself. She’d wanted to hoard it and later, to turn it over in her mind, the same way Emília stashed
Fon Fon
magazines beneath their bed and read them at night with a lantern. Luzia had watched her many times; Emília stared at those pale models, those perfect cityscapes, those ads for rice powder and egg-oil hair creams. Emília turned the pages carefully. Her plucked brows furrowed, her eyes shone. Luzia had never felt such concentrated wanting, such avarice.
I can’t help myself,
Emília said once when Aunt Sofia chided her. Luzia had not understood her sister then. Anything could be helped; anything could be pushed out of a person’s mind if they tried hard enough. She knew better now.

“There’re twenty cangaceiros,” Dona Chaves continued. “He’s got them posted along the trail to Vertentes. No one can leave.” She went on to tell the rest of the afternoon’s news: the Hawk had sacked the town’s two stores. Xavier had locked the doors to his shop and the cangaceiros had broken in. They turned over tubs of manioc flour and beans; they knifed open massive jute bags of coffee beans and held them over their shoulders like bodies, pouring their contents onto the floor. They stomped on Xavier’s stock of salted meats and codfish with their dirty sandals. But Zé Muela had left the doors to his shop open, and the outlaws strode in like patrons. Zé Muela stood behind his counter, dutifully packaging all of the items the cangaceiros picked out: five kilos of coffee, three kilos of rapadura to sweeten the coffee, five kilos of salted beef, manioc flour and beans, and ten cans of brilliantine hair paste. The Hawk set three pure gold coins on the counter. “One from 1786!” Dona Chaves said and slapped the table.

He took all of the ammunition from Xavier’s back room. He called on Padre Otto, who gave Holy Communion to the whole lot of them, then asked the Hawk to show mercy on the town and its residents. “He’s taken over the colonel’s house,” Dona Chaves said, then requested more water.

Aunt Sofia ignored Dona Chaves’s thirst. She shoved past their neighbor and closed the window shutters. She slid the metal bolts into their holes along the sides of the kitchen door. Then she shoved a wooden beam diagonally across the top part of the door. The room was dark.

They huddled in the kitchen for the rest of the afternoon. Aunt Sofia prayed, alternating between oaths to São Dimas, the protector against thieves, and the Virgin. She dozed off occasionally. Luzia heard her aunt’s prayers grow softer, saw her head bob and her chin slowly rest on her chest. She jolted awake each time shots were fired outside. They left their chairs when they heard the gunshots—loud pops coming from the direction of the town square and followed by a succession of hoots and whistles—and peeked through the broken slats in the window shutters. There was nothing to see.

Emília lit a candle and split three oranges for their dinner. They put out the fire in the cookstove, dousing the kindling so that smoke would not emerge from the roof tiles.

“You shouldn’t sleep alone tonight,” Aunt Sofia said, patting Dona Chaves’s hand. “It isn’t safe.”

“I won’t be any trouble,” Dona Chaves said. “I assure you.”

Dona Chaves’s poor back prohibited her from sleeping in a hammock, and Emília and Luzia’s bed was much too soft for her old bones. After much cajoling, Dona Chaves agreed to take Aunt Sofia’s bed. Luzia strung up their old cloth hammock across the front room. Emília brought her a blanket and lingered there, picking at the tangled fringe that dangled along the hammock’s sides. As little girls, they had twisted the white strings into tight braids, ripping them out and starting over again, until the fringe became uneven and snarled.

“I don’t want to sleep with Tia,” Emília pouted. “She kicks.”

“Then sleep with Dona Chaves,” Luzia whispered.

“No! She smells like chickens!”

They burst into giggles. Emília almost dropped her candle. Luzia covered her mouth.

“Girls!” Aunt Sofia shouted from their room.

“Good night,” Emília said. She kissed Luzia’s cheek and walked away, taking the candlelight with her.

As a child, Luzia had slept comfortably in that hammock, pretending she was a seed in a pod. But she had grown since then. Her feet popped out of one side, and when she tried to adjust them, her head popped from the other. Luzia could not sleep. She closed her eyes and recalled the men from that morning. The boy was no more than thirteen. The mulatto was older—in his twenties perhaps. The scarred man seemed both old and young at the same time. Was he the Hawk? Had he done the things Dona Chaves spoke of?