The Seamstress (12 page)

“You,” he said to Luzia before she could measure her first man. “You measure me.”

The scarless side of his face moved too much—twisting and rising as if pulled by invisible strings. It was boyish and animated. But the slack side of his face was placid, serious. It looked sensible, as if it did not approve of the other side’s behavior. Despite the scar, the right half of his mouth moved slightly, the lips barely opening and closing as he spoke. His right eye blinked slowly, languidly, as if winking. The eye had a teary glaze. He dabbed it with a handkerchief and then walked into the yard, far removed from the line of men.

Luzia looked to her aunt and her sister. Aunt Sofia crossed herself, then motioned for Luzia to go. Emília looked confused.

Luzia stood before the Hawk and held out the measuring tape, stretching her good arm as long as it would go. Her fingers pressed against the metal rivets at the ends of the cloth tape and she studied it intently, searching the hand-drawn numbers—the ticks of centimeters and meters—as if the tape would reveal some great mystery, or at least tell her how she should comport herself.

“What would you like?” she asked, her eyes focused on the strip of tape. When she looked at him, the skin of Luzia’s scalp and along the back of her neck seemed to shrink.

“What can you make?”

“Anything.” Her hands felt rubbery and useless and she disliked him for making her feel so clumsy.

“Then measure me for anything,” he said.

Luzia sighed. She never enjoyed measuring the living. The living squirmed, asked questions, looked curiously at her arm as she bent and stretched her body to compensate for its limited range. When weeping families knocked on their door requesting a death suit, it was always Luzia who took the deceased’s measurements. The colonel already had his death suit prepared and hanging in his closet—a fancy double-breasted affair made of the thinnest, softest linen Luzia had ever touched. But other families, modest families, had to order death suits and gowns after the fact. Emília hated it; she felt squeamish at the thought of a body. But Luzia preferred the silence, the solemnity, the importance that came with measuring the dead. Some bodies, depending on the cause of death, were in better shape than others. But most were laid flat on beds or tables, and Luzia had to circle them, careful not to overturn the bowls of water filled with lemon and orange slices laid out around the corpse to take away the smell. She slipped the tape around their wrists and across their chests. She always estimated the back and shoulder and waist measurements, so the family would not be forced to move the body. They would sew the suit as quickly as possible for the wake and funeral—among the three of them, they could make a simple suit or burial gown in a few hours—and Luzia always felt warmly satisfied when the suits and gowns fit perfectly, when her secret estimates proved correct.

“I’ll measure you for a jacket and shirt, then,” Luzia said, forcing herself to face him.

His nose was long, its bridge mashed. His tunic was stained yellow at the neck and under the arms. Beneath the scent of shaving soap and the colonel’s sandalwood aftershave was the heady, animal scent from the other morning. Luzia pointed to the green silk bandanna tied around his neck.

“You’ll have to take that off,” she said. She would measure him as she measured the dead—quickly and quietly, estimating as much as she could.

He obliged. His hands were dark and ridged with veins. The rings he wore—one on each thick finger—clinked against each other as he unknotted the bandanna and bunched it in his hand. He loosened the top two buttons of his tunic as well, and beneath the scarf and shirt was a tangle of gold chains and red string. She was surprised to see a small golden cross dangling from one of the chains; the other necklaces held a collection of saints’ medallions. Luzia almost reached out to touch them, to ask him which saints he worshipped, which ones he asked for help and guidance. Instead, she slid the measuring tape around his neck and pinched it closed with her fingers. He was shorter than she was—Emília’s height—and she had to lean in to read the tape. There was a nick in his neck, from shaving no doubt, and a spot of blood bubbled from his tan skin. Luzia wondered about his body—was he pale like the bathing boys? Or was he dark all over? Her face grew hot.

“Thirty-seven centimeters,” she said, and held the tape in place. Luzia looked back at the row of men, at Emília with her pad and pencil. “I have nowhere to write it.”

“I’ll remember it,” he said. His breath smelled spicy. His mouth felt too close to her face and she backed away, moving to measure the back of his body.

Luzia held the tape along his back, from shoulder to shoulder, pressing the edges firmly with her fingers. “Fifty-one centimeters,” she said.

“How tall are you?” he asked.

“One meter ninety.”

He whistled. “You’re taller than my man Baiano.”

Luzia turned and spotted the hulking mulatto who’d held the mirror earlier. Aunt Sofia stood on her tiptoes beside him, trying to reach his neck. “Yes. I suppose so.”

Luzia held the tape from the base of his neck to his shoulder, and in the middle of this measured space, where a dip should be, there was a large lump. She slid her fingers along the tape and felt the mound.

“It’s a callous,” he said. His voice startled her.

“I was only making certain it didn’t alter the measurement.”

“We all have them,” he continued. “Bullets and water are heavy.” He twisted his neck to look at her.

“It must be a relief to put those things down,” Luzia said, avoiding his gaze.

He laughed. “We’re like oxen with their cangas. They get so used to those wood collars that they can’t live without them. I need my things to weigh me down or else I don’t feel right. I feel too light.”

Luzia nodded. “Lift your arms.”

She measured from shoulder to wrist. Fifty-eight centimeters.

“Pardon me,” he said, lowering his arms. “What is your name? Your given name.”

“Luzia.”

“And that”—he pointed to her arm—“is why they call you Victrola?”

“Yes,” she said. She felt embarrassed and strangely giddy. “It wasn’t always this way. It was an accident.”

She had finished all of the measurements required for a simple jacket. She could walk away. She could call Aunt Sofia to measure his pants. But she continued to press the tape to him, as if fitting him for a fancy dress shirt. Luzia tried to wrap the tape around his waist but tucked into his belt was the silver-handled knife. Two gold rings were molded onto its bulbous top.

The Hawk shifted it within his belt. “Measure around it. Please.”

Luzia slid the tape under the knife handle and around his waist. Seventy-eight centimeters. He was thinner than she had imagined—the hat and bullet harnesses he’d worn earlier had made him look larger. But the tape showed her that he was a small man, a lean man. “No fat, no flavor,” Aunt Sophia always said before selecting a chicken from their backyard brood. Luzia measured from his collarbone to his upper thigh. “Sixty-six centimeters,” she said.

“That bird from yesterday,” he interrupted. “The sofreu. It’s dead.”

“Oh?” Luzia said, startled. He remembered her after all.

“It got sick,” the Hawk continued. The brow on the good side of his face rose. “Did you curse it?”

“No,” Luzia said, keeping her voice low. “Curses don’t exist. It was already weak. Sofreus aren’t pets.”

“That’s a foolish bird, don’t you think?”

“Why?”

The Hawk shrugged. “It’s hardheaded. All it had to do was make its owner happy. All it had to do was sing for him, and it would’ve had shade and fresh water. An easy life.”

“It sings for itself,” Luzia mumbled. “Maybe it didn’t want an easy life.”

“Then what did it want?”

Luzia faced him. “I wouldn’t know,” she said. “I’m not a bird.”

“No,” he said, the left side of his mouth rising in a smile. “You’re a thief.”

The words stung, like a hundred prickling ant bites. Heat filled Luzia’s chest. It rushed through her arms, making her fingers feel thick. The measuring tape fell from her hand. Luzia crouched to retrieve it. The Hawk followed her.

“I was playing,” he said. “Pardon me.”

“I’m not a thief,” Luzia said.

“I know.”

He handed her the tape. There was a stain around his right cuff—a reddish brown splattering—a color Luzia had seen countless time before, when they cut their chickens’ throats and let the blood flow into a bowl with vinegar, or in the middle of each month when she felt a heaviness in the bottom of her stomach and would go to the outhouse and see that her knickers were stained. Luzia took the tape from his hand. She began to roll it tightly, focusing all of her energy into making it into a perfect, rigidly wound ball. She stared at his cuff. The blood, she reasoned, could be anyone’s. It could be his own.

“I’m finished here,” she said.

The Hawk nodded, then held out his hand. “I didn’t properly introduce myself. I’m Antônio.”

Those hands, Luzia thought, had done terrible things. Those hands had sinned. But they looked no different from any workingman’s hands—the tops tanned, the knuckles dry, the palms rough like uncured leather. The only difference was the jewelry. Some of the gold rings on his fingers were dented and misshapen, their stones foggy, but they fit each of his fingers so snugly that they looked as if they had been welded on at birth.

His hand was warm, the grip firm. His rings pinched the skin of her palm. Her eyes focused again on the stained cuff and when he saw her staring at it, he retracted his arm and stepped away.

6

They worked in the colonel’s sitting room. The sewing room could not hold three seamstresses and two Singers, so the cangaceiros carried Dona Conceição’s new machine and Aunt Sofia’s old one into the largest room in the house. Emília ran the pedal-operated Singer. Aunt Sofia used her sewing machine with the help of Ponta Fina, who turned the stiff, circular handle. Luzia had hoped to talk to her sister when they were alone, but the young cangaceiro’s presence made them wary and tense. They all worked quietly except for Aunt Sofia.

“Faster,” she grunted as she slid precut jacket and pants panels through the machine’s needle. Ponta Fina turned the handle quickly. “No! Slower, slower,” Aunt Sofia said, careful not to yell at the boy.

Luzia cut the cloth. The cangaceiros had stolen three bolts of strong bramante fabric. The Hawk had purchased another bolt—a finer bramante, thinner and less canvaslike—for himself. Luzia read Emília’s notes and marked each man’s measurements on the tan fabric with a charcoal pencil. She used her bent arm to steady the cloth and with her mobile arm she held her sewing scissors and sliced though the bramante in long sweeps.

When she was a girl—just when she was beginning to learn how to sew—Luzia had her accident and suddenly her arm became a burden. She didn’t know how to maneuver herself. She dropped eggs and plates. Anything that required two hands took a tortuous amount of time: making up the bed, bathing, dipping a chicken in hot water and plucking off its steaming feathers without burning her fingers, running the hand-cranked sewing machine. Aunt Sofia refused to help her
.
“I won’t raise an incompetent in my house,” she declared each time Luzia stormed off into the banana grove, sick of fumbling with her rigid arm.

When Luzia was thirteen, Dona Conceição ordered an expensive piece of Portuguese silk for slips and undergarments. Aunt Sofia made Luzia cut it. Luzia stood before the silk, knowing that they had to be frugal with the material, that if she made a crooked cut, much of it would be wasted and Dona Conceição would be livid. Aunt Sofia stood beside her. Luzia placed the slippery silk on a table and switched the scissors back and forth between her hands. “You must do this now or you will never do it,” Aunt Sofia said. There was a pinching feeling at the tip of Luzia’s nose, as if someone were twisting it. Her eyes grew warm and wet. “Don’t waste your tears,” Aunt Sofia said, as she always did when she found Luzia or Emília crying, as if tears were precious things, as if you were born with a limited supply and had to preserve them for truly important moments. Luzia grew up believing this. But Emília got angry each time Aunt Sofia chided her for crying over silly or inexplicable things.
I want to waste them! They’re my tears to waste!
Emília would roar. Luzia stared at that costly silk and wanted to weep as her sister did—not suppressing her tears or locking herself in the saints’ closet—but crying loudly and breathlessly, for everyone to hear. Aunt Sofia took her hand and held it under her own. “If you want to be a seamstress, you can never be afraid. You must cut. Cut straight and cut fast.” And together they sliced through the silk so quickly that Luzia didn’t have time to make a mistake. Just like that, she lost her fear.

Luzia placed the bramante cutouts according to size around the room. The front and back panels of cangaceiro jackets hung over Dona Conceição’s wicker-backed settee. The loose legs of slacks were draped across her chairs. The tubes of sleeves lay in neat piles on her glass-paneled liquor cabinets. The only measurements Luzia had not written down were the Hawk’s
. Antônio
, Luzia thought, then chided herself. Each time a cangaceiro appeared at the sitting room door, Emília and Aunt Sofia stopped pedaling. Luzia did not look up from her work. Instead, she kept her eyes on the fabric, afraid of making a crooked cut. To their surprise, the cangaceiros did not bother or threaten them. Instead, they delivered cups of water and, later, plates of rice and chicken for lunch. It had been so long since Luzia had tasted chicken that she ate each piece slowly, stripping every bit of meat from the fragile bones and tendons. Ponta Fina gulped down his lunch at the far end of the sitting room.

“Luzia,” Emília whispered, her eyes on the young cangaceiro. “You need to cut more slowly.”

“I’m going as slow as I can,” Luzia hissed.

They had heard of cangaceiros sacrificing their helpers once their work was done. That way, there would be no witnesses to describe them. As long as there was still sewing to do, they were safe. They’d worked straight through the morning and had only finished eight trousers and seven jackets. But there were only twenty uniforms to make and their pattern was simple; the cangaceiros would expect experienced seamstresses to finish quickly.