The Seamstress (18 page)
“After all,” Emília said, staring at the handkerchief in her hands and not at the priest’s profile through the latticed wood, “most Taquaritinga girls marry out of necessity and not love.”
Aunt Sofia had told her this time and again when trying to coax Emília to be kind to her suitors. Love was not like a bee sting, her aunt had said. It didn’t strike quickly and painfully when you weren’t paying attention. It was earned over years of companionship and struggle, so that a couple could look at each other after decades of marriage and say, proudly, that they had eaten much salt together. It would be that way with Degas, Emília reasoned, but not so bitter. She was resourceful by nature: she’d turned chicken feathers into a stylish hat, had made lovely creations out of poor cloth. Degas was finer stuff than Emília had ever worked with before. He had praised her innocence, her sweetness, her childlike nature—things Emília never knew she had until Degas insisted upon them. With time and imagination, she could create a husband out of such a man. She could shape him. And with his refinement and his worldly knowledge, Degas could guide her hand.
The priest was solemn and kind. Only at the end of her confession did he speak.
“Remember, sin calls softly,” he said. “It speaks kindly. It does not yell; it whispers. It beckons you with sweetness and possibility.”
Afterward, as Emília walked to the colonel’s house, the priest’s words grated against her mind. Who wouldn’t want sweetness? Who wouldn’t want a whisper rather than a shout? Who wanted only toil and austerity? To her, the monotony of goodness seemed as sterile and empty as Dona Conceição’s sewing room—all white walls and work. She had lost her aunt and her sister. She had done away with her shrine to Santo Antônio. She had stopped reading the romance serials in
Fon Fon
. There was only Degas.
I lost the ability to make castles out of air.
Once, not long ago, Emília would have been chilled by those words. But when Degas said them, she hadn’t been disappointed. She didn’t want anything made of air. She wanted tile and concrete. She wanted running water. She wanted a fine dress, an elegant hat, and a first-class train ticket that she could present proudly to the conductor, who would take her gloved hand and help her aboard.
1
I
n the beginning, she was one of many things acquired on their raids. She was like the red-lacquered accordion with eight baixos; like the gold rings they tugged off the fingers of disobedient colonels; like the crucifixes and mother-of-pearl-faced pocket watches they scooped out of jewelry boxes. The Hawk carried a golden shaving set, a silver flask, a pair of brass binoculars in a velvet-lined case. He and his men carved their initials into each of the things they acquired, adorning them with metal rivets and leather straps, carrying them through the toughest stretches of drought-stricken scrubland. When they finally entered a town, priests and children, farmers and colonels alike gawked at the cangaceiros’ amazing wealth, and the treasures became worth their terrible weight. During her first long weeks with the group, Luzia felt like one of those possessions—she was a useless treasure, an extra burden acquired in a moment of weakness and fascination. And like those binoculars and cigarette cases and countless golden crucifixes that became stained by the cangaceiros’ own sweat, corroded by winter rains, scratched and bullet ridden after raids, Luzia feared that she, too, would be irrevocably transformed.
When he spoke to her outside Aunt Sofia’s house, he did not shout. He did not threaten. He gave her no comforts or guarantees. He simply handed her the extra uniform she’d sewn for Baiano and said, “I have never seen a woman like you.” Yet he regarded her without pity or fascination. He didn’t even glance at her bent arm.
“Let’s see if you have a preference,” he said.
It was a challenge, not a question.
Let’s see.
Luzia took the uniform and walked into the house, into her saints’ closet. She would ask them for guidance, for direction. What made up her mind were not the saints but the floor. Those hollow indentations made by her knees, by years of prayer and deliberation. Luzia ran her fingers along the dents as if tracing a map of her life. They would grow deeper and deeper with her daily prayers. There would be drought and rain. There would be weddings and funerals. Each July, Luzia would pull the bean vines from the ground and store them in piles inside the living room. Each August, she would put them outside to dry. In January came the cashews, in April the cajá fruits. Eventually, Emília would leave. Aunt Sofia would pass on, a candle placed in her stiff hands to light her way to heaven. And Luzia would stay behind, kneeling in the saints’ closet and praying for her aunt’s soul and her sister’s happiness. Waiting. For what, she did not know. Not death—that would already have come to her, slowly and stealthily, killing her little by little each day of her lonely existence—but some kind of salvation. Some bit of grace that the dented floor and those fickle saints could never give her, because no matter how hard she prayed or how many candles she lit, she would always be Victrola—crooked, sullen Victrola—and never anything more.
Luzia pulled her hand away from the indentations and cradled her bent arm. Something bitter had welled up within her, as if she’d eaten sour manioc flour. She moved her hand across the floor and found the canvas cangaceiro suit. Carefully, she stepped into the trousers. It felt strange to have her legs divided one from the other. She walked back and forth in the dark kitchen. In trousers, she could take longer strides. She didn’t have to worry about a fluttering skirt or a dragging hem. She felt enclosed by the pants, protected and yet free. Was this how men felt?
She’d almost told Emília about this feeling, this freedom. Her sister had wanted to make ladies’ trousers for herself ever since she’d seen a pair in her magazines, but that night Emília’s eyes were glazed and distracted, her movements frantic. She’d been ordered to pack Luzia’s things.
To pack for her! He hadn’t even waited for her decision! Luzia felt a rush of anger, then fear. But it was too late. She was dressed, her things packed, and the tall mulatto led her out the door with a firm grip on her arm. As Aunt Sofia often said, there could be no mending. The cloth was already cut.
2
The men did not touch her. They did not stare or speak. They did not joke or sing as they had at the colonel’s house. They walked. Each day they moved in a silent line through the scrub, ducking and rising, bending and leaning to avoid barbed vines and tangled branches. They kept up a rhythmic pace, each man placing his foot in the steps of the one before him, so that it looked like one man and not twenty were crossing the caatinga. One man and one woman, because Luzia could not keep up.
Blisters bubbled across her toes, beneath the heel straps of her alpercatas, and in tender crescents on the soles of her feet. When they burst, her sandals became slick with water and then blood. Monk’s-head cacti littered the ground, their bulbous tops emerging from the earth like men buried neck high in the dirt. Their thorns stabbed Luzia’s ankles, the tips breaking and lodging beneath her skin. Her ankles swelled. Her feet grew heavy and numb. Ponta Fina carried a medicine bag with mercurochrome and gauze. On the Hawk’s orders, they stopped while Ponta unbuckled her alpercatas and poured the red liquid across her feet. When the burning began, Luzia clenched her teeth and closed her eyes. She tried to go deep within herself, to that silent space in her mind where she had retreated so many times before: when the encanadeira snapped her broken arm together, or when Padre Otto made her kneel on the church’s stone floor and repeat a hundred Our Fathers in forgiveness for something she had done. But Luzia could no longer gain access to that place.
The entire group had halted, and many of the men—the big-eared one especially—stared at her, irritated.
“My feet hurt, too, at first,” Ponta Fina whispered as he wrapped her feet in gauze. Stiff curls of hair were beginning to sprout from the boy’s pimpled chin. “You’ll get used to it,” he said.
Luzia nodded. She forced herself to move forward, to take one step, then another. As long as they kept walking, the men paid attention to their destination and not to her. Movement kept her safe, but not invisible. The men glanced at her while they walked, studying her when they believed she wasn’t aware. Luzia cradled her crooked arm. The freedom she’d felt when she’d first stepped into her new trousers was gone. In the saints’ closet, she’d only imagined the thrill of leaving. She hadn’t thought of what would come afterward. In Taquaritinga, Luzia was immune from Aunt Sofia’s concerns about the dangers a girl faced. She’d never felt the risk of losing her virtue. But that safety came from being Victrola, which she wasn’t anymore. There, in that strange scrubland, she was a woman—the lone woman in a pack of men. Luzia kept walking.
In the evenings, when it grew dark and they could no longer move easily about the scrub, the men made camp. They looked for jurema trees, whose roots were poison to the plants around them, making the soil beneath their spindly branches free of undergrowth. The ground was sandy but not smooth. They laid blankets on it; the Hawk did not allow hammocks. Men slept too deeply in hammocks, he insisted. The ground was rocky and uncomfortable, which made them keep one eye open. Luzia slept on her own blanket. During the first few nights, she couldn’t rest. She held her penknife close to her chest, ready to swipe at any man who came near. None of them did. In later days, as her feet grew more blistered and raw, Luzia looked forward to evening and the possibility of rest, but when it finally came, she still could not sleep. A chilling desperation moved through her, starting at the pit of her stomach and surging into her chest. She bunched a damp corner of blanket into her mouth. The cloth dried her tongue, and the sand that stuck to the cover’s fibers gritted between her teeth. Still, the blanket muffled her sobs. Her life and her virtue depended on those men’s mercy. It was a thought Luzia could not stomach. Mercy, after all, was divine. Those men were not. They were unwashed and crude. They lived lives based on instinct and desire. Mercy was beyond such impulses; it required restraint, deliberation. So far, the cangaceiros had not touched her, but that was no guarantee. Luzia bit down on the blanket. She sensed the men listening in the darkness, eavesdropping from their own sandy beds. In the mornings, after a night of fitful sleep, some of the cangaceiros smirked at her. Most ignored her. None commented on her crying.
In the beginning, rains did not touch the caatinga scrub. The trees were gray and stunted, as if they’d been torched by fire. Orange-backed lizards were the only animals that appeared, rushing from tree to tree, the dry underbrush crackling beneath their clawed feet. But rain would come; Luzia felt a constant ache in her locked elbow. Dark clouds hung on the horizon, like a gray lid placed over the land, leaving Luzia and the cangaceiros to stew in the muggy air.
When the rain came, it fell in quick, torrential bursts. It washed away the sand, exposed the knotted roots of trees, made the smallest of gullies into great channels. In response, the caatinga bristled with life. Shoots as tall and straight as spears emerged from the spiky clumps of agave. Leaves appeared between the black thorns of jurema bushes. Vines emerged from the dirt. Some were threadlike and sticky, others waxy and barbed. They snaked along the ground and wrapped themselves around bushes and tree trunks. They festooned the massive, many-limbed facheiro cacti. They moved across the scrub and turned the gray forest green.
The rain soothed her feet but soaked her leather shin guards, making them heavy and black with mold. Her canvas suit was never dry. Beneath it, Luzia felt her skin grow puckered and slack. She imagined it loosening bit by bit, like the peel of an overripe fruit. And she felt as if the rain had entered her mind as well, seeping inside like it did with the kitchen door in Aunt Sofia’s house, making it warped and thick and unable to close out the world around her. Luzia heard every droning mosquito. She heard the jangle of the men’s cartridge belts, the clinking of their tin mugs against the barrels of their rifles. She heard the hollow tapping of their water gourds against the silver handles of their knives. Often the sounds merged, becoming a long, deep ringing in her ears. She stumbled. The Hawk forced a sweet chunk of rapadura into her mouth. Luzia shook her head roughly. Her saliva was as thick as paste. She tried to speak but no sound came.
Each night the men sliced the squat xique-xique cactus into rounds, plucked out its thorns, and pressed down upon the slices with the flat faces of their knives. A yellow juice squirted out. They filled Luzia’s gourd with this juice and nothing else. It was an old sertanejo trick—a desperate trick—that kept animals and people hydrated during the worst droughts. The xique-xique’s juice saved lives, but it burned throats. Luzia recalled the rumors she’d heard as a child: tales of entire families subsisting on xique-xique, of farmers forcing the juice into the mouths of their cattle and goats, who, after a week of drinking the bitter fluid, would open their mouths in hoarse, voiceless bays. All new members of the Hawk’s group were required to drink the juice.
“It teaches us silence,” the Hawk said as he poured the first, frothy yellow batch into her gourd. “A quiet man listens. Out here, a man who doesn’t listen isn’t a man. He’s a corpse.”
Perhaps the xique-xique worked; the men had keen ears. They could distinguish between the baying of a lost goat and that of an injured one. They grew suspicious if they heard a cock crowing at the wrong hour or when they sensed the smell of sweat that was not their own. They’d spent so much time in those backlands that, like the scrub foxes or the wild caititu pigs or even the fabled spotted panthers, they sensed any foreign element.
Luzia had learned this when she tried to escape. During the first days of their journey, when Taquaritinga’s mountainside still loomed in the distance, Luzia said she needed to relieve herself. The men stopped. She walked far into the scrub, wary of the cangaceiros watching her. Her mind felt numb from lack of food. Her thoughts were plodding and trivial, until she looked up and saw, beyond the scrub trees, Taquaritinga’s mountain. It was blue-gray, like a shadow, and it seemed so close. Only when she started running toward the mountain did Luzia realize that the men were waiting, that they might punish her or even kill her for tricking them. Her heart thumped wildly. Her blistered feet burned. She ran harder. The underbrush crackled loudly beneath her feet. Dry tree limbs lashed her arms and then her face; the scrub trees grew taller the farther she ran. Before long, they blocked the view of the mountain. Luzia’s direction faltered. She turned, weaving back between bushes and trees. It wasn’t long before she heard footsteps and the men quietly surrounded her.
That night it rained, and the cangaceiros made their toldas—stringing up oilcloth tarps and digging small moats around them with the tips of their machetes—while Ponta Fina guarded her. The men were quiet and wary around her, as if she were a wild thing the Hawk had lured into camp and did not want to frighten away.
With each day that passed, Luzia felt wildness creeping into her. Each morning, the Hawk handed her a sliver of sun-dried beef. A downy coating of mold grew on the meat, and during her first days, Luzia ate around it. But later, she snatched the slivers from the Hawk’s hand and ate them whole. On the rare occasions when the men caught and cooked a stray goat, Luzia sucked on the bones long after she had devoured her small share of meat. Most evenings, the men killed rolinha doves with slingshots or trapped and gutted massive, black teú lizards. For days afterward, Luzia craved the lizards’ tough white meat and crackling tails. She searched the ground as she walked, desperate to catch one with her own shaking hands. Sometimes, before a dizzy spell, she thought she heard Aunt Sofia’s voice. It rose above the season’s last screeching cicadas. Above the sad, incessant whoops of the cururu frogs.
I caught your mother eating dirt,
Aunt Sofia had said.
When she had you in her belly.