The Seamstress (3 page)

Emília read the article’s last line and did not feel the porcelain coffee cup slip from her hands and break into bits against the slate floor. She did not feel the burning liquid splash onto her ankles, did not hear her mother-in-law gasp and exclaim that she had no manners, did not see the maid crawl beneath the veined marble table to pick up the mess.

Emília rushed up the tiled staircase to her bedroom—the last room at the end of the carpeted and musty hallway. Expedito was there. He sat on Emília’s bed while the nanny combed his wet hair. Emília dismissed the woman. She lifted her boy from the bed.

When he squirmed in her tight embrace, Emília released him. She pulled a polished wooden box from beneath the bed. Emília unclasped the gold chain around her neck and used the small brass key that dangled from it to open the box’s lock. Inside was a velvet-lined tray, empty except for a ring and a pearl necklace. Degas had bought her the largest jewelry box he could find, promising to fill it. Emília lifted the tray. In the deep space beneath it—a place meant to hold pendants, or tiaras, or thick bracelets—was Emília’s collection of newspaper articles, bound with a blue ribbon. Beneath those was a small framed photograph. Two girls stood side by side. Both wore white dresses. Both held Bibles. One girl smiled widely. Her eyes, however, did not match her mouth’s rigid happiness. They looked anxious, expectant. The other girl had moved when the picture was taken, and so she was blurred. Unless one looked closely, unless one knew her, you could not tell exactly who she was.

Emília had cradled this communion portrait in her arms as she rode on horseback out of her hometown of Taquaritinga. She’d held it in her lap during the bumping train ride to Recife. In the Coelho house, she’d placed it in her jewelry box, the only place the Coelho maids were prohibited from probing.

Emília knelt beside the portrait. Her boy copied her, clasping his hands firmly to his chest as Emília had taught him. He stared at her. In the morning sunlight, his eyes were not as dark as they sometimes seemed—within the brown were specks of green. Emília bowed her head.

She prayed to Santa Luzia, the patron saint of the eyes, her sister’s namesake and protector. She prayed to the Virgin, the great guardian of women. And she prayed most fervently to Saint Expedito, the answerer of all impossible requests.

Emília had given up many of her old, foolish beliefs in this house—a place where her husband had not been her husband but some stranger she did not care to know, where maids were not maids but spies for her mother-in-law, where fruits were not fruits but wood, polished and dead. But Emília still believed in the saints. She believed in their powers. Expedito had brought her sister back from death once. He could do it again.

Taquaritinga do Norte, Pernambuco

March 1928

1

B
eneath her bed, Aunt Sofia kept a wooden box that held her husband’s bones. Each morning Emília heard the rustle of starched bedsheets, the pop of Aunt Sofia’s knees as she knelt and tugged the box from its resting place. “My falecido,” her aunt whispered, because the dead were not allowed names. Aunt Sofia called him this on her better days. If she woke irritated—her arthritis bothering her, or her mind plagued with worries over Emília and Luzia—she addressed the box sternly as “my husband.” If she had stayed up late the night before, rocking in her chair and squinting up at the family portraits, the next day Aunt Sofia addressed the box in a low, sweet whisper as “my departed.” And if the drought worsened, or there was too little sewing work, or Emília had once again disobeyed her, Aunt Sofia sighed and said, “Oh my corpse, my burden.”

This was how Emília guessed her aunt’s moods. She knew when to ask for new dress fabric and when to stay quiet. She knew when she could get away with wearing a dab of perfume and rouge, and when to keep her face clean.

Their rooms were divided by a whitewashed wall that rose three meters from the floor and then stopped, giving way to wooden posts that supported the roof beams and rows of orange tiles. Aunt Sofia’s whispered prayers rose over the low bedroom wall. Emília shared a bed with her sister. A dusty beam of light shone through a crack in the roof tiles. It entered their yellowed mosquito netting. Emília squinted. She heard the click of rosary beads rubbed between her aunt’s palms. There was a grunt, then the hollow rattle of Uncle Tirço’s bones as Aunt Sofia pushed him back beneath the bed. The daily dragging of the box had worn away a path in the floor—two indentations lighter than the oiled brick that paved each room of their house except for the kitchen.

Their kitchen floor was made of packed earth; it was orange and always damp. Emília swore its moisture seeped through the soles of her leather sandals. Aunt Sofia and Luzia walked barefoot on that floor, but Emília insisted on wearing shoes. As a child, she’d roamed the house barefoot and the bottoms of her feet had become orange, like her aunt’s and her sister’s. Emília scrubbed her soles with boiled water and a loofah in order to make them white, the way a lady’s feet should look. But the stains remained and Emília blamed the floor.

That year, the winter rains had been sparse and the January rains had not come at all. Their neighbors’ coffee trees had not flowered. The purple blossoms of the bean plants Aunt Sofia tended in their backyard had shriveled and they’d lost half of their yearly crop. Even the kitchen floor had become dry and cracked. Emília had to sweep it three times a day to keep the orange dust from filming up the pots, settling in the water jugs, and staining the hems of their dresses. She was saving to install a proper floor—sewing extra nightshirts and handkerchiefs for their employers, Colonel Pereira and his wife, Dona Conceição. When she had enough money, Emília would purchase half a sack of cement powder and the packed dirt would disappear under a thick coating of concrete.

Luzia’s side of the bed was empty. Her sister was praying, no doubt, as she did every morning in front of her saints’ altar in the kitchen pantry. Emília slipped under the mosquito netting and climbed out of bed; she had her own altar. On their dressing trunk was a small image of Santo Antônio, clipped from the latest issue of
Fon Fon
—her favorite periodical, which featured sewing patterns, romance serials, and the occasional prayer guide. Dona Conceição gave Emília backdated copies of
Fon Fon
and Emília’s other cherished magazine,
O Capricho
. She kept them in three neat stacks under her bed even though Aunt Sofia insisted this would attract mice.

Emília knelt before the old black trunk.
Fon Fon
instructed you to place the image of Santo Antônio—the matchmaker saint—in front of a mirror with a white rose next to him. “Find your love match!” the magazine said. “A prayer to ensure you find the right beau.”
Fon Fon
assured readers that three Our Fathers and three Ave Marias to Santo Antônio each morning would do the trick.

Emília had placed the saint’s image next to her foggy mirror—it was a bit of glass the size of her palm that she had purchased with her savings. It was nothing compared to the full-length mirror in Dona Conceição’s fitting room, but Emília could prop her little mirror on the dressing trunk and get a good look at her face and hair. There were no white roses in her town, though. There were no flowers at all. The hearty Beneditas that grew along the roadsides had lost all of their pink and yellow petals and had dropped their seeds onto the hard, dry ground. Aunt Sofia’s dahlias hung their heavy heads and disappeared into their bulbs beneath the earth, hiding from the heat. Even the rows of cashew trees and coffee plants looked sickly, their leaves yellowed from constant sun. So Emília had sewn a rose from stray scraps of fabric; Santo Antônio would have to understand. She wrapped her hands together and prayed.

She was nineteen and already an old maid. The town gossips had predicted that she and Luzia would become spinsters, but for different reasons. Luzia’s fate had been sealed with the accident she’d suffered as a child: at eleven, she’d fallen from a tall tree and nearly died. The misfortune had deformed her arm and left Luzia—the gossips proclaimed—slightly addled. No man would want a crippled wife, they said, much less one with Luzia’s temper. Emília had no physical deformities, thank the good Lord. She’d had many suitors; they had turned up at the house like stray dogs. Aunt Sofia offered them coffee and macaxeira cake while Emília hid in her room and pleaded with Luzia to shoo them away.

If they insisted on staying, Emília stood beside the door frame and peeked into the kitchen. Her suitors were young farmers who looked older than their years. They wore misshapen hats, sat with their legs wide apart, and cracked their enormous, calloused knuckles. During courtship they were all awkwardness and smiles. But Emília had seen them negotiating at the weekly market, shouting and swaggering, taking up roosters by the wings and swiftly cracking the birds’ necks. After she’d rejected a suitor, Emília often saw him parading a new wife around the Saturday market, pulling his shy bride this way and that as if the girl were some skittish animal that would escape from her husband’s grip.

Emília read the romances in
Fon Fon
. Outside of Taquaritinga there existed another breed of man. Gentlemen were perfumed and suave. Their mustaches were combed, their hair oiled, their beards trimmed, their clothing ironed. It had nothing to do with wealth, but with bearing. She was not a snob, as the town gossips said. She craved refinement, not wealth. Mystery, not money. At night, after prayers, Emília imagined herself as one of those smartly dressed
Fon Fon
heroines, in love with a captain whose boat was lost at sea. She pictured herself on a dune, shouting his name over the water. Or as his nurse, treating him when he returned. He’d gone mute and she became his voice, watching his dark eyebrows move up and down, communicating in a language only she understood. This mystery, this sad longing that ran through all of the
Fon Fon
stories, seemed to be the source of love. Emília prayed it would come to her. She slept without a pillow, swore off sweets, pricked her finger thirty times with her sewing needle as an offering to the saints for their help. Nothing had worked. The white rose and her
Fon Fon
prayers were her last hope.

Emília placed the newspaper clipping of Santo Antônio in her hands and squeezed.

“Professor Célio,” she said between prayers.

Célio, her sewing instructor, was not mysterious or tragic. He was a skinny man with doe eyes and long fingers. But he was different from the Taquaritinga boys. He wore freshly pressed suits and shined shoes. And he came from São Paulo, the great metropolis of Brazil, and would return there when the sewing course was over.

“Please, Santo Antônio,” Emília whispered, “let me go with him.”

“You shouldn’t ask the saints for trivial things,” Luzia said. She stood in their bedroom doorway. Her head nearly touched the top of the whitewashed frame. When she entered a room she seemed to fill it, making the space feel smaller than it actually was. Her shoulders were wide and the muscles of her right arm—her good arm—were round and hard, conditioned from years of turning the crank of Aunt Sofia’s sewing machine. Her eyes were her best, most feminine feature. Emília envied them. They were heavy lidded, like a cat’s, and green. Beneath Luzia’s thick brows and black lashes, their color was startling, like the shoots of Aunt Sofia’s dahlias emerging from dark soil. Luzia cradled her left arm—her crippled arm—in her right. The arm’s elbow was forever locked in a sharp right angle. Luzia’s fingers and shoulder worked perfectly, but the elbow had never healed correctly. Aunt Sofia blamed the encanadeira for her poor work in setting the broken bones.

“Love isn’t trivial,” Emília said. She closed her eyes to resume her prayers.

“Santo Antônio isn’t even the one to ask,” Luzia said. “He’ll make the wrong match. You ask for a stallion and he’ll give you a donkey.”

“Well,
Fon Fon
says otherwise.”

“You should pray to São Pedro.”

“You say your prayers and I’ll say mine,” Emília said, pressing the picture of Santo Antônio harder between her palms.

“You should light a candle to get his attention,” Luzia continued. “Flowers won’t work. That’s not even a real flower.”

“Be quiet!” Emília snapped.

Luzia shrugged and left. Emília tried to concentrate on her prayers but could not. She tucked her hair behind her ears, kissed her picture of Santo Antônio, and followed her sister out of their room.

2

Aunt Sofia’s house was small but sturdy, with brick on the outside and finished walls on the inside, plastered and painted with whitewash. When people visited, they held their hands to the walls’ powdery surface, amazed by this extravagance. Aunt Sofia had also installed an outhouse in the back, complete with a wooden door and a clay-lined cavity in the dirt floor. People said that she was playing at being rich, that she spoiled her young nieces with such luxuries. Their aunt was the town’s best seamstress. There were other women who sewed but, according to Aunt Sofia, they were not professionals; they had clumsy stitching and they didn’t reinforce the seams of pants or know how to tailor a gentleman’s dress shirt. Aunt Sofia’s sewing machine—a hand-operated Singer with a round crank and a wooden base—was ancient. The machine’s hand crank had rusted and grown hard to turn, the needle had dulled, and the lever that popped the foot of the sewing needle up and down often stuck. But Aunt Sofia insisted that it was not the sewing machine that made a seamstress. A good seamstress had to pay attention to detail, to recognize the shape of people’s bodies and understand how different fabrics would fall or cling to that shape, to be efficient with these fabrics, never cutting too much or too little, and finally, once a cloth was cut and set under her machine’s needle, she could not waver, she could not hesitate. A good seamstress had to be decisive.

When they were very young, Aunt Sofia made them cut out doll’s clothes from butcher paper and then trace the patterns onto scraps of real cloth. She taught them how to stitch by hand first, which had been easier for Luzia, and then showed them how to operate the sewing machine. The hand-cranked machine had been a challenge for Emília’s sister. Luzia’s good arm ran the crank while her petrified arm moved the cloth through the needle. Because her arm would not bend, Luzia had to move her whole upper body in order to keep the cloth from slipping and to keep the stitches straight. Most people hired Aunt Sofia, Emília, and Luzia to sew their children’s First Communion gowns, their daughters’ wedding dresses, their fathers’ death suits, but these were rare and solemn occasions. Their main clients were the colonel and his wife, Dona Conceição.

Emília adored sewing at the colonel’s house. She loved eating the sugared guava cakes that the maid brought into the sewing room as a snack. She loved the strong smell of floor wax, the sounds of Dona Conceição’s heels clicking on the black-and-white tiles, the grandfather clock’s deep chiming in the front hall. The colonel’s ceiling was covered with plaster and paint, which hid the orange roof tiles from view. It was smooth and white, like the frosted top of a cake.

Dona Conceição had recently purchased a state-of-the-art machine: a pedal-operated Singer. The machine was set on top of a heavy wooden base with iron legs. It had floral designs engraved on its shining, silver face. It had taken both of the colonel’s pack mules to carry the Singer up the winding mountain trail into town. Its operation was much more complicated than Aunt Sofia’s ancient, hand-operated machine. Because of this, the Singer Company shipped instructors across Brazil and offered seven free lessons with each purchase. Dona Conceição insisted Emília and Luzia take them. Luzia didn’t appreciate the lessons, but Emília did. They’d introduced her to Professor Célio, who, she hoped, would introduce her to the world.

On lesson days, Emília shortened her prayers to Santo Antônio so that she could wash her hair. It had to be completely dry before Aunt Sofia allowed her out of the house. Her aunt believed in the perils of wet hair—it caused fevers, terrible illness, even deformity. When they were children, Aunt Sofia often repeated the story of a rebellious little girl who went outdoors with wet hair. The wind hit her and made her crooked for the rest of her life, her whole body twisted up and useless.

Emília made her way to the kitchen. Kindling glowed and jutted out from the sooty mouth of the cookstove. Aunt Sofia poked the fire with her long kitchen stick, then flicked a woven fan back and forth before a small hole in the brick stove, below the flames. Her aunt’s legs were as thick as fence posts, her ankles indistinct from her calves. Blue veins bulged beneath the skin of her ankles and behind her knees from years of sitting at a sewing machine. A long, white braid hung down Aunt Sofia’s back.