The Seamstress (4 page)

“Bless me, Tia,” Emília yawned.

Her aunt stopped fanning the stove. She kissed Emília’s forehead.

“You’re blessed.” Aunt Sofia frowned. She tugged at Emília’s hair. “You look like a man with this—like one of those cangaceiros.”

The models in the newest
Fon Fon
—pencil-sketched women with long bodies and rouged lips—had dark, shining bobs that looked like fine-cut silk framing their faces at sharp angles. A week before, Emília had taken the large sewing scissors and copied their haircut. Aunt Sofia nearly fainted when she saw it. “Dear Lord!” her aunt had screamed. She took Emília by the arm and led her into the saints’ closet to pray for forgiveness. Since then, Aunt Sofia made her tie a scarf over her head each time she left the house. Emília had expected such a reaction from her aunt—it had been years since Uncle Tirço had passed away, yet Aunt Sofia wore only black dresses with two camisoles underneath. Wearing any less, Aunt Sofia declared, was the equivalent of walking about naked. She never allowed Luzia or Emília to wear the color red, or encarnado, as Aunt Sofia called it, because it was the color of sin. And when Emília wore her first califom, Aunt Sofia had tied the strings of the brassiere so tightly that Emília almost fainted.

“Tia, do I have to wear a scarf today?” Emília asked.

“Of course,” Aunt Sofia replied. “You’ll wear it until your hair grows back.”

“But everyone in the capital wears their hair like this.”

“We aren’t in the capital.”

“Please, Tia, just today. Just for the sewing lesson?”

“No.” Aunt Sofia fanned the fire faster. The kindling glowed orange.

“But I look like a coffee picker.”

“Better to look like a coffee picker than an easy woman!” Aunt Sofia shouted. “There’s no shame in being a coffee picker. Your mother picked coffee when she was a girl.”

Emília let out a long sigh. She didn’t like to imagine her mother that way.

“Don’t sulk,” Aunt Sofia said, pointing the black-tipped fire stick at Emília’s head. “You should have thought before you did…that.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Emília replied. She removed the cloth covering from the clay jug beside the stove and scooped a cupful of water into their metal washbasin. In the far kitchen corner, Aunt Sofia had rigged a makeshift curtain so that they could bathe in private. Emília took her bar of perfumed soap from its hiding place on the windowsill. It was a gift from Dona Conceição. Emília preferred it to the cheap black soap Aunt Sofia purchased, which made everything smell like ashes. She crouched beside the washbasin and scooped water over her head. She rolled the small, perfumed nub in her hands.

“Bless me, Tia,” Luzia said. She entered barefoot through the back door, an empty bowl in her large hands. She’d been throwing corn to the guinea hens. Emília disliked those speckled chickens—whenever she fed them, they pecked at her toes and fluttered near her face. With Luzia the guineas were deferential. They moved from her path and let out their unusually high-pitched call, which sounded like a tribe of old women repeating the words, “I’m weak, I’m weak, I’m weak.”

“Washing your hair again?” Luzia asked. When Emília ignored her, she rested her hands on her hips. “You’re wasting water. What if it doesn’t rain for another four months?”

“I’m not an animal,” Emília replied, shaking her head. Sprinkles darkened the dirt floor. “I refuse to smell like one.”

Aunt Sofia grabbed a tangled chunk of Luzia’s hair and held it to her face. She crinkled her nose. “You smell like a tacaca! Stop chiding your sister and wash up, too. I won’t have you go to your sewing lesson dirty.”

“I hate those lessons,” Luzia said, pulling away from her aunt’s grip.

“Hush up!” Aunt Sofia said. “Be grateful.”

Luzia flopped onto a wooden kitchen stool. She cradled her bent arm in her good one, a habit that made them both look normal, as if Luzia was exasperated and was simply crossing her arms across her chest.

“I am grateful,” she mumbled. “I only have to watch Emília fawn over our professor once a month.”

“I do not fawn!” Emília said. She felt her face flush. “I’m respectful. He’s our teacher.”

Aunt Sofia would never approve of the perfumed letters, the secret smiles. Their aunt believed that holding hands in public was shameful, that a kiss in a public square meant marriage.

“You’re jealous,” Emília said. “I can work the Singer and you can’t.”

Luzia eyed her. “I’m not jealous of you,” she said. “Balaio butt.”

Emília stopped drying her hair. The children at the priest’s school had called her that name when her body changed and she began to fill out her dresses. Emília couldn’t even look at the massive, round balaio baskets on sale at the market without feeling a pang in her heart.

“Victrola!” Emília yelled.

For an instant, Luzia’s eyes widened, her pupils like holes cut into those bright green circles. Then they narrowed. Luzia grabbed the nub of perfumed soap and flung it out the window. Emília rose, nearly knocking over the washbasin. She undid the bolts on the kitchen door. Her lavender soap lay near the outhouse, in a scattering of dried corn. The guinea hens pecked at it. Emília rushed outside, kicking them away.

“Two donkeys!” Aunt Sofia shouted. She followed Emília and flung a towel over her wet curls. “I’ve raised two donkeys!”

Back inside, Aunt Sofia crossed herself and spoke to the ceiling, as if Emília and Luzia weren’t present. “Dear Lord, full of mercy and grace,” she said. “Let these girls realize that they are flesh and blood. That all they have in this world is each other!”

Luzia left the kitchen. Emília wiped bits of corn from her soap. She tried to ignore her aunt’s voice; she’d heard this prayer a dozen times and each time she wished it wasn’t true.

3

Only Aunt Sofia and Emília used Luzia’s given name. Everyone else called her Victrola.

The name had originated in Padre Otto’s schoolyard. Emília had been the first girl in their church class to develop—her hips and breasts filling out so quickly that Aunt Sofia had to rip her dresses in half and sew in new panels. When she was thirteen, a boy grabbed her during recess. He pressed his lips roughly to her neck. Emília squealed. She squirmed from his grip. The boy tugged her back.

Luzia looked on, her dark eyebrows knitting together. She strode toward them. She was only eleven but already taller than most boys in their class. That winter she’d grown as thin and gangly as a papaya tree. Aunt Sofia had stopped letting out the hems of her dresses and instead, began adding mismatched strips of fabric around the bottoms.

“Let go of my sister,” Luzia said, her voice low and husky. She smelled of sour milk. Her locked elbow was swaddled in cloth and slathered with butter and lard. Aunt Sofia and the encanadeira still believed they could grease the joint loose.

The boy smirked. “Victrola!” he yelled. “Victrola arm!”

Only two citizens in Taquaritinga owned the fancy, wind-up record players. Once a year, during the São João festival, they brought the Victrolas into the town square. The machines’ brass speakers looked like giant trumpet flowers. They blasted forro music, and when a song ended, their owners carefully moved the machine’s bent brass arm onto a new wax record.

“Victrola! Victrola!” the other children laughed and shouted. Luzia’s head fell into her chest. Emília believed she was crying. Suddenly, Luzia reared up. On their way to school she and Emília often passed goats grazing on weeds. When the animals fought, they rammed their enemies with their foreheads, then flicked their faces upward to pierce an eye or a belly with their horns. Luzia rammed the boy headfirst. She would have stepped back and done it a second time if their teacher, Padre Otto, had not stopped her. He led the weeping boy, his mouth and shirt bloody, inside the church. After the incident, people began calling Luzia Victrola. They did it secretly at first, but the name caught on quickly and everyone, even Padre Otto, used it. Before long, Luzia disappeared and Victrola took her place.

Before her accident, Luzia had been boisterous, playful. People called her the yolk and Emília the white, a nickname that had irritated Emília because it implied that her little sister was more concentrated, powerful. After the fall, Luzia was replaced by Victrola, who was quiet and brooding. She liked sitting alone and embroidering scraps of fabric that sat in piles in their home. On those throwaway cloths she stitched armadillos with chicken heads, panthers with wings, hawks and owls with human faces, goats with frog legs. At school, Victrola was uninterested in their lessons. There were no desks in the schoolroom, only long tables with wooden benches that hurt Emília’s backside by midmorning. Jesus hung on the front wall, above Padre Otto’s desk. The paint on Christ’s feet was chipped, revealing a gray gesso. He stared at them with pitying eyes as they did their lessons. Victrola stared back. She scratched her stiff arm, as if trying to make the bones come alive again, and squinted up at the Jesus. Padre Otto knew Victrola wasn’t paying attention during lessons but, believing she was consumed by Christ’s suffering, he didn’t chastise her as he would Emília or the other children in class. But when Emília saw her sister’s green eyes glaze over she knew Luzia was looking past the Jesus, lost in her own imagination. Her sister often went into this state at home. She burned rice or spilled water or sewed in a crooked line until Emília shook her and told her to wake up.

Although Luzia had come out of her accident alive, she’d left some vital part of herself behind, in another realm where no one could reach it. She’d left Emília to deal with the town’s vicious gossips, their aunt’s superstitions, and her own changing body, which grew suddenly ample and soft. Emília no longer wanted to squat in the dirt and poke at ant holes or crack clay wasps’ nests with farm girls her own age. Their games seemed dull and uncultured. Luzia, too, wanted no part in the games but for different reasons. The girls made fun of her arm, her size, and Luzia inevitably fought them, tugging their hair and bloodying their noses. Emília was the only one who could calm her sister. So they were left alone, isolated in Aunt Sofia’s sturdy house, with only their sewing and their family’s portraits to comfort them.

Three framed portraits hung in the front room of Aunt Sofia’s house. As a girl, Emília liked to climb onto the wooden sewing table where Aunt Sofia measured and cut cloth. She would place her hands on either side of the framed pictures. The whitewashed wall felt cool and powdery under her palms.

The first photograph was a black-and-white wedding portrait of her parents. The edges were warped from rainwater that had trickled between the roof tiles and seeped into the frame. They sat side by side, her father’s hand blurred over her mother’s. They looked frightened. His hair was oiled slick and parted in the middle. His skin was a pale gray while her mother’s skin, obscured slightly by her chin-length veil, was dark, the color of ashes or stone. She bit her lip in the picture, making it look as if she was trembling. Their mother had bled to death immediately after giving birth to Luzia, and after the funeral Aunt Sofia removed the bedsheets and the soiled capim grass mattress and burned them both in the yard, near the outhouse.

Their father was Aunt Sofia’s youngest brother. He was a tall man and made his living as a beekeeper, caring for several hives on the rocky side of the mountain and selling honey, pollen, and propolis. Emília had foggy memories of playing with propolis—rolling the tacky substance in her palms before her father took the gray lump and placed it in a tin boiler. She recalled her father’s makeshift bee suit: brown leather gloves, thick canvas jacket, and a leather hat with mosquito netting stretched tightly from the brim and tied around his neck. There were some beekeepers who could put their bare hands in hives without so much as a sting. Her father was not one of those men.

When Emília was five and Luzia only three, he left them at Aunt Sofia’s house and never picked them up again. He preferred to sit at the tin shacks along the roadside and consume shots of cane liquor. He grew into a raspy-voiced and unkempt drunk who liked leaning on tree stumps or sitting on street corners, talking to himself and to passersby. On his good days, he visited Aunt Sofia’s house smelling of vomit and cheap cologne. His startlingly green eyes shone from between the wrinkled folds of his face, which had grown as brown and coarse as the leather seat of a saddle.

Each time Emília asked her aunt about their father’s affliction, Sofia gave the same response. “He has nervous tendencies,” she said. Then she cranked the handle of her sewing machine harder, or stirred a pot of beans on the stove faster to indicate that the conversation was over.

On his bad days, their father saw his small daughters walking to Padre Otto’s school and confused Emília with his dead wife.
Maria!
he called to her, tears falling from his glassy eyes. His toenails were cracked and rimmed with blood from tripping on things. He had a penchant for losing his shoes, and once a month Aunt Sofia bought him cheap rope sandals.
Maria!
he called out, slurring the last letters of her mother’s name, and Emília looked down at her sandals and kept walking, afraid of her father’s gaze.

When Emília was fourteen and Luzia twelve, he returned to his hives. The mountain path was overgrown with vines. The lids of the hive boxes were thick with propolis. The bees had grown angry and wild. Two farmers had to dress from head to toe in leather vaqueiro uniforms in order to bring their father back down. They carried his bloated body—which looked, to Emília, like a sack of skin filled with water—down the main trail and into town. Emília and Luzia sewed his death suit.

Each Sunday, she and Luzia put flowers on their parents’ crypt. She placed proper flowers—bunches of dahlias mixed with long stalks of blood red rooster’s crest—next to the wilted and oddly sized bunches of weeds Luzia liked to pick. Once a year, on the Finados holiday, Emília and Luzia brought a pail and brushes to the cemetery and whitewashed the crypt. Each time she passed the chalky liquid over her parents’ grave Emília felt nervous, believing that all of the inert bodies in that yard were watching and yearning for a fresh coat over their own resting places. There were rows of tiny crypts—the size of Emília’s sewing box—for “angels,” as their distraught mothers called them, born too weak to survive. There were larger graves decorated with rosaries and photographs of the dead, men mostly, their leather knife holsters placed beside their portraits. Taquaritinga was like any other town in the countryside; owning a knife was more common than owning shoes. Peixeiras, they called them, their short blades sharpened across flat rocks to a perfect, shining edge. They sliced through rope; hacked cornstalks; cut melons from their vines; pierced the necks of goats and steers, then skinned and gutted them. If there was an argument, knives settled it. Taquaritinga had no sheriff—only a Military Police sergeant who appeared twice a year and dined with the colonel. Padre Otto encouraged men to settle their differences with words, and Emília felt sorry for him during these sermons. Before he arrived, there was no school. Words were elusive, awkward, difficult to grasp. A knife was much easier. People found bodies stabbed and abandoned on isolated paths. Almost always the dead man had insulted another man’s wife, or had stolen from someone, or had compromised someone’s honor, so he had to be dealt with. Sometimes the fights became feuds and families lost their men, one by one, leaving the women to bury them. Women, too, had their perils. Births were often accompanied by funerals, and one of Emília’s childhood acquaintances from church school—a quiet girl with buckteeth—had fallen prey to her husband’s temper. So death, with all of its rites and rituals, its incense and prayers, its long masses and white burial hammocks, was common, while life was rare. Life was frightening. Even Emília, who disliked superstition as much as she disliked sloppy dressing, ended her sentences, her plans, her prayers with “God willing.” Nothing, it seemed, was certain. Anyone, at any moment, could be touched—an arm caught in a manioc press, a swift donkey kick, or an accident similar to that of Uncle Tirço’s.