The Seamstress (41 page)
“I don’t want him giving you jewelry.”
“They’re not jewelry,” Luzia replied, the glasses clamped tightly in her hand. “They’re a remedy. For my eyes. To correct my vision.”
He held her hand firmly. The glasses dug into her palm.
“You don’t need correcting,” he said.
His eyes were glistening and dark. The unscarred side of his face furrowed, rising and falling as if unable to decide what expression to take. Finally Luzia touched it, so that it would be still.
She already knew him—each wrinkle, each muscle, each dark and shining scar—and this knowledge made her bold. Luzia stared at his crooked lips. They seemed strange and inaccessible to her but his scars did not. Before he could move away, she pressed her mouth to the mark on his neck, to the circular bites on his hand, to the long and crooked cut on his forearm. He tasted like salt and cloves. He pulled her braid aside and leaned into her neck. He did not kiss—he inhaled, moving toward her ear, breathing her in. His voice was low and urgent. Luzia could not hear his words, could not tell whether they were pleas or prayers.
The spectacles fell from her hand. Luzia closed her eyes and felt as if she were back in that gulley, wading into strange waters and suddenly stepping too deep. She was gripped, enfolded, pulled under. He was beside her on that hard guest room floor. Luzia felt a chilly wave of fear. She could not catch her breath. There was movement, then pain, then a great burst of heat within her, like the pouring of burnt sugar in her belly. She stiffened and grabbed him, breathing back his strange vows, ending them not with
amen
but with
Antônio.
13
They married in November, in the shade of Eronildes’ front porch. Luzia wore a clean blouse and skirt loaned to her by one of the farmhand’s wives. She’d had to extend the hems, sewing a ruffle of rough cotton mescla around the skirt and shirt cuffs. She carried an orange-blossom bouquet, its stems tied with twine. She wore her spectacles.
Normally before a ceremony the groom and his relatives walked to the bride’s home, where she said good-bye to her family and walked to the chapel beside her betrothed. There was no chapel on Eronildes’ ranch and Luzia had neither home nor family, so she stood on Eronildes’ back porch and waited with the elderly maid. The old woman had put away her pipe. She’d given Luzia no heart-felt warnings or advice. She’d simply braided Luzia’s hair very tightly, told her to chew cloves for her breath, and pilfered some of the doctor’s Royal Briar lotion and wiped it along Luzia’s neck and arms. The perfumed lotion was potent, and as Luzia stood on the back porch and waited for Antônio, she smelled like Dr. Eronildes, like a starched sheet.
Antônio arrived accompanied by his men. His hair was slicked back with so much brilliantine that it shone like a silk cap. His alpercatas were polished with the hair paste, too. He must have used a whole tin, Luzia thought. The unscarred side of his face trembled—his mouth rose, his cheek followed, and the skin around his eye crinkled. They were small movements that would have been subtle on anyone else, but when coupled with the placid, immutable stare of his scarred side, they seemed exaggerated and involuntary. It was easier to turn away, to look at the calm side despite its ridged scar. But Luzia focused on his moving side; that was the side she knew she must watch.
When he stepped on the back porch and extended his hand, Luzia turned her back to him and knelt. Tradition dictated that she fall to her knees and kiss her parents’ hands good-bye. But there was only the old maid. Luzia reached for her hand. It was thin boned and coarse, like a chicken foot.
Antônio led her to the front porch where Dr. Eronildes waited. There were no priests near his ranch and they could not call on one from the nearest river town. It would attract too much attention. At first, Eronildes had not wanted to officiate at the ceremony. He had no Bible, he said. He knew no prayers, but Antônio had insisted. He wanted a true wedding. He pointed to the framed medical diploma written in sharp-edged, calligraphic script and hanging in Eronildes’ front parlor. The diploma made Eronildes an official, Antônio said. It made him nearly as good as a priest.
The ceremony was quick. When it came time for the ring, Luzia held out her hand but Antônio shook his head. He unbuttoned his jacket and untangled a gold chain from around his neck. It was a Santa Luzia medallion—a round charm with two gold eyes in its center. Antônio slipped it over Luzia’s head.
The cangaceiros stood below the porch, in the sun. They wore serious, concentrated expressions on their faces. The same expressions they used when hiding in the scrub and watching a ranch or town from afar, taking note of its merits and its threats. Still, a wedding meant a party and this animated them. Canjica and the elderly maid had roasted three lambs and three chickens. They’d opened jars of caju jam and bottles of sugarcane liquor. The men ate and danced. When Luzia broke apart her bouquet and threw the orange blossoms into the air, they playfully pushed each other aside to grab them.
Only Dr. Eronildes kept away from the festivities. In the fading afternoon light, he sat on his porch and read through his last remaining newspapers. A bottle of whiskey sat half empty beside him.
“Are we going to toast?” Antônio asked him. “You promised us a toast.”
Eronildes looked up. His glasses were smudged, his eyes red. He bunched a newspaper in his hand. “This isn’t the occasion for a toast.”
Antônio frowned. Eronildes quickly gulped down a tumbler of whiskey. Then he threw a newspaper at Luzia.
“Read it,” he said, coughing. “The market crashed.”
“It’s caved in?” Luzia said, confused. For no reason at all she thought of Emília and was worried. “Which one? Where?”
“Not a building!” Eronildes said, holding his forehead. “The monetary market, in the United States. Sugar, cotton, coffee, it’s all worthless now. We’re doomed.”
Luzia smoothed out the crumpled paper. It was weeks old, dated as the last days of October. The coffee barons of São Paulo and Minas stood in a line, looking tired and stern. Their crops had no value. In the United States they called the financial trouble “the Crash,” but in Brazil it was called “the Crisis.” The sugar farmers around Recife were burning cane, hoping it would bring up the price. The presidential election had been delayed until March of the next year. The candidates blamed each other’s parties for the Crisis.
“God knows what’s happened since,” Eronildes said. “That paper’s old. I’ll have to telegram Salvador tomorrow to see if my mother is all right. Things must be a mess in the capitals.” He took another gulp of whiskey. His fingers shook. “Electing Gomes is our only salvation now.”
“Our salvation’s not on this earth,” Antônio replied.
“I mean commercially,” Eronildes snapped, his words slurring. “Modernization’s our only hope, whether we want it or not.”
“What’s new isn’t always what’s best,” Antônio said.
Eronildes poured himself more whiskey. It dribbled on his trousers.
“You use rifles, don’t you?” the doctor asked. “You can shoot men from meters away. That’s a modern invention.”
“A rifle’s useful,” Antônio replied. “I admit that. But any fool can shoot one. To kill a man with a punhal takes more skill. That’s the problem with modern things—they encourage fools to think they’re just as capable as men.”
Eronildes let out a shrill laugh. A wilted orange blossom fell from his buttonhole.
“Well,
Mrs. Teixeira,
” he said, emphasizing each syllable, “what do you think of all this? Who is the fool and who is the man?”
Luzia heard him but could not speak. She’d picked up the Society Section of another discarded paper. Under its heading was a photograph labeled “Ladies’ Auxiliary of Recife Annual Parasol Contest, 1929.” A row of smiling women held elaborately decorated parasols. The first-place winner had ribbons dangling from its edges and a design sewn into each paneled section: a rain cloud, a corncob, a sun, a dahlia. The woman holding this parasol wore a round hat with one striped feather emerging from its brim. Her hair was chin length and curled. Her lips were dark. Her eyes were closed. Still, Luzia knew her.
1
T
he annual parasol contest of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of Recife occurred in the last week of September. Late enough not to be overshadowed by the rowdy Independence Day parades in the beginning of the month, but early enough to avoid October’s stifling heat. That year, the competition was held on Boa Viagem Beach.
Degas drove to the ceremony. Emília sat in the Chrysler Imperial’s backseat beside Dona Dulce, who gripped the leather armrest between them. Degas preferred speed to caution. He veered around donkey carts and bumped over curbs. In the passenger seat, Dr. Duarte shifted uneasily. “No need for recklessness,” he muttered. With each swerve and jostle, Dr. Duarte’s face reddened and he held fast to the sides of his seat. Several times, he threatened to hire a chauffeur. Degas smiled. Automobiles were a still a novelty in Recife and operating a car was considered a luxurious skill, like reading and painting. There were few capable drivers in Recife, and Degas considered himself one of them. Dr. Duarte grunted. Emília was the only one who appreciated her husband’s haste. She was eager to see the ocean.
Years before, the city government had built a bridge to the swampy region of Pina, making Boa Viagem Beach accessible by automobile and carriage. Soon, the trolley line was installed, and later, the main avenida was paved. By the time Emília became familiar with Recife, Boa Viagem Beach had a reputation as a popular summer vacation spot. The palm-frond fishing huts that lined the beach were slowly being replaced by brick-and-mortar mansions.
The baroness had invited Emília to participate in the parasol contest. She’d said it was a silly competition—each contestant received a simple cloth parasol and had three weeks to decorate it—but the results were worth the tedious work. The winner was awarded a seat on the Ladies’ Auxiliary. Emília spent a day decorating her parasol, covering it with things inspired by Aunt Sofia’s garden: yellow silk corncobs, red crepe dahlias, blue beaded strands of rain. Emília kept the design colorful but simple; she did not want to seem too eager. She sensed that the Auxiliary judges had made their decision long before the contest. The prior year they had accepted Lindalva, though she’d simply pinned pages of poetry to her parasol on the way to the competition. Her mother was, after all, the baroness. If you did not have a family member on the Auxiliary, you had to be accepted through your merits. You had to belong to a New family. You had to have a skill like sewing, painting, music, or, in Lindalva’s case, oratory. And, most important, you had to be interesting, because the Auxiliary women hated boring meetings. “But you cannot be too interesting,” the baroness warned. “Then you become vulgar.”
In the nine months since her first, disorienting Carnaval in Recife, Emília had met every member of the Ladies’ Auxiliary. One by one they’d appeared at the baroness’s home on the same days that Emília made her visits to Lindalva. They drank coffee together on the baroness’s porch, where the Auxiliary women calmly inspected Emília.
“Oh,” they’d said, pressing embroidered handkerchiefs to their brows and patting away any unsightly beads of sweat. “This must be very different from the backlands.”
They rarely said
countryside
or
interior.
They preferred
backlands,
a word that made Emília think of the musty recesses of a hard-to-reach drawer or cabinet. A dark space filled with forgotten things, opened only in moments of need or nostalgia and then quickly shut.
Over time, the Auxiliary women extended Emília invitations to teas, luncheons, and dinner dances at the International Club. At each of these events, the women regarded her with fascination and a touch of wariness and pity, like a wild animal one traps as a pet but never particularly trusts. Emília realized that her friendship with the baroness had given her social clout, but the possible seediness of her origins made her alluring to the Auxiliary women. They’d proclaimed her interesting.
As a seamstress for the colonel and Dona Conceição, Emília had learned how to be a successful servant: watching her mistress closely, understanding her changing moods, deciphering her wants, and being both immediately available and invisible, depending on the situation. Emília used these skills with the Recife women. She laughed at the proper times. Was energetic but not overly eager. Learned when to listen sympathetically and when to turn her head and pretend to give the women privacy. But Emília could not be too accommodating; the Recife women had spent their lives commanding hired help. If Emília took the demeanor of a servant, she would be treated like one. So she had to temper her compliant nature with strong opinions.
Emília took books from the Coelhos’ library shelves and forced herself to read them. The novels, poems, and geography books were hard to understand at first but she’d slogged through. She’d looked up large words in Degas’ tattered dictionary. She’d read countless newspapers and studied Dr. Duarte’s international news magazines and the manifestos in Lindalva’s feminist bulletins. Through her readings, Emília learned that the distinction between what was vulgar and what was acceptable fluctuated as much as women’s hemlines. What was improper one month became avant-garde the next, and before long, was positively fashionable.
Recife, like other Brazilian capitals, was modernizing. Ladies were stepping out of their gated homes and into dark cinemas to watch silent films. They were exchanging the manicured gardens of Derby Square for Rua Nova, to perform their “footings” where there were teahouses and jazz bands. In Rio, photographs of the beach showed women wearing sleeveless bathing suits with dangerously low necklines. And thanks to the presidential campaign and the upcoming elections, even suffrage became acceptable. Lindalva convinced the Auxiliary to undertake a campaign to give literate women the vote. Voting, they argued, was a moral duty like any other: bearing children, keeping house, and raising the young leaders of tomorrow. The suffragettes did not add the right to divorce or to own property to their demands, separating such liberties from their campaign as strictly as Dona Dulce separated food in her pantry—moving black beans and ham hocks into the servants’ section even though she’d once admitted to Emília that, on cool and rainy evenings, she often craved those fatty foods. Like most donas, she never gave in to her cravings. They were unseemly, Dona Dulce said, and seeing a wife consume such things would be too much for any husband to stomach.
Dona Dulce was not a suffragette. She looked at the news articles with disgust and a tremor of fear. Not only nameless typists, schoolteachers, and telephone operators, but also fine family girls were falling into what Dona Dulce called the “vortex of modern life.” She believed Emília was a casualty of this, too. Emília pretended to disregard her mother-in-law, but she secretly used Dona Dulce as a warning post, so she wouldn’t go too far with her opinions and ambitions. Emília, like the women in the Auxiliary, had to keep the delicate balance between being current and being respectable.
At Boa Viagem Beach, members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary milled about, greeting the contestants, who showed off their parasols. Dug into the densely packed sand near the road were rows of wooden chairs where judges and guests sat. Emília stayed on the outskirts of the crowd, near a coconut palm. She did not mingle. Her parasol remained unopened, forgotten in her hands.
The ocean lay before her, vast and dark, the color of a bruise. It was not green, as she’d once imagined. Like all things in Recife, it was not what Emília had envisioned. It alarmed her, all of that water. Near the shore, giant, foamy waves receded and advanced. Emília closed her eyes. The breakers sounded like cloth ripping.
“Emília!” a woman’s voice, breathless and urgent, yelled.
Emília opened her eyes. Lindalva hurried toward her.
Her friend’s formerly ruffled, bohemian style was replaced with a green pleated skirt and matching cardigan. A “twin set,” Emília called it when she’d first spotted the style on a British tennis star in one of Dr. Duarte’s news magazines. Emília had admired the tennis player’s tidy skirts and practical tops. Inspired, she’d holed up in her bedroom, sat behind her newly purchased Singer, and sewed herself a twin set. When Lindalva saw the outfit, she insisted on having one. Emília instructed the baroness’s seamstress on the design, teaching the girl how to make pleats. Several ladies from the Auxiliary approached Emília and inquired if they, too, could share the pattern with their dressmakers. Before long, every influential woman in Recife had a twin set. At social functions, these women stopped referring to Emília’s origins or asking her about the backlands. Instead, they grilled her about fashions. During these conversations, the women’s demeanor changed—they nodded, smiled, became deferential—and Emília realized that admiration came not only from social status or fine manners but also from ideas; her talent could erase her past.
Lindalva kissed Emília’s cheek. In one swift movement she took the parasol from Emília’s hands and popped it open. Lindalva inspected her work.
“A country theme! Oh, the judges will eat this up,” she said. “Once this silly business is done, you’ll have a seat on the Auxiliary and we can concentrate on more important matters. I’ve found a girl. Very spirited. Says she knows how to sew. You’ll have to see if she’s any good, of course. And then we’ll need a location. It can’t be Mother’s house—everyone will see us coming and going with cloth and seamstresses. We must have our own location—”
“Yes,” Emília interrupted, taking Lindalva’s hand. Emília had gotten used to reining in her friend’s constant chatter. “I want the seamstresses to have a nice place to work—a room with windows and fresh air. And we can’t have them at the machines from morning until night. I want the Auxiliary women to volunteer to run a class. To teach them to read.”
“That’s brilliant!” Lindalva smiled widely, revealing the gap in her teeth. “It will give us more voters!”
She squeezed Emília’s hand and guided her toward the crowd.
During the winter months, when rain had fallen in heavy sideways sheets, making the trolleys’ cables crackle on their electric lines, Emília and Lindalva had sat on the baroness’s porch and read suffrage magazines. They’d giggled uncontrollably when Lindalva taught Emília the tango—a dance the newspapers called “lascivious”—pressing their cheeks together, extending their arms and marching back and forth across the baroness’s sitting room. And after Emília created her successful twin sets, she and Lindalva plotted to open their own atelier. They would copy the newest, most daring fashions from Europe and introduce them to Recife, making clothing that even Rio and São Paulo women would covet. Emília would be the creative force, while Lindalva would handle the finances. As a married woman, Emília was considered a ward of her husband, like a child or a demented relative. Any business they created would have to be in Lindalva’s name; that way, they wouldn’t need Degas’ permission and were not required to give him a share of the profits if they succeeded. If they failed, however, Lindalva would bear the brunt of the burden.
Emília appreciated her friend’s generosity. Still, she was wary of Lindalva. She recalled Dona Dulce’s warning: Recife women made alliances, not friendships. In Lindalva’s presence, Emília was afraid of saying too much, of slipping into her old habits or speaking with her country accent. Emília never mentioned Luzia. She didn’t like to talk about her past, though Lindalva begged to hear about “the life of a working woman.” Emília felt envious of Lindalva’s good fortune; her friend never had to worry about making social errors. Lindalva was not married and didn’t have to be. She could buy her own clothes, organize suffrage rallies, make fun of Recife society while still being accepted by it. Worse was that Lindalva believed such freedom was available to any woman, if she only wanted it badly enough.
At the parasol contest, Lindalva steered Emília toward the Auxiliary judges, who admired her work. Nearby, Dr. Duarte socialized with Auxiliary husbands. Degas smoked and looked at his pocket watch. Dona Dulce surveyed the crowd. She wore a tan dress and hat. She had packed away her blue and green dresses when the election campaign began, opting for neutral colors. Politics was vulgar, Dona Dulce said, and she wanted to steer clear of it. The city had divided into two camps: Green and Blue. Each day photographs of opposition candidate Celestino Gomes—his military uniform rumpled, his tall boots taking up most of his squat frame—appeared arm in arm with his running mate, José Bandeira.
The Old families were not partial to Gomes. They feared he was a populist with his calls for a minimum wage, women’s suffrage, and a secret ballot. Most New family leaders, including Dr. Duarte, believed Gomes and his Green Party would modernize Brazil. Recife women, Old and New, did not delve into politics, but they fiercely supported their husbands’ choices. During her walks through Derby Square, Emília saw that the Old family matriarchs wore sapphire and aquamarine jewelry. They wore blue dresses and had milliners pin iridescent blue feathers to their hats. On Boa Viagem Beach however, the dominant color was green. The members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary preferred emeralds. Their husbands, even Dr. Duarte, wore neckties in mint, leaf, and sage.
Emília, too, wore green. Her new cloche had a single, olive-hued feather cocked in its band. The hat was a gift from Degas. He’d given her many presents in the months after Carnaval: reams of fabric for her new outfits, beaded shawls, a pair of reptile-skin shoes whose leather was so soft it felt like cloth in Emília’s hands. He gave her a large, velvet-lined jewelry box and promised to fill it with products sold by Mr. Sato, the Japanese jeweler who appeared at the Coelhos’ door once a month and carefully spread his selection of broaches, rings, and pendants on Dona Dulce’s table. Degas presented his gifts before meals, with everyone present. During these awkward exchanges, Dr. Duarte beamed by his son’s side and Dona Dulce wore her tight, smiling mask. Emília knew what was expected of her.