The Seamstress (49 page)

Degas faced Emília. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes glassy.

“It’s not like here. Here there’s no peace for me. Everyone looks and judges. You know it, because they’ve done it to you. They watch how I pick up my coffee cup, how I steer my car. Here, I’m expected to pull up my socks and marry. I’m expected to pick up a gun and fight in this damned revolution.”

“Is that why you chose me?” Emília asked. “You thought I wouldn’t expect anything of you?”

“Maybe,” Degas said. “Actually, no. You did expect things of me, but everything you wanted was simple, defined. You seemed very practical. You had no notions of romance in your head. Everything you wanted, I could give to you. I should’ve known better.”

“Better how?” Emília asked.

“People change. Women especially. You always want more than you’ve got.”

“And you don’t?” she asked.

“I do. Of course I do. But I’m not foolish enough to hope for it.”

Degas moved toward her as if to kiss her cheek. Emília smelled his shaving musk and the stale smoke of cigarettes. When he reached her face, he did not kiss her but whispered instead.

“If I don’t come back,” he said, “I’ve told Father to give you a house of your own. Someplace nice. He’s got dozens around the city. I owe you that much.”

He folded the trousers over his arm and left.

8

After Degas disappeared beyond the Coelho gates to fight, Dona Dulce frantically searched the house. She separated out her best linens, her silver coffeepot, her porcelain, her Franz Post painting and carried them to the maids’ quarters. The rooms were starkly furnished and dark.

“If they invade,” Dona Dulce said, pushing her valuables beneath the maids’ empty beds, “they’ll burn the main house down. Not the servants’ quarters.”

Emília saw plumes of smoke rise beyond the Coelhos’ gate. She heard the faraway popping of guns, like firecrackers. She heard the corrupião’s constant singing of the national anthem. Without electric power, she and the Coelhos’ went to bed early, though no one slept. Dr. Duarte opened the parlor’s courtyard doors and fussed with the radio, futilely trying to get a signal. Dona Dulce swept the courtyard to make up for the maids’ absence. Emília looked out her bedroom window. The sky glowed with faraway fires.

Emília worried for Degas, forced out into the city’s stench and smoke. She worried for Lindalva and the baroness, trapped in Derby Square beside the city’s Military Police Headquarters. And she worried for the city itself. What would become of it after the fighting? Would it be in ruins? She did not know Recife, not really. She did not know the beaches, the bustling markets, the narrow, peak-roofed buildings that lined Aurora Street. She’d only driven past them, shuttled from one destination to the next. She knew only the confines of the Coelho house, the International Club, the fabric store, and the baroness’s mansion. Nothing more. And now the revolution would tear the city down before she even had a chance to know it.

As the night dragged on, Emília’s thoughts became strange, her fears exaggerated. What if only the Coelho house survived? What if she was trapped there for good?
Life’s too short!
It was one of Lindalva’s favorite phrases. She used it as a rallying call, an excuse, a motivation. But during that first revolution night, Emília saw that Lindalva was wrong. Emília thought of the minutes, the hours, the days, the years, and the decades before her. If Degas did not return from the fighting, then Emília would become a widow, as he’d predicted, but it would not be a release. She would be forever dependent upon the Coelhos’ goodwill. But if Degas did come back, their lives would continue exactly as before. Emília’s chest tightened. How would she fill so much time?

In the weeks after the revolution of 1930, when electricity returned to the city and presses began printing again, Emília pored over newspapers to understand what had happened while she’d been trapped in the Coelho house. In the early hours of October fourth, seventeen members of the Green Party—professors, merchants, students, bakers, street sweepers, trolley conductors—invaded the city’s largest munitions depot. It was not clear if the soldiers inside had helped them, or simply sat back while they took their weapons. Green Party men occupied Recife’s tallest buildings and shot at Blue Party police. When they stood on the second floor and looked out the windows, they saw sandbags and troops placed at the March 6th Bridge, the Boa Vista Bridge, and the Princess Isabel Bridge. The governor and his staff were in the palace across the river and did not want the revolutionaries to invade. Telegraph clerks loyal to Gomes cut lines so that the Blue Party governor could not communicate with the South. Throughout Brazil, in key capital cities, Gomes staged his revolution.

In the end, Degas did return. He told Emília and his parents about the things he’d seen during the fighting: houses belonging to both Blue and Green Party members were looted; the offices of the
Jornal do Commércio
—the Blue Party’s official newspaper—were burned down, its typeset machines thrown through the windows. The Cinema Arruda, owned by Gomes supporters, was set on fire by a Blue Party militia. Delivery cars were covered with guava paste tins and used as makeshift tanks by Green Party members.

During the three days and four nights of fighting, Emília did not know any of this. She tried to make herself useful in the Coelho house. While Dona Dulce frantically swept and dusted, trying to keep her house “livable,” Emília had free rein in the kitchen. There was no ice delivery; most of the food in the icebox rotted. The milk clumped. The cheeses soured. The greens wilted. They did not know when the next gas delivery would be, so Emília used the wood-burning stove to cook any leftover meat. She opened Dona Dulce’s jars of jam, pickled beets, and cucumbers. She cooked vats of the beans and manioc flour reserved for the maids. Thanks to the backyard well, the Coelho house had safe drinking water. There was no wind for the cata-vento to propel the pump, so Emília carried bucket after bucket from the yard to refill their water supply.

By October seventh, the city was tired of fighting. The governor and a few Blue Party loyalists escaped Recife by boat, vowing to come back with reinforcements. They never did. Gomes had already taken over five major states, including the nation’s capital in Rio de Janeiro. Gomes’s rival, the recent president elect of the Blue Party, was barricaded in the Presidential Palace with no way out. In Recife, Green forces led by Captain Higino Ribeiro had quickly set up a provisional government. Pernambuco Tramways was reopened. Electricity and radio returned. Trolleys would be working as soon as streets were cleared of debris. Captain Higino wanted normalcy. He asked patriots to return any weapons and prohibited the sale of alcohol. Newspapers printed that shops and markets would function normally. They encouraged patriots to get out of their houses and walk about. By living normal lives, they would be celebrating the revolution.

When Degas returned—his knees scraped, his fingers black with grime, his eyes nearly closed from fatigue—he slept for two days. On the third day, Dr. Duarte forced him from bed. He unlocked the front gate and made them go out, arm in arm, with green bands tied to their jackets and dress sleeves. Dona Dulce wore a black dress, as if in mourning. Degas moved gingerly, his body still sore from crouching behind sandbags. They walked down Real da Torre Street and over the bridge. Other families wandered the city alongside them, dazed and wary.

Pharmacy owners swept glass off the sidewalks. Peddlers sang happily, selling dozens of brooms and buckets. Buildings were pocked with bullet holes so numerous and close together they made the walls look like lace. The air smelled smoky and foul, like singed hair. Across the bridge, a large crowd gathered in a square. They’d ripped branches from trees and waved the leafy bouquets over their heads. They stood around a bronze bust of the escaped Blue Party governor and defaced it—covering him in a woman’s dress and tying a pink ribbon around his metal hair.

“Any excuse for vulgarity and they’ll be out on the streets,” Dona Dulce sneered.

“This is my son!” Dr. Duarte said excitedly to anyone who passed. “He fought!”

People shook Degas’ hand. Some hugged him. Degas shifted nervously at first, but soon became used to the attention.

Each day the papers printed lists of the dead. Any unknowns were buried in a mass grave on a farm outside Recife. The papers gave descriptions of unknowns, hoping to find their families. There were innocent casualties: a man in blue pajamas; a girl with a yellow ribbon around her wrist; a German immigrant found in a boardinghouse. Emília studied these descriptions, never knowing what or who she was looking for. Surely Luzia would not be there, among the dead. Still, Emília pictured her sister as the girl with the yellow ribbon around her wrist. Why yellow? Why around her wrist and not in her hair?

Emília could not shake such questions from her thoughts, until she found two more obituaries embedded in the newspaper’s last sections. Colonel Clóvis Lucena and his son Marcos had been killed on their ranch in the countryside. The father’s body, found inside his ranch house, had a single gunshot wound to the head. The son’s cause of death could not be determined—only his bones were found in the front yard. Though the cause of death was a mystery, the killers’ identities were not: the obituary said that the colonel and his son were the cangaceiros’ latest victims. The Hawk and the Seamstress had written a note to Marcos Lucena’s new wife who lived on the coast, informing her of his death. The cangaceiros had returned to the site of their ambush and had taken their revenge, as well as the deeds to the colonel’s ranch and cotton gin. No one except Emília, it seemed, took note of this obituary. The petty rifts between colonels and cangaceiros didn’t matter to Recifians—they were too busy mourning the revolution’s many casualties.

The most casualties came from within the Downtown Detention Center, where Green Party mobs had entered in the hopes of finding José Bandeira’s killer. The building was too small to hold the masses that invaded it, and many prisoners, along with the rowdy trespassers, were trampled and killed. Listed among the identified dead was:

A young Mr. Felipe Pereira, law student, survived by his father, Colonel Pereira, and his mother, Dona Conceição Pereira, from Taquaritinga do Norte, a small town in the interior of the state. His body was transported back to his birthplace.

 

Degas coughed loudly when Dr. Duarte read this. He excused himself from the breakfast table and locked himself in his childhood bedroom, where he played his English records for the rest of the day.

In the following weeks, Celestino Gomes took over the Presidential Palace. The gaúcho cowboys who had fought for him in the South rode their horses through the main avenida of Rio de Janeiro and hitched them to the city’s obelisk. Newspaper photographs showed Gomes arriving in the palace wearing his trademark military uniform and tall boots. He smoked a cigar and then posed for a portrait with his generals and advisors, who squeezed close to him. He was the shortest man in the bunch. His belt was crooked, the buckle far to his left. For no reason at all, Emília clipped his picture, placing it beside her Communion portrait and the growing stack of articles about the Seamstress.

After the news of Felipe’s death, Degas slept more. He wore his pajamas to lunch and dinner, spilled his coffee, locked himself in his childhood bedroom for hours on end. Dona Dulce attributed his lethargy to the “barbarities” he must have seen during the revolution. Dr. Duarte prescribed him an invigorating diet, with plenty of cabbage, greens, and malagueta pepper drinks. Degas barely touched his food.

Before the revolution, Dr. Duarte would have chided his son for such pickiness. Dona Dulce would have nagged him for his unkempt appearance. But neither his parents, nor the maids, nor the handful of Green Party loyalists who visited Degas during his convalescence commented on his behavior. They all looked at him with respect and concern. Though Degas finally had the attention he’d hoped for, he didn’t seem to enjoy it. He brushed away his mother’s hands upon his forehead. When Dr. Duarte or one of the Green Party men congratulated him, Degas looked as indifferent as one of the courtyard turtles.

The only time Degas agreed to dress and leave the house was to attend the Revolutionary Celebration Dinner at the Saint Isabel Theater. Dr. Duarte insisted upon it. Green Party fighters and financial backers from all of the Northeast states were invited. Dr. Duarte, it seemed, had given a substantial amount to the cause.

The Saint Isabel Theater was a massive building, painted pale pink with white trim around its arched doors and windows. Inside, the main room was circular. The theater’s chairs had been removed and replaced by a series of long dining tables. These were covered in linen and set with green, leafy centerpieces. Only men—officers, fighters, donors—sat at the center tables. Around the periphery of the theater, near the doors where the coats were hung, were tables for wives and daughters. Emília was placed beside Dona Dulce, who fingered the table linen and clucked loudly. Across the room, at the other end of the women’s tables, Emília spotted Lindalva and the baroness. Lindalva waved and smiled.

Above them, crammed around the theater’s rows of circular white balconies, were the less prestigious guests. Flags were draped from the balconies in long, colorful rows. There were several copies of the state flag of Pernambuco, with its rainbow, sun, and red cross. There were many Brazilian flags, with their yellow diamond and the words
Order and Progress
prominently sewn across their starred blue globes. And there were green flags, dozens of them, hanging from the balconies and above the entrance doors. The largest hung above the theater’s stage, where the most prestigious table sat above the rest. There, Captain Higino Ribeiro and visiting Green Party officials from the South made toasts and led the singing of the national anthem.