The Seamstress (5 page)

The second portrait on Aunt Sofia’s wall was a painting of Emília’s uncle. The man in the painting was young—his mouth turned down and his chin lifted in a serious pose. He had a thick mustache and wore a short-brimmed leather hat that strapped beneath his chin. The painting was commissioned by the very first Colonel Pereira, who’d died in 1915 and left his only son—the second and current Colonel Pereira—one thousand head of cattle, eight hundred hectares of land, and his title. Many whispered that the first Colonel Pereira had purchased the title by bribing a politician in Recife. Colonels were not military officials, although they had small cadres of men who were loyal to them. In the backlands, colonels were the major landholders. Because of this, they made their own laws and enforced them. Many colonels employed networks of capangas and cabras—silent, loyal men trained to make examples of thieves and dissidents and political rivals by cutting off a hand, or branding a face, or making them disappear completely, sending a message to local citizens that their colonel could be magnanimous or he could be cruel, depending on their level of obedience.

Emília knew that there were two types of colonels: those who had inherited or purchased their titles, like the current Colonel Pereira, and those who had earned them through sheer force—building indomitable reputations, hiring small armies of loyal men, and then forging a bloody path acquiring land, then money, and later, influence. Both types of colonels were extremely wealthy, but one was more dangerous than the other. Colonel Chico Heráclio of Limoeiro was so rich, it was rumored that he had a mouth filled with gold teeth. Colonel Clóvis Lucena shot a man for getting dust on his shoes. And Colonel Guilherme de Pontes, who ran Caruaru, was said to be the most powerful of all, owning so much of the state it was rumored that he had private meetings with the governor.

Uncle Tirço had worked as a vaqueiro, herding cattle for the late Colonel Pereira during the great drought of 1908. According to Aunt Sofia, people and animals alike were subsisting on cactus. The old colonel’s cows were collapsing. “Losing a cow or horse was more tragic than losing a man,” Aunt Sofia often explained to Emília and Luzia. She told Uncle Tirço’s story in the evenings, while massaging their fingers and the pads of their hands before bed. Aunt Sofia’s massage invariably became halfhearted, her touch lighter and less concentrated as she became lost in her memories. Her falecido liked black coffee. Her falecido combed his mustache before church. Her falecido protected the colonel’s cattle as if they were his own. And one day, he did not come back with the herd. No one knew what had happened to him: if cangaceiros caught him, if he was bitten by a scorpion or a snake, or if he had simply died of exposure.

The colonel sent two other vaqueiros to find him. They walked through the caatinga scrub below the mountain. They called his name. They scanned the horizon for vultures. Three days later they found him deep in the arid pasture, his body picked clean
.
The first colonel commissioned a portrait and a wooden box for the bones. Padre Otto blessed the box, agreeing that as long as Uncle Tirço was buried eventually, it would not hurt to keep him near his loved ones. Luzia found the box of bones romantic, but Luzia knew nothing of romance. Pinning your lover’s handkerchief to the inside of your blouse was romantic. Exchanging perfumed notecards was romantic. Living with the flame of unreturned love in your heart, as the women in the
Fon Fon
serials did, was romantic. Keeping bones, Emília thought, was something dogs did.

The third and final portrait nailed to the front wall was a photograph of her and Luzia. It was a portrait of their First Communion. Padre Otto stood between them, resting a white hand on each of their shoulders. Aunt Sofia said that Padre Otto had been a spectacle when he first came into town, riding up the mountain on an oxcart filled with books and trunks and rolled-up maps of the world. He smiled and sweated, his face bright pink above his priest’s collar. Aunt Sofia had never seen a man that color—like the insides of a guava. He didn’t come out pink in the photograph though; in the portrait he was as white as their Communion dresses.

Padre Otto had come from Germany during the first Great War. Each morning he rang Taquaritinga’s church bells and waited for his school’s few students to file inside. Padre Otto’s was the only school in town, but its seats were never full. Colonel Pereira hired private tutors for his children, and many other residents of Taquaritinga believed schooling was a waste. Boys would inevitably become what their fathers had been: farmers or vaqueiros or the next colonel’s capangas. They did not need to read or write. And for farm girls, literacy was a barrier rather than an asset. Wives who could read would put on airs, trick their illiterate husbands, and worst of all, be able to write love letters. There were a few residents, however—merchants, carpenters, and other tradespeople—who valued Padre Otto’s school. Even though she didn’t know how to read or write, Aunt Sofia was one of these. Printed dress patterns were becoming more and more popular, and most sewing machines came with thick, detailed instruction manuals. Aunt Sofia wanted Emília and Luzia to keep up with the times.

Geography was Emília’s favorite subject. Below Jesus was a map of the world with countries painted in pastel colors and their names written in calligraphic script. Padre Otto quizzed the class daily, and all of them, except Luzia, recited the countries’ names in unison. When they shouted
Germany!
Emília always pictured it as a place filled with Padre Ottos—short, stout men and women with pink faces, blue eyes, and hair that was so thin and blond it looked as white as manioc flour
.

There was a large map of Brazil, too. Padre Otto pointed out their state of Pernambuco many times during each lesson. It was near the top of the republic, longer than it was wide. Emília thought it looked like an outstretched arm reaching toward the coast. At the shoulder was the caatinga scrubland—often called the sertão—where water was scarce and only cactus grew. Padre Otto said that runaway slaves and Dutch soldiers and Indians retreating from the coast had all settled there, protected by the harsh desert climate. Emília pictured these dark and light tribes of men living together, spearing snakes and hawks for their dinners. At the elbow of the state was her town of Taquaritinga, set on a small mountain range that was the gateway to the scrubland. At the wrist were the plantations, the stretches of Atlantic forest that had been slashed and burned to grow sugarcane. At the knuckles was the capital—Recife—with its cobblestone streets, its rows of tightly stacked houses, and its immense port that Emília pictured filled with warships and smoking cannons because of the paintings depicting the Dutch invasion she’d seen in one of Padre Otto’s history books. And at the fingertips of her state was the ocean. Emília dreamed of visiting that ocean, of putting her toe in its saltwater. She pictured it as green, dark green, even though the oceans on the map were all painted a powder blue.

Taquaritinga was a week’s journey from the coast, on a mountaintop near the state border with Paraíba. The first thing people saw as they hiked up the curved mountain trail was the church steeple; but in the rainy winter season they could see only a mist of clouds. The town square around the church had been dirt until the colonel commissioned it to be cobbled, and for months there were piles of rocks and the sounds of workmen heaving sledgehammers, pounding stone against earth. Emília often asked Padre Otto what real cities were like.
Crowded,
he said, and Emília imagined him in his dark priest’s cloak, making his way through masses of women and children who all wore bright clothing and hats decorated with ostrich feathers.
Crowded and not half as beautiful as Taquaritinga,
Padre Otto assured her. Emília did not believe this.

On their First Communion, Padre Otto had given Emília and Luzia two white, palm-size Bibles specially ordered from Recife. They’d held the books to their chests when they posed for their Communion portrait. Aunt Sofia had saved for three months in order to pay the photographer. The skinny man would take only one shot. Emília wanted the portrait to be perfect. She stood for what seemed like an eternity, waiting for the shutter to click. The corners of her mouth shook. She tried to keep perfectly still so that the rosary dangling from her hands would not sway. Luzia did not keep still. Perhaps she was ashamed of her bent arm, which the photographer had concealed by draping a scrap of lace over it. Perhaps she disliked the mousy man hidden beneath the camera’s black cloth. Or perhaps it was because Luzia didn’t realize, as Emília did, that they had only one chance to get it right, that with one click they would be framed forever.

Just as the flashbulbs popped, Luzia shifted. Her rosary swayed, her Communion veil went crooked, and the lace drape slid off her locked arm and onto the floor. When the portrait came back from the photographer’s laboratory, Emília was bitterly disappointed. In it, her sister was blurred. It looked as if there was a ghost moving behind Luzia, as if there were three little girls in the portrait instead of two.

4

The sun rose slowly over the church’s yellow bell tower. Luzia walked fast. She hooked her sewing bag on her bent arm. She had found subtle ways to make her Victrola arm useful, as if she preferred it that way. Emília tried to keep up with Luzia’s long strides, but her feet ached. She wore a pair of black patent pumps that had once belonged to Dona Conceição. The shoes’ straps and narrow sides cut into Emília’s feet. She stepped gingerly along the dirt path.

Their sewing lessons were in Vertentes—a real town. It had a narrow dirt trail connecting it to Surubim and beyond. It had the first official doctor in the region and the first lawyer—both with diplomas from the Federal University in Recife. Emília knew that Vertentes people judged you by your shoes. Respectable people wore alpercata sandals with leather straps and rubber soles. Common farmers wore rope flip-flops. Pé-rapados wore no shoes at all; they had to scrape the mud-crusted soles of their feet with the dull edges of knives before entering stores or attending church. Gentlemen wore wingtips, and ladies—real ladies—wore heeled pumps. Aunt Sofia did not approve of heeled shoes, so Emília hid the pumps in her sewing bag and put them on after she left the house.

Luzia slowed her stride. She looked disapprovingly at Emília’s shoes but said nothing. Emília was thankful for her sister’s silence; she didn’t want another quarrel that morning. Two women swept their front steps. Plumes of dust rose around their feet. They leaned upon their brooms as Emília and Luzia passed.

“Good day,” Luzia said, nodding.

“Victrola,” the older woman replied.

“Emília,” the younger woman said, then covered her mouth to suppress her laughter. The older woman smiled and shook her head. Emília gripped the scarf that covered her shorn hair.

“It looks fine,” Luzia whispered. She flashed the giggling women a stern look, then shouted, “If you want a laugh, buy a mirror and take a look at yourselves!”

Emília smiled. She squeezed her sister’s hand. Months before, Emília had seen a hat in
Fon Fon
—a beautiful feathered creation that clipped to the hair like a small skullcap. Emília admired the little hat so much she sewed one of her own. She couldn’t find smooth black feathers like the ones on the model’s hat, so when Aunt Sofia killed a rooster, Emília saved the prettiest feathers: red, orange, and some black speckled with white. Despite Aunt Sofia’s objections, Emília wore her feathered skullcap to the market. She felt quite elegant, but as they moved through the market stalls people laughed and called her a strange chicken. Emília wanted to rip the hat from her head in embarrassment, but Luzia whispered:
Don’t take it off.
She held out her crooked arm and Emília took it. As they moved past the vegetable stalls and around the butchers’ pens, Luzia stared ahead, her body straight and tall, her face ferociously still. Luzia did not have the pale, petite looks of a
Fon Fon
model, but she had somehow mastered their elegance, their look of confident disdain. Afterward, Emília had tried to copy that look in her little mirror. She never could.

“You know, Lu, you’re quite good on the new machine,” Emília whispered.

Luzia shrugged. “You’re better. I’m sorry about your soap.”

Emília nodded. It could have been worse. At least Luzia had not revealed anything about the notecards. Emília had purchased a set of sky blue correspondence cards from the papelaria in Vertentes. Each month she addressed one to Professor Célio. She sharpened their thick sewing pencil to a perfect point (they did not have an ink pen; Emília longed for one) and composed her messages on scraps of butcher paper before carefully transferring the words to the correspondence card. The messages were tentative at first:

I would like to compliment you on your teaching abilities.

Sincerely,
Maria Emília dos Santos

 

 

Professor Célio wrote back—
It is because I have talented pupils
—and Emília’s messages grew bolder:

Dear Professor, my heart beats quickly each time you stand near my machine.

Yours Sincerely,
Maria Emília dos Santos

 

 

And he responded in kind, in her favorite note yet—

Dearest Emília,

 

I have watched the way you guide cloth through the machine. You have lovely, nimble fingers.

Atenciosamente,
Professor Célio Ribeiro da Silva