The Seamstress (51 page)

As he spoke, Emília felt chills. She pictured that roadway—wide, smooth, and flat, like a black ribbon. It would be a clean line, stitching the state together. Forcing people to look inward, toward the countryside instead of away from it. If such a road had been in place years before, she and Luzia might have made different choices. Their lives wouldn’t have been so closed from opportunity. They wouldn’t have had to make such desperate escapes.

“The roadway,” Captain Higino read, “will be a uniting force, a civilizing force.”

Emília looked down into the crowd of men. She tried to find the rancher-doctor but could not. Instead, she spotted Degas and Dr. Duarte. Her father-in-law stood. He clapped vehemently for the roadway. Emília felt a stirring in her stomach. Beneath her excitement she discovered a layer of dread, cold and heavy. She recalled the Mermaid Girl. Recalled the porcelain skull in Dr. Duarte’s office, its cranium dissected by a series of black lines separating reason from amativeness, idealism from caution, benevolence from courage.

Caatinga scrubland, Pernambuco São Francisco River Valley, Bahia

January 1932–July 1932

1

T
he road into and out of the scrubland was not a road at all. It was a cattle trail: a wide dirt path used by vaqueiros to bring their herds to Recife for slaughter. The trail’s route was dictated not by distance or efficiency, but by water. Twice a year, vaqueiros led their cattle near the Navio River, the Curupiti, the Riacho do Meio, the Ipojuca, the Capibaribe, and all of the springs and offshoots in between. This way their animals wouldn’t die before reaching Recife, where they were fattened on farms just outside the city and periodically sent to meat markets. The rest of the year, the cattle on the trail were replaced by modest travelers: merchants with mule carts, young men walking to the coast in hopes of finding jobs, and, after Gomes’s revolution, caravans of escaping Blue Party loyalists.

By late January 1932, the trail was empty. Only the Hawk’s cangaceiros crouched along its edges, poorly hidden behind the scrub’s short, leafless trees. They’d separated into four groups staggered along the trail. There were forty cangaceiros in all. So many new men had joined the group that Luzia had trouble recalling each of their nicknames. In the past, Antônio hadn’t allowed men to join for the fun of it. He’d wanted warriors, not revelers. “Men who join for necessity or for revenge, they are men of fiber,” he’d once explained to Luzia. “The others are perverse.” But after losing most of his group in the ambush at Colonel Clovis’s ranch, Antônio relaxed his criteria. He wanted to build an army. Some new members met Antônio’s old requirements: they’d settled scores with colonels and could not live safely in their towns. Life had hardened these young men, so they understood that the cangaço was the only route left for them, and that the cangaceiros were the last family they would have. These men obediently shouldered the weight of their bornal bags and rifles. Other young men joined because they were tired of toiling on their fathers’ farms and were excited by the prospect of roaming the Northeast and invading towns. They weren’t perverse as much as impressionable. Wary of their overexcitement, Antônio gave them uniforms and half-moon hats but not guns. Discipline would come first, he told the new recruits, then firearms. He made Baiano, Little Ear, and Ponta Fina into “subcaptains.” Each man was responsible for a group of recruits. Each subcaptain hid along the cattle trail with his men.

Luzia and Antônio crouched behind a boulder. In the noonday heat, there were no birdcalls, no buzzing insects. Breezes were heard before they were felt, rattling the branches of faraway trees, shaking dried leaves until a collective crackle moved across the scrub. Luzia closed her eyes in anticipation. Breezes gave a reprieve from the heat, but they also stirred up sand. The cangaceiros tied silk neckerchiefs over their noses and mouths to block out dust. Luzia did the same. Her bandanna was damp with sweat, making it difficult to breathe. She couldn’t see the other cangaceiros but she heard their chorus of breath. She tried to match her inhales and exhales to theirs. Antônio had taught them this: to mask their presence by making their sounds uniform. That way, forty men’s breathing blended together to sound like one large beast, or the respiration of the scrub itself.

They’d gotten word of travelers along the cattle trail. The well-stocked caravans of escaping Blue Party officials had dwindled in the months after the revolution. The cangaceiros were excited about robbing new, unexpected travelers.

“Stragglers,” Antônio suspected.

“Maybe not,” Luzia countered. Maybe these new travelers were escapees of the latest group Gomes disliked. The Blue Party escapees had come with families in tow. According to a saddle maker Little Ear had caught earlier in the week, the new travelers were all men. The saddle maker was returning from a job in Carpina and had passed a group of city men. They traveled with five pack mules. The escaping Blue Party officials had traveled in carriages whose wheels creaked under the weight of wooden trunks filled with linens, dish sets, dresses, and jewelry. Sometimes there were sewing machines. Antônio’s group had blocked their paths and demanded gifts in order to pass. Most complied without incident, handing over leather purses filled with mil-réis and jewelry. Luzia let the men have those luxuries; she’d wanted only newspapers. Most escapees brought a pile of
Diário de Pernambuco
s to show their relatives and hosts in the countryside. Luzia took the papers and searched for news of Emília.

Now Luzia didn’t want news; she wanted food. Five pack mules would be well stocked with bags of beans, good manioc flour, and possibly cornmeal. Surely they would have meat, Luzia thought. It would be dried of course, but better than what was available in the scrub. At the end of the dry season, the meat was so thoroughly salted to disguise rot that it had to be cut into bits because it was impossible to chew.

The memory of such beef created an odd swirling in Luzia’s stomach. She was going to be sick. Luzia crouched lower in her hiding place. She pulled the bandanna from her face and took several breaths. Antônio pivoted toward her. Untroubled by dust, he wore no mouth cover.

“My Saint?” he whispered. This was his name for her now. Not Luzia. Not “the Seamstress,” as the papers called her. Little Ear was responsible for that silly name. In one town, someone had asked about Luzia. “Who is that?” they’d said, and Little Ear, annoyed, replied, “She’s our seamstress.” The name stuck, but only outside the group.

“I’m thirsty,” she replied. “That’s all.”

Antônio nodded. Quickly, he unfastened his metal canteen—a gift from a colonel—and handed it to her. Luzia drank. The water was warm and silty. Grains of sand gritted between her teeth. Luzia forced herself to swallow. She hoped it wouldn’t come back up. Recently, she’d experienced similar moments of queasiness. A week before, she’d swooned at the scent of the men’s Fleur d’Amour perfume poured over their greasy hair. The nausea was coupled with soreness in her chest and, each time she braided her hair, a tingling in her scalp. Luzia knew these pains were premonitions, like the ache in her locked elbow before a rain.

Recently, each time Antônio spotted a cloud on the horizon he asked Luzia if her bent arm hurt. She reluctantly said no. Back in December, none of the salt mounds laid out for Santa Luzia had dissolved overnight. Some of the cangaceiros blamed the salt itself, saying it was mixed with flour. Some blamed Canjica for not scooping it out properly; some found fault with Luzia, saying she hadn’t blessed the bag of salt correctly; and some, like Little Ear, said it was because they hadn’t given Santa Luzia a proper offering. They’d taken few eyes in the years after Gomes’s revolution. Robbing the alarmed Blue Party officials had been easy, clean work. Most of the escapees had only old papo-amarelos with tight triggers and rusted barrels, if they carried weapons at all. And thanks to the revolution, the new president Gomes had called all troops to the coast to maintain his power in the capital cities. Like other politicians before him, Gomes believed that if he ruled Brazil’s coastal capitals, he automatically harnessed the countryside connected to them. There were no monkeys in the caatinga to chase the cangaceiros. No colonel could amass an army large enough to defend itself against the Hawk’s group. Little Ear urged Antônio to take advantage of this power. The new subcaptain wanted to invade more towns, to kill colonels, to take over their houses and brand their cattle in the Hawk’s name. Antônio wouldn’t allow it; before burning bridges with the colonels he wanted to see what President Gomes would do with his revolutionary troops. Gomes might prove himself to be different from previous presidents—after stabilizing the capitals, he might turn his attention to the countryside. Monkeys might return in larger numbers, looking to dominate the caatinga under the authority of the Green Party. If this happened, Antônio said, the cangaceiros and the colonels would need one another.

Peace with the colonels mellowed Antônio but bored Little Ear and the new recruits. The men wanted excitement, a chance to flaunt their newfound power as cangaceiros. Antônio couldn’t deny them. He allowed Little Ear and his subgroup to take out their frustrations on Blue Party escapees. The cangaceiros kicked the escaping officials in their stomachs. They beat the backs of the men’s legs with the wide sides of their knives. Antônio stopped the cangaceiros from doing worse. Each time he did, Luzia felt it was harder and harder for Antônio to get the men’s attention. She recalled the mule breaker in Taquaritinga. He’d said that even obedient animals tested their masters, tugging reins or nipping hands, and if the leader did not stop these small rebellions he would have a larger one. Luzia began to watch Little Ear the same way she watched the cloudless sky: noticing each subtle shift, wary of what it might mean.

So far, Santa Luzia’s predictions had proved to be true. December’s rains hadn’t fallen. By January, the month that usually marked the beginning of the wet season, the scrub was gray and brittle. Farmers living near the trail expressed worry; each time they fetched water, they saw the bottoms of their springs. Along the trail, travelers constructed makeshift altars to São Pedro. Antônio made his group stop and pray for rain at these altars. Each day they inspected the sky. Each day it was bright and blue.

Antônio liked to say that they had no master or colonel. Luzia disagreed. They lived under the scrub’s yoke, and it was a temperamental overseer. During the wet months, when rain fell for thirty and sometimes forty days straight, the caatinga was kind. It gave them fresh corn and beans. It gave them flowers and honey. Scrub fruits grew, round and prickly, from trees and cacti. Calves were born and cow’s milk became so cheap that the cangaceiros bought liters of it. They ate pumpkin mashed in milk and made cheese covered in rapadura shavings. Even with this bounty, everyone cured meat, dried beans, and ground corn, knowing their master would change. Each year during the dry months, the scrub became miserly and often cruel. It threw dust into their eyes, sunburned their skin, made them search for water. Just when they’d had enough, it presented them with a hidden spring or a healthy river. It gave them goats and docile armadillos with meaty underbellies. But it only gave if they paid close attention. Like good servants, caatinga residents learned to listen to their master, to anticipate its moods, to know that ants walking in long lines outside their holes meant rain, that a green-leafed gameleira tree growing from a rock’s crevice meant a spring, that large mounds of termites meant dryness and thirst. If they learned to read this cruel master correctly during the dry months, they would live to greet a kinder master once the rains came.

That year, the scrub had remained hardhearted. “Not even Celestino Gomes can order it to rain!” Antônio liked to say, proud of the caatinga’s stubbornness. It bothered Luzia when he spoke this way.

She capped the canteen and hooked it back to the strap slung across Antônio’s shoulder. Farther down the trail, a mule bayed. Luzia heard the snap of a whip. Antônio took his brass binoculars from their case.

“Bird food?” Luzia whispered. That was what the newspapers had dubbed political escapees. The Hawk had attacked so many Blue caravans that the Green Party called him an ally; Gomes sent no soldiers to guard the trail.

“Men,” Antônio replied. He signaled to Baiano, who crouched across the trail.

“City men?” Luzia asked.

Antônio nodded. “They’ve got long coats. And leather boots.”

“But no families? No caravan?”

Antônio looked at her and smiled. “I’ve always wanted a pair of leather boots.”

It was hard for him to blink the eye on the scarred side of his face. He had to make an effort, and even then the eye’s lid shut lazily, if at all. Over the years, a cloudy film had formed, as if his eye was covered in milk. He insisted he was not losing his sight, but at night, after prayers, he knelt beside their blanket and whispered a series of pleas to Santa Luzia. Antônio kept other ailments hidden as well. During their walks, while he observed the scrubland, Luzia observed him. She saw each shallow breath, each pained step. His injured leg still bothered him. At night, he felt sharp pains on either side of his lower back. Each morning, he had trouble rising from his blanket.

Antônio handed Luzia the binoculars. She stared through them and saw a mule driver flick his animals’ hindquarters with a whip. There were five mules. Two carried basic supplies: kerosene tins, a small barrel, lanterns, rope, a large burlap sack, a flank of sun-dried beef. The other three mules carried strange black tubes and a metal machine. The machine was long, with three legs and a bulky top covered in cloth. It reminded Luzia of the tripod and camera used to take her First Communion portrait years before.

Two men, perched on top of skinny horses, rode alongside the pack mules. One man was young and lean. He wore a driving coat, like a huge smock covering him. His face shone with sweat. His eyes were obscured by leather driving goggles. The other man was more sensible, Luzia thought. Less vain. He was middle-aged and portly, with short legs and a small head, like an armadillo. He’d balled up his driving coat and set it in his lap. He wore a cotton suit, stained yellow with dust, and cinched with a thick leather belt. The driving goggles hung limply around his neck. A straw fedora shaded his face.

Antônio tugged Luzia toward him.

“My Saint,” he whispered. “Put a hole in that hat. Can you?”

It was a silly question. After three years of practice, Luzia could shoot a bullet into the coin-size mouth of an empty cachaça bottle, making it explode from the inside out. She could dent a brilliantine can from seven meters away. She could shatter knees, making a man as lame and useless as an injured horse. Or she could aim with a more conclusive purpose, setting her mark on head or throat or chest.

Luzia straightened her spectacles. Her eyelashes fluttered against the scratched lenses. She caught sight of the traveler’s straw hat and aimed lower—at the hatband—knowing her hand would move upward. She held her breath.