The Seamstress (52 page)

As if hit by a swift wind, the hat flew off the portly man’s head. The younger traveler’s horse spooked at the sound of the shot. His rider tumbled to the ground. The man squirmed to avoid his horse’s hooves, becoming tangled in his driving coat. The mule driver tugged his animals to a stop and fumbled in his leather pack. There wasn’t time to retrieve his firearm. Antônio whistled. A contingent of cangaceiros surrounded the mule driver. They took away his small chumbo rifle. Antônio stepped out of the scrub. He ordered the mule driver to strip down to his underclothes and leave. The man obeyed, running into the gray trees. The mules bayed.

The young, goggled traveler finally stood. He put his hands between the folds of his driving coat and groped inside it.

“I hope you’re reaching for a handkerchief,” Antônio said.

Baiano stood behind the young man, pressing a Winchester into his back. The traveler froze. Antônio ordered him to remove his driving coat. Inside its pocket was a small snub-nosed pistol. Antônio took it, then whistled for the rest of the cangaceiros. They emerged from the scrub, tugging down their bandannas to expose their faces.

Life in the caatinga made the men’s skin dark and leathery. It made their teeth fall out. Ponta Fina had grown a mustache. Baiano had shaved his head. Canjica had lost a finger playing with a child’s hunting musket that had backfired in his hands. Chico Coffin’s bald spot had grown but so had his remaining hair, making him look like a rebellious friar. Tufts of stiff, sun-bleached hairs sprouted from Little Ear’s ears, making them look like round, thick, cactus pads. And Inteligente still had his childlike stare and his loping step, but his face was more creased and he couldn’t shoulder as much weight. Because of this, the younger members took turns carrying the group’s two portable Singers. They’d taken the machines from Blue Party caravans. Antônio had one Singer equipped with a saddle maker’s needle to decorate leather. Ponta Fina, whose embroidery skills began to rival Luzia’s, helped her teach the new recruits to sew. Ponta had grown into a quiet man—no longer the butt of the group’s teasing but one of its founding members—and he conducted his sewing lessons in a serious and professional manner. Some recruits rejected sewing at first. After a few weeks, they discovered that life in the scrub was not as eventful as they’d imagined. During the dry season they spent long hours in the shade each afternoon waiting out the heat. Sewing relieved the cangaceiros’ boredom. Before long, the new recruits—their throats raw from xique-xique juice—hoarsely asked to be included in Luzia and Ponta’s lessons.

Luzia, like the rest of the men, left her hiding place. She didn’t return her parabellum to its shoulder holster. Before she could reach Antônio, the older traveler slipped off his horse. His short legs made his descent cumbersome. He pried off his wedding ring and shook it at Antônio.

“Here,” he said.

The good side of Antônio’s mouth creased in a frown. “Why are you handing me that?”

“Take it. It’s all we have.”

“Did I ask for that?”

“No,” the man replied.

“Then put it back or I’ll shoot you.”

The man jammed the ring onto his finger. Antônio shook his head.

“I’m disappointed,” he said. “You’re city boys. I know you weren’t born in a goat corral. I know your mothers taught you manners. But before I can even introduce myself, you try to grab a pistol. And you! I haven’t even made a threat, and you hand me your wedding band. What would your wife say to that?”

The older man stared at his boots. The young one lifted off his goggles. They left a red crease around his eyes, which were hazel and heavy lidded, like a teú lizard’s. They gave him a lazy look, as if he was constantly unimpressed.

“My Saint,” Antônio called. “Talk to them or I’ll lose my patience.”

Luzia took her place beside him. The city men stared up at her, their eyes wide. Antônio smiled.

“It’s not well bred to stare at an honest woman,” he said. “But I understand. You can’t help it. Don’t strain your necks.”

Behind her, Luzia heard some cangaceiros chuckle. She gripped her parabellum tighter. In the beginning, she’d appreciated Antônio’s fascination with her height. At first, Antônio whispered his compliments only to her, but as his eye clouded, as his shoulders hunched and his injured leg dragged, he began to praise her in front of others. The more his appearance weakened, the more concerned Antônio became with hers. He crowded her fingers with rings. He gave her silk handkerchiefs and a pair of leather gloves to keep her hands free of thorns. He presented her with a shoulder holster and a Lugar parabellum—a semiautomatic German pistol with eight shots, an easy trigger, and a furious recoil. He encouraged Luzia to pull back her shoulders and stand at her full height, to hold her locked arm proudly beside her and not to cradle it over her chest. With time Luzia’s demeanor became as sure as her aim, but she was unsure if Antônio loved her appearance or the impression it made.

“What’s your business here?” Luzia asked.

“We have no business,” the older traveler said. “We’re surveyors.”

“You’re what?” Antônio asked.

“Mapmakers,” the young one snapped.

“You’re headed the wrong way,” Antônio said.

“No,” the younger man replied. “We are headed inland.”

“You’ll starve to death. There’s no rain.”

The mapmakers looked at each other.

“I’m not fibbing,” Antônio continued. “You won’t get far. Horses need water. And food.”

Antônio ordered the cangaceiros to empty the mules’ cargo baskets. Pencils, pots of ink, white sheaves of paper, and a compass fell onto the dirt. Then there were the black tubes. The cangaceiros handled them gingerly, as if they were weapons. As they pried the mysterious tubes open, the portly man wrung his hands. The younger man scowled. Inside the tubes there were no treasures; there were only papers. Luzia unrolled them on the ground. They were not newspapers, but large, penciled drawings with curving lines, tick marks, strange symbols, and city names. Maps. Above the drawings, Luzia read the name
National Roadway Institute
. Beneath them she saw a list of companies: Standard Oil, Pernambuco Tramways, Great Western of Brazil.

Antônio studied the unrolled maps at Luzia’s feet. “Why do you want to draw this trail?”

“Not the trail,” the older mapmaker whispered. “The trail is just a guide.”

“For what?” Antônio asked, impatient.

“A roadway.” Luzia answered, looking at another map. She saw a long black line starting at the coast and snaking into the scrubland. She traced it with her finger. It looked like a black river. The
Trans-Nordestino
.

“Yes. Exactly,” the older mapmaker said, his lips twitching into a smile. “Madam is astute. We’re just simple mapmakers. We work for private companies…and the government, of course,” he added in response to his young coworker’s scowl. “They’re building the Trans-Nordestino. It’s a road. They plan to run it from Recife all the way into the sertão.”

Antônio laughed. He dabbed his milky eye with a handkerchief. “A roadway? Out here? For what?”

“For transport,” the old mapmaker said. “To facilitate transport of cotton and cattle. And to have access.”

“Access to what?” Antônio asked.

“To the land,” the young man interrupted. “The North isn’t just coastline. President Gomes says we can’t run a country when it’s unknown.”

“It’s known to the people who live here,” Antônio said, stepping near the young mapmaker. “We don’t need you running anything. We don’t need your road. Gomes should stay out of our business.”

Behind them, the cangaceiros laughed. One of them tried on an extra driving coat. Ponta Fina took the young man’s goggles and cupped them to his eyes. Baiano looked through their surveyor’s telescope. Little Ear kicked at the metal tripod, hoping to bend and break it. Canjica and Inteligente raided the food supplies, divvying them up between the cangaceiros’ packs. Antônio pocketed their compass. Luzia crouched. She folded the largest map into a square and slipped it inside her bornal.

“That’s ours!” the young mapmaker called out. The older one elbowed him, but he would not quiet. “Take anything else, but leave our work!”

Luzia wanted to hush him. If he wanted to save his maps, he should have pretended they were meaningless. Antônio calculated worth not by value but by affection. The more a person cared for something, the more he wanted to take it from them. Antônio lifted a tin of kerosene from one of the mule’s baskets. He stood over the maps and poured the yellow liquid. The cangaceiros laughed. The older mapmaker cradled his head in his hands. Antônio lit a match and stepped away.

The maps burned quickly. Their heat made Luzia’s face tingle. She covered her mouth from the smoke.

“They’ll send more,” the young mapmaker cried. He took shallow breaths. The tendons of his neck bulged with each inhalation.

“Of what?” Antônio asked.

“Of us. The road’s already started. It’s past Carpina. You think you can block it?”

“Why not?”

“You’re a relic!” the young mapmaker yelled.

“A what?” Antônio asked.

The older man hushed his coworker. “He’s a brash youth. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”

“I do,” the young man interrupted. “Viva Gomes!”

Little Ear moved forward. He held the tripod’s broken metal leg in his hands, ready to swing it at the surveyor.

“Step back,” Antônio ordered, still staring at the young man. The left side of Antônio’s mouth moved up. The skin around his eyes crinkled. He bared his teeth.

When Antônio smiled in earnest, his eyes matched it. But when this false smile appeared, his eyes looked dull and dead, as if in a trance. Luzia had watched him with victims before. There were those who begged, sputtered, sometimes soiled themselves as they knelt before him. With these he was quick and businesslike, as if sparing them more embarrassment. In his eyes she saw sadness and reluctance, as if he was fulfilling obligations he did not fully understand or enjoy. When he showed mercy, he met their eyes and sighed, flicking his hand and telling them to get out of his sight, as if dealing with rebellious children. He encouraged his men to show mercy because it proved that they could dominate anything, even their own tempers. But when his false smile appeared, Luzia felt frightened. It was as if the slats of a shutter had opened, partially revealing something unsettling and unknown within him—an anger he could not dominate with the force of his will.

A familiar wave of nausea rose in the pit of Luzia’s belly. She took a breath and held it back. Then she placed her hand on Antônio’s arm.

“We could get more from them than their boots and jackets,” she whispered. “We could put them up for ransom.”

She felt his shoulders loosen. In the newspapers she’d taken from Blue Party escapees, Luzia had read of foreign investors. She’d studied photographs of Emília standing beside those speculators, those company executives. They might pay to have their surveyors back. They might pay for the map she’d slipped into her bornal.

Luzia calculated the money they could earn in exchange for those mapmakers. Not the petty sums they stole from Blue Party escapees or coerced from merchants. The money they carried was a fortune in the scrub, but it never totaled the impossible amount needed to buy land. If they ransomed those mapmakers, Luzia thought, maybe they could get enough to buy a large plot near the São Francisco River. Those cangaceiros who wanted to settle down could divide the land equally; they could build houses and plant crops. Buying was different from renting a plot from a rancher or toiling under a colonel in exchange for a home. Buying meant owning, and owning meant working your own hours, managing your own house, and selling the crops you harvested. These were luxuries reserved for men like Dr. Eronildes, or for colonels, or for the children of colonels. For an instant, Luzia let her hand rest on her stomach.

She replaced her parabellum in its holster and straightened her shoulders. She moved toward the surveyors. The men staggered backward.

“If this roadway’s important, you must be, too,” she said.

The men wouldn’t meet her eyes. Instead, they stared at her crooked arm, at her canvas trousers. Luzia let them take a good look, knowing that they saw her richly embroidered bornal and not the tough beef and stale manioc inside it. They saw the two gold pendants around her neck, not the two babies she’d lost before her stomach had even swelled. They saw the shining pistol in her shoulder holster, not the numbness that now lived in her chest, as if her heart had become as thick and as calloused as her feet. They saw the Seamstress.

2

Her first child had craved mimo oranges. A few weeks after she and Antônio married on Dr. Eronildes’ porch, Luzia’s monthly blood disappeared. The yeasty smell of manioc flour made her retch. Her breasts became sore to the touch, her nipples hard and round, like the pits of pitomba fruits. One night, she dreamed of a mimo. She felt its peel under her fingernails. She took its soft, ear-shaped sections into her mouth. When she woke, she smelled the mimo on her hands, in the air, and around the edges of her coffee tin.

“I need an orange,” she told Antônio. “A mimo.”

He laughed. They’d have more luck finding a spotted panther. When Luzia insisted, he understood. A mother had to have the food she craved or else the child in her belly would die. That was what the women in Taquaritinga believed. One of Aunt Sofia’s neighbors had almost lost her child because her husband delayed in bringing her the oxtail stew she’d craved. There was even the legend of the Cannibal Wife that Aunt Sofia often told them before bed, to frighten them. The pregnant Cannibal Wife sniffed her husband’s arm, innocently at first, taking in its scent of sweat and dust.
Husband, I want a bite of your arm,
she said. The husband paused, unsure. Then he held it out. She took a bite. The husband screamed. Still, the wife was not satisfied.
Husband, I want another bite.
This time, he said no. When she gave birth, there were twins in her belly—one was alive, the other dead. The story’s ending always made Luzia shiver. After Aunt Sofia blew out the candle, Luzia and Emília reached under the covers and tried to bite each other’s arms until Aunt Sofia chided them. Secretly they hoped that there was some truth to the story, and each Saturday at the market Luzia and her sister stared at the vendors’ forearms, hoping to find teeth marks. They never did.