The Seamstress (54 page)

As a reward, Antônio made each man feel important. He counseled them and healed them. He gave long speeches about their freedom, their independence. Luzia sat on her blanket in the darkness and listened impatiently. His speeches frustrated her. Their life was not one of freedom but of escape: from their old lives, from past mistakes, from enemies, from colonels or monkeys or drought. And what good was freedom for its own sake? What good was that vast, open scrubland that caught at their clothes and cut their faces? What good was wandering simply to wander, with no cause, no goal, no future in sight?

Even the poorest, most disorganized shacks with dirt floors and dogs skulking in corners had order and permanence compared to Luzia’s life in the scrub. In each of those shacks there was a sturdy wooden pillar for mashing dried corn into fubá and coffee beans into grounds. There were hooks above the stove for curing meat. There were chairs, cribs, and caroá rope hammocks—all things passed down from mother to daughter. All things Luzia could never carry through the scrub. “The Seamstress” possessed embroidered bags, jewelry, and a pistol, but she had no household.

At first, Luzia’s envy was subtle. With time, it grew. A bilious feeling rose in the pit of her belly each time she entered a house, souring her mood for the rest of the day. She was ashamed of her jealousy and never spoke of it. She simply avoided houses. Antônio interpreted her dislike of closed spaces as a love for open ones, for the scrub itself. He approved.

“You have the finest house of any woman,” he said, brushing loose hair behind her ears.

Her house was vast. Rivers, not walls, divided it. In the dry season, its roof was as blue as the glazed pottery sold near the banks of the São Francisco. During the wet months her roof became gray with bright streaks of lightning. Luzia’s kitchen was well stocked with goats, armadillos, scrub rabbits, and rolinha doves. Her furniture was sturdy: small boulders made good chairs, evergreen juazeiro trees gave fine shade, and the rock formations that rose, round and massive like the humps of sleeping beasts, from the scrub’s stunted arbor were first-rate armoires, storing ammunition and supplies in their crevices or buried at their bases.

Antônio whispered such things to Luzia when they were alone. In the mornings, before the sun rose, he woke her and led her away from camp. She followed him into that early morning darkness. She waited as he cleared a place for them on the ground. Sand often found its way onto their blanket, their hair, their skin. Ants, too. The morning air was cold. They shivered and held each other close. They could not be too loud, or the men would hear. They could not move too freely in one direction or the other, or cacti and nettles would cut into their skin. Sometimes Luzia feared that there were snakes or long-toothed caititu boars. She gripped Antônio closer.

The pain of her first time was gone, replaced by urgency. Antônio often went fast—too fast—and soon his body took over, his gaze grew remote. At first, Luzia was angry with him. He’d moved to some faraway place and left her there, on that sandy blanket. Then she felt him shudder. He looked at her, his eyes wide.
“Luzia!”
he said, his voice urgent and pleading. Luzia felt a sudden, intoxicating pride. This was the man people had called the devil. This was the Hawk, docile under her hands. In that moment, she was in possession of him. And like any person who’s managed to subdue a wild thing, Luzia was thrilled and frightened.

She’d never admit her fear, but it was there, like the thin layer of hair canvas concealed beneath the cloth of a gentleman’s jacket. The canvas was a rough, unseen element that gave the entire piece its form. With his men, Antônio was a swaggering, moody captain. When he entered towns and ranches, he was the unflinching Hawk. With Luzia, he was Antônio—gentle, inquisitive, solicitous. It was easy to feel affection for such a man. But some nights, when the ground beneath her blanket was too rough, or the night air too cold, or her locked arm ached and kept her awake, Luzia stared at Antônio’s hunched back, at his calloused shoulders and long hair, and wondered: if he wasn’t also the Hawk, would she love him?

Her second child was different from the first. It did not crave oranges. It did not make Luzia feel nauseous or tired. It was calm—a child of the rainy months, when everything flourished. At night, Luzia believed she could feel it moving in her belly, like a moth. The nights were cold and wet. Luzia huddled beneath her blanket. She covered herself in two jackets. She prayed to Our Lady of the Good Birth. The child could not crave anything because Luzia didn’t give it a chance. She drank goat’s milk each day. She sucked on sweet blocks of rapadura. In mountain towns, she gulped down the meaty, yellow insides of jackfruits. Whatever she could find, she ate. Despite Luzia’s efforts, the child left her. At the first sign of cramping, they’d stopped at a ranch house. A farmer’s wife gave Luzia her bed. She placed wet cloths on Luzia’s forehead. Antônio paced outside the door. When Luzia finally rose, wearing her extra pair of trousers, Antônio was waiting.

“It’s best,” he said, shaking his head as if shooing away other thoughts. “Cangaceiros shouldn’t have babies. They’re dead weight.”

Antônio had never hit her. He’d never yelled, or gripped her hand too tightly, or shoved her. In this respect, Luzia reminded herself, she was a lucky wife. Yet Luzia felt something harden inside her, like warm molasses poured into wooden blocks and set in the cold night to solidify into rapadura.

After losing her second child, she drank quixabeira-bark tea each day and swallowed one tiny chumbo pellet—the kind children poured into their BB guns to kill rolinha doves—each month to prevent another pregnancy. She began to join the men in their shooting games. Luzia picked through the pile of old papo-amarelos and muskets they’d stolen. Unlike the cangaceiros, she hated the chumbo muskets with their thick, blocklike barrels and their large metal pellets that scattered everywhere. The cangaceiros preferred Winchesters, but they also favored the chumbos. The guns’ shots weren’t clean but they rarely missed.

“You want deep holes,” Baiano told her. “If you can’t get deep, then the more the better. They let blood out and air in.”

At first, Luzia had never aimed at a human target. During shooting contests, they practiced on trees, brilliantine cans, kerosene tins, and empty bottles. For these things, Luzia preferred the exactness of a pistol or a long-necked rifle. She copied the men’s methods, snaking on her belly and balancing the gun against a rock to keep her shot steady. In the evenings, when it became too dark to embroider, Luzia joined the men in cleaning their weapons. Guns were precious. It angered Antônio to see rusted or dirty guns, made worthless by their owner’s carelessness. “You clip a goat’s hooves! You wash down a good horse! So why wouldn’t you do the same for your gun?” Antônio often said. When the men cleaned their weapons, they did not speak. There were only the sounds of unlocking barrels, the clink of bullets, and the men’s whispering to pass a rag or a can of brilliantine. They used sticks wrapped in soft cloths to get inside each of the chamber holes and the barrels. Baiano liked to apply a dab of brilliantine to grease his triggers

Before long, Luzia won every shooting contest. Antônio and the men—even Little Ear—praised her aim. They marveled at Luzia’s shots but always congratulated the cangaceiro in second place. Luzia’s wins weren’t considered real because she’d never hit a man. A few months after the revolution, this changed. The cangaceiros returned to Colonel Clóvis Lucena’s ranch to exact their revenge. There, Luzia took aim at her first human target. The colonel’s son, Marcos, had married and left his new bride in the coastal city of Salvador; Luzia’s perfect aim made the woman a widow.

After her first kill, shooting became easy for Luzia. When they raided a hostile colonel’s house, or when they surprised a group of escaping Blue Party officials, Luzia and the other sharpshooters hid in doorways or behind tree trunks. At first, when she looked over the metal nib of her gun’s barrel, Luzia expected her shots to make men whip around or flay their limbs. They didn’t. Only the bad shots did that. If a bullet hit a joint, or a hip bone, or grazed the men’s skin, they would jolt back and sometimes shudder or convulse. This was dangerous. As Baiano liked to say, even after a deadly shot a man could live for ten seconds, and ten seconds was long enough for him to shoot back. So Luzia wanted only good shots. She learned to aim for the head, the neck, and because the vital organs were higher in the body than she’d imagined, she aimed between the armpits and no lower. It became satisfying to hit her mark. This frightened her. It was confusing, how she was both willing and unwilling, proud and repentant, angry and afraid.

By early 1932, when they’d kidnapped the mapmakers, Luzia was pregnant a third time. Shooting accurately became more important to her; she suddenly had two lives to defend instead of one. Each day she waited for the familiar cramping and release, but it never came. Despite the heat, the endless walking, and the thick, silted drinking water, the child held on. Its presence made Luzia understand the implications of something Antônio had once told her: the life of a cangaceiro was like a fire balloon, born to burn brightly and die quickly. This was why the men cherished their gold pendants, their rings, their embroidered bags and brass binoculars—because they secretly knew that those things would outlast them all. Unlike her possessions, Luzia’s child was a living weight. She was determined it would outlast her.

3

Luzia preferred the older mapmaker. At midday, while the group crowded in scarce shade and waited for the sun to cool, Luzia unfolded the map she’d salvaged and spread it before the surveyor. He taught her how to read it. She’d seen only the large, colorful maps in Padre Otto’s school; this one was different. It was drawn in black ink and neatly ruled, with plus and minus symbols for ground levels. Luzia asked the mapmaker to show her the locations of Taquaritinga, Recife, and the Old Chico. Some of the cangaceiros crowded around them, interested. The younger mapmaker scowled at the men’s questions. Antônio also watched the lessons but never participated. He disliked maps. He distrusted anything that had to be written instead of kept in one’s memory.

After kidnapping the mapmakers, they’d sent a telegram to the
Diário de Pernambuco
offices. They demanded a ransom of two hundred contos in exchange for the mapmakers. There were one thousand mil-réis in just one conto; Antônio insisted they start high. It would be like bargaining at the weekly market, he said. The Gomes government would try to whittle them down. Luzia hoped this wouldn’t happen—even if they received the full amount, it would buy only a tiny property along the São Francisco River. Still, she thought, rightfully owning a small piece of land was better than having none at all.

Antônio had dictated the ransom request to a trembling telegram clerk, who’d wiped sweat from his fingers before tapping each word into the telegraph machine. In the message, Luzia and Antônio did not specify details of the ransom exchange. First they wanted a reply from the National Roadway Institute—yes or no to saving their mapmakers. In the telegram, they told the institute to print their answer in the
Diário
. And, in case Luzia and Antônio could not find the newspaper quickly enough in the scrub, they also required the roadway officials to send telegrams with their response to all major stations in the state. This way, Antônio said gleefully, no one would be able to pinpoint the cangaceiros’ exact location, and, most important, the roadway institute would be forced to say yes. If they said no, in the newspaper and in widespread telegrams, everyone would know they hadn’t tried to save their own men. The cangaceiros would shame Gomes’s roadway institute into paying.

While Antônio thought only of the attention they’d receive for the kidnapping, Luzia thought of their next telegram. Each night she lay on her sandy blankets and composed the message in her head—if the roadway institute said yes to their demands, they would have to be ready with a meeting point. The Gomes government could easily send troops instead of funds, so the cangaceiros had to carefully coordinate an exchange. They could not trap themselves. Luzia thought of leaving the mapmakers in one location and receiving the money in another, to try to divert attention from the ransom. Perhaps one of their loyal helpers—a coiteiro—could be used to pick up the funds? Each time Luzia told her ideas to Antônio, he barely listened. He wanted to find newspapers. He wanted their names in print.

With the mapmakers in tow, the group had left the cattle trail and headed toward the São Francisco, a plentiful source of water. No one said the word
seca,
as if by ignoring it, the drought would not exist. Only the richest colonels could afford to take their herds of cattle to the highlands—towns like Taquaritinga, Garanhuns, and Triunfo—where there was more water. Smaller ranchers were forced to release their cattle into the scrub, hoping the animals would fend for themselves. In the dry heat, ticks multiplied. They infested the cows’ ears and covered their noses like a bumpy brown skin. Vultures grew fat and numerous. Luzia saw saints’ statues tied to the roofs of houses. The figurines were roped down, their faces toward the sun. Some were blindfolded. Some had hands missing or feet smashed off. People would return the limbs when it rained. It was only February 1932; residents would hold out hope until March 19. São José’s day was an important marker: if it rained on or before the saint’s day, crops could still be planted. If it didn’t rain, there was no hope. Residents would have to dig into their food reserves—if they had them—and wait until next year. No one spoke of the possibility that, if a drought came, it would not rain the next year either. If their prayers for rain were answered, however, caatinga residents would untie the saints’ statues, repair them, and worship them again. On one chapel’s roof, Luzia saw the baby Jesus. His arms and legs were gone, leaving dark holes in his clay torso.