The Seamstress (55 page)

“They shouldn’t do that,” Luzia said.

“People don’t know better,” Antônio replied. “It’s what they understand.”

Luzia shook her head. “People understand threats. Saints don’t.”

“They were people once.”

“Yes,” Luzia said. “Maybe that’s why they don’t listen.”

“They listen.” Antônio stroked her cheek with the tips of his fingers. He did it quickly, so the men wouldn’t see. “They just don’t give us what we ask for. They have their reasons.”

Antônio, like many residents, believed there was a reason behind the lack of rain. God and the saints had presented him with a message, a warning. Antônio believed the drought was an omen—it had begun after Gomes took power. The scrub and the people within it would now suffer under this man’s watch. Antônio grew to distrust the president even more.

Food was scarce, but the cangaceiros never suffered. Mostly they caught the tiger-striped surubim from the São Francisco River. The smell of fish stayed on Luzia’s hands, in her nose, on her clothing. She hated that bony fish with its flavorless white meat, but it was better than the sour manioc flour and tough jerked beef sold in towns. On good days, the men caught teú lizards or rolinha doves. The cangaceiros were used to walking long hours on little food. The mapmakers were not. Their feet became bloodied and tender. The men’s beards grew unclipped and came to snarled points beneath their chins. They looked like wandering beatos, except they did not wear a tangle of rosaries or bear the burden of life-size wooden crosses.

Luzia could will her mind through the drought but her body demanded more. Her belly’s skin tightened and her trousers became hard to button. Her hip bones felt oiled and slippery. Luzia stumbled. She bumped into the men as she walked. She felt as clumsy and awkward as a growing girl, her body changing in ways she did not understand. She felt tired. It wasn’t the familiar fatigue of walking or living under the scrub’s hot sun, but something deeper. The child was sapping her, feasting on her. Her stomach felt like the boil of a bichada, the parasites that burrowed under the hides of cattle and goats, then ate them from the inside out. One night, Ponta Fina brought her the heart of a rolinha dove. Luzia hadn’t spoken of her condition, but Ponta had guessed. He knew the old legend: to predict a child’s sex, the future mother punctures a chicken heart and holds it over a fire. If, after it’s cooked, the heart is open, the child will be a girl. If it’s closed, it will be a boy. They did not have a chicken heart but a rolinha’s would do. Luzia put the tiny heart on the tip of her punhal. She held it over the cook fire. Ponta stood beside her. When she lifted the knife from the flames, the heart was dark and closed tight, like a fist.

By mid-February, they’d visited a dozen telegraph stations but no telegrams had arrived from the roadway institute. Dust rose from the ground in orange clouds, covering the cangaceiros’ clothes, dulling the polish of their leather cartridge belts, and coating the insides of their mouths. Antônio’s vision worsened. The eye on the scarred side of his face teared and itched. He could not blink out the sand and grit. Since water was too precious to waste, he cleaned his eye with a handkerchief. It was no use; the eye grew murky and dull, like a child’s marble. Some nights, Antônio woke in a panic, worried that his other eye was clouding as well. He prayed to Santa Luzia. Finally, he decided to cross the São Francisco and see Dr. Eronildes.

The doctor, like others near the São Francisco, had the luxury of water. As long as food supplies held out, fishermen and tenant farmers could stay in their homes until it rained again. Despite the benefits of the Old Chico’s waters, most ranchers like Eronildes had already left the region. The crash of 1929 and “the Crisis” that followed it had been the first blow to independent farmers; the drought debilitated them even more. Most had abandoned their farms, allowing neighboring colonels to take possession of the land. Dr. Eronildes wouldn’t stomach this; despite the drought, he stayed.

The whitewash of his ranch house had faded to a dull, dirty yellow. The sun had bleached his front gate gray and made its wood splintered and warped. Eronildes opened the gate himself. The stresses of caatinga life had taken a physical toll on the doctor. Sunspots dotted the skin beneath Eronildes’ eyes. His beard was poorly shaved. A rope belt had replaced the leather one he’d once worn. When he greeted Luzia, his hands shook. She smelled drink on his breath.

Without prompting, he examined each of the cangaceiros. He sterilized a small pair of pincers and squeezed thorns from red, painful bumps in the men’s skin. He treated superficial wounds with a few, precious drops of hydrogen peroxide and iodine, and warned the men against using rusted knives. For most, he prescribed herbal remedies to soothe their coughs or the constipation brought on from their scanty diets. With his thin fingers, he inspected the men’s teeth and gums. Some were loose and bloody and Dr. Eronildes told the men to eat umbu, or any scrub fruits they could find. When he came to the mapmakers, Eronildes grew quiet. He cleaned their feet with the last of his hydrogen peroxide. Then he poured a diluted solution of carbolic acid over the broken skin, making the mapmakers wince. Dr. Eronildes told Ponta Fina to bandage the hostages’ feet while he took Antônio and Luzia indoors. In his private study, Eronildes inspected Antônio’s eyes.

“The left one is fine,” Eronildes said. “The other eye can never be repaired. Only tolerated.”

He opened a wooden cabinet and searched through its contents. After a while, he returned with a glass vial. It had a rubber top and an eyedropper.

“You will lose your sight in the right eye,” Eronildes said. “But this will help with the dust. It’s a solution to moisturize the eye.”

Antônio examined the vial. Without asking Luzia to test it first, he opened the bottle and squirted several drops into his foggy eye. He clamped his eyes shut, then sat up. His cheek was wet.

“I’m very grateful to you,” Antônio said. “You’ll always have my protection.”

Eronildes wiped his hands.

“I have something to show you,” he said, then riffled through the stack of newspapers beside his desk. He pulled out a
Diário de Pernambuco
dated three weeks prior. “This was in my most recent shipment, my last one. The river’s too low to carry barges now.”

On the front page was an article about the mapmakers. Luzia read it aloud.

“A few perverse thieves will not deny the people their needs,” Tenente Higino Ribeiro, the state’s new leader, was quoted as saying. He assured readers that the government would send more surveyors. They would build the Trans-Nordestino. The article spoke of the duty the mapmakers had done for their country. How they had been fine, honorable men.

Gomes sent a letter from the presidential palace in Rio de Janeiro, stating that cangaceiros were small impediments on the path to a greater future: “There is no place for them in the New Brazil!” Dr. Duarte Coelho, the state’s newly appointed special advisor on criminal matters, was also quoted. He funded a hefty reward for the cangaceiros’ heads—25:000$00, or 25 contos for the Hawk and the Seamstress. City officials were trying to define the criminal mind, to make physical criteria they would use to weed out future offenders, to know which could be rehabilitated and which had to be destroyed.

“Like lame goats,” Luzia said. “Like calves born blind or with only one teat.” Such animals were doomed from the beginning, their destinies prescribed by their bodies and not their souls.

“We made the front page,” Antônio said, ignoring her.

“You shouldn’t joke,” Dr. Eronildes replied. “That article might as well have been an obituary for those surveyors. They won’t pay you for them. They don’t care.”

“They will care,” Antônio said. “I’ll make them.”

“How?”

Antônio looked at Luzia. “We’ll get a portrait made, with all of us. Prove they’re alive.”

“Don’t do it,” Eronildes said, his voice grave. “There’s a price on your heads. Your protection is your anonymity. If you photograph yourselves, they’ll know your faces. You’ll never be free.”

“We’re already free,” Antônio said. “But if we let that road in here, we won’t be. That road will be like a fence; Gomes’ll use it to herd us. To push us back and back into the caatinga until there’s no caatinga left. And then he’ll corner us for slaughter. We’re men, Doctor, not cattle.”

Eronildes sighed. He removed a bottle of White Horse whiskey and two glasses from his shelf. The doctor poured drinks. When Antônio declined, Eronildes quickly swallowed both servings.

“Things have changed,” the doctor said, wiping his mouth.

Antônio nodded. “Whiskey’s more common than water these days.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Eronildes snapped. “Staying here, in Bahia, won’t remedy your troubles. Bahia, Pernambuco, Paraíba—all the states are united under Gomes now. One is no safer than the other. If you make an example of those surveyors, the law will have to make one of you.”

“Gomes never complained when we stopped those Blue runaways,” Antônio said. “But when we stop his men, we have a ransom on our heads.” He looked down and fidgeted with his eyedropper. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you, Doctor. What’s a
relic
?”

“A relic?” Eronildes replied, confused. “Something that’s old. Useless. It’s survived past its time.”

Antônio nodded. His grip tightened on the eyedropper bottle; Luzia feared he’d break it.

“Why do you ask?” Eronildes said.

Antônio stared at the doctor. His eyes were still wet from the drops; Luzia wanted to reach out and wipe his face but didn’t dare.

“I never bothered the capital. I never took my men past Limoeiro. I left the coast alone. Never intruded on their business. They should show the same respect for me, for my place.”

“It’s not about manners, Antônio,” Eronildes said softly. “The scrub isn’t yours.”

The good side of Antônio’s brow crinkled.

“Times change,” Eronildes continued. “We must change with them.”

“Or become relics?”

“Yes.”

Antônio cleared his throat as if to spit. Instead, he spoke. “You’re a son of the city, Doctor. I’m a son of the caatinga. And I’m a loyal son.”

“Loyal to what? To the old ways?” Eronildes shook his head. “You want people to live under the same yoke.”

“And you want them to take on new ones.”

“The roadway’s not a yoke, Antônio.”

“People here will be against it. They’ll take my side. They’ll help me because I help them. They’re loyal.”

“No,” Eronildes replied. “People are fickle. They’ll make a hero out of the first man they can find until another, better one comes along. There’s no loyalty here, Antônio. There’s only need. People need food. They need money and security. Whoever gives them more, that’s who they’ll call a hero. The reward for your head will erase any loyalty.”

“You’re one of them then?” Antônio asked. “A Gomes man?”

Eronildes raised his sunspotted hands, as if to show he had no weapon. “What else is there to be? Tell me.”

Antônio nodded. He placed the newspaper article under his arm and stalked out of the room, forgetting Luzia. When she moved to follow him, Eronildes skirted around his desk. He caught her locked elbow. Embarrassed, he quickly let go.

“I can order new lenses for your spectacles,” Eronildes sputtered. “Yours are scratched.”

“They work fine,” Luzia said. “Thank you.”

“You…Antônio won’t come back here again, will he? This is the last time.”

Luzia nodded. Antônio was suspicious of those he deemed “Gomes men,” even if they had once been his friends. The doctor wrung his hands.

“I’m asking this as a doctor,” Eronildes whispered. “And as a friend. How far along are you?”

Luzia looked up, startled.

“It’s your face,” Eronildes said. “The dark crescents under your eyes. And your trousers,” he said, nodding toward Luzia’s waist, “they barely button.”

Luzia felt her face reddening. Men—even doctors—did not talk to women about such things. Only midwives dealt with feminine problems, but Luzia had no midwife. She had no guidance.

“It’s been three moons,” she said. “Since I…” Her words caught. She could not complete her sentence.

“You must rest,” Eronildes said. “You must eat properly. You’ll lose it if you don’t.”

“No. Not this one. This one is staying.”

“Will you leave the group?”

Luzia shook her head, surprised that he would even consider it.

“How will you raise this child?” Eronildes said, indignant.
This child,
he said, as if it wasn’t hers.

“I’ll raise it properly.”

“Where?”

She faltered, then spoke quietly. “Somewhere near the river. We’re going to buy a plot of land with our ransom.”

Eronildes snorted. “You’re just as stubborn as him. They won’t pay. Even if they did, it wouldn’t help. The land is dead. No one’s cotton crop—not even mine, here by the river—has flowered! And if it doesn’t rain this year, you won’t even have manioc growing. You’ll starve.”

“Where should I go then?” Luzia said, keeping her voice level. “A city? The capital? I’d starve there, too. No one wants to hire a cripple. Especially one with my belly.”

“You could stay here.”

“As your maid?” Luzia coughed. She didn’t let the doctor answer. “Antônio wouldn’t let me stay.”

“If he loved you he would.”

Luzia had never heard a man say the word
love
aloud. Emília used to say it, in whispers before bed. But men, especially caatinga men, didn’t speak of such things. Luzia turned her face from the doctor’s gaze.

“I hear you’re a good shot,” Eronildes said.

“Yes,” Luzia replied, her voice too loud. “I am.”

“Who taught you to shoot?”

“Antônio.”

“Why?”

“To defend myself,” Luzia replied, confused. She felt a twinge of shame for her shooting ability and was angry at Eronildes for making her feel this way. “He taught me because it would help me.”

“Or was it to help himself?” the doctor continued. “So you’d be useful to him, now that his vision’s failing?”