The Seamstress (56 page)

Luzia’s heart thumped wildly. It was silly of him, to say such things to her. Didn’t he see the parabellum in her shoulder holster? Didn’t Eronildes know what she was capable of? Luzia’s fingertips brushed the handle of her gun.

“Are you thinking of shooting me now?” Eronildes asked, his expression sad. “That would be easier, wouldn’t it? Rather than listening to me. You see, when you call upon violence as a solution once, you will be tempted to do it again and again. Until one day, Luzia, you will not be able to decide for yourself whether to use it or not. It will come automatically, and you will not be able to contain it. How will you raise another human being, when you can’t control yourself? What will you teach this child of yours?”

Luzia’s chest felt tight, her breath short. “You’ve never had to shoot,” she said. “You don’t know anything about it.”

Eronildes nodded. “That’s true. But I know medicine. I know what it means to carry a child. And you know that there’s no rain coming. You know that husband of yours will attack the roadway. He’ll give you no peace. The country’s changing, Luzia. The backlands will be a part of it whether he likes it or not. If that child is lucky, it will die the day it’s born.”

“Is that a curse?” Luzia asked.

“I don’t believe in curses,” Eronildes said. “If your child dies, don’t blame a curse. Blame yourself.”

Luzia left the study. She walked quickly through the dim corridors of Eronildes’ house until she reached the kitchen door. Outside, she disappeared into the scrub where the cangaceiros had made camp.

4

Luzia still recalled her first kill and how it had changed her. One year and two months before kidnapping the mapmakers, while Gomes was organizing his new government on the coast, Antônio also decided to organize—gathering his new recruits and returning to Colonel Clóvis’s ranch. Little had changed in São Tomé since their first, disastrous visit. Colonel Clóvis still wore pajamas with a peixeira knife tucked into his waistband. Marcos was no different, except for the gold wedding band that dug into his meaty finger. He’d married but kept his wife in the coastal city of Salvador, protected from the scrubland’s sun and dust, and its cangaceiros. When Antônio’s group took over the ranch, quickly overpowering the colonel’s capangas, Marcos tried to escape out the back gate. Baiano caught him. Colonel Clóvis, on the other hand, sat placidly in his porch chair.

“I knew you’d come around,” he said, jutting his whiskery chin at Antônio. “I can’t abide waiting. Go ahead. Do what you mean to.”

The colonel stood, handing Antônio his peixeira knife. Antônio nodded and took the old man inside the ranch house. From the porch, Luzia heard a single gunshot. When Antônio returned, he faced Marcos. The colonel’s son stood between Baiano and Little Ear. The front of his dress shirt was damp with sweat. Its fabric clung to his chest.

“It was all Papai’s idea,” Marcos said hoarsely. “Papai made a deal with Colonel Machado—the one whose son you nearly killed. He would trade his entire cotton harvest if Papai would give you up. It was business.” Marcos looked to Luzia, as if for sympathy. She stared back, her mouth rigid. Marcos wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “It shouldn’t matter now. Gomes is in. Troops are gone. You’re alive.”

“I lost half my men,” Antônio replied. “Got shot in my leg. You know what it’s like, crawling around the scrub with a shot leg?”

Marcos shook his head. He stared at his shoes.

“That day the troops came, you disappeared,” Antônio continued. “I’m going let you do that again.”

Marcos’s eyes opened wide. “But the cotton,” he said. “There’s not much of it, but I have to start harvesting—”

“That’s my concern now,” Antônio interrupted.

“And if I stay?”

The porch was quiet except for Marcos’s strained breathing—a whistle of air flowing in and out of his nose.

“You’d better saddle a horse,” Antônio said. “Be quick or I’ll change my mind.”

Marcos nodded. Baiano guided him to the stables. When Little Ear protested that they were being too lenient, Antônio made him leave the porch.

“He’ll come out at a gallop,” Antônio whispered to Luzia. He reached beneath her armpit and gently snapped open her shoulder holster. He eased out the parabellum and placed it in her hands. “Hit him in the leg,” he said. “Make him fall.”

Antônio’s voice was low and soft. It was the same tone he used when he asked her to read their wedding certificate aloud, or to make a compress for his bad eye. It made his orders seem like requests.

Luzia heard the beat of hooves. The parabellum felt very heavy in her hand. She recalled standing before an immense bolt of Portuguese silk, just after she’d injured her arm.
Cut straight and cut fast,
Aunt Sofia had said.
The first cut’s always the hardest. After that, it gets easier.

“My Saint,” Antônio whispered.

Luzia brought up her good arm. She steadied it with her bent one. Marcos—large and toad like—bumped on top of his horse. Dust clouded the entrance path. Soon, he would be out of range. Luzia held her breath.

The cangaceiros complimented her. It was a hard shot: a moving target, with all of that dust. Her eyes were sharper than they’d imagined. Ponta Fina offered to clean her parabellum. Little Ear called it a lucky shot. Marcos spent the day dragging about the front yard, bumping against fence posts and the pillars of the house, trying to find the front gate. Antônio had tied a stiff canvas cloth over his eyes. At night, Marcos wept and moaned. Luzia couldn’t sleep with the sound of it. The next day, Marcos was quiet. Antônio unsheathed his punhal and went into the yard. Black-necked vultures congregated on the fence and in the ipê trees’ branches. Luzia stuffed cotton in her ears, but she could still hear the flapping of their wings. Her actions had brought those birds there.

She also avoided the colonel’s kitchen. Over the cookstove’s fire, where smoke was used to cure meat, Canjica had carefully hooked another offering to Santa Luzia. They were not round but lumpy, like balls of dough with several stringy pieces connected to their ends. After a few days in the smoke, they deflated and shriveled. Antônio placed them in his leather pouch.

At Antônio’s request, Luzia penned a letter to Marcos’s widow in Salvador, informing her that her husband, Marcos Lucena, and his father, Clóvis, had died. Antônio sent his deepest condolences. They assured the widow that the farm would be looked after. Out of fairness, she would receive a yearly share of the gin’s profits. There was no need to visit or make inquiries.
The interior is no place for a lady,
Luzia added before sealing the letter.
If the senhora is wise, you will keep that in mind.

Luzia hoped they would stay in São Tomé where they could work the land and live normally. After a month, Antônio grew restless. He argued that the property wasn’t rightfully theirs and in order to protect their claim to it, he would need more men and more money. They left São Tomé and returned to the scrub. But Luzia couldn’t leave behind the memory of that dusty yard, the slippery feel of the parabellum in her hands, or the loud thump Marcos made when he fell from his horse. She’d expected to feel guilt or remorse from these memories, but instead she felt anger. At what, she wasn’t sure. It was as if her first kill had pulled a latch within her, opening the door to emotions that had been shut away. Luzia’s girlhood rage returned.

In the months that followed, when the cangaceiros robbed Blue Party loyalists on the cattle trail, Luzia stole only newspapers from the men. From the women, she took much more. The escapees often traveled with wives and daughters who looked at Luzia with a mixture of fear and disgust. They stared at her trousers and her bent arm. To them, she was the lowly Seamstress. Luzia yanked pendants from the women’s necks, tugging until the chains broke off, until her palms hurt. She pulled the city women’s hair taut and hacked it off, cutting so close she sometimes nicked the women’s pale scalps. She could act on her rage now, unhindered by Aunt Sofia’s rules or Emília’s soothing voice. Now, Luzia could aim and shoot. She could hurt anyone before they hurt her.

After her argument with Dr. Eronildes, Luzia began to understand the consequences of this logic. She’d learned to be as cruel as the men. In the scrub, women were only taught to live alongside cruelty, to endure it, sometimes to prize it. As a woman, Luzia saw what Antônio and the other cangaceiros could not—cruelty could not be contained. It could not be used and then discarded, like an alpercata sandal. Once it was there, it stayed. It grew within her and the men, becoming numbness. Indifference. Eronildes was right. But Luzia had something else growing inside her, competing for space. The child in her belly could save her. It had prompted her to crave stability, to want a plot of land. That desire had given her the idea of kidnapping those mapmakers and asking for a ransom. If it could do this to her, Luzia thought, perhaps the child would change Antônio, too, prompting him to stop being a cangaceiro and become a father.

5

In their camp near Eronildes’ house, Antônio showed the newspaper to his men. The mapmakers’ kidnapping had made the front page. Gomes’s government was scared of them. So scared, Antônio said, they’d offered a reward for their heads. The cangaceiros couldn’t read, so they took their captain’s word. Only Baiano knew his alphabet, but he couldn’t hold the newspaper long enough. The men passed it about, cheering and laughing. They were famous, Antônio said. It merited a celebration. The men made a bonfire and cooked a steer Eronildes had given them. The animal was skinny and its meat was tough, but it had been weeks since anyone had eaten fresh beef. After dinner, some of the cangaceiros danced. Others, led by Little Ear, walked to a nearby village, hoping to find women-of-the-life. With those who stayed, Antônio tried to be jovial. He sang and took turns playing dominoes. When he tired, he moved away from the fire and sat beside Luzia.

Antônio removed his hat. Beneath it, the hair near his scalp had an oily sheen. At ear level, where the hat no longer protected it, his hair gradually lightened and changed texture, becoming dry and tangled until its honey blond ends brushed his shoulders.

“It’s late, My Saint. You should rest. We’re getting an early start tomorrow.”

“To where?”

“Another town. Somewhere with a photographer.” Antônio nodded to the mapmakers. They slumped beneath a nearby tree, their feet bound. Antônio had given the hostages meat; grease shone around their mouths.

“We’ll send proof,” he said.

“That they’re alive?” Luzia asked.

Antônio wiped his clouded eye. “Proof of the capital’s mistake.”

Her husband had the habit of addressing the capital as if it were a living thing.
We’ll teach the capital a lesson,
he often said. Or,
This will get the capital’s attention.
It was easier for Antônio to say
the capital,
than to name Tenente Higino Ribeiro or even Gomes. It bothered Luzia. He’d begun to say it often, and adamantly, as if he were speaking of one man and not an entire city.

“The doctor asked about my health,” Luzia said. She took a deep breath; if Antônio thought it improper, her revelation could kill Eronildes.

“What kinds of things did he ask?”

“He’s worried for me. For our boy.” Luzia coughed. It was the first time they’d spoken of the child.

“Are you worried?” Antônio asked.

Luzia couldn’t nod. Worry would be a betrayal to Antônio, a way of saying that he couldn’t care for her like a good husband should. Luzia hunched. She bent into him, resting her head on his shoulder. Antônio didn’t like such displays. Near the fire, the mapmakers and the cangaceiros were watching them. Luzia pressed her nose to Antônio’s jacket. She took in his scent of dust, sweat, and Fleur d’Amour.

“My Saint,” Antônio whispered, nudging her to face him. He rolled up his jacket sleeve, revealing his bare arm. It was paler than his hand but still brown. Luzia stared at its soft underside, at the shadows of its roping veins in the firelight. Antônio smiled.

“Take it,” he said. “It’s yours.”

“You think I want that tough meat?”

“No,” he replied, his smile gone. He continued to hold out his arm. “But if you did, I’d let you take as many bites as you needed. I’d let you eat me alive.”

“I don’t like that kind of talk,” Luzia said. When they were newly married, she’d told him the story of the Cannibal Wife. Now, with a drought coming, the story wasn’t amusing.

“It’s the only kind of talk I know,” Antônio replied, his voice low.

Luzia stared at his arm. If she brought it to her mouth, he would not flinch. He would not cry out. He would give. He would let her consume him, bit by bit, if that was what she needed.

The next day, as they prepared to leave Eronildes’ ranch, Antônio thanked the doctor but did not shake his hand. Eronildes quietly reminded him to put the drops in his eyes. Minutes later, while the cangaceiros cleaned their camp and checked their bags, Eronildes took Luzia aside. He placed folded cloth in her hands. It was a sturdy, blue bramante.

“You’ll need to sew yourself some trousers to accommodate your belly,” Eronildes said. He placed his hands between the cloth’s folds and removed a corked vial. Inside the brown glass was powder.

“It’s cyanide,” he whispered. “Please, only open it if you mean to use it. It’s very strong. It’s better than starving, or getting caught by soldiers. Especially soldiers. That’s no way for a lady to die.”

He pressed the vial into her palm.

“I’ll die the way God intends,” Luzia said. Still, she took the vial and slipped it into her bornal. Then she stared at the doctor. Eronildes’ eyes were large and wide behind his thick lenses. Luzia thought of Antônio’s binoculars—when she looked through them, everything became tangible and easy to reach, even when it wasn’t. Perhaps that was the way Eronildes saw things.
Leave
, he’d urged her, thinking it was a simple act. Eronildes believed that leaving Antônio meant she loved her child. And if she didn’t leave, the opposite was true.