The Seamstress (66 page)

The farther they moved from the São Francisco River, the more homes the cangaceiros found abandoned. Sometimes entire towns were empty. Luzia and the cangaceiros searched houses and storerooms for food. One afternoon, inside a house she believed to be vacant, Luzia came across a woman.

The hem of her dress was shredded. Her arms were as thin as branches, the bones of the elbows exaggerated knobs. Her cheeks were slack but her nose was wide and regal. At first, she didn’t see the cangaceiros standing just outside the house’s doorway. The woman’s focus was on the ground.

“Get up!” she yelled. “Get up, damn you!”

A wall obscured Luzia’s view; she couldn’t see the object of the woman’s fury. Luzia thought it was an animal—a pet dog perhaps. The woman took a breath, as if collecting her strength. She knelt and shook whatever was on the ground before her. Dust rose. Luzia stepped closer, craning her neck. She saw a tiny, sandaled foot peeking from behind the wall. Luzia entered the house. The men followed.

The child—Luzia could not tell if it was a boy or a girl—wore only stained shorts. Its head was too large for its body. Its mouth was open and its ribs protruded, making it resemble a plucked bird. Its eyes were closed, as if sleeping peacefully despite the woman’s yelling. She wasn’t scared or surprised to see the cangaceiros. She simply stared at the men and swayed, as if she might tip over. When Luzia uncapped a canteen, the woman’s stare instantly changed. It was no longer dazed, but intent.

She would kill me for this brown water,
Luzia thought, holding tight to her canteen. “Step aside,” she said.

The woman scraped her dry tongue across her lips. “My girl,” she croaked, pointing to the child. “My girl.”

Luzia knelt. She slid her crooked arm beneath the child’s neck. The girl’s head was limp and very heavy, but fit perfectly into the bend of Luzia’s locked arm. It seemed that this was what her arm had been made for, this was the purpose it was meant to serve: cradling, not shooting or sewing. Luzia felt something jerk inside her—that thread, that inexplicable connection, had been stifled but was not gone. She stared at the limp child. Shoving her canteen between her knees, Luzia used two fingers to open the child’s mouth wide. The girl’s lips were scaly, her tongue gray tinged. Luzia held the canteen to her mouth. The water inside was brown and sandy. Days before, Ponta Fina had found an old well and after he dug one meter deep into its sandy base, a viscous liquid had bubbled up.

The child did not swallow. Water pooled in her small mouth, then dribbled out, streaking her neck and bare chest. Luzia massaged her throat. She lifted the child’s head higher and poured again.

“Drink!” she muttered.

Baiano stooped beside her. He removed his hat, then pressed two dark fingers to the child’s neck. He shook his head. Luzia ignored him. She gave the child more water. Baiano put a hand on her shoulder. The whites of his eyes were yellowed, as if his dark irises were leaking their color.

“Don’t waste it, Mãe,” he said. “The mother’s alive. She needs the water now.”

The woman looked desperately between the canteen and her child, as if she had only enough energy to reach for one and didn’t know which to choose. Her mouth twisted. Baiano moved behind her. He held her thin arms.

“Ready, Mãe,” he said.

Luzia stood. If given the canteen, the woman would empty it. Luzia would have to feed her the water little by little. The woman took long, noisy gulps. When she tried to move her arms and clasp the canteen, Baiano held her back. Beneath the woman’s worn, nearly transparent smock Luzia saw long and shriveled breasts—a mother’s breasts, stretched by feedings.

“I gave her all the food I had,” the woman said once she’d finished drinking. She addressed Luzia, but it was Baiano who nodded in response to her words, as if he and the woman were having a private talk.

“Grown people, we can tell ourselves we aren’t hungry. We hear the voice inside, but don’t speak to it,” the woman said. “We can shut it out. Kids can’t. They can’t be tricked.”

Luzia nodded. The woman’s eyes were glassy, her focus far away.

“The more you give, the more they want,” she continued. “I gave her our last bit of rapadura. I told her she had to hold it in her belly and remember it was there, like a present. A present her mamãe gave her. Three minutes later she was crying, saying she was hungry. God help me; I wanted to hit her.”

The woman coughed and lowered her head.

“Feed her,” Luzia ordered.

Baiano obeyed, opening his bornal and removing a sliver of dried beef. The meat had a green sheen but the woman eagerly accepted it. She chewed quickly and with her eyes closed. Luzia was suddenly ashamed to look at her; in the face of this refugee woman’s grief, Luzia felt relieved. She wouldn’t have to watch Expedito grow skinny, or endure his cries for food. Her boy had escaped the drought.

“What’s your grace?” Luzia asked.

“Maria,” the woman replied. “Maria das Dores.”

Food made the woman more alert. Her eyes widened as she regarded the cangaceiros around her. Slowly, she edged away from Baiano and Luzia.

“Don’t brand me,” she said, clasping her hands. “Have mercy.”

“Brand you?” Luzia said.

The woman nodded. “I know that’s what you do. I met a girl with a brand on her face. The skin was burnt right through. She said a cangaceiro—a big-eared one—did that to her.”

The woman scanned the group, looking for such a man.

“Big ears?” Luzia said. “What does he call himself?”

“The Hawk. They say he’s got a bandaged arm. He has a small group, and he’s been branding women. Only women. Especially the ones with short hair. He burns their faces, or stomachs, or chests. Like they’re cattle.”

“You saw him?” Luzia asked.

The woman shook her head. “I only saw the girl—the branded one. Her cheek was so swollen, she couldn’t see out of her eye.”

“Could you read the brand?”

“Can’t read. But I remember the look of it.” The woman knelt and then extended her hand. In the dirt before her, she drew shaky letters:
L E

A warm spurt of bile rose in Luzia’s throat. It burned like xique-xique juice. Little Ear was alive, and claiming to be the Hawk.

“We don’t brand,” Luzia said. “That cangaceiro’s a fake.”

“A traitor,” Ponta Fina corrected her. Next to him, Baby shook her head.

The cangaceiros buried the child’s body deep, so vultures wouldn’t claim it. Ponta Fina made a cross out of two sticks and tied it together with his subcaptain’s scarf. They’d passed dozens of similar graves during their walks. At each one, Luzia and the cangaceiros had stopped and made the sign of the cross. Luzia had done this out of habit and also superstition—she didn’t want to anger the dead—but she’d never allowed herself to wonder about who filled those graves. After burying the little girl, Luzia was forced to think about all of the dead they’d passed. Who were those buried people? What were their names, their occupations? And if the drought worsened, would there be such unmarked graves for her men, for herself? Would they be so easily forgotten?

When they left the gravesite, Maria das Dores went with them. The men called her “Maria Magra” because of her thin frame, and they laughed at this nickname because they were all skinny; even Inteligente had lost his bulk.

“Take this,” Luzia said and handed Maria Magra her canteen.

“She’ll share mine,” Baiano replied.

That night at camp, Luzia gave Baiano and Maria Magra the same lecture she’d given Ponta Fina and Baby. After prayers Luzia made both couples kneel before her. Antônio had taught her that ceremony was important—it made insubstantial things seem real. So Luzia took off her shawl and wrapped it around the couple’s hands, binding them together. She made the men and women switch shoes. When they switched back, Luzia declared them married and Maria Magra became the third woman admitted into the cangaceiro group. Luzia sensed that she would not be the last.

4

The Great Western cargo cars carried stacks of burlap bags, all stamped with red lettering that read
STATE OF PERNAMBUCO
. When the cangaceiros sliced open the bags, only manioc flour spilled into their hands. In another car there were blocks of rapadura and strips of dried meat as thin and tough as tanned hides. Gomes had sent food that could be consumed immediately, without water or heat. Luzia and the cangaceiros understood this logic, but Gomes’s good sense made their dreams of elaborate meals seem silly and they hated him for this. When Baiano and Inteligente found stacks of flyers bearing Gomes’s photograph and the title “Father of the Poor,” the men took turns urinating on the president’s likeness.

Trains were difficult to stop but not impossible. The first Great Western the cangaceiros ransacked had stopped of its own accord, to replace conductors and release passengers at the halfway point between Caruaru and Rio Branco. The station was called Belo Jardim and, when the train arrived, few people exited there; the drought compelled people to leave the scrub, not enter it. Luzia and her men staked out the station. Only five soldiers guarded the government shipment, but they were well armed. The men stepped off the train to smoke and relieve themselves. They walked to the side of the station, spread their legs, and unbuttoned their trousers. Luzia whistled. Her cangaceiros fired. Distracted, the monkeys were easy targets. Some didn’t have time to turn around, and they slumped against the wet sections of the station wall. While Ponta Fina and Inteligente stripped the dead soldiers of their weapons, Luzia and the other cangaceiros entered the train.

Luzia didn’t bother opening the safe or robbing the passenger cars: she could not eat mil-réis or drink gold jewelry. The real treasure was food, no matter how basic. The cangaceiros heaved supplies from the train. Word of the hijacking spread into the town of Belo Jardim and a crowd quickly formed.

The residents of Belo Jardim confirmed that Little Ear had survived. They told Luzia that he’d been in their town a few weeks before, recruiting men by claiming to be the Hawk. Little Ear’s cangaceiros were more brutal than Antônio or Luzia would have allowed. As punishment for wearing revealing dresses or for having short hair, Little Ear branded young women. He killed men for no good reason. Luzia knew that this would hurt her group—random violence made cangaceiros unpopular at a time when they most needed popular support. Little Ear’s actions would throw people into the arms of Gomes, who’d begun to call himself “Father of the Poor.”

Then I will be their mother,
Luzia thought.

“Take only what we need,” she ordered Ponta Fina as he unloaded the train. “We’re giving the rest away.”

After receiving the food, the men and women of Belo Jardim kissed the cangaceiros’ hands. They praised the Seamstress. They offered the group shelter and protection. Luzia raised her hands to quiet the crowd.

“Remember,” Luzia yelled, “the Hawk and the Seamstress did this for you. When you find us, you find protection. That other group is a fake—they claim to be cangaceiros, but they are vagabundos.”

Weeks later, there were more trains, more grateful crowds. Luzia and her men piled dead cactus trunks, branches, and brush on train tracks. When she saw dark puffs of smoke rise from a train in the distance, Luzia lit the mound on fire. Conductors stopped their trains and got out to examine the obstruction, and this was when Luzia’s cangaceiros moved in.

The trains carried newspapers as well as food. Soldiers and relief workers in Gomes’s drought camps wanted to know what was happening on the coast. Gomes had approved the nation’s new electoral code. It created a secret ballot and a federal agency called the Justiça Eleitoral to supervise elections. The code also gave literate women the right to vote. There were a few editorials and articles about this, but for the most part women’s suffrage was overshadowed by the drought. Despite Gomes’s relief camps, refugees still crowded the capital. Luzia read editorials advocating a mass relocation of backlands residents. “The land is too poor,” one article proclaimed, “and daily existence too precarious to allow Brazilian citizens to live in such a place.”

There were calls to forcibly move the scrub’s residents to the south, to work in São Paulo factories. Gomes agreed with the migration of workers but did not condone abandoning the scrubland. Antônio had been right—Gomes would invade the caatinga and attempt to claim it.

“Brazil,” Gomes said, “is a great body composed of many parts. Each is vital. None can be abandoned and allowed to become a refuge for criminals and anarchists!”

Luzia tried to concentrate on articles about the roadway and President Gomes’s plans for Brazil, but her attention was always diverted to the Society Section. The
Diário
printed extensive coverage of a charity trip, to the Rio Branco Relief Camp, organized by Mrs. Degas Coelho. The final photograph of the trip showed the delegation just before its triumphant return to Recife. They posed on the Rio Branco train platform. Mrs. Degas Coelho—the charity mission’s muse—stood in the center, surrounded by men and one elderly woman. Emília held a baby in her arms.

“If we could all save one poor soul,” a journalist wrote, “by giving a child otherwise doomed to ignorance a chance at education and civilization, we would solve our social woes.”

Within weeks, the Society Section reported that Mrs. Degas Coelho had started another trend, one that had nothing to do with fashion. Other wealthy Recife women wanted to rescue their own drought babies. There were unsavory stories of refugee women being paid for their babies, while others had their infants snatched by servants who wanted to please their mistresses.

Luzia couldn’t finish these articles. She thought of those Blue Party women she’d robbed years ago, when Antônio was still alive. She recalled their unnaturally white faces, dusted with powder. She recalled their shrill voices. They’d been at Luzia’s mercy back then, on the cattle trail, and she’d been cruel to them. Now her boy was among such women, and he was at their mercy. He’d have Emília though, and Luzia comforted herself by thinking that her sister, her blood, wouldn’t treat Expedito as a “foundling,” but as a son. Even this thought made Luzia’s chest ache and her hands curl into fists—she wanted her boy to be fervently loved, but she didn’t want him to love Emília back with the same fervor, the way one would love a mother.