The Seamstress (7 page)

Luzia cut holes into the mangoes’ tops. She handed one to Emília. They sucked out the fruits’ insides, smashing the soft mounds between their fingers like bread dough. When they finished, Luzia threw down her flaccid fruit. She lifted her skirt. Slowly, she untied the drawstring of her knee-length knickers and shifted from side to side on the tree branch, pushing her underpants around her ankles. Then, Luzia gripped the branch above her. She leaned her body back. Emília saw a neat streak of liquid fall from between her sister’s legs and onto the ground below. It bubbled into the orange earth.

“Do it, Mília,” Luzia said. “I dare you.”

Emília could not bring herself to do such a thing. She could not take her underpants off in front of her little sister, embarrassed by the curling black hairs that had begun to grow on that part of her body. She heard a rustling in the coffee trees—saw the leaves ripple in waves.

“Someone’s coming!” Emília hissed.

Luzia rushed to pull up her knickers. She took both arms from the branch above her. In an instant, Emília saw her sister’s face change from a look of surprise to one of dread—her eyebrows furrowing and teeth clenching as if prepared for the impact. Luzia tipped backward.

“Luzia!” Emília shouted. She grabbed for her sister. Their fingers touched, sticky and wet from mango juice, then moved apart.

Luzia’s head thudded against two thick branches. She flopped onto the earth, exhaling a small sigh before closing her eyes. Her left arm was twisted at a horrendous angle beneath her body. She looked like one of their rag dolls—her limbs splayed and limp. Emília wrapped her arms around the tree’s trunk and scrambled down, scraping her knees and the pads of her hands. Zefinha’s neighbor appeared from the coffee trees, ready to yell at the girls for stealing his fruit. His scowl disappeared when he saw Luzia.

Emília knelt and quickly pulled up Luzia’s underpants. “Pick her up!” she ordered the old farmer, her voice sounding unfamiliar to her, too high pitched and insistent.

Aunt Sofia covered her mouth when she saw them emerge from the trees: Emília shouting orders, Zefinha’s neighbor wide-eyed and frantic, Luzia limp in his arms. They laid her on the kitchen table. Blood leaked from a wound on the back of her head.

“I found her like this,” the neighbor said, holding his dark and calloused hands together as if in prayer. “They were in my tree.”

“We’ll put her hands in cold water,” Zefinha said, then ran and filled two clay bowls. Luzia’s hands hung limply inside them. Her left arm was twisted elbow side up, as if it had been sewn on backward. Aunt Sofia stroked Luzia’s hair away from her forehead. She did not wake. They poured water over her face, wafted a bottle of strong vinegar under her nose, pinched her cheeks and pulled her hair, but Luzia did not move.

“Her breath,” Aunt Sofia whispered, “is so shallow.” She looked intently at Luzia’s chest. “I can barely see it rise.”

Zefinha lifted Luzia’s head gingerly and slipped a towel beneath it to soak up the blood. She faced her son. “Ride to town,” she ordered. “Get the midwife.”

Dona Augusta, the local midwife, was the closest thing Taquaritinga had to a trained doctor. Aunt Sofia fell to her knees. Everyone followed. The dirt floor felt cold against Emília’s knees. The neighbor shifted next to her, curling the brim of his hat in his hands. He smelled of onions and dirt. Emília felt dizzy. She shuffled away from him and clasped her hands together.

Aunt Sofia recited a series of prayers to the Virgin. They opened their eyes after each one, hoping to see Luzia stir. When she did not, they quickly lowered their heads again.

“My Santo Expedito,” Aunt Sofia called out, her voice shaking and grave, “guardian of all just and urgent causes, help us in this moment of affliction and despair. You, the warrior saint. You, the saint of all afflictions. You, the saint of all impossible causes. Protect my niece. Help her; give her strength. Don’t let her go to that dark place. My Santo Expedito, she will be eternally grateful and will carry your name for the rest of her life.” Aunt Sofia stood. She put her head to Luzia’s chest. “I can barely hear the beating,” she said.

“We should get a candle,” the neighbor said.

Aunt Sofia gripped her rosary tighter. The deep, V-shaped creases that ran across her forehead twitched. “No,” she said. “She’s still alive.”

Zefinha placed her hand on her friend’s arm. “Sofia,” she whispered, “her breath is so faint. What if she doesn’t wake? She’ll need that light.”

Emília clasped her hands tighter. There was a metallic taste in her mouth. Her spit felt viscous and thick. She remembered when Cosmo Ferreira, a local farmer, was bucked by his donkey one Saturday during the market. Aunt Sofia had tried to cover Emília’s eyes but she squirmed and saw everything. His face had been smashed and he lay twisted and bloody near the donkey corral. A storekeeper put a lit banana frond in the farmer’s limp hands so that the light could guide his departing soul into heaven and guard against the darkness that surrounds death.

“Let me get a candle,” Aunt Sofia wept. “Just in case.”

Emília held her hands together so tightly her fingers tingled. She prayed to all of the saints she could remember; prayed to Jesus and the Holy Ghost and to the soul of her mother. Over and over she prayed, until the words of her prayers sounded foreign and meaningless, like the nonsense songs she and Luzia had sung when they were very small.

Zefinha produced a thick white candle. She lit it with a piece of kindling from the cook fire. Aunt Sofia arranged Luzia’s limp right hand onto her chest and wrapped the candle in her small fingers. Then, their aunt moved the twisted left arm. Luzia’s eyes fluttered open. She scanned the room as if lost, then looked down at her arm. Her mouth twisted in pain.

“Ave Maria!” Aunt Sofia cried. “Thank God!”

Luzia sat up. The candle fell to floor. Zefinha quickly stamped it out.

“It hurts,” Luzia croaked, her voice hoarse, the back of her hair matted with blood. She slid from the table. “It hurts,” she said, louder this time, glaring at Emília.

Emília felt trapped by her sister’s stare. There was pain, confusion, a wild anger in Luzia’s eyes. Emília saw blame there, too. She looked at her clasped hands and pretended to pray. Luzia cried. She ran about the kitchen, finally dunking her broken arm into a water jug beside Zefinha’s stove.

Her son returned minutes later. His horse’s velvety nostrils were large and circular, opening and closing with its deep breaths. The midwife was nowhere to be found, so he’d brought Padre Otto. The priest sat precariously behind Zefinha’s boy, his bald head shining with sweat, his black pants hiked up, revealing white ankles. He crossed himself when he saw Luzia, who stood with her arm in the water jug. Her face was dangerously pale. Zefinha’s son raced back to town to find the bonesetter.

“What happened here?” Padre Otto asked.

“She was almost gone,” Aunt Sofia whispered to the priest. “It’s a miracle, isn’t it, Father? She came back to us. A miracle.”

Aunt Sofia explained the accident and Padre Otto nodded solemnly. He did not take his eyes from Luzia’s. When Aunt Sofia finished, the room grew quiet. Padre Otto took Luzia’s chin between his thick forefinger and thumb.

“Miracles are rare, young lady,” he said. “They are gifts. Don’t fall from any more trees.”

Emília knelt, forgotten in the corner of the whitewashed kitchen, like a stranger bearing witness to a private family event. She felt a cold certainty prick her, as steely and sharp as Aunt Sofia’s sewing needles: this was what her life would be like, living with a sister who had come back from the brink of death.

7

Emília knotted the scarf more tightly over her hair. The arid country below the mountain was hot and dusty. They crossed paths with a caravan of donkeys. The animals carried kerosene tins and crates of soaps, hair tonics, and other packaged goods from Limoeiro. Barefoot children ran beside the trail. They kicked up dust. Emília closed her eyes.

Professor Célio had not written her a note. In the past, he’d scribbled a response on a slip of newspaper print torn from his Singer manual. After their lesson, Emília had lingered at her machine, straightening her chair and brushing away loose threads while Luzia waited impatiently by the door. Professor Célio stayed behind his desk, answering the other students’ questions. It was the scarf, Emília concluded. Before copying the
Fon Fon
models, she’d had curling black hair that she tied back with a ribbon. Now she looked like a farmer’s wife. Next time she would disobey her aunt. She’d set her curls with goma water to keep them from flattening beneath the scarf, and she’d take it off as soon as she entered the Singer building.

“Look,” Luzia said.

Emília kept her eyes closed. During their trips home, Luzia pointed out the same boulders—rocks so weathered by rain and time that they looked soft and almost porous. People had recently whitewashed them with political slogans:
Vote # 25, Celestino Gomes!
Luzia hated the signs. Emília did not know who the man was—politicians were strange, phantom figures whose crackling voices occasionally appeared in radio broadcasts or whose names were painted onto rocks or fences and endorsed by local colonels. Only literate men could vote. The few who fit this profile in Taquaritinga rarely saw a ballot; Colonel Pereira filled them out as he saw fit. Luzia swore that if she were a man, she’d never support the candidate who ruined boulders with his slogans. Emília ignored her; she liked the painted rocks. They added freshness to the brown barrenness of the countryside. To Emília, they were a sign of civilization among the cracked mud houses and tightly bound goat fences, whose constant repetition made her clutch her scarf and then her stomach, where she felt a fluttering, an awful tightening of her insides that she could only identify as disgust.

“Look,” Luzia insisted.

Her sister’s elbow jabbed her ribs. Emília opened her eyes. They’d already passed the painted boulders. Four figures blocked the road.

“Whoa!” their elderly chaperone yelled. He held the mules’ reins in one hand and felt beneath the bottom of his shirt with the other, revealing a shabby knife holster. There were thefts along the roadways—groups of cangaceiros or even lone outlaws sometimes took merchandise and money. Some people in town lived in fear of cangaceiros, even though Taquaritinga hadn’t been attacked in Emília’s short lifetime. Dona Ester, the barber’s wife, insisted that the cangaceiros were not heroes, as some claimed, but hoodlums and killers of the worst kind. Repentista singers, who passed through town wearing threadbare suits and carrying polished violas, sang of the cangacieros’ cruelty: how they burned down entire towns, killed whole families, slaughtered livestock. Then, immediately afterward, the same men sang of the cangacieros’ mercy and generosity; how the outlaws threw gold pieces and left treasure chests behind for kind hosts.

Dona Teresa, an elderly woman who sold chickens and cinnamon sticks at the Saturday market, believed that the cangaceiros were simply poor farmhands who got fed up with the colonels’ petty territory wars. The old woman’s nephew—a sweet boy, she insisted—had become a cangaceiro to avenge the death of his sweetheart at the hands of an enemy colonel. This was a common story. There were three kinds of cangaceiros: those who entered for revenge, those who entered to escape revenge, and those who were simply thieves. Emília believed that the first two eventually had to become the third kind; they could not live by scavenging in the scrub like animals. Still, in the backlands, revenge was sacred. It was a duty, an honor. Even those who feared the cangaceiros as thieves respected them as men. “Cangaceiros don’t bow their heads to the colonels,” Zé Muela, a shopkeeper, often whispered when he was sure Colonel Pereira was far from his store. “They handle things. They don’t cross their legs like women.”

Some of the girls Emília had gone to school with believed cangaceiros were romantic, even handsome. Emília disagreed. Whatever their motivations, cangaceiros were those very farm boys she disliked, except worse—they were made bolder by guns and prestige. They were, Emília thought, like the band of feral dogs that prowled Taquaritinga each evening. Once docile, they’d grown wild and rabid—pilfering chickens, snapping the necks of baby goats, roaming gloomily through town with their bloodied coats and awful stench. They were unpredictable, ungrateful mutts that would turn on each other if given the chance. Some of her neighbors felt pity and fed the dogs. Emília preferred to keep her distance.

As the mules slowed, the men drew closer. They wore flat-brimmed leather hats and green uniforms. There was so much brown below the mountain that the uniforms looked vibrant, alive. Their chaperone moved his hand away from his holster.

“Checkpoint,” he murmured. “Monkeys.”

Emília had seen a soldier only once before, during a visit to Caruaru, where she and Luzia observed a group of them drinking beer and catcalling women. Caruaru was the largest metropolis in the interior of the state, but even there real officials of the law were rare. Colonel Pereira complained about their current governor who, he said, had bribed poor city boys, given them ancient weapons, and proclaimed them soldiers before sending them to posts in the countryside. There, the soldiers made more trouble than good. They were boisterous one moment and vicious the next, as unruly and cruel as a band of cangaceiros. People in the interior had nicknamed them monkeys.

The donkeys slowed. Luzia straightened. Emília tightened her scarf. The soldier held a thick-barreled rifle across his body, ready to aim. The gun was scratched, its wooden butt cracked. The other soldiers did not have weapons, but stood with their feet spread apart, blocking the mules’ path. The armed soldier surveyed Emília and Luzia.

“Your business?” he asked.

“Sewing lessons,” Luzia responded.

The soldier nodded. “No chaperone?”

“I’m their chaperone,” the old man said, removing his hat. “I work for Colonel Carlos Pereira.”

The soldier shook his head. “And where is this colonel from? There are so many around here it’s hard for me to keep track.” The other soldiers laughed.