The Seamstress (71 page)
3
In July 1933 the newly elected First National Assembly appointed Celestino Gomes to serve another term as president of the republic. For weeks after the appointment, troops in the Northeast complained about the endless drought and about their pursuit of the Hawk and the Seamstress.
“The cangaceiros have food and women,” one soldier said to a
Diário
reporter. “Those girls—the cangaceiras—are so young, like little lambs! When we find their abandoned camps, I swear, I can smell the girls who were there. We soldiers have nothing but empty stomachs, torn clothes, and late salaries. We’re like animals abandoned by fortune.”
Dr. Duarte countered reports of the cangaceiros’ dominance by insisting that the government could not abandon the backlands; this would only allow the cangaceiros to gain favor in residents’ hearts. Roadway jobs, telegraph stations, new schools, and charitable efforts by private citizens—like Emília’s clothing shipments—showed backlanders that the capital had not forgotten them during the drought.
Emília and her seamstresses continued to make clothes for the drought victims. Once a month, a team of movers hauled the crates of clothing to a government warehouse. Emília insisted on accompanying Degas and Dr. Duarte to this secret depot. There, she watched workers repack her charity shipments. Guns and ammunition were tucked between the tunics, trousers, skirts, and baby jumpers. There were new Winchester rifles, a German shipment of Mauser pistols, and several Brownings, all meant to replace the troops’ ancient and clunky rifles.
Because the cargo bore Emília’s name, it wasn’t attacked. One week before the first gun shipment left Recife on a Great Western train, Emília appeared in the Society Section announcing her charity shipment’s departure. Emília had stopped seeking reporters’ attention but, during social events, Degas dragged the men to her. In her most unenthusiastic voice, Emília told reporters about her charity work. She did not smile in photographs and she’d stopped bringing Expedito to events, hoping his absence would create suspicion in the Seamstress’s mind.
Expedito learned to walk with firm steps, pounding his tiny feet into the floor. He tried to pick up the jaboti turtles, grabbing the lips of their shells and heaving the animals into his arms. He liked to creep into the kitchen and hide in the pantry. At first, the Coelho maids screamed in fright when they found him there, in the darkness, his eyes wide and shining. Slowly, they got used to his presence. They grew to like it. When Dona Dulce wasn’t looking, the maids slipped Expedito bites of cake or spoonfuls of jam.
Miss Emília’s boy,
they called him at first, but soon Dr. Duarte gave him a nickname that stuck.
“Where did he get such seriousness?” Dr. Duarte laughed. “He looks like a colonel. I’m waiting for him to put a pipe in his mouth and denounce the government!”
After that, everyone called him Colonel, except for Dona Dulce; she had her own names for Expedito. She called him a “little barbarian,” and a “terror.” He left fingerprints on her varnished tables and glass cabinets. He secretly plucked the stuffing from her throw pillows and hid it in the courtyard.
He was quiet but not timid. When visitors coddled him or pinched his cheek, he stared sternly at them and walked away, to Emília. “How sweet,” the uneasy visitor often said, “he’s shy.” But it wasn’t shyness. Expedito never stood behind Emília. He never sought protection in her skirts. He stood beside her, clasping her fingers tightly in his small hand.
Dr. Duarte admired the boy’s pluck, his quiet assertiveness. Each week, he took the Colonel to the Madalena Bird Fair and laughed as Expedito poked his fingers through the cages or fed banana slices directly into a parrot’s beak. Emília worried constantly. She feared the fair’s birds would peck Expedito’s hands, or the jaboti turtles would snap at his fingers.
His eyes were dark brown with streaks of green in them. His jaw was square and set. He rarely smiled. Even when Dr. Duarte gave him a stuffed toy or a model plane, Expedito stayed serious. Only when Emília squealed at the touch of the jaboti turtles that he plopped in her lap, or when she tickled him before bed, did Expedito smile. Those smiles—so sweet and rare—were like gifts. Like secrets shared between them.
The first shipment of guns bore no results. After the second shipment, however, the Coelhos received a late-night phone call. Emília heard the distant ringing, but didn’t wake until she heard Dr. Duarte in the hallway, pounding on Degas’ bedroom door.
“Wake up!” her father-in-law called.
Expedito shifted in his crib. Emília quickly rose and opened her door. Dr. Duarte paced the hallway, his white hair tousled, his dress shirt untucked. When Degas finally opened his door, Dr. Duarte skittered toward it.
“Get dressed,” he ordered breathlessly. “Drive me to the Criminology Institute.”
“Why?” Degas asked.
Dr. Duarte waved his arms. “I don’t trust my night vision, and I’m too anxious to heed road signs.”
“What’s so urgent?” Degas persisted.
“A specimen is what!” Dr. Duarte said. “There was a skirmish, a roadway attack. The troops won and brought one back for me.”
“One what?”
“A cangaceira!” Dr. Duarte yelled.
Emília held the doorknob. Her knees wobbled and she felt like Expedito’s wood-and-string dolls, whose legs gave out at the press of a button. Behind her, she heard the boy moving in his crib. From the hall she heard the faraway scream of a kettle.
“Your mother’s making coffee,” Dr. Duarte said. “Hurry along.”
Degas stared across the dimly lit hall. He caught sight of Emília.
“A living specimen?” he asked, turning to his father.
Dr. Duarte shook his head. “I’ve begged those troop captains to hold a living one for me, but it’s futile. You think they listen to my telegrams? They’re half mad themselves with hunger and envy. They’ve sent a cranium. At least they had the sense to preserve it in a kerosene tin, otherwise it would be unrecognizable.”
“Whose is it?” Degas asked, glancing again at Emília.
“I don’t know!” Dr. Duarte said. “That’s why I’m in a rush.”
He followed Degas’ gaze and looked over his shoulder, at Emília. Seeing her, Dr. Duarte smiled.
“I’m sorry to wake you,” he said. “Business matters.”
Emília held so tightly to the doorknob that her hand cramped. She knew she had to smile back, to accept her father-in-law’s apology and insist she hadn’t been disturbed, but Emília’s face felt rigid, her mouth unable to open. Only her hands seemed to work; they slammed the bedroom door shut.
Emília heard the front gate creak open and the Chrysler’s engine sputter. Her stomach knotted and cramped. She wanted a cup of water or chamomile tea, but she couldn’t face Dona Dulce in the kitchen. She stayed in her room, staring at Expedito in his crib. For a few minutes the boy stared back, then he fell asleep again.
Hours later Emília heard the car return. She left her room and waited in the dark hallway. Degas padded up the stairs. When he saw Emília in her white nightgown, he jumped.
“Osh!” he cried. “You scared me.”
Emília’s mouth felt dry. If she spoke, she would ask only one question, and she was afraid of Degas’ answer. Afraid, also, of what her hands might do to him in response. Degas shook his head.
“It wasn’t her,” he said
Emília closed her eyes. “How do you know?”
“The soldiers sent a note along. And the head was too small. None of the features matched the photograph.”
“Who was it then?”
“I don’t know. A girl. One of the wives.”
Emília covered her face with her hands. She was relieved but also unsettled. She imagined the Mermaid Girl, forever trapped in a glass jar. The guns that had killed that young cangaceira were the same ones Emília had allowed into her charitable shipments. Degas tentatively patted her arm.
“They bring it upon themselves, Emília. It’s not my fault. It’s not yours.”
Emília returned to her room. There, she lifted Expedito from his crib and into her bed. She examined his tiny, clenched fists; his long eyelashes; his soft feet.
There would be more gun shipments hidden in the folds of Emília’s charity clothes, and afterward, more specimens brought back to the coast. Emília would have to stand in that dark hallway again and again, waiting for Degas to tell her if Dr. Duarte had received his prize specimen. Emília felt a pinch between her eyes. Her throat tightened. She hated that Seamstress! Why didn’t the woman heed her warnings, give up, and disappear into the caatinga? Instead the Seamstress fought, making more headlines and making Emília’s secret more serious. If she wasn’t careful, or if Degas decided to open his mouth, Expedito himself could become a specimen. But if the Seamstress was caught, then the road could be finished, news reports would dwindle, and the cangaceiros would be forgotten. It would be better for all of them if the Seamstress died.
Emília covered her eyes. She tried to breathe through her mouth, to muffle the gurgles of her clogged nose. Despite her efforts to stay quiet, Expedito woke. He stared at her with the expression children use when they see an adult crying—a mix of confusion, worry, and reproach. In that moment, Emília saw Luzia staring at her from across their pedal-operated Singers, chastising her for passing notes to Professor Célio. She pressed her hand to Expedito’s face.
The Seamstress was a criminal, but somewhere inside that woman was Luzia. And Luzia had sent Emília this boy, the greatest gift she’d ever received. Her sister had trusted Emília not only with Expedito’s life but also with his memories. Emília would shape his idea of his real mother. And the way Emília remembered her was not as a cangaceira, but as Luzia: tall, long-haired, and proud. Awkwardly dancing alone in their childhood bedroom. Feeding the guinea hens in Aunt Sofia’s yard. Praying in her saints’ closet.
Emília couldn’t prevent those armed charity shipments, but she could continue her subtle warnings. She would even offer clearer messages, if given the chance. If she didn’t try to warn her sister, then she would be helping Dr. Duarte get his specimen. And when it came time to tell Expedito about his mother’s death, how could Emília face him? How could she explain that she’d helped doom Luzia?
1
N
ecks were like the branches of caatinga trees: thin but tough. There were tendons, muscles, vertebrae, and other sinewy structures that made the cutting difficult. There were differences in men, too. Some necks were thicker than others. Luzia found herself evaluating men by their necks: which would be hard to slice, which would be easy. These thoughts came so naturally they scared her at first, and she had to focus on the fact that if Gomes’s soldiers caught her they would take her head. In fact, they’d do worse—they’d disgrace her first. And they would be rewarded for their efforts; Gomes offered a hefty price for the Seamstress’s skull. Tenente Higino also gave soldiers an incentive: any man who caught a cangaceiro or cangaceira could loot whatever was found on the bodies. Luzia found a letter of thanks printed in the
Diário
. It was from a soldier who’d recently shot one of her men.
“I’ve got plenty of gold necklaces and rings for my wife and daughters,” the soldier wrote. “Praise God and Gomes! I found enough money in the thief ’s bornal to fix my mother’s house!”
Because of this, Luzia enforced a new rule among her group: any soldiers who were caught, even dead ones, would have their heads removed and their possessions looted.
“Gomes can’t boss us,” Luzia told her cangaceiros after each raid. “We are our own masters.”
At night, when she couldn’t sleep, she recalled the bulandeiras of cotton. Before the drought, those mills worked at a breakneck pace, each operated by two strong mules. The animals were hitched to the mill wheel and they moved in great circles, pulling the wheel round and round. At the end of the day, the mules couldn’t stop their circles. They were addled by the turning of the wheel, by the circular motion of the mill, and they bucked when workers tried to unhitch them. The mules became their own masters. Trapped by their own desperate need to keep going, they worked until they fell down dead.
Luzia understood those animals. Roadway raids led to newspaper articles, which led to a higher value on the cangaceiros’ heads, which led to more monkeys sent into the scrub, which made the cangaceiros indignant and led to more raids. The Seamstress and her cangaceiros were caught in a great circle of their own making, and they would push themselves until death.
Each cangaceiro head that Gomes’s soldiers removed supposedly belonged to either the Hawk or the Seamstress. Until the craniums arrived in Recife, bobbing in kerosene tins, and the skull scientists there declared the specimens belonged to other, unknown cangaceiros. Or until Luzia sent a telegram to the capital after an unsuccessful roadway attack or relief-camp raid and proved her existence. The telegrams were signed, “Captain Antônio Teixeira and Wife.” Each time officials tried to confirm who had sent the messages, they could not. The telegraph stations had been burned; the telegraphers trapped inside.
In those telegraph stations and in the roadway camps and trains the cangaceiros looted, Luzia found newspapers. The latest
Diário
headline read:
Captured!
The Hawk Caught at Last!
Luzia found a photograph on the second page, with a warning above it advising ladies not to look. There was a wooden ammunition box and around it, a pile of half-moon hats and embroidered bornais. On top of the box, set in a neat row, were heads. Their hair was wild and long. Their faces looked fatter, the jowls loosened and spread without necks to hold them. Their mouths were open and their eyes closed, as if in a deep sleep. Only Little Ear’s eyes were partially open, as if he’d blinked during the photograph. The craniums were taken to Recife, the paper said, to the Criminology Institute where they would be measured and studied. Little Ear had pretended to be the Hawk and he’d paid for his charade. Luzia cut out the photograph and slipped it into her bornal for later use. She would have to prove Gomes’s skull scientists wrong; the Hawk was not dead and neither was the Seamstress.
At the roadway camp near Rio Branco, workers were separated into three crews: one to hack trees and cacti, one to pull out the trunks, and one to pound the earth flat. Oxen pulled carts over the flattened dirt, their hooves crushing rocks and making it even flatter. Each time she saw the land wiped bare, Luzia felt heaviness in her stomach. She felt as if those uprooted trees, those rocks, those hacked agave spears had all settled within her, weighing her down with their deaths. She understood Antônio’s love for the scrubland: the birds, the sands, the rocks, the cacti, and the secret springs didn’t look to the Seamstress for guidance or leadership. The caatinga asked nothing of Luzia. And Gomes with his roadway wanted to take this, her only comfort.
Near the construction site were rows of workers’ tents. The arrangement resembled Gomes’s relief camps except that there were no children or wives. Guarding the roadway camp was a pack of skinny dogs chained to scrub trees. The mutts sniffed the air. Luzia and her group crouched downwind, so the breeze wouldn’t carry their scent to the dogs. Luzia watched the camp through Antônio’s old binoculars. Near her, Ponta Fina peered through a German spyglass he’d taken from a roadway engineer months before. Behind them, the other cangaceiros waited.
Clouds of dust rose from the worksite. The roadway men were coated with this dirt, making their skin gray and dull, like stone. At dusk, a foreman stopped the roadwork with a whistle. Oxen were freed from their tethers and drank water from shallow bowls. Men moved slowly back to their tents. Instead of carrying shovels or hoes, some workers carried guns. Gomes’s new monkeys weren’t clueless city boys unaccustomed to the scrub’s heat and vegetation. These new soldiers were former residents of the scrub who understood how to fight and how to hide in the caatinga. Instead of wearing the green uniforms that were so easily spotted in the dry scrub, the former flagelados dressed like road workers.
Luzia and her cangaceiros also wore more humble uniforms, but not by choice. During the drought, they’d traded their sewing machines for food. They didn’t have the energy to carry such things and didn’t have the time for embroidery. Their uniforms were stained and threadbare. The appliqués and fine stitching had faded. Their jewelry was dented and dull. The cangaceiros’ gold saints’ medallions were sacred, and could not be traded or sold. The rings, watches, and other jewlery they’d stolen over the years were considered worthless during the drought—people in the caatinga wanted useful things like knives, hats, shoes, and sewing machines. Only Gomes’s soldiers coveted the cangaceiros’ jewlery.
Their poor appearance didn’t matter, Luzia told her men. Fine suits and polished sandals weren’t what the cangaço was about. She often heard Antônio’s voice—smooth and confident—in her ear and repeated all of the things he’d told her. The cangaço was about freedom. It was about dignity. The roadway was like a fence, like a giant corral that the city and Gomes would use to herd them. They were cangaceiros, not cattle.
These were the kinds of things Luzia told her group before a raid, though she knew such speeches weren’t necessary; her men and women would attack without motivation or coaxing. They wanted to fight, and so did she.
As she looked at those road workers and poorly disguised soldiers, Luzia’s fingers itched. Her ears rang. Her pulse quickened.
Before her first raids, she stoked her temper by thinking of Antônio’s death and her son’s absence. She thought of Gomes. She thought of city people, who claimed to be civilized and proper yet coveted the
Diário
’s gory reports. Cangaceiros who removed soldiers’ heads were called brutes, but soldiers who cut off cangaceiros’ heads were called patriots and scientists. Now, before a raid, Luzia didn’t have to dig up anger. It already existed. Her dislike of Gomes, of the roadway, of soldiers, of the city, of the drought and all things outside her cangaceiros and her caatinga had grown as quickly and stealthily as a scrub cashew. The tree’s crown and trunk were deceptively small, but its roots were thick and deep, thriving more underground than at the surface. Before she could control it, Luzia’s dislike had penetrated as deeply as those cashew roots. It turned to hate. She tasted it in her mouth, like salt, making the sides of her tongue tingle. Luzia put down her binoculars.
“It’s time,” she whispered to Baby and Maria Magra.
The two women were her best cangaceiras. They’d put on simple dresses and taken off their holsters. Concealed under their clothes were peixeira knives, the blades tucked snugly into their armpits. Baby and Maria Magra knelt for Luzia’s blessing. She pressed her fingers to their foreheads and made the sign of the cross.
“I seal you,” Luzia said.
After this, the women rose and walked into the scrub. They hiked upwind of the roadway camp. The guard dogs barked. While Baby and Maria Magra’s scent distracted the dogs, Luzia’s group edged toward the camp.
With the two women’s arrival, the roadway soldiers shouted. Baby and Maria Magra lifted their hands.
“We want work!” Baby shouted.
Two soldiers lumbered toward her, moving gingerly, as if their feet were burnt. This was why Luzia attacked at dusk: the road workers and soldiers were tired after a day of labor under the scrub’s sun. Fatigue made the men’s reflexes slow, their senses dull. Luzia, Ponta Fina, Baiano, and the rest of the cangaceiros—thirty in all—crouched and moved quietly toward the camp. Luzia could smell the oxen’s fresh dung. She could hear the soldiers question her cangaceiras.
“What kind of work you looking for?”
Baby smiled, flashing her small brown teeth. “Whatever kind suits a woman.”
Road workers peered from their tents. A few women already employed at the work camp moved toward the visitors and eyed their competition. The soldier began to reply to Baby but stopped. He stared into the scrub.
“Where’d you come from?” he said, raising his rifle. “You’re not carrying water, or food.”
Maria Magra undid the top button of her dress. Before the soldier could aim his gun, she reached under the dress collar and stepped forward. Baby followed suit. The soldiers had no time to shout or to run. In fact, it looked as if the women visitors had embraced the men. They stood, surprised and motionless, until one soldier grabbed his belly. Baby stepped back. A knife handle protruded from the man’s midsection. She’d done as Luzia and Baiano had taught her, raking her knife through his belly in a
z
shape, ensuring death. Baby and Maria Magra grabbed the soldiers’ weapons. Near them, a road worker shouted and more soldiers moved toward the women. Luzia aimed her rifle and fired.
Some women stood back during attacks, camouflaging themselves like scrub moths against the trees. Others learned to shoot and stab. These fought alongside Luzia and their husbands. The women attacked without showmanship or flourishes. They aimed for the head. They bit soldiers’ hands to force them to release their pistols. The women attacked quietly and efficiently, with the same cool detachment they’d shown in their former lives when ringing the necks of chickens or slicing off the heads of goats, innately understanding that such tasks were grim but also necessary for their survival.
Luzia understood this brutality. She felt it in herself. Men could boast and joke during attacks because they faced only death—the soldiers wanted their heads and nothing else. With the cangaceiras it was different. If caught they faced disgrace, violation, and then, if they were lucky, death would come. The women fought with this in mind.
Road workers scattered. Startled by the loud popping of gunshots, oxen bucked and reared, breaking free from their tethers. The animals weren’t used to running and they moved awkwardly. Some fell and, unable to lift their bulky bodies, crushed tents and the men hiding inside them. Worried for her own men, Luzia aimed for the animals’ heads. When she shot, she thought of eating meat again, of oxtail and grilled flank. Her stomach growled.
“Witch! Snake!” a voice called behind her.
Luzia turned. She saw a man through the great clouds of dust and smoke. He was armed with a shovel and ready to strike. Instead, he stared.
Antônio had taught her that a man’s reputation was his greatest weapon. A fine gun or the sharpest punhal was useless in the hands of a man of no repute. It was the opponents’ fear, their awe, that saved you. It made their hands tremble, ruining their aim. It made their palms sweat, loosening their grips on their knives. It made them curious, wanting to catch a glimpse of the Seamstress before they attacked her. This gave Luzia time to shoot first.
2
If a raid was unsuccessful—if they were ambushed or chased off by monkeys—the cangaceiros felt ashamed and angry. Luzia didn’t need to motivate them to attack another highway outpost or telegraph station; the men and women instinctively wanted revenge. But after a successful raid, once the exhilaration of fighting had worn off, the cangaceiros’ bodies began to tell them that they were tired, hungry, injured.
Despite their fatigue, they had to pick the sites clean, lifting soldiers’ bodies to remove guns and ammunition, searching through bags and barrels for food. There was no excitement in this, no righteousness. The cangaceiros were like vultures, dependent on the dead for their survival.
Luzia walked through the roadway camp, stepping over broken tents and bodies. Her eyes watered from smoke. She blinked and adjusted her spectacles. Small fires glowed around the camp; blood would attract flies, vultures, all kinds of scrub pests and predators. The fires would deter them until the cangaceiros finished their work. The men and women moved quickly, stripping corpses of their hats and clothes. Inteligente tried on a soldier’s alpercatas, tugging them onto his massive feet. Near him, old Canjica sliced open the dead oxen. The meat shone in the firelight. A dark pool accumulated beneath the animals. Canjica sweated as he butchered, removing oily hunks of fat and handing them to Sabiá, who distributed the lard among the wounded cangaceiros. They would use the fat to draw out any bullets lodged beneath the skin. Ponta Fina had already replenished his medical bag with the camp’s supplies of iodine and mercurochrome, gauze and needles. There were no fatalities among Luzia’s group, only a few wounded, but these had large and gaping bullet holes. One cangaceira had lost two fingers. The wounded would have to rest after leaving the roadway camp. Luzia and Ponta Fina would sew up the lesions and use Antônio’s old remedies to prevent infection. They would search for bark and make poultices. If the wounds didn’t heal this way, they would have to call upon Dr. Eronildes.