The Seamstress (19 page)

It was something her aunt had told her long ago, when Luzia was small. As a child, Luzia could not imagine her mother—that pretty woman from the wedding portrait—eating earth. But after weeks with the cangaceiros, she understood. At night, Luzia crouched at the edge of her damp blankets and dug into the wet ground, past the thin topsoil, until she reached clay. She took quick, forceful bites. She did not like the clay’s metallic taste or the thick, pasty residue it left in her mouth. But something murky and insistent had risen within her, something she could not control.

Perhaps the Hawk heard her clawing at the ground. Perhaps he saw her orange fingertips or noticed how she choked down the juice in her gourd. He began to cook her entire rolinha doves. He gave her long sips of water from his canteen. Luzia felt surges of gratitude, then disgust. She clenched her teeth, refusing his gifts. The Hawk calmly pried her mouth open with his thick fingers. He held her jaw and forced her to chew. Each night, after prayers, he ordered Ponta Fina to hold Luzia’s arms while he unbuckled her alpercatas. He placed her feet in a warm pot of quixabeira bark tea and then unwound their wet bandages. He moved his thumbs in hard circles around her heel, her arch, her ankle. Luzia felt a tingle through the numbness. The Hawk pressed harder. There was a burning pain, as if she’d been stung by a hundred red wasps. Luzia squirmed along the ground, trying to break free of his grip. Ponta Fina held her arms. The Hawk clamped her foot in his hands.

“Shhh,” he whispered. “Shhh.”

She let out a long, choked breath. She wanted to tug her feet away, but her body rebelled. Her leg muscles were rubbery and weak. The Hawk repeated his long, slow hiss.
Shhhh. Shhhh.
Like a hushed whistle. Luzia closed her eyes.

As a girl, she’d visited Colonel Pereira’s ranch. She’d watched their hired man break mules. He’d tied ropes to their bridles and held tight as the animals kicked and bucked, their ribs protruding beneath their coats, their mouths frothy. With quiet persistence, the man held those ropes until the animals collapsed from exhaustion and hunger. Then he spoke to them in a soft voice, stroking their muzzles and feeding them from his hands until they stood and followed him. She and Emília had left the ranch troubled and angry. Her sister hated the man, while Luzia hated the mules, not for their final collapse but for their short memories.

By the time the first full moon rose, as round and white as one of Padre Otto’s Communion wafers, Luzia, too, had forgotten. She could not recall Aunt Sofia’s smell or Emília’s capable hands. Her mind became as cloudy and thick as the cactus juice in her gourd. There were no hours or minutes. No today or tomorrow. There were only her labored steps and her heavy feet, as red and raw as hunks of meat. There was only her cramping stomach, her burning throat, her pungent and amber-colored urine. She felt no fear, no regret.

3

An empty jar is easily filled. That was what Aunt Sofia used to say. This was why Luzia’s aunt obsessively kept each of her clay water jugs full—if one was left empty it soon became home to spiders, lizards, or the shiny-backed cockroaches that came from the banana palms. Looking back upon her first weeks with the cangaceiros, Luzia felt as though her mind had been turned over and emptied out like one of Aunt Sofia’s clay jugs. But slowly, her dizzy spells decreased. Her feet grew a thick, yellow skin. Her hands darkened in the sun, becoming the color of burnt sugar. The skin on her face and neck burned and peeled so many times that it felt taut and rough when she touched it. As her body healed, her mind sharpened.

She began to see the difference between the gnarled trunks of the canela-de-velho trees (which made her recall Aunt Sofia’s arthritic fingers) and the smooth yellow bark of the inaé. She learned to dodge the pincushion-shaped bulbs of monk’s-head cacti that littered her path. She learned to distinguish between the hoarse call of the cancão bird and the musical twitter of the leather jacket. Luzia began to study the men, too. Soon, like the scrub’s trees and birds, each cangaceiro became distinct and familiar. As they walked, she could define them by their heights and by the hair that sprang from beneath their leather hats. A few, like the Hawk, had fine and tangled hair, honey colored at the tips, from the sun. The others—Ponta Fina, Sweet Talker, Baiano, Little Ear—had hair that ranged from tightly wound curls to springy muffs. When the cangaceiros weren’t walking, they were busy setting up camp, building fires, and catching food. It was only during prayers that the men stayed still enough for Luzia to study them.

Each day, before dawn, the men prayed. They rose from their blankets and pulled their thick-strapped bornal bags over their heads. They slipped off their leather water pouches, their hollowed gourds, and the heavy ribbons of bullets that they wore even during sleep. They knelt before the Hawk and unbuttoned their jackets. Pinned to their tunics were pieces of their past: a sister’s faded photograph, a lock of hair, an unraveling red ribbon, a damp slip of paper. They placed their hands over these objects and bent their heads.

They prayed not for their souls but for their bodies, repeating the prayer of corpo fechado to close their bodies off from illness, injury, and death. When they finished, each man removed an item from his bornal and placed it on the ground before him. Baiano put down a dented pocket watch. Ponta Fina put down his array of knives. Sabiá, the group’s best singer, placed the red-lacquered accordion before him. The balding Chico Coffin put down an initialed cigarette case; the hook-nosed Caju, a bag of gold teeth. Sweet Talker put down a riding crop with silver studs on its handle. Little Ear placed a book before him, though he didn’t know how to read. One by one, all but the Hawk laid objects before them. Luzia bowed her head but did not pray. She watched the men instead.

She saw that Ponta Fina bit his fingernails. Baiano, the tall mulatto, was the Hawk’s second in command. He kept a necklace of red seeds wrapped around his wrist to ward off snakes. Caju wouldn’t tolerate jokes about his large nose. Jacaré chewed juá bark incessantly to keep his teeth white. Chico Coffin had a habit of patting the bald patch on his head, as if making sure it was not spreading. One morning, Luzia overheard the men’s conversation and learned that Half-Moon’s eye had been damaged when he was a boy, during a game of cangaceiros versus colonels. A cactus thorn had lodged in it, turning it the dull beige of a boiled egg. The charcoal-skinned Sweet Talker had earned his nickname for the line of tick marks on his knife sheath, one for each lady he’d seduced.
Raparigas don’t count,
he said. Branco, the freckled one, stammered when he spoke. Safety Pin had a vast collection of paper saints pinned to his tunic, hidden under his jacket. Jurema had long, skinny arms that flapped wildly each time he played Sabiá’s accordion. Coral had a fear of choking, which made him chew his food a dozen times before swallowing. Tatu had an oversize belly. Furão had long, deft fingers. Surubim was the only cangaceiro who knew how to swim. Inteligente became tangled in his bornal straps each morning and Canjica, the group’s old cook, patiently helped untangle them. Vanity had small, piggish eyes and many missing teeth, but each evening he meticulously cleaned his uniform, polishing the coins sewn onto his hat brim and shining his alpercatas. And Little Ear fell into a petulant silence each time the Hawk requested Baiano’s counsel instead of his.

The Hawk always knelt in the center of their prayer circle. He stared intently at the ground and spoke the prayers slowly, pronouncing the longer words syllable by syllable, as if he had memorized them but did not fully know their meaning.

“Beloved sir,” the Hawk began, his voice deep and steady. “Who was sent from God’s breast to absolve our sins, give us your grace and mercy. Take away the fury of our enemies and hold us, your children, in your gracious arms.”

He clasped his hands tightly together. His fingernails were short and white tipped. Each morning he scrubbed them clean with a hard-bristled brush. In the evenings he often sat alone, away from the cook fire, and stared into the scrub’s darkness. He lifted his nose and took deep, concentrated breaths, as if sniffing out a scent. Some evenings he spoke with Baiano. Luzia could not hear their conversations. She could only see a meticulously rolled palha cigarette bobbing between his thick, crooked lips. When the cigarette was finished, he rubbed his face roughly, as though trying to coax the slack side back to life.

During the day, Luzia and the men walked behind him, following his loping step. He kept his eyes cast downward, wary of snakes. He guided them through that maze of thorns and trees, seeming to recognize each rock formation, each black-trunked pau-preto, each hillside, each gulley. In the scrub, even small accomplishments—finding a fresh-water spring hidden between two boulders, or spotting an umbuzeiro tree with shade and thick, tuberous roots that they could dig up and suck in order to trick their thirst—became miracles. The Hawk always found them. His consistency made his findings seem more than lucky. They were larger, more significant, like gifts from a guiding hand.

Some nights, he insisted they light no fires and smoke no cigarettes. Other nights he woke everyone and made them all leave camp. Whatever his whims, the men obeyed. He was their quiet, brooding teacher, collecting leaves and carving away bark to instruct them on which were poisons and which were cures. He showed them how to make teas, pastes, and poultices to treat toothaches, ulcers, headaches, and cuts. He was their stern father, intolerant of carelessness. Just as he divined their route through the scrub, he seemed to divine how to please each man and how to shame him. Once, he’d cut off Ponta Fina’s silk bandanna when the boy hadn’t buried their food scraps deep enough and they’d looked back and seen vultures circling their abandoned campsite, giving away the cangaceiros’ presence. The Hawk was their brother, mussing Ponta Fina’s hair, patting Inteligente’s shoulder, or clapping wildly after Sabiá sang one of his mournful ballads. And, above all, he was their stoop-shouldered priest, their counselor who treated them not as slaves or thugs, but as men.

Luzia disliked his strange whims. There was no logic in his calls for silence—he would simply cock his head toward some indecipherable sound and motion with his hands. “Stop breathing,” he would order her in a low, stern whisper. “You have a heavy walk,” he chided, making Luzia feel like an unruly child. “Don’t drag your feet.”

When he spoke to her, Luzia felt a terrible heat inside, as if she’d swallowed a cup of malagueta peppers. That nervous heat overtook her each time the Hawk watched her sew. It made her clumsy with her stitches and made her speech jumbled and stuttering. Luzia hated him for it. When he said prayers, she made herself focus on parts of him and not the whole, in order to thwart her nervousness. She stared at his wrist, so narrow and tapered compared to his thick hands. A blue vein ran upward, underneath the skin, disappearing into his jacket sleeve. She stared at his ears—curved and brown, like tamboril tree seeds. She stared at each of his square, white-rimmed nails.

“If our enemies find us,” the Hawk said, continuing his prayer, “they will have eyes but will not see us. They will have ears, but will not hear us. They will have mouths, but they will not speak to us. Beloved Redeemer, arm us with the weapons of São Jorge. Protect us with the sword of Abraham. Feed us with the milk of our Virgin Mother. Hide us in the ark of Noah. Close our bodies with the keys of São Pedro, where no one may hurt us, kill us, or take the blood from our veins. Amen.”

Luzia had attended mass all of her life and had never heard Padre Otto say such prayers. But the priest had never knelt before them as the Hawk did. The priest had never used such a deep, sad tone, praying with such fervor that his voice cracked. When this happened, the Hawk seemed fragile, confused. It proved he was a man, like any other, and this was a comfort.

“Amen,” the cangaceiros muttered. They unclasped their hands. They lifted their heads. One by one, they leaned forward and spat upon the objects before them.

It always shocked her—the way they cleared their throats and pursed their lips, the quick, startling trajectory of their spit. The men glanced uncomfortably at Luzia. Perhaps her face registered her disapproval. The objects before them were inert and blameless in Luzia’s eyes, which gave the spitting an unnecessary, calculated violence. Afterward, the men wiped their objects clean and stuffed them quickly back into their bornais without meeting her eye.

Luzia also carried a pair of canvas bornais. Days after leaving Taquaritinga, the men had emptied her old valise. They’d taken the case and filled it with their camp’s refuse—used coffee grounds, maxixe stems, an empty brilliantine tin—and buried it. Then the cangaceiros inspected the items Emília had packed for Luzia, shaking their heads at the old dress, the embroidery thread, the pincushion, the torn knickers. They’d laughed at her penknife until the Hawk made them return it. Luzia was surprised at first, but when he placed the knife back into her hands it seemed small and pathetic, and she knew he hadn’t returned it out of kindness. He wanted to show his men and Luzia how powerless she was. Even armed, she posed no threat. Some of the cangaceiros did not agree. They didn’t see Luzia as a physical danger, but as a deeper one.

“Women are rotten luck,” she’d heard Half-Moon mutter once as they set up camp. Several of the men concurred before Baiano hushed them.

The men tolerated Luzia’s presence but didn’t like it. She wore their uniform, she carried bornais, and she drank the bitter xique-xique, as they had during their initiations, but she was not one of them. Often, Luzia caught the men staring, studying her as she studied them during prayers. But on their faces were not looks of curiosity or friendliness. There was only concern and expectation, as if the men were waiting for her to reveal her purpose. Luzia didn’t understand these looks until the boy cangaceiro explained them.

Outside of the Hawk, only Ponta Fina spoke to her. And since her burnt throat prohibited her from asking questions or disagreeing with the boy, Luzia could do nothing but listen and nod. Because of his age, the men either teased Ponta or shouted orders at him. They rarely tolerated his conversation. In Luzia he found a willing listener and pupil. He showed her how to skin the sweet-faced mocó rats, or scrape scales from the teús. Sometimes he spoke of the other men, venting his frustrations. Once, he speculated about her presence.