The Seamstress (50 page)

Emília picked at her food. The greens were wilted and bitter, the chicken rubbery. After each long-winded toast, the men at the center tables shouted, “Here, here!” and tapped their crystal goblets excitedly with their forks. Emília spotted Chevalier and his tangled head of hair at one of the tables. Degas sat a few chairs down from him, next to Dr. Duarte. Emília’s husband looked pasty and skittish. He gulped glass after glass of wine.

Before dessert, Captain Higino was expected to deliver a message directly from Celestino Gomes. When the dinner plates were taken away, however, the captain continued to chat with his neighbors on the Saint Isabel stage. The women in the theater’s periphery remained in their seats while, in the center of the theater, their husbands and sons and brothers mingled. The men left their chairs and shook hands, patted backs. Degas ignored his father’s prodding and headed directly for Chevalier. Emília stood.

“Where are you off to?” Dona Dulce asked. A dark stain of wine ringed her lips.

“To say hello to Lindalva,” Emília replied.

“Not now, dear,” Dona Dulce ordered, shaking her head and smiling at the women on either side of them. “Emília’s anxious to be the first at everything. If the men mingle, she must as well.” Dona Dulce returned her gaze to Emília. “Sit down. Captain Higino’s wife is the hostess. We must wait for her to stand before we do.”

Emília looked down the row of women.

“I’d think you’d recognize her immediately,” Dona Dulce continued. “With all the newspapers you read.”

Emília sat. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Seu Tomás tells me you’ve been buying papers from his friend who runs the corner newsstand. He says you hide them in your fashion magazines.”

Emília’s palms felt warm. She fidgeted with her gloves. “I don’t hide them. I’m being discreet like you taught me. You said a lady shouldn’t be seen reading the newspaper.”

“You’re a sharp pupil,” Dona Dulce said, laughing. Her small teeth shone. Beside her, the other women smiled politely.

“I understand, dear,” Dona Dulce continued. “You have to keep current to help Dr. Duarte. I have no patience for such things. I’m so glad you’ll be helping him again, with his sciences and such. I would hate to hire one of those ghastly secretaries. Especially when we already have you.” Dona Dulce turned to their table companions. “Women who can’t be mothers must find another occupation.”

“And men who can’t be fathers,” Emília answered, “find their own distractions.”

Dona Dulce took another sip of wine. “Yes. Sadly, they do. Unlike you modern girls, they don’t have as many diversions to keep them occupied. You have your fashions and your haircuts and your special teas. Emília drinks a special tea for her skin. That’s how it stays so smooth and clear. It’s one of your country remedies, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“You should tell us what it is.” Dona Dulce smiled. “Don’t be a miser with your beauty secrets. Raimunda wouldn’t tell me. I had a talk with her—a frank talk. She says she buys some kind of bark at the market, but nothing like that is on my grocery list. She says you give her your own lists. I’m thrilled that you’re taking responsibility, Emília. Taking charge of the staff, making grocery orders. I should let you have the run of things. It would be a fine vacation from my worries.”

As she spoke, Dona Dulce’s voice grew louder. The neighboring women looked away, examining their dessert plates.

“You’d find something new to worry over,” Emília said. “You always do.”

“That’s the life of a good wife. When you have your own home, you’ll understand.”

“I don’t expect that. Degas likes your home too much. And he can’t be without his father.”

Dona Dulce glanced down the long table of women. She took her napkin from her lap.

“I saw Dona Ribeiro rise in her chair,” she said. “Emília, accompany me to the ladies’ room. Excuse us.”

The women around them nodded politely. When Emília stood, Dona Dulce clamped her arm under her own.

They moved out of the theater and into the lobby. Several waiters milled about. Electric lamps buzzed above them, their light reflected in the lobby’s collection of gilded mirrors. Arranged in rows across the tile floor were circular sofas. They looked like massive red cakes covered in velvet and dimpled with buttons. From their centers rose similarly upholstered cylinders, meant to support theatergoers’ tired backs. Dona Dulce steered past several couches, stopping before one that was far from the theater’s doors, but nowhere near the ladies’ room.

She let go of Emília’s arm. Behind her mother-in-law, seated on a circular couch and partially concealed by its cylindrical backrest, sat a man. Dona Dulce did not notice him. Her lips trembled. She pinched them together. Emília felt small and frightened, as she had on her first day in the Coelho sitting room, but she did not look away from her mother-in-law. She would not let herself cower.

When Dona Dulce finally spoke, her breath was sour from wine.

“You may think that just because you’ve won a contest, you can speak to me in that tone. That you can prance about in your silly dresses. That you can make
insinuations
about my son. But don’t get too bold. Those New family women in there, they laugh at you. When you aren’t near them. They think it’s quaint, the way you try to be a lady. They think it’s entertaining. I know. I’ve heard them. And the maids tell me. You don’t think maids listen to their mistress’s talk? You don’t think they tell each other? That word doesn’t spread from house to house about Degas Coelho’s country wife? Don’t fool yourself. Let me say this in a way that you’ll understand, being from the backlands: Do you know what happens when an ant grows wings? It gets a big head. It flies about like a bird. But it will always be an insect. And you will always be a seamstress.”

Emília’s legs wobbled. She locked her knees, willing herself to stand tall.

“Don’t come back to my table,” Dona Dulce said, straightening her skirt. “I’ll tell them you feel ill.”

When her mother-in-law had walked away, Emília slumped onto the couch behind her. A mirror hung on the opposite wall. It was large and wide, unlike the bit of glass she’d had in Taquaritinga. She could see herself fully instead of in fragments. She didn’t look any different from the other women in the Ladies’ Auxiliary—she was dark but not too dark, plump but not too plump, her hair curly but not kinky. The women in the Auxiliary copied her clothing. They sat next to her at sewing circles and invited her for coffee. But what did they do after Emília left their homes? Did they scald her used coffee cup with boiling water? She’d seen them do this to Mr. Sato’s—the traveling jeweler’s—used cup because, even though he was too refined to use the servants’ dishware, he was considered suspect. Unclean.

Emília put her head in her gloved hands.

During her lessons, Dona Dulce had purposefully simplified things. Emília could memorize table settings, she could train herself to walk, to dab her mouth, to hold a coffee cup, to listen with just enough interest, to laugh with just enough mirth. But there were things she could never learn: codes that were hidden from her, motives that could never be explained. The road to respectability was not as straight as the crease in a tablecloth, as Dona Dulce had led her to believe. It was jagged and mysterious, like the metallic teeth of her slide fasteners, which came together so simply, but were just as easily snagged and undone.

“She got that saying wrong.”

The voice was gentle. A man’s. He sat on the couch across from her, no longer hidden by the backrest. He was thin necked and hunched, his body lost within his oversize suit. The pants bunched above tall rancher’s boots, though he didn’t look like a rancher. His hair was lank and brown. He wore it longer than was fashionable for Recife men, and partially slicked back, as though he’d made an attempt at formality. He looked no older than Degas, but his pale skin was dotted with sunspots. Unlike Felipe’s freckles, this man’s didn’t seem to be a natural part of him, but a product of many sunburns. Brass spectacles sat on the bridge of his ample nose. His eyes looked glassy, as if he’d participated in the men’s many toasts and downed his wineglass each time.

“I beg your pardon,” Emília said, wiping her face.

“You don’t have to beg. I’ll give it freely,” he said, and smiled. “She got that saying wrong. My father liked sayings. He was a collector of them, if you can collect such things. ‘When an ant grows wings, it disappears.’ That’s what the saying is. What it means is up to the listener. Some might take it to mean that even the smallest can rise above their circumstances. Move on to something else.”

“Gentlemen don’t listen to other people’s conversations,” Emília said. She balled her hands into fists so they wouldn’t shake. She wanted to escape, to find the ladies’ room and sit in peace.

“I’m not a gentleman; I work for my living. I’m trained as a doctor.”

“You don’t look like a doctor,” Emília said, inspecting him again. She’d met plenty of Dr. Duarte’s colleagues—including the medical man who’d felt her stomach beneath the sheet and prescribed her vitamins—and they were all grave, bearded men with aloof manners and metal thermometer boxes peeking out from their suit pockets instead of handkerchiefs.

“Thank you,” the man replied. “I’m actually a rancher now, out in Bahia. But no one in Recife cares for my current profession. They’re only impressed by my old one. So I use that, when introducing myself.”

Emília nodded. She stared at her gloves, hoping he would leave her alone.

“I’m sorry I overheard,” he said. “I didn’t mean to. I had to escape the auditorium. It’s too noisy. The whole city is.”

“You get used to it.”

“I won’t. I traveled a long way for this celebration, but I can’t wait to get back to the country.”

“It’s just as noisy there. But not because of trolleys or people. It’s goats and frogs out there.”

“You’ve been?”

Emília nodded. “I’m from there. I escaped. I thought you overheard that part.”

The man reddened. He choked out a laugh. “It’s hardly an escape.”

“Not for you. You can go back and forth as you please. But without means or a profession, you’re stuck there. I was lucky. I was a seamstress.”

“And now?”

“A wife. A poor one, according to my mother-in law.” Emília smiled. The man chuckled.

“I’m a poor rancher, if that’s any consolation.”

“I thought all ranchers were against Gomes.”

“Not all.” The man frowned. “The colonels, yes. But their loyalties will have to change. They’ll have to support Gomes now. And I hope he’ll finish them off. He’ll change the countryside. The colonels don’t want that.”

“You do?” Emília asked.

“Yes. Of course. There aren’t roads. Or schools. It’s a miserable life out there. You know that better than I.”

“But you said you liked it? You traded a city life for it.”

The man straightened his spectacles. He shifted to the edge of his couch, his knees nearly touching Emília’s, and lowered his voice.

“The countryside, the backlands, the caatinga, whatever you want to call it—it frightens me. It always has. Ever since I was a boy, back in Salvador, I was terrified by the stories people told. Terrified of the place, and everything that came out of it: the snakes, the bandits, the droughts, the people. City people, they turn their heads the other way. They want to look at the ocean, the palm trees. But I never wanted to turn away. A life in the city is fine, but it’s an effortless life. Everything’s been settled and paved. But in the caatinga, it’s still new. It can still be molded. It can be made into something else. Something better. The colonels had their chance. Now it’s Gomes’s turn.”

The man spoke with such conviction, such raw hopefulness that Emília felt moved by his beliefs and ashamed of her own. She’d abandoned the place he wanted to change. And where he saw a new land she saw an ancient one, as intractable in its beliefs as Aunt Sofia had been in hers. Yet Emília was touched that he argued for the countryside at all. He didn’t ignore it like Recifians. He didn’t keep its traditions like the colonels. Why couldn’t the countryside have telegraphs, phones, schools, and roadways like the cities? What, Emília agreed, was wrong with bringing the countryside up to speed with the coast?

Before she could respond to the doctor, there was a wave of applause inside the theater.

“Higino’s going to give Gomes’s message,” the doctor said, rising from his spot on the couch. “We should listen.”

Emília nodded. She followed the doctor to the theater door, but did not accompany him inside. She did not want to hide in the back of the theater, exiled from her table by Dona Dulce. Instead, Emília climbed the stairway to the second level. There, she pressed through the middle-class crowd—many of whom stared at her green gown and silk gloves—and stood near a balcony. From above, she had a clear view of Captain Higino standing before his table and holding a yellow telegram in his hands. She saw the rows of men seated before him, saw the crowns of their heads with their bald spots and pomaded hair. She saw the New family women around the theater’s edges, their heads obediently turned toward the stage but their eyes flitting along their own tables, examining each other.

At first, Dona Dulce’s words had saddened Emília. Now she felt relieved by them. It was as if a pane of glass had been before her, rubbed as clear and spotless as the windows in the Coelho house, and Dona Dulce’s speech had made a smudge. Like an insect flying into a window and leaving its remains, showing Emília that there was a barrier before her. Instead of feeling disappointed, Emília felt liberated. It was freeing to finally understand her place. To see that she’d allowed the smallest compliments to become victories and the slightest errors defeats. If she allowed herself to be so easily swayed, to believe a barrier did not exist between her and the Recife women, she would always fail. She would be trapped, always observing and imitating them through the glass instead of making them see her.

In his speech, Captain Higino expressed Gomes’s goals for the region. In Recife, they would replace all gas lamps with electric lights. City workers would open roads into Recife’s swampy periphery. They would fill the marshlands to create areas for “popular homes”: real brick structures set to replace the palm-frond mocambos set precariously on hills and alongside rivers. Gomes called for a new sewage system. He called for vaccination drives to combat cholera, leprosy, and diphtheria. “The ideal man will wear only one tattoo: his vaccination scar,” Captain Higino announced. Finally, Higino revealed Gomes’s most ambitious plan of all: a roadway. The Trans-Nordestino would unite the Northern states and cut across the state of Pernambuco. It would open up the backlands. It would connect coast to countryside. East to west.