The Seamstress (68 page)
The widow’s eyes sparkled. She spoke quietly, as if sharing a secret with Luzia. “You want to be the hero,” she said. “Gomes is stealing your fire, is that it?”
The widow smiled slightly. She wasn’t scared and Luzia wanted her to be.
Fear is good,
Antônio once said.
It means respect.
A burning pressure rose inside Luzia; she imagined it as being thick and dark, like beans cooked too long in their vat. Luzia felt the dark substance working inside her, burning away her stifled tears and turning them into something else, something dangerous but also useful.
The widow’s dress had a double collar—one part high necked and tight, the other part opening at the collarbone into two wide flaps of embroidered black cloth. Luzia released the widow’s arm and took hold of her collar. She folded over the cloth and inspected its underside. There were long, sloppy diagonals running from one design to the next; the seamstress had been too lazy to cut and knot her thread.
“This is shabby stitching,” Luzia said.
The widow’s expression changed from amusement to confusion. Luzia let go of her collar and faced the red-lipped girls. Some had tried to wipe away the lip grease and their chins were smeared with pink. Luzia looked above her; the poster of President Gomes—“Father of the Poor”—hung overhead, his face huge, his expression smiling and magnanimous. What must she look like, Luzia wondered, standing beneath such a large and handsome face? A starving, crippled woman? A terrible cangaceira? She stared at the crowd that surrounded the porch. Some looked at her with fear, others with doubt. The widow was right; Gomes wasn’t completely evil. That’s what made him dangerous. If Gomes became the people’s hero, he would make the Seamstress and her cangaceiros into villains. He was already trying to do this in the papers, calling cangaceiros useless criminals. Dr. Eronildes had been right—people in the scrub had room in their hearts for only one hero. If she was to survive, Luzia would have to fight for that place.
“Look what Gomes’s road will do!” she yelled. “It will make honest women into putas.”
Some of the cangaceiros’ eyes widened, shocked by her strong language. Some spit on the ground and cursed Gomes. Several of the refugees shook their heads, indignant. Luzia pointed to the Widow Carvalho.
“She’s profiting off our misery,” Luzia announced. “And Gomes is letting her—he trusted her with supplies! His soldiers sat here and let her sell our women. They turned a blind eye!”
Shouts rose from the crowd, cursing the widow. Luzia grabbed the woman and presented her to the angry mob.
“We aren’t the same,” she whispered into the widow’s ear. “You keep their money. I’d rather have their good graces.”
Luzia dug into the widow’s leather money belt and found a tin of red lip grease. She opened it and dipped her finger inside. Then she swiped a red glob across the Widow Carvalho’s thin mouth. The crowd laughed. Luzia raised her hand, quieting them. When they obeyed, her heart beat faster.
A mandacaru cactus grew in the center of the yard. The plant’s crown had several green cylinders, like the fingers of a cupped hand. Its trunk was as brown and as thick as a tree’s. Spines the size of sewing needles protruded from it.
“Now she’ll know what it’s like to be forced!” Luzia yelled to the crowd. “To hug and kiss what she doesn’t want!”
The cangaceiros and refugees cheered. Luzia felt a strange rush—her face felt warm, as if the crowd were a fire and she was benefiting from its heat. Luzia dragged the widow off the porch and placed her in front of the mandacaru cactus.
“Hug it,” Luzia said.
The widow clenched her arms to her sides. “I will not.”
Luzia caught sight of the pigtailed girl on the porch and thought of Emília. What would her sister make of her actions? Luzia thought of her boy—would he be proud to have a mother who inflicted such cruel punishments? She felt the heat draining from her body. Her grip on the widow loosened, but the crowd pressed in around her.
“Hug it!” a woman cried.
“Make her hug it!” a boy called.
The crowd was impatient; Luzia could not lose face before them. If she was to beat Gomes, she would have to satisfy their sense of justice: a public crime called for a public punishment. Antônio had taught her this. In the days after his death, she’d asked him to haunt her. Now, she called on him again. Luzia put away her parabellum and removed Antônio’s old punhal from her belt. She pressed it between the widow’s hunched shoulder blades. The woman let out a dry yelp.
“Hug it tight,” Luzia said.
The widow stared at the mandacaru cactus and slowly opened her arms. She turned her cheek and stepped forward. When she hugged the trunk she did so gingerly, her arms barely touching its spines. Luzia nodded at Baiano. On the other side of the trunk, the cangaceiro grabbed the widow’s hands. He pulled her in tighter. The Widow Carvalho gasped and craned her neck backward, as if resisting an aggressive suitor’s advances. Baiano tugged her again. The mandacaru’s spines punctured the widow’s face. The woman shuddered. There were pinpricks of blood on her cheek. She tried to lift herself away from the needles but each time she moved, her chest pressed deeper into them. All the while, the widow stared at Luzia.
“You are an ignorant cripple,” the old woman said.
Luzia recalled the teasing children and gossiping women of Taquaritinga. She recalled the name Victrola. She recalled her previous children, falling from her in pieces. She recalled the one who had lived—Expedito—only to be carried away. She thought of the hefty price on her head, of the many graves along the old cattle trail. She thought of Gomes and his roadway. It would slice the scrubland apart. Antônio had been right: the president would build despite the drought. He would make refugees into roadway workers, and women into whores. Luzia stared at those girls on the porch. They were skinny and pitiful looking, but their stares were angry, like her own. Those girls could learn to fight. They could learn to shoot. Luzia would train them and, together, they would attack the roadway and teach Gomes and the colonels and anyone else who doubted them a lesson: that the meek and the wretched of the earth could become strong.
Luzia extended her good arm and cupped the widow’s head in her hand. The widow’s skull felt warm. Luzia gave it a gentle push. The widow’s neck stiffened. The mandacaru’s thorns disappeared into the woman’s face. Luzia pressed harder. A thorn pierced the widow’s closed eyelid. A whimper, soft and childlike, escaped from her mouth. Luzia pressed again, then again, until the widow was quiet, until she gave no resistance. Around her, the crowd cheered.
1
M
rs. Haroldo Carvalho appeared on the covers of the
Diário de Pernambuco,
the
Recifian,
and even in the prestigious
Folha de São Paulo
. In all of her photographs, the Widow Carvalho angled her head to showcase the black patch over her left eye. The Seamstress had blinded her. The leather eye patch reflected the camera’s flash, giving it a dull sheen. To Emília, this made the widow’s patch resemble the large, dark lens of an insect, shielding not one eye but hundreds.
Emília had heard men—Dr. Duarte in particular—laugh over the incident; an old crone forced to embrace a cactus was amusing to city dwellers. Even though the widow was the subject of jokes, the Seamstress’s attack was not. Cangaceiros had executed four soldiers and two roadway officials. They’d stolen government rations. They’d defiled a large poster of President Gomes. And, according to the Widow Carvalho, the Seamstress had slit a man’s throat and drunk his blood, like a witch. In another newspaper interview, the widow said that the Seamstress had killed young children—babies especially—with a sharp knife. Worst of all, the cangaceira leader had taken several girls from the mob of flagelados and forced them to marry her men. Throughout Recife, people spoke of these new female bandits, holding them up as proof that the backlands was becoming lawless and depraved, a place where even women became criminals.
Newspapers clamored for interviews with the Widow Carvalho. There were dozens of flagelados who’d claimed they’d seen the Seamstress up close, but they were tenant farmers and pé-rapados, people so poor they couldn’t afford shoes. The Widow Carvalho was a landowner, which made her credible. Shortly after the attack on her ranch, roadway officials visited, as scheduled, to gather new recruits from her food lines. Instead of workers, the roadway men found their recruiters and soliders massacred, and the widow tied to a cactus. They’d brought the old woman back to Recife to tell her story.
Government officials presented her with a check as payment for her land, and President Gomes sent the widow a handwritten note commending her patriotic spirit and thanking her for selling her ranch to the National Roadway Institute. All of these commendations appeared in Recife newspapers, making the widow a popular figure. Her story forced Tenente Higino to allocate more funds toward the recruitment and training of soldiers. Young flagelado men entering Recife in search of food and work found recruitment stations at the edges of the city, where they were given guns, uniforms, and the promise of a paycheck, and were immediately sent back into the scrubland to serve Brazil and President Gomes. After the Widow Carvalho’s many interviews and the cangaceiros’ continued attacks, people paid more attention to Dr. Duarte’s theories. Emília’s father-in-law appeared in the papers nearly as often as the widow herself, and his explanations about the criminal mind became widely accepted. Because of this newfound interest in his science, Dr. Duarte worked long hours in his Criminology Institute measuring craniums and attempting to find ways to catch his most coveted specimens: the Seamstress and the Hawk. Pernambucans were both outraged and enthralled by their state’s famous bandit couple. And Recifians who, under different circumstances, would have considered the Widow Carvalho too coarse to keep their company, suddenly invited the old woman to lunches and afternoon coffees, wanting to hear her story firsthand in the hopes that this would bring them closer to the cangaceiros.
Members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary rented out the famous Leite Restaurant and sponsored a luncheon for the Widow Carvalho. The old woman sat at the head of a long table at the restaurant’s center. She wore a black dress and occasionally fingered her patch, drawing attention to her wounded eye. Waiters lingered near the table. Ladies’ Auxiliary members craned their heads each time the widow spoke, but her conversation was limited.
“Pass the salt,” she said. And later, “Don’t you have any farinha?”
None of the widow’s requests was followed by “please,” or “thank you,” and this bothered Emília. She sat at the middle of the table, beside the baroness and Lindalva, and barely touched her plate of codfish in cream. Emília, like the other Auxiliary women, was focused on the Widow Carvalho. The old woman sensed this and smiled as she ate. She had a small, thin-lipped mouth.
A mean mouth,
Emília thought, and watched the widow cut her meat; the old woman stabbed it so forcefully with her fork it seemed as if the steak was in danger of leaping off her plate. The old woman didn’t put her napkin on her lap, and her elbows flapped wildly as she ate. Emília felt like Dona Dulce—privately chiding another’s manners—and she disliked the Widow Carvalho for making her feel this way. All around her, the Auxiliary women complimented the widow and coaxed her to speak.
“They’re wasting their breath,” the baroness whispered. “I know her type. She’ll wait until dessert to talk. Or she’ll try to get another lunch out of us.”
Lindalva shook her head. “If they spend another tostão on her, I’m resigning my membership.”
Emília nodded. The Widow Carvalho’s gory reports of her encounter with the Seamstress had displaced more important news. By April 1933, ninety thousand flagelados were housed in seven relief camps scattered throughout the Northeast. In Recife, the drought-baby adoption trend had declined as soon as the infants gained weight and lost their tragic preciousness. Recife society’s grand dreams for the children’s futures were forgotten. The drought babies were relegated to servants’ quarters, where they would eventually be incorporated into the daily workings of large households as errand boys or maids. Lindalva was particularly frustrated because the Widow Carvalho’s stories had overshadowed the upcoming election, the first in which females would be allowed to vote.
After his successful revolution, Celestino Gomes had taken the office of president by force and had appointed Green Party members to government posts across the country. Three years later, some people called his administration a dictatorship. In order to prove he was a democrat and a fair leader, Gomes called for national elections. They were scheduled for mid-May, yet only 15 percent of the women eligible to vote had registered. Lindalva wanted newspapers to publish exposés on the barriers to voter registration. Women had to take complicated literacy tests and deal with erratic registration hours; working women couldn’t leave their jobs long enough to register, and wives couldn’t leave their children and household duties either. Lindalva and Emília lobbied for the Ladies’ Auxiliary to take a greater interest in these problems, but they were outvoted. Instead of sponsoring a campaign to promote fair registration, the Ladies’ Auxiliary courted the Widow Carvalho.
Emília could never admit to Lindalva that her interest in suffrage was a selfish one: it made her appear less concerned with the Seamstress. Emília pretended to be unenthusiastic about meeting the Widow Carvalho. In truth, she barely slept the night before the luncheon. At the restaurant, Emília was aggravated by the woman’s silence. Like the baroness, Emília also recognized the widow’s type. Back in Taquaritinga, when she’d worked at Colonel Pereira’s house, Emília had seen other colonels and their wives come and go as houseguests. The Widow Carvalho resembled the worst type of colonel’s wife: eager to punish her husband and her servants; stingy with food and with praise; and outwardly pious yet always willing to gossip, to tell stories that served her purposes, even if they were lies.
Emília put down her utensils. Leaning into the table, she faced the widow.
“What did she look like?” Emília asked.
The Widow Carvalho responded with a mouth full of rice. “Who?”
“The Seamstress.”
The table’s occupants grew quiet. Near Emília, a waiter stopped filling water glasses. The Widow Carvalho took another forkful of food.
“Like a bandit,” she said between bites. “Ugly as sin.”
A twitter of laughter rose from the table. Emília stiffened.
“No one talks about the men’s ugliness,” she said. Her voice shook. Emília recalled Dona Dulce’s many lessons on composure and how not to lose it. She took a sip of water and smiled.
“I’ve followed your interviews in the papers,” Emília said. “You gave such detailed accounts. I wish I had your knack for observation. You saw so many things even though you were bound face-first to a cactus.”
Lindalva chuckled. At the end of the table, the widow stopped eating. She studied Emília with her remaining eye. Emília smiled in response, but her palms were clammy. She and Luzia didn’t look alike, but perhaps upon further inspection the widow—like Dr. Eronildes—had recognized some trait, some likeness Emília wasn’t able to conceal. Emília’s heart beat quickly. Why was she prodding this widow? Why was she taking such a risk? After a moment, the Widow Carvalho finally spoke.
“Have you ever seen a mandacaru, young lady?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know how long and how sharp their thorns are. It doesn’t matter what I saw or what I heard. What matters is, I survived. And the survivor has the right to tell whatever story she pleases.”
“The papers love exaggerations,” Emília replied. “They sell more because of them.”
The Widow Carvalho sat back in her chair. “Do you support the cangaceiros?”
Emília balled her hands in her lap to stop them from shaking. “No,” she replied. “But I can’t hold myself above them. None of us can say we don’t agree with killing, because we killed for the revolution, didn’t we?”
There was silence around the table. Some Ladies’ Auxiliary members stared at their plates. Others looked at Emília, their mouths frozen in tight smiles but their eyes angry, like mothers too polite to openly condemn their children in public but warning them that punishment would come later. A few women looked pensive. One of these was the first to break the quiet.
“Men killed, not us,” she said.
“But they were our husbands and sons,” the baroness said. “And we stood by them.”
A few women blushed. Whether they were afraid of the conversation or excited by it, Emília couldn’t tell. At the head of the table, the Widow Carvalho took out a handkerchief and sniffled into it, bringing the group’s attention back to her.
“The revolution was a noble cause,” she said, patting her remaining eye and looking at Emília. “The cangaceiros kill for the fun of it. That’s the difference. It’s unforgivable what she did to me. She had no reason, and no remorse either.”
Around the table, several Ladies’ Auxiliary members nodded. The woman sitting nearest the Widow Carvalho patted her hand. Others complimented her bravery. Emília picked at her gloves. She felt an intense dislike for the widow, just as she’d disliked the girls who’d teased Luzia as a child, calling her “cripple” and “Victrola.” Luzia used to attack those girls. She stomped their feet or slapped their faces, and Emília stood back and watched, mesmerized and afraid of her sister’s rage. The teasing girls were hurt, but they’d deserved it, hadn’t they? The sting of a slap went away. The bruise left by a punch faded with time. This schoolyard logic didn’t seem to apply to the Seamstress’s actions—the widow’s punishment had done permanent damage. Emília had seen mandacarus up close; she’d touched their sharp spines. What kind of woman, Emília thought, would think up such a punishment? Worse, what kind would act it out? Whatever the Widow Carvalho had done wrong didn’t merit the cruelty of the Seamstress’s response. This knowledge made Emília keep quiet for the rest of the luncheon. Forced to endure the widow’s stories, Emília drank glass after glass of coconut water so she would not speak out and embarrass herself. She left the lunch in a foul mood.
When Emília returned to the Coelho house, she went directly upstairs. She’d placed Expedito’s crib in her room, beside her bed. Near the crib was a cot for the wet nurse she’d hired. The nurse was a large woman who, on her first day, immediately popped out her caramel-colored breast and fed the child in the house’s foyer, in front of a horrified Dona Dulce. Emília had laughed out loud. Later, so as not to disturb her mother-in-law’s sensibilities, Emília arranged a proper feeding schedule and found an embroidered cloth for the nurse to place over her chest.
She found the nurse in her room. Expedito suckled on the woman’s breast, but his eyes slowly closed and his head lolled back. It was the end of his feeding and he was caught between his two greatest pleasures: sleep and food. Emília watched him. She was glad to have the wet nurse but felt sharp twinges of jealousy each time Expedito fell asleep in her arms. Emília took off her gloves and hat. She extended her hands and the wet nurse rose from her chair and handed over Expedito. When the nurse left the room, Emília pressed her face to the boy’s head. His skull felt soft and malleable, like partially baked clay. Expedito’s baby fat, which had been so hard for him to gain, was disappearing. At seven months, his chin and cheekbones were more defined. His neck had elongated. His arms slowly smoothed out, and the rolls of fat on his wrists—which looked as if strings had been tied around them—were disappearing. Emília worried about his ears, which were beginning to protrude. Each time she brushed Expedito’s brown curls, Emília cupped her hand over his head, afraid of how it would grow, of the calculations Dr. Duarte might make.
Emília placed Expedito in his crib. She removed the tiny gold key she wore on a chain around her neck and used it to open her jewelry box. Next to the Communion portrait, stuffed beneath her pearl necklace and a ring, was Luzia’s penknife. Emília inspected the knife. How would she explain its significance to Expedito?
One day, he would ask about his mother—his
real
mother. Those words made Emília angry. It was a petty, confusing anger she recalled from childhood. Luzia was the youngest and, because of this, she always got to eat chicken hearts at lunch, or sit on Aunt Sofia’s lap. Luzia got horses whittled from corncobs. She got the ripest fruits. As the older, ignored sister, Emília didn’t know which she wanted more: the adults’ attention or her little sister’s. She ended up cursing them both. When she thought of Expedito and the questions he’d eventually ask, Emília felt the same bitter mix of resentment and yearning she’d felt as a child.
