The Seamstress (72 page)

Luzia’s foot caught. She looked down and saw an arm bent at an unnatural angle, the hand at its end closed in a fist. There was a body beside it. Luzia leaned down. Half of the face was coated with sand, which sparkled in the firelight. The other half was clean. His eyes were wide as if, even in death, he feared the Seamstress. His lips were open. There was no hair on his chin or his cheeks; he was twelve or thirteen years old at most. Luzia pressed her hand against his chin, closing his mouth. She thought of Expedito.

Luzia carried an envelope at the bottom of her bornal. Inside was a collection of photographs torn from the
Diário
: Emília with a bundle in her arms; Emília with a fat, dark-eyed infant on her hip; and later, Emília standing beside a boy dressed in tiny suits, like a little man. He gripped Emília’s hand and frowned at the camera. Luzia allowed herself to look at the photos only once, the moment she found them, and never again. She put the pictures out of her mind. Sometimes though, when she reached into her bornal to retrieve a bit of food or Antônio’s old binoculars, her fingers brushed against the envelope and Luzia felt a cramp in her stomach, like a cold hand gripping her insides.

Lately there had been no photos of him in the Society Section. Emília always appeared alone and stared smugly into the camera. She announced the departure of her charity shipments into the scrubland. Luzia understood her sister’s message: Emília had done Luzia a great favor and she wanted protection in return. Luzia respected favors—her survival was based on them—and she followed Emília’s wishes. She did not touch the charity shipments in the hopes that, in gratitude, Emília would photograph Expedito again. Luzia hadn’t expected such mercenary behavior from her sister and she felt angry at Mrs. Degas Coelho for her stinginess. But Luzia was also thankful. Perhaps, she thought, it was better not knowing or seeing what her boy had become.

She didn’t want to know about the dead boy before her either. She stopped herself from wondering about his name, his age, his likes and dislikes, and what had brought him to work on the roadway. He had no life before that life, the one he had chosen as a soldier. His choice had damned him. Luzia took his guns.

There were two: a black Browning pistol with a wide grip, and a long, shining Winchester armed with bullets Luzia had never seen before. Their tips were extremely thin and pointed, while their ends were thick and blunt.

“Those’ll burst in a man. Tear away his insides,” Baiano said. He stood near her, his expression pained, his arm in a sling. Ponta Fina was beside him.

“New guns,” Luzia said. “All new guns. Bullets, too.”

“Where’re they getting them?” Ponta Fina said. “That’s what we need to know.”

“From Recife,” Baiano said. “Maybe they get them as recruits. Leave the city with them in hand.”

Luzia shook her head. “That’s not in the papers. In the pictures the recruits leave clean—they’ve got uniforms and food, that’s all. Gomes won’t give them guns in the beginning, so they won’t be tempted to run off and join us. They give the guns to them here, when they’re already stuck in the camps.”

Ponta Fina sighed. “They’re not on supply trains. We know that.”

Luzia nodded. They’d attacked several supply trains and hadn’t found weapons in any of them.

“It could be a colonel,” Baiano said.

“How?” Ponta snapped. “We would’ve seen the distribution. We would’ve gotten word. They’re getting these guns from the coast. They’re not growing them on trees.”

“If they are growing, I want that seed,” Luzia said and smiled.

Ponta Fina shook his head. “Those charity trains give me an uneasiness.”

“Do they?” Luzia said. “Why? You want new clothes?”

“Mãe,” Ponta said, his voice urgent, “we’ve robbed everything: telegraph shipments, supply trains, colonels. Why not those charity loads? Just one, just to see what we find.”

“We won’t find anything.”

“Are you sure?”

“Are you doubting me?”

Ponta and Baiano stared at her. During the drought, they were forced to let their beards grow because there was no water to shave with. The men scratched at their faces and necks, itching the bristly hairs that appeared. Soon, thick and tangled beards clumped with dust hid the men’s faces. They looked wild and unkempt. Antônio wouldn’t have approved but Luzia liked them this way; the men looked fearsome.

“I just don’t like this,” Ponta Fina said, pointing to the new guns. “Pardon, Mãe, but I don’t feel right. Something about those charity trains doesn’t feel right.”

“Those shipments are for people we want on our side—our people,” Luzia said. “If we stop them, we’ll look like criminosos. Gomes wants that.”

Ponta shook his head. “We stopped the food trains. No one complained, seeing that we gave out the food onboard. We can do that with the clothes. We’re not stopping the trains to steal, just to look.”

“No,” Luzia said. The heaviness in her stomach increased. “I have my reasons.”

“Are they good ones?” Ponta said.

Luzia closed her eyes. “We don’t always understand the things God does, or the saints, but we trust in them.”

“We aren’t God, Mãe,” Ponta Fina whispered. “We can’t see like He sees.”

He was too polite to challenge her directly; he made her folly a collective one. Ponta’s “we” really meant “you.”
You aren’t God. You can’t see like he sees.
His words made her angry. There was a strategic purpose behind ignoring the charity shipments, but Luzia’s reasons were also selfish. Did Ponta suspect this? Did he believe that she was putting them at risk to satisfy a personal favor, ensuring her son’s safety by appeasing Emília? Luzia was ashamed by the thought.

“If you don’t like my choices, leave,” she said. “I don’t need you.”

Ponta Fina looked up, startled. He rubbed his bloodshot eyes.

“I go where you go,” he said.

Luzia’s chest burned. She felt the same irrepressible agitation she experienced before a raid, except the raid had passed. Their enemies were dead. There was no one left to fight.

Luzia removed the crystal rock from beneath her jacket. A paper was wrapped around the rock, a prayer she’d found in Antônio’s bornal. She’d liked the prayer and used it after each successful raid, before the severing began. Luzia called her cangaceiros together and they knelt around her. The girls in the group watched her carefully. They listened to Luzia, obeyed her, and knelt before her during prayers, but unlike the men, the girls stared. They saw every tremble of her hand, every hesitation, every unsure step. They reminded Luzia of herself when she’d first joined, spying on the cangaceiros for any sign of weakness. Luzia could lead the men by awing them. The cangaceiros were intimidated by her height, her short hair, and the threat of Antônio’s ghost. The women were different; sometimes Luzia regretted letting them join. The girls’ wonder at her looks wore off after their first few days with the group. During that crucial time, Luzia had to become something else. She could not be seen as just another woman. If she could not awe the girls in her group, she had to frighten them. Slowly she became the Seamstress, neither woman nor man but something apart. Some scrubland predator: pitiless and unknowable.

After praying, the cangaceiros stood and spread out among the raided camp. Each man and woman found a dead soldier. They removed machetes from their sheaths. Luzia removed hers. She stared at the solider boy on the ground before her. He had no past and no future. He’d been relieved from life, whereas Luzia held on. She had a duty to her cangaceiros and to Antônio, even though she felt ancient at twenty-four. Her joints ached. Her vision was blurred. Her hair had thinned. She was as wasted and cynical as the old gossips in Taquaritinga, the ones who’d dubbed her Victrola. She’d been so eager to get away from that name, to escape becoming the useless cripple people believed her to be, that she’d allowed herself to become the Seamstress. But once, long ago, before the fall from that mango tree, she’d been Luzia. Who was that girl? What would she have become if people hadn’t caged her inside Victrola? If she hadn’t caged herself inside the Seamstress?

The Seamstress’s only reward was revenge, and forgetfulness. Her machete sliced the air on its way down. The blade’s sound was like a long, satisfied sigh. When it hit, the impact wasn’t graceful or clean. But each time her machete cut, it was as if she was slicing away at that invisible thread that tethered her to Expedito—her only weakness and her last connection to a normal life.

3

The thread, however, was sturdy. It wasn’t easily severed; each time Luzia searched a newspaper in the hopes of finding her son’s photograph, she felt its tug. In the Society Section she found only photos of Mrs. Degas Coelho, while the other sections were filled with articles about Celestino Gomes and his new government. In late November 1933, the newly elected First National Assembly convened to draft a constitution. There was intense debate. Southern states like São Paulo—home to vast coffee plantations and the Antarctica Brewing Company, which brought in more tax revenue than all Northern states combined—fought for states’ rights. The North and Northeast disliked the South’s dominance and favored Gomes’s strong central government. Groups that Gomes had courted during the revolution also wanted their say: workers wanted labor rights, the Catholic Church lobbied for morality codes, the military for power.

The leader of Pernambuco—Tenente Higino Ribeiro—earned a new title. “Tenentes” were part of the provisional government, while “governors” were considered part of the old republic. State leaders needed a new designation. In December, the First National Assembly made Higino the official “interventor” of the state of Pernambuco. The Seamstress’s title had also changed; the
Diário
reported that a North American newspaper had gotten wind of the cangaceiros’ constant highway attacks. Papers throughout the Northeast translated the foreign headline:

Female Bandit Is the Terror of Brazil!

Luzia felt a surge of pride in the fact that people across the ocean were talking about the Seamstress, and that her status had changed: she wasn’t simply the terror of the caatinga, but the terror of a nation. Her pride was short-lived however; Luzia knew that the real terror was the drought.

She and her cangaceiros were weak. Their gums bled. Their hair lost its pigment, turning a sickly orange and falling out in knotted clumps. Luzia’s men and women began to look like terrified animals—a clear slime ran from their noses, their faces were gaunt, and their eyes bulged, the whites turned yellow. Soon, they wouldn’t have the strength to fight. Soldiers and road workers also suffered, and newspapers deemed the scrub a “wasteland.” Some editorials said the roadway should be stopped, that it was a useless and expensive endeavor.

Luzia felt a secret gratitude for the drought; it was better to die of starvation than to be killed by Gomes’s soldiers. But before they starved, she would have to disband the group. If the drought continued and roadway construction stopped, she would tell her cangaceiros that it was easier to break apart, to separate into pairs and seek their fortunes in the South, or along the coast. Antônio would never have disbanded the group, but the thought gave Luzia a quiet comfort. Dr. Eronildes had told her that he could fix her locked arm. He could rebreak it. At the time, Luzia hadn’t believed him. But the drought allowed her to hope. Maybe her fused bone, like a plant, could be trained to grow a different way. Maybe she could cast off her cangaceira’s clothes, wash her face and hair, and put on a woman’s dress. Emília was good at transformation; she could teach Luzia how it was done. They could travel to the South together. Luzia could show Expedito all of Antônio’s cures. She’d teach him how to skin a goat, how to puncture an animal’s throat without being afraid. She’d show him how to thread a needle, how to cut a pattern. She’d teach him when to measure, when to cut, and when to mend. If he shied away from her calloused hands or her too tight embrace, if he preferred his pretty aunt to his ungainly mother, Luzia could bear it.

Each day the cangaceiros prayed for rain and Luzia joined them. But in her secret prayers—the ones she said alone, at night—she asked for a sign. If the drought continued into February of the New Year, she would abandon the Seamstress for good. If it rained, it meant that she was destined to continue as a cangaceira, and that her battle with the roadway was not over.

Luzia looked to the scrub for an answer. When she’d first joined Antônio, she saw monotony in the caatinga’s gray expanse. She’d been wrong; the scrub was always changing. The light, the wind, the positions of clouds constantly shifted. It was as if the caatinga was speaking to her, and Luzia listened. During the drought, it told her where it hid water and food. When more troops appeared, Luzia asked the scrub which routes were safe and which were sabotaged. The caatinga responded with a sudden gust of wind, or a wasp’s nest blocking a certain path, telling her to beware. In January of the new year, the air changed. It was not the dry, sharp air that seemed to crackle with heat. Instead, it was heavy. Clouds blocked the sun, but this wasn’t a novelty. So many clouds had hovered over them during the drought that Luzia and the cangaceiros had stopped seeing them as indicators of rain.

That night, after the group had made camp, a girl tugged at Luzia’s bent arm. Her name was Fátima and she had nervous, darting eyes.

“Mãe,” she said, “look.”

The girl pointed to a mandacaru cactus. On its uppermost limb was a thick-petaled flower.

“It could be predicting dew,” Luzia said. “A cold night after a hot day.”

That night Luzia could not sleep. She lay on her blanket and listened for the sound of frogs coming up from their hiding places underground. Instead, she heard only panting and soft moans—several couples had moved away from camp to be together.

Each man was married to the girl he chose. They were not playing house, Luzia warned. They were entering into sacred unions, blessed by a priest when they could find one. The couples slept apart each Friday—the sacred day—and always before a highway attack, so they wouldn’t sap each other’s strength. There would be no swapping of husbands or wives. And there would be no babies. Any children born would be given to priests or to families leaving the caatinga. If the girls disobeyed, there would be no warnings or forgiveness. There was only one consequence for defiance; Luzia made sure the girls understood this.