Free The Seamstress by Frances de Pontes Peebles Page A

flattening beneath the scarf, and she’d take it off as soon as she entered the Singer building.
    “Look,” Luzia said.
    Emília kept her eyes closed. During their trips home, Luzia pointed out the same boulders—rocks so weathered by rain and time that they looked soft and almost porous. People had recently whitewashed them with political slogans: Vote # 25, Celestino Gomes! Luzia hated the signs. Emília did not know who the man was—politicians were strange, phantom figures whose crackling voices occasionally appeared in radio broadcasts or whose names were painted onto rocks or fences and endorsed by local colonels. Only literate men could vote. The few who fit this profile in Taquaritinga rarely saw a ballot; Colonel Pereira filled them out as he saw fit. Luzia swore that if she were a man, she’d never support the candidate who ruined boulders with his slogans. Emília ignored her; she liked the painted rocks. They added freshness to the brown barrenness of the countryside. To Emília, they were a sign of civilization among the cracked mud houses and tightly bound goat fences, whose constant repetition made her clutch her scarf and then her stomach, where she felt a fluttering, an awful tightening of her insides that she could only identify as disgust.
    “Look,” Luzia insisted.
    Her sister’s elbow jabbed her ribs. Emília opened her eyes. They’d already passed the painted boulders. Four figures blocked the road.
    “Whoa!” their elderly chaperone yelled. He held the mules’ reins in one hand and felt beneath the bottom of his shirt with the other, revealing a shabby knife holster. There were thefts along the roadways—groups of cangaceiros or even lone outlaws sometimes took merchandise and money. Some people in town lived in fear of cangaceiros, even though Taquaritinga hadn’t been attacked in Emília’s short lifetime. Dona Ester, the barber’s wife, insisted that the cangaceiros were not heroes, as some claimed, but hoodlums and killers of the worst kind. Repentista singers, who passed through town wearing threadbare suits and carrying polished violas, sang of the cangacieros’ cruelty: how they burned down entire towns, killed whole families, slaughtered livestock. Then, immediately afterward, the same men sang of the cangacieros’ mercy and generosity; how the outlaws threw gold pieces and left treasure chests behind for kind hosts.
    Dona Teresa, an elderly woman who sold chickens and cinnamon sticks at the Saturday market, believed that the cangaceiros were simply poor farmhands who got fed up with the colonels’ petty territory wars. The old woman’s nephew—a sweet boy, she insisted—had become a cangaceiro to avenge the death of his sweetheart at the hands of an enemy colonel. This was a common story. There were three kinds of cangaceiros: those who entered for revenge, those who entered to escape revenge, and those who were simply thieves. Emília believed that the first two eventually had to become the third kind; they could not live by scavenging in the scrub like animals. Still, in the backlands, revenge was sacred. It was a duty, an honor. Even those who feared the cangaceiros as thieves respected them as men. “Cangaceiros don’t bow their heads to the colonels,” Zé Muela, a shopkeeper, often whispered when he was sure Colonel Pereira was far from his store. “They handle things. They don’t cross their legs like women.”
    Some of the girls Emília had gone to school with believed cangaceiros were romantic, even handsome. Emília disagreed. Whatever their motivations, cangaceiros were those very farm boys she disliked, except worse—they were made bolder by guns and prestige. They were, Emília thought, like the band of feral dogs that prowled Taquaritinga each evening. Once docile, they’d grown wild and rabid—pilfering chickens, snapping the necks of baby goats, roaming gloomily through town with their bloodied coats and awful stench. They were unpredictable,