The Seamstress Read Online Free PDF Page A

knuckles. During courtship they were all awkwardness and smiles. But Emília had seen them negotiating at the weekly market, shouting and swaggering, taking up roosters by the wings and swiftly cracking the birds’ necks. After she’d rejected a suitor, Emília often saw him parading a new wife around the Saturday market, pulling his shy bride this way and that as if the girl were some skittish animal that would escape from her husband’s grip.
    Emília read the romances in Fon Fon . Outside of Taquaritinga there existed another breed of man. Gentlemen were perfumed and suave. Their mustaches were combed, their hair oiled, their beards trimmed, their clothing ironed. It had nothing to do with wealth, but with bearing. She was not a snob, as the town gossips said. She craved refinement, not wealth. Mystery, not money. At night, after prayers, Emília imagined herself as one of those smartly dressed Fon Fon heroines, in love with a captain whose boat was lost at sea. She pictured herself on a dune, shouting his name over the water. Or as his nurse, treating him when he returned. He’d gone mute and she became his voice, watching his dark eyebrows move up and down, communicating in a language only she understood. This mystery, this sad longing that ran through all of the Fon Fon stories, seemed to be the source of love. Emília prayed it would come to her. She slept without a pillow, swore off sweets, pricked her finger thirty times with her sewing needle as an offering to the saints for their help. Nothing had worked. The white rose and her Fon Fon prayers were her last hope.
    Emília placed the newspaper clipping of Santo Antônio in her hands and squeezed.
    “Professor Célio,” she said between prayers.
    Célio, her sewing instructor, was not mysterious or tragic. He was a skinny man with doe eyes and long fingers. But he was different from the Taquaritinga boys. He wore freshly pressed suits and shined shoes. And he came from São Paulo, the great metropolis of Brazil, and would return there when the sewing course was over.
    “Please, Santo Antônio,” Emília whispered, “let me go with him.”
    “You shouldn’t ask the saints for trivial things,” Luzia said. She stood in their bedroom doorway. Her head nearly touched the top of the whitewashed frame. When she entered a room she seemed to fill it, making the space feel smaller than it actually was. Her shoulders were wide and the muscles of her right arm—her good arm—were round and hard, conditioned from years of turning the crank of Aunt Sofia’s sewing machine. Her eyes were her best, most feminine feature. Emília envied them. They were heavy lidded, like a cat’s, and green. Beneath Luzia’s thick brows and black lashes, their color was startling, like the shoots of Aunt Sofia’s dahlias emerging from dark soil. Luzia cradled her left arm—her crippled arm—in her right. The arm’s elbow was forever locked in a sharp right angle. Luzia’s fingers and shoulder worked perfectly, but the elbow had never healed correctly. Aunt Sofia blamed the encanadeira for her poor work in setting the broken bones.
    “Love isn’t trivial,” Emília said. She closed her eyes to resume her prayers.
    “Santo Antônio isn’t even the one to ask,” Luzia said. “He’ll make the wrong match. You ask for a stallion and he’ll give you a donkey.”
    “Well, Fon Fon says otherwise.”
    “You should pray to São Pedro.”
    “You say your prayers and I’ll say mine,” Emília said, pressing the picture of Santo Antônio harder between her palms.
    “You should light a candle to get his attention,” Luzia continued. “Flowers won’t work. That’s not even a real flower.”
    “Be quiet!” Emília snapped.
    Luzia shrugged and left. Emília tried to concentrate on her prayers but could not. She tucked her hair behind her ears, kissed her picture of Santo Antônio, and followed her sister out of their room.
    2
     
    Aunt Sofia’s house was small but sturdy,