The Seamstress Read Online Free PDF Page B

her whole body twisted up and useless.
    Emília made her way to the kitchen. Kindling glowed and jutted out from the sooty mouth of the cookstove. Aunt Sofia poked the fire with her long kitchen stick, then flicked a woven fan back and forth before a small hole in the brick stove, below the flames. Her aunt’s legs were as thick as fence posts, her ankles indistinct from her calves. Blue veins bulged beneath the skin of her ankles and behind her knees from years of sitting at a sewing machine. A long, white braid hung down Aunt Sofia’s back.
    “Bless me, Tia,” Emília yawned.
    Her aunt stopped fanning the stove. She kissed Emília’s forehead.
    “You’re blessed.” Aunt Sofia frowned. She tugged at Emília’s hair. “You look like a man with this—like one of those cangaceiros.”
    The models in the newest Fon Fon —pencil-sketched women with long bodies and rouged lips—had dark, shining bobs that looked like fine-cut silk framing their faces at sharp angles. A week before, Emília had taken the large sewing scissors and copied their haircut. Aunt Sofia nearly fainted when she saw it. “Dear Lord!” her aunt had screamed. She took Emília by the arm and led her into the saints’ closet to pray for forgiveness. Since then, Aunt Sofia made her tie a scarf over her head each time she left the house. Emília had expected such a reaction from her aunt—it had been years since Uncle Tirço had passed away, yet Aunt Sofia wore only black dresses with two camisoles underneath. Wearing any less, Aunt Sofia declared, was the equivalent of walking about naked. She never allowed Luzia or Emília to wear the color red, or encarnado, as Aunt Sofia called it, because it was the color of sin. And when Emília wore her first califom, Aunt Sofia had tied the strings of the brassiere so tightly that Emília almost fainted.
    “Tia, do I have to wear a scarf today?” Emília asked.
    “Of course,” Aunt Sofia replied. “You’ll wear it until your hair grows back.”
    “But everyone in the capital wears their hair like this.”
    “We aren’t in the capital.”
    “Please, Tia, just today. Just for the sewing lesson?”
    “No.” Aunt Sofia fanned the fire faster. The kindling glowed orange.
    “But I look like a coffee picker.”
    “Better to look like a coffee picker than an easy woman!” Aunt Sofia shouted. “There’s no shame in being a coffee picker. Your mother picked coffee when she was a girl.”
    Emília let out a long sigh. She didn’t like to imagine her mother that way.
    “Don’t sulk,” Aunt Sofia said, pointing the black-tipped fire stick at Emília’s head. “You should have thought before you did…that.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” Emília replied. She removed the cloth covering from the clay jug beside the stove and scooped a cupful of water into their metal washbasin. In the far kitchen corner, Aunt Sofia had rigged a makeshift curtain so that they could bathe in private. Emília took her bar of perfumed soap from its hiding place on the windowsill. It was a gift from Dona Conceição. Emília preferred it to the cheap black soap Aunt Sofia purchased, which made everything smell like ashes. She crouched beside the washbasin and scooped water over her head. She rolled the small, perfumed nub in her hands.
    “Bless me, Tia,” Luzia said. She entered barefoot through the back door, an empty bowl in her large hands. She’d been throwing corn to the guinea hens. Emília disliked those speckled chickens—whenever she fed them, they pecked at her toes and fluttered near her face. With Luzia the guineas were deferential. They moved from her path and let out their unusually high-pitched call, which sounded like a tribe of old women repeating the words, “I’m weak, I’m weak, I’m weak.”
    “Washing your hair again?” Luzia asked. When Emília ignored her, she rested her hands on her hips. “You’re wasting water. What if it doesn’t rain for another four months?”
    “I’m not an