The seamstress - By Frances de Pontes Peebles Page 0,2

was fourteen and Luzia twelve. They lived with their aunt Sofia after that, and though Emília loved her aunt, she couldn’t wait to run away, to live in the capital. As a girl, Emília had always believed that she would leave Sofia and Luzia. Instead, they’d left her.

Emília slipped a black-bordered card from the newest wreath. It was addressed to her father-in-law, Dr. Duarte Coelho.

“Grief cannot be measured,” the card said. “Neither can our esteem for you. Come back to work soon! From: Your colleagues at the Criminology Institute.” The wreaths and cards weren’t meant for Degas. The gifts that arrived at the Coelho house were sent to curry favor with the living. Most of the floral arrangements were from politicians, or from Green Party compatriots, or from underlings in Dr. Duarte’s Criminology Institute. A few of the wreaths were from society women hoping to be in Emília’s good graces. The women had been customers in Emília’s dress shop. They hoped her mourning wouldn’t stifle her dressmaking hobby. Respectable women didn’t have careers, so Emília’s thriving dress shop was considered a diversion, like crochet or charity work. Emília and her sister had been seamstresses. In the countryside, their profession was highly regarded, but in Recife this tier of respectability didn’t exist—a seamstress was the same as a maid or a washerwoman. And to the Coelhos’ dismay, their son had taken up with one. According to the Coelhos, Emília had two saving graces: she was pretty and she had no family. There wouldn’t be parents or siblings clapping at the front gate and asking for handouts. Dr. Duarte and his wife, Dona Dulce, knew Emília had a sister but believed that she—like Emília’s parents and her aunt Sofia—had died. Emília didn’t contradict this belief. As seamstresses, both she and Luzia knew how to cut, how to mend, and how to conceal.

“A great seamstress must be brave.” This was what Aunt Sofia used to say. For a long time, Emília disagreed. She believed that bravery involved risk. With sewing, everything was measured, traced, tried on, and revised. The only risk was error.

A good seamstress took exact measurements and then, using a sharp pencil, transferred those measurements onto paper. She traced the paper pattern onto cheap muslin, cut out the pieces, and sewed them into a sample garment that her client tried on and which she—the seamstress—pinned and remeasured to correct the flaws in her pattern. The muslin always looked bland and unappealing. At this point, the seamstress had to be enthusiastic, envisioning the garment in a beautiful fabric and convincing the client of her vision. From the pins and markings on the muslin, she revised the paper pattern and traced it onto good fabric: silk, fine-woven linen, or sturdy cotton. Next, she cut. Finally, she sewed those pieces together, ironing after each step in order to have crisp lines and straight seams. There was no bravery in this. There was only patience and meticulousness.

Luzia never made muslins or patterns. She traced her measurements directly onto the final fabric and cut. In Emília’s eyes this wasn’t bravery either—it was skill. Luzia was good at measuring people. She knew exactly where to wind a tape around arms and waists in order to get the most accurate dimensions. But her skill wasn’t dependent on accuracy; Luzia saw beyond numbers. She knew that numbers could lie. Aunt Sofia had taught them that the human body had no straight lines. The measuring tape could miscalculate the curve of a slumped back, the arc of a shoulder, the dip of a waist, the bend of an elbow. Luzia and Emília were taught to be wary of measuring tapes. “Don’t trust a strange tape!” their aunt Sofia often yelled at them. “Trust your own eyes!” So Emília and Luzia learned to see where a garment had to be taken in, let out, lengthened or shortened before they’d even unrolled their measuring tapes. Sewing was a language, their aunt said. It was the language of shapes. A good seamstress could envision a garment encircling a body and see the same garment laid flat on a cutting table, broken into its individual pieces. One rarely resembled the other. When laid flat, the pieces of a garment were odd shapes broken into two halves. Every piece had its opposite, its mirror image.

Unlike Luzia, Emília preferred making paper patterns. She wasn’t as confident at measurement and felt nervous each time she took up her scissors and sliced the final cloth. Cutting was unforgiving.