Title Page

FOR RUTH

Epigraph

The house was sold with all its memories
all its furniture all its nightmares
all the sins committed, or just about to be;
the house was sold with the sound of its doors banging
with its windy corridors its view of the world its
imponderables.

CARLOS DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE

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When Yaqub returned from Lebanon in 1945, his father went to Rio de Janeiro to fetch him. The quay at Mauá Square, close to the center of the city, was teeming with the relatives of officers and men of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, coming back from Italy. Brazilian flags decorated the balconies and verandas of the apartments, rockets were bursting in the sky, and wherever Halim looked, there were signs of victory. He caught sight of his son on the gangway of a ship that had just come in from Marseilles. He was no longer a boy, but a young man who had spent five of his eighteen years in southern Lebanon. His bearing was still the same: his quick, firm steps gave him a poise and stiffness unthinkable in the other, younger son.

Yaqub had grown by a good few inches. As he came down to the quay, his father compared the physique of the son just arrived with the image he’d built up in the years of separation. Yaqub was carrying a threadbare gray canvas bag, and under his green cap his large eyes were wide open, taking in the shouts and tears of the soldiers of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force.

Halim waved with both hands, but his son took a while to recognize this man in a white suit, a little shorter than he was. He had almost forgotten his father’s face, his eyes, in fact everything about him. Apprehensively, Halim came up to the lad, the two exchanged glances, and then the son asked “Baba?” First came four kisses on the cheek and a long, drawn-out embrace, then the greeting in Arabic. They left the quay arm in arm and went to Cinelândia. The son recounted his journey, and his father complained of the hard times in Manaus—the poverty and hunger of the war years. In Cinelândia they sat at a café table, and amid the surrounding hubbub Yaqub opened his bag and took out a parcel; his father saw moldy bread and a box of dried figs. Was that all he’d brought from Lebanon? No letters? No presents? No, there was nothing more in the bag, no clothes, no presents, nothing! Yaqub explained in Arabic that his uncle, his father’s brother, hadn’t wanted him to go back to Brazil.