Stamps, soldiers, and cannons were forgotten. The lively music on the record player was switched off. An old clock struck four times. The rush down the wooden staircase made the house shake, and in no time the basement was alive with shouting, as people fought over the front-row seats. Yaqub kept a place for Livia, and Omar, with a look, showed his disapproval of this polite move. From the darkness there emerged black-and-white pictures, and the monotonous sound of the projector underlined the afternoon silence. Domingas said goodbye to the Reinosos. The magic of the dark basement lasted some twenty minutes. Then a breakdown in the generator effaced the images, someone opened a window, and the audience saw Livia’s lips pressed to Yaqub’s cheek. Next there was a sound of chairs pushed to the ground, the crash of a bottle breaking, and Omar’s furious, quick, well-aimed thrust. The silence lasted for some seconds. And then came Livia’s cry of panic as she saw Yaqub’s torn cheek. The Reinosos came down the stairs, and Abelardo’s voice drowned the hubbub. Omar was panting, leaning against the white wall, with the piece of dark glass in his right hand, and his gleaming eyes fixed on his brother’s bloodied face.

Estelita took the victim upstairs and called one of the houseboys: “Go to Zana’s house and call Domingas, but don’t say what’s happened.”

The scar was already beginning to grow in Yaqub’s body: the scar, the pain, and feeling he didn’t show, and perhaps didn’t even understand. They didn’t speak to each other again. Zana blamed Halim for the lack of a firm hand in the twins’ education. He didn’t agree: “It’s nothing to do with that; you treat Omar as if he were our only son.”

She wept when she saw Yaqub’s face, said Domingas. She kissed his right cheek over and over and wept bitterly when she saw the other cheek swollen, with its semicircle of stitches. Sewn with black thread, it looked like a tarantula’s leg. Quietly, Yaqub reflected. He avoided speaking to his brother. Did he despise him? Was he silently brooding over his humiliation?

“Scorpion-face,” they said at school. “Sickle-cheek.” There were lots of nicknames, new ones every morning. He swallowed these insults and never reacted. His parents had to put up with a silent son. They feared Yaqub’s revenge, and feared for the worst: violence in the home. That was when Halim decided on the journey and the separation. Distance would be sure to extinguish the hatred, the jealousy, and the act that had given rise to them.

Yaqub left for Lebanon with his father’s friends and came back to Manaus five years later—alone. “A hick, a shepherd, a ra’í. Just look at the way my son eats!” Zana complained.

She tried to forget the scar, but distance brought Yaqub’s face even closer. What letters she wrote!