Halim never spoke of death to me, except once, obliquely, skirting around the edges of the topic. He spoke when he already felt close to his end, some years after his son’s affair with Pau-Mulato. He didn’t see the worst, the final calamity. He didn’t see it, but he did take omens seriously—all the prophecies he had heard from his caboclo friends, the offspring of solitude and the jungle. He had a naive belief in these stories, and let himself be carried along by their plots and word magic. Halim was a faux naïf, an idolater of love and its ecstasies, in pursuit of the good life in the trivial world of the provinces. He took life as it came: any sugar, coarse or fine, was good enough for his coffee. But when it came to love, with Zana, he always wanted and always asked for more. In the days and months of Omar’s absence, he began to hide away, begging for crumbs, starved and dizzy with pain. He acted, too. There were no tricks he didn’t try, to see the back of the prayers, novenas, and suchlike mumbo jumbo. He didn’t promise the earth: just one thing, the really tough act. He said: “I’m going to bring Omar back home. Either he comes back or takes that woman with him and finally gets the hell out.”

6

6

Halim was getting old: he was well over seventy, nearly eighty—even he didn’t know what day and year he’d been born. He said: “I was born at the end of the last century, some day in January … The best thing about it is that I’m aging without knowing how old I am: that’s what happens when you’re an immigrant.” Still, the flab had to fight to take all the strength out of his muscles. He was as strong as an ox, as he opened or shut up the shop. He pulled and lifted the metal doors with real vigor, and the cylinders crashed noisily as he did it. Rânia could have done the work, but he got there first, displaying his muscles and showing off to his daughter. Right up to a little before his death, he was discreet when he was with friends, incapable of false laughter, generous without thinking twice, but with an unpredictable, masculine bravado. He could give a good left hook to a hostile chin, and hurt.

That’s what happened with one A. L. Azaz and his gang of brutes, a year after the end of the Second World War. I have no difficulty remembering the date because Domingas told me: “You were born when Halim had a fight in the public square, and was the talk of the town.”

Everybody in the city heard about this fight, and remembered it, the anecdotes still circulated years later, distorted by time and its many voices.