Dozens? Hundreds, maybe. Five years of words. No replies. The little news she got about Yaqub’s life was transmitted by friends or acquaintances coming back from Lebanon. A cousin of Talib’s who had visited Halim’s family had caught sight of him in the basement of a house. He was alone, reading a book, sitting on the ground, beside a pile of dried figs. The boy tried to speak to him, in Arabic and Portuguese, but Yaqub paid no attention. Zana spent the night putting the blame on Halim, and threatened to go to Lebanon, even with the war on. Then he wrote to his relatives and sent the money for Yaqub’s passage.

That was what Domingas told me. However, I also saw a lot of what happened, because I watched this little world from the outside. Yes, from outside, and sometimes from a distance. But I was the observer of this game, and I was present at many of the moves, until the final outcome.

In the first months after Yaqub’s arrival, Zana tried her best to give both sons equal attention. Rânia meant much more than I did, but even so, less than the twins. For example: I slept in a small room built in the garden, separate from the house. Rânia slept in a small bedroom, but on the first floor. The twins slept in similar rooms, adjacent to one another, with the same furniture; they got the same monthly allowance, the same pocket money, and both of them went to the Salesian college. It was a privilege: it also caused trouble.

The two of them left for school early; anyone who saw them from a distance, walking along together in their uniforms starched by Domingas, would think that the two brothers were reconciled forever. Yaqub, who had lost a few years’ schooling in Lebanon, was like a beanpole in a room full of pygmies. Zana was afraid he would piss in the schoolyard, eat with his hands in the refectory, or kill a kid and bring it back home. Nothing like that happened. He was shy, and maybe that was why people thought he was a coward. He was too ashamed to speak: p’s turned into b’s (“Yes blease, baba!” “What a bity!”); he was an object of mockery from his fellow pupils, and from some of the teachers who thought he was uncouth and strange: like a badly made pot. But he also attracted looks from the girls. One thing he did know how to do was look—straight in the eye, fearlessly, raising his left eyebrow: shy he might be, but you could see the ladies’ man. He smiled, and chuckled, beautifully timing it to draw a sigh from the girls congregated in the squares, and at dances in clubs and in the open air. At home, Zana was the first to notice her son’s taste for flirting. Domingas, too, fell under the spell of that look. She said: “He’s got the dolphin’s eye; if you let him, he’ll carry everyone off to the bottom of the river.” But he didn’t carry anyone to the enchanted city. The spell of his eyes left hopes and promises in the air. Zana had to put up with the local girls who laid siege to her son. They sent notes and messages via the manicurist. She read these words of supplication with an almost cruel pleasure, safe in the knowledge that her Yaqub wouldn’t succumb to verses copied from the Romantic poets. Shut in his room, he spent whole nights studying Portuguese grammar; over and over again, he repeated words he’d pronounced wrong: atonito instead of atônito. Where to put the stress: it was a terrible problem for Yaqub. Slowly he learned, spelling out the words, chanting them, until the fishes, plants, and fruits, all with their indigenous names, no longer stuck in his throat. Even so, he was never exactly chatty. He was the quietest one in the house and the street, reticent as could be. Inside this laconic, tongue-tied twin, a mathematician was taking root. His talent for abstraction, calculation, and working with numbers more than made up for what was missing in his ability to use the language.