“What do you mean, stay in a hotel? Did you hear that, Halim? Our son wants to hide with his wife … He wants to be a stranger in his own country …”

Halim moved away: with a gesture of his hands, he asked to be left in peace.

“My wife doesn’t have to put up with a sick man’s tantrums,” Yaqub said, in a loud voice.

Zana swallowed the words. She’d have swallowed anything to avoid a confrontation between the twins. She went with Yaqub to the door, and then I saw her going up the staircase, slow and hesitant, as if her thoughts hindered her steps. I nodded off for the rest of the morning and woke up with a continuous buzz in my ears that kept going for some seconds, then tailed off until it finally disappeared. It was Yaqub’s plane that had just taken off. The midday flight to the south, as we said in those days.

I had a foreboding I would never see Yaqub again. I asked my mother what they had talked about when he went into her room. What was there between the two of them? I plucked up the courage to ask her if Yaqub was my father. I couldn’t stand Omar; everything I saw and felt, everything Halim had told me was enough to make me detest him. I didn’t understand why my mother didn’t snub him once and for all, or at least keep her distance from him. Why did she have to put up with so much humiliation? She asked me to calm down: I ought to use these days to rest and read in bed. “You’re thin and pale …” she said, her hands on my face. Domingas hid things as much as she could, and tried to console me with the last words she said before she left the room. Omar’s health was more delicate than mine. He was a sick man; I was a convalescent. Laval’s death was a blow for Omar and me. The groans and the violent reaction might seem exaggerated, but he had been affected by the master’s death.

Antenor Laval, more than Chico Quelé, had been Omar’s friend. It was a half-secret friendship, just as with Omar’s two love affairs, or anything that gave him pleasure, desire, and self-confidence. He was a prisoner of these forbidden pleasures. He didn’t forget Laval, and stayed shut up in his room even after his brother’s departure. There was sincerity in the recluse. He wrote a “Manifesto against the Coup” and read it out loud. It was a courageous act, and it was a pity so much courage went to waste in an almost empty room; only I heard the daring phrases and harsh words.

When he emerged from his room, he looked like the ragged individual I’d seen coming down the walkway, coming towards me. He had the same fixed, staring look of a man in solitary confinement: nightmare eyes, lost in the darkest night.