“You don’t need a tongue for that, just a brain,” his father said, proudly. “His brother might be short that way, but Yaqub’s got plenty and to spare.”

Omar heard those words, and heard them again years later, when Yaqub, in São Paulo, told his family that he’d got into the Polytechnic School (the Bolytechnic, Baba, he wrote, jokingly); he was top of the list. Zana smiled in triumph, as Halim said repeatedly: “Didn’t I tell you? Brains, intelligence, that’s what Yaqub’s got plenty of.”

He was a mathematician, and a proud young man, guarded and trusting in no one; the chess player who, on the sixth move, wrapped the game up and whistled like a bird, in an aimless, guttural fashion, with the cornered king already in his sights. He would beat his opponent, emitting this rather irritating whistle, the sure harbinger of checkmate. Days and nights he spent in his room, never going for a plunge in the creeks, not even on Sundays, when the people of Manaus come out in the sun and the city makes its peace with the river Negro. Zana was worried about this hermit, stuck in his cell. Why didn’t he go to the dances? “Look at your son, Halim, hidden away in a hole like that. If he goes on that way, he’ll get mildewed.” His father couldn’t understand why he was giving up on his youth, the noisy parties and serenading that echoed through the Amazonian nights.

What nights? Forget it! Proud in his solitude, he despised the Carnival balls, which in the years after the war were even crazier. The parades with their Harlequins and Columbines left from the Praça da Saudade and went down the avenue in a mad frenzy to the Municipal Market; he despised the midwinter festivals with their native tipiti dances, the boat races, the parties on board the Italian ships, and the football matches in the Parque Amazonense. He shut himself in his room and lived in his own world, closed off from anyone else. Was he a shepherd, a hillbilly terrified of the city? Maybe, or perhaps something more: he was a tough peasant plotting a brilliant future for himself.

Yaqub, going pale like a chameleon on a damp wall, made up for keeping out of the sun and not exercising his body by honing his ability to calculate and do equations. At school, he was always the first to find the value of z, y, or x. He had his teachers baffled: the most complex equations would be worked out in Yaqub’s head; chalk and blackboard were of no use to him.