When Domingas missed Omar in the middle of that October afternoon, Zana didn’t get upset. In the garden, she lifted her head and shouted her son’s name. Up there, where he was ensconced, he gave signs of life: he opened his arms, swung his body from a thick branch, and let out a shriek like a bird.

“He always liked that kind of tomfoolery,” Zana remembered. “When he was a kid, he defied everyone and climbed up to the highest branch. Yaqub was terrified, poor thing …”

It seems he’d climbed into the rubber tree to rest and meditate, or, who knows, to look at the world from up there, like a god, a bird, or a monkey. Here on the ground, things were less comfortable, infested with ants’ nests, pests, and tree parasites; anthills appeared overnight, creating hard, dark mounds in the wooden fence and the tree trunks. Omar always forgot to destroy these anthills, and I knew that task would be left over for me. Sooner or later, I would have to pour kerosene on these huge brown lumps and set them on fire. I really enjoyed watching a whole community of insects writhing and burning to a crisp, devoured by the flames. That was not all that was destroyed. I cut the bushes and dead plants down, and then pulled everything out, the stalk, the roots, everything. The holes in the ground turned into subterranean bonfires; the grasshoppers and the umbrella ants with their queen were incinerated as well. It was quite a spectacle seeing these organized families, like ordered, disciplined armies, going up in flames. What pleasure I got from witnessing a whole hierarchy of insects turn to ash. For some time at any rate, the ground was free of these pests. It was a relief to see our square bit of the garden smoking here and there. Omar avoided contact with fire: he was afraid. He couldn’t bear the presence of ashes, carbonized matter that nourished the remaining vegetation in the garden.

He couldn’t bear to see his father dead in the house, sitting on the gray sofa, where he used to see his son drunk or befuddled with sleep in the red hammock; the same sofa where Halim had sat for some minutes, panting, exhausted, after he’d slapped his son and chained him down. Omar must have remembered this, on the night when he was woken by the convulsive weeping of the women of the household. When he came downstairs, Omar didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand what had happened. On the gray sofa he saw the only man who had dishonored him with a slap. He began shouting, like a child burning with hatred, or some feeling like hatred. Beside himself, he shouted: “Isn’t he going to chain his son up? Aren’t you going to wipe the sweat off his forehead? Why doesn’t he budge and talk to me? Is he going to stay there, with that look on his face like a dead fish?”