He went back to the brothels, the nightclubs in the center and the suburbs; the early hours when he came in drunk, like a robot, sometimes stuttering the name of the two women he really had loved, or crying like a child that’s lost something precious. He became half infantile, prematurely aged, with long silent intervals, like some children who reject maternal warmth or put off uttering the first intelligible word. He sat there on the veranda like a cornered animal, avoiding human contact, destroyed perhaps by the long hangovers, when his drinking continued at home until dawn. I wasn’t sorry for him. It was he who had taught me that pity and sympathy were useless. I remembered one afternoon when Zana had sent me to the Praça da Saudade to get a dress at a seamstress’s. I hadn’t had lunch, and the strong sun made me dizzy. I sat down on a bench in the shade of a pergola. I was looking towards the Rua Simon Bolivar, at the back of the orphanage where my mother had lived. I thought of her, of the time she’d spent in that prison, and then remembered what Laval had said: there was an Indian cemetery beneath the square. The racket made by a group of men woke me up. As they came up to the pergola, one of them pointed at me and shouted: “That’s my maid’s son.” They all laughed and went on their way. I’ve never forgotten. I had the urge to drag Omar to the most stinking creek I could find and chuck him into the mud, into the rotting debris of this city.

That was what I said to Halim; I had the courage to say it when he’d finished telling the story of Pau-Mulato.

He looked at me and turned his face to the storehouse window. Streaks of silver light flashed in the bright sun, dancing on the black water, amid the bustle of the little quay at the back of the Adolpho Lisboa Market on a lively Saturday morning.

I thought what I had said about Omar would mean the end of our conversation. His grayish eyes turned towards me, and he asked me about the Rui Barbosa Lyceum, and if it was worth going to this school, with its awful reputation. “It’s always worthwhile finishing something,” I said. “I learned a bit in the Vandals’ Cockpit, and a lot reading the books Laval lent me, and talking to him after class.”