“My son didn’t want to study even in the Cockpit,” Halim complained. “A weakling … he let my wife suck all his strength, all his fiber … his courage … she sucked out his heart, his soul … his will … I didn’t want children, that’s true … but Yaqub and Rânia, one way or another, let me live … I wanted to send the twins to Lebanon, they’d get to know another country, speak another language … That was what I really wanted … I told Zana, and she went to pieces, told me that Omar would be lost without her. It didn’t work … either for the one that went away or the one that stayed here. When Yaqub came back, I still had hope … I brought Zana here, we fooled around as much as we wanted, we were free … What I didn’t do to seduce that woman! Months and months … the gazals, the wine to overcome my shyness … Nobody wanted to accept it … Nobody thought a peddler could win over Galib’s daughter. She had courage; she decided. And I believed … I thought only about her, only wanted her … Then life started giving twists and turns, closing in, cornering me … Life goes in a straight line, then suddenly it turns head over heels, and the thread has a knot in it you can’t untie. That was the way it was … The death of her father, Galib … Death far away, the pain it causes, I can understand … A father … I never knew what it means … I never knew my father or mother … I came to Brazil with an uncle, Fadel. I was about twelve … He went away, disappeared, left me on my own in a room in the Pension Oriente … I clung to Zana, I wanted everything … things I couldn’t have. It was a devouring passion, a bottomless abyss … After Galib died, Omar began to grow in her affections … She kept on saying he was going to die … It was an excuse; I knew nothing would happen to him … She went crazy, did everything for him, she’s capable of dying at his side … When her son wasn’t around, she was my wife, the woman I loved. I smelled her; I remembered our most passionate nights, the two of us rolling on top of those old pieces of cloth. In the early morning, we went to have coffee in the market kiosk; we’d walk barefoot on the beach … I had the urge to run away with her, get into a boat, go to Belém, and leave the three children with your mother … I thought of that, I thought of everything … even of running away on my own … But I could never have done it; she’d have haunted my dreams … We had lots of nights of pleasure, right here, in the midst of all this mess … The problem was Omar, his love life, those two women … The second one was a real upset; Zana realized she might lose her son … The weakling! Coward … He’ll never know … I can’t even look at him … I don’t want to hear his voice … I don’t think I ever did, he makes me sick … If I had the strength, I’d give him another clout, I’d have given him a hundred or so when he broke the mirror Zana adored … A thousand, thousands …”