In the last years of his life, Halim lived alone with this landscape in the little storeroom with its objects from the past, absorbed in the meanders of his memory; for he smiled and gesticulated, went serious and then smiled again, affirming or denying something indecipherable, or trying to keep hold of a memory that burst into his mind, some kind of scene that developed into others, like a film beginning in the middle of the story, and whose confused, jumbled images leap around in time and space.

That’s how I saw Halim as an old man: a shipwrecked man clinging to a log, far from the banks of the river, pulled along by the current towards the calm waters of the end. Was he pretending to be cut off from everything? Sometimes he pretended to go blank, like someone floating in the air, above the things of this world. He listened to no one; it was as if he were deaf, but he had some energy left. He never stopped downing a few good mouthfuls of arrack. He drank, sweated, licked his lips, and watched Zana’s gestures; he only had eyes for her, and stammered out a few words of love. And he was still around to witness some of the important events in our lives.

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