In the first week of January 1964, Antenor Laval came to our house to talk to Omar. The French teacher was flustered, asked me if I’d read the books he’d lent me, and reminded me, lowering his voice: classes at the lyceum begin straight after Carnival. He was talking like a robot; there were none of the calm and the pauses he had in class, and none of the humor that kept our attention when he was translating or commenting on a poem. My mother got a shock when she saw how low he was, like a corpse, and with the anguished expression of a cornered man. He refused coffee and guaraná, and smoked several cigarettes as he tried to convince Omar to take part in a poetry reading, but Omar first made a face, then joked: if it had been in the Shangri-la, I’d have been game. For Laval, this was no time for jokes: he frowned, went silent, cleared his throat, but soon asked Omar, begged him to go to the basement where he lived. Even then, Laval had to wait for his friend to have a bath to get rid of his hangover. The two of them left in a hurry, and Omar only came back at dawn the following day, when Zana was surprised her son was sober; there was something on his mind that he was hiding. She bombarded him with questions, but he gave no straight answers. Before lunch he asked his sister for some money. It was much more than he usually asked for, a large sum, which Rânia refused to give him: “Certainly not, Omar, no binge can cost that amount.” He didn’t give up, without his usual cynicism, or the seductive gestures that undid her resistance. Rather he insisted, with a tense face, a serious voice, and a sincere look in his eye. Zana, suspicious, interrupted her daughter, and told her to give him part of the money, or a little anyhow: maybe Omar was wanting to pay off a debt. “You two never stop asking for money. Why not spend a week behind the counter? Or a whole day, just once, in that furnace, putting up with drunken insults, boring customers, and Papa’s rigmarole, just to top it all.”