Omar, on the other hand, went overboard in his youthful escapades; he played truant from his Latin lessons, bribed the pofaced school porters, and went out for the night disguised from head to toe, the complete delinquent. He went around the dance halls of the Maloca dos Bares, the Acapulco, the Sheik Club, the Shangri-la. In the early morning, when the last mists of the night were lifting, he came back home. There was Zana, impassive in her red hammock, a surface serenity on her face; at bottom she was tormented, grieved at having spent another night without her son. Omar could hardly make out her curved shape, suspended on the veranda. He went straight to the bathroom, brought up the night’s drinking in one spasm after another, then staggered as he tried to go up the stairs; sometimes he completely fell over, his heavy body bathed in sweat, unconscious of what the night had done. Then, she would get out of her hammock, drag her son’s body to the veranda, and wake Domingas up: the two of them then took his clothes off, cleaned him with alcohol, and settled him in his hammock. Omar slept until midday. His face swollen, parched by his hangover, gruffly he would ask for ice-cold water, and off went Domingas with the pitcher. She poured the liquid into his open mouth; first he gargled, then swallowed it like a thirsty jaguar. It got on Halim’s nerves; he hated his son’s smell, which infected the sacrosanct places where they took their meals. His father prowled around the room, crossing it obliquely and glancing at the red hammock on the veranda.

One day when Omar spent the whole afternoon in his underpants lying in the hammock, his father nudged him, lowered his voice, and said: “Aren’t you ashamed of carrying on like this? Do you mean to spend your whole life in that filthy hammock, with a face on you like that?” Halim was getting ready to mete out some exemplary punishment, but Omar’s insolence only increased when his father was involved. He wasn’t bothered; it was as if he had done nothing wrong, and was free of any guilt. But he did get a black mark: he flunked two years running at school. His father took him to task, using his brother as an example, and Omar, though he kept quiet, seemed to be saying: “Go to hell! They can all go to hell, I’m living my life the way I want to.”

That was what he shouted when he was expelled from school. He shouted several times in front of his father, daring him to do anything as he ripped up his blue uniform and taunted him: “I landed one on the math master that teaches your blue-eyed boy, the one who’s all brains and nothing else.”