Now Zana had no husband to help her, and Domingas’s withdrawal left her even more abandoned. Talib’s daughters came to see her; Nahda held Zana’s hands and Zahia chatted, trying to distract her. Zana’s wandering gaze disconcerted visitors. On the morning when Cid Tannus and Talib appeared, she said, with no warning, that it wasn’t right, it wasn’t right that one brother should steer clear of the other. “You must find my son; you must bring Omar back to my house. Do it for Halim’s sake.”

Talib, who was more intimate with the family, took a long look at the only plate on the table set for lunch. Omar’s plate, glass, and cutlery hadn’t been removed from the head of the table. As he went out, the widower said: “God shuts one door and opens another.”

One day, when she woke up weeping, Zana ordered Rânia to take everything out of the safe, everything, all the old papers Halim had kept. She called a carter and four men to lift it; they were to take the steel box away, and throw the accursed safe into the jungle. It was the memory of her son in chains.

I went with the carter and the men to the shop, where Rânia was waiting for us. When I got back home, Zana, immersed in bad memories, had shut herself in her room. It was almost midday, and my mother wasn’t in the kitchen. I found her curled up in Omar’s hammock, which she’d hung in her own little room. The hammock had lost its original color, and the red, its vibrancy gone, was only in the memory of our eyes. I saw her dry lips, her right eye shut, the other covered by a lock of gray hair. I drew it to one side, and saw the other eye was shut. I rocked the hammock; my mother didn’t move. She wasn’t asleep. I saw her body slowly swaying, and began to cry. I sat on the ground beside her and stayed there, stunned, suffocated. While I looked at her, as the hammock swung back and forth, I relived the nights we had slept in each other’s arms in the same little room that stank of cockroaches. Now, another smell, of wood and copaiba resin, was stronger. The little animals carved in brazilwood were arranged on the shelf. There, the polished birds and the snakes shone. My mother’s menagerie: miniatures her hands had molded, night after night, by the light of an oil lamp. The slender wings of a saracuá, the loveliest bird of all, perched on a real branch, fixed into a brass bowl. Its wings wide open, narrow breast, beak pointing upwards: a bird about to take off. All my mother’s strength and energy had gone into serving others. She kept those words to the end, but she didn’t die with the secret that so irked me. I looked at my mother’s face and remembered Omar’s brutality.