Birds were singing outside and through the open window I could see bowed branches and ripe fruit scattered on the soil. I stopped rocking the hammock and stroked my mother’s callused hands. Then came Zana’s voice calling Domingas, three or four shouts coming from the first floor, then a noise on the staircase, the steps coming closer and closer, in the living room, the kitchen, the noise of leaves in the garden, and Zana’s frightened eyes on the face with its eyes shut. She shook the hammock and, on her knees, she embraced Domingas.

I couldn’t tear myself away from Domingas. A boy from the slum went to hand Rânia a note. I wrote: “My mother has just died.”

At that time, I tried to write other things too. But words seem to wait for death and forgetting; they seem to be buried, petrified, in abeyance; later, they slowly regain heat, and kindle in us the desire to recount events time has dispersed. “Only time turns our feelings into truer words,” Halim said to me during one conversation, using his handkerchief over and over to wipe the sweat brought on by the heat and his anger at his wife’s entanglement with her younger son.

I asked Rânia for my mother to be buried in the family grave, next to Halim. She agreed, and paid for everything without protest, and I never knew how much complicity there was in such a generous act. My mother and my grandfather, side by side, under the earth, had found a common destiny; the two of them, who had come from so far away to die here. Now, so long after, I still visit their tomb. One Sunday, I even saw Adamor, Toad-Leg, in the cemetery. We glanced at one another; all I could see was his face, the rest of his body was hidden in a hole. But he soon lifted his arms up and went on working. He was one of the gravediggers.

10

10

The house gradually emptied, and aged in a short time. Rânia had bought a bungalow in one of the districts built on in the deforested areas north of Manaus. She told her mother the move was inevitable. She didn’t explain why, but Zana reproached her: she’d never leave her house—she’d rather die than leave her plants, her living room with the altar and the saint, her morning walk around the garden. She didn’t want to abandon the neighborhood, the street, the familiar things she looked at from the bedroom window. How could she live without the cries of the fishmongers, coal heavers, peddlers, and fruit sellers? The voices of people who already in the early morning had stories to tell: so-and-so was sick, such-and-such a politician, a nonentity only yesterday, had gotten rich overnight, a high-up had pinched bronze statues from the Praça da Saudade, the son of that bigwig in the law had raped an Indian girl—news that never got into the paper and that these morning voices retailed from door to door, until the whole city knew about them. When Rânia came in from the shop, her mother lost no time in saying: “You can go to your bungalow, I’m not budging from here.”