Estelita backed away with a start.

“You know who, Lívia, your sister’s daughter … You know very well who she married … She hooked my son in one of those movie sessions in your basement. When he married, Yaqub was as pure as the driven snow. He married in São Paulo, in secret, far from his family, like a wild animal … Look what the two of them did to Omar.”

Estelita’s bossy voice. I opened the door for her to go, and laughed in her face, a laugh that had been waiting a long time, and as brazen as I could make it, for I knew that the Reinosos were being excluded from high society in the new order of things.

“I don’t want to see anyone else,” Zana said when someone knocked at the door. She only had patience with one visitor: the old matriarch Emilie, who rarely came by. When she came, Emilie listened to everything, all the complaints, and then spoke in Arabic, in a loud but calm, unassertive voice. I heard that voice: its engaging, strangely lilting sound; and I saw that woman, still strong at the end of her life: her attention focused, her words full of feeling, the proverbs that came from centuries back. I remembered Halim, and the considered words he tried to win Zana back with, right to the end, to free her from her younger son.

Little by little, Zana told me things perhaps few people knew: the name she was baptized with in Biblos was Zeina. In Brazil, when she was still a child, she learned Portuguese and changed her name. I found out more about Galib and Halim, and about my mother. Domingas changed a lot after she got pregnant. She spent hours lost in thought. “You had to see it … alone by herself, until Halim gently opened the door of her room and asked, ‘What are you thinking about?’ ‘What? Me?’ Your mother answered like that, startled … She sharpened a little knife and got hold of a piece of wood to make those animals. Halim said to me: ‘That girl … For goodness’ sake, something’s happened to her …’ What a struggle your mother was in the orphanage! She was rebellious; she wanted to go back to that village, on her river … How was she to grow up alone, in the back of beyond? Then Sister Damasceno offered me the little girl, and I accepted. Poor Halim! He didn’t want anyone here, no one at all. Over and over he said: ‘It must be tough, bringing up someone else’s child, nobody’s child.’ When you were born, I asked: ‘Now what? Are we going to put up with another nobody’s child?’ Halim got angry, he said that you were somebody, a son of the house …”

She spoke in fits and starts, and asked her own questions: “On the carpet? Did we make love on the carpet where he prayed? Thousands of times … Didn’t you watch us, my boy?”