Omar’s strange mania let me study on Saturdays, but I was afraid of being called for some job in the house or the shop. Sometimes I would interrupt some reading to buy meat from Quim the butcher or take a dessert to someone’s house; I waited for hours at the neighbors’ front doors, because they wouldn’t send the platter or the gourd pot back until they’d filled it in their turn. These friendly exchanges spoiled my Saturday afternoons, and maybe that’s why I hated these mutual courtesies. On the way back, I used to cut a piece of pie or a slice of cake and take it to Domingas. I did it to save her effort too, because on Saturday mornings she was exhausted, her back aching, her voice hoarse. She began the week wanting to do everything, cleaning every corner of the house; the only reason she didn’t clean out the hen coop built by Galib was because Zana didn’t allow it; coyly ashamed of her own superstition, she said: “No, no one can go in my father’s hen coop … it might bring bad luck.” But Domingas devotedly looked after the rest of the house, and seemed distressed by Omar’s mania, as he spent hours in the sun. From my room I secretly watched him as he clumsily cut branches, weeded, and piled up dry leaves. There was too much madness in this sudden enthusiasm for gardening. From time to time he dropped the rake and the machete to appreciate the beauties of our garden: the river Negro curassow that Domingas liked so much, roosting on a high branch of the old rubber tree; a chameleon crawling up the trunk of the breadfruit tree, stopping near a nest of black-tailed trogons, where the hen bird was sitting. On the ground, near the fence, Omar grubbed for the rose apples and red flowers that fell from the neighboring garden. He filled his hands with the little pink fruits, and hungrily bit into the ripe ones, purple and fleshy. The children from the slum came to plague him: a grown man like him, on all fours, smelling the flowers, twisting the ingás and sucking their white berries. He would stop, too, to dig in the earth, just for the sake of it, perhaps to get the smell of the humidity, strong after the rain. He enjoyed this freedom, and even made you feel like doing the same.

One Saturday afternoon, when I was amusing myself watching Omar’s movements, Rânia sent a message for me to go to the shop to help her pile boxes of goods in the storeroom.