Omar had not forgotten the humiliation of a previous punishment: he had had to kneel at the foot of a Brazil-nut tree, from midday until the first star could be seen in the sky. The boarders had taunted him, surrounding the tree and shouting: “What if it rains, eh, tough guy? What if a tree-porcupine falls on your head?” Insults came from every side, while the figure of Bolislau loomed in the victim’s sight, twisted and loathsome. It didn’t rain, but in the dim evening sky, the first twinkle took a long time to appear. Omar, still buoyed up by his vengeance, said to his mother: “He-man Bolislau saw every star in the sky, Mamma. And there wasn’t even any sky. That’s a miracle, isn’t it? Seeing a constellation without a sky?”

This time, Omar really had gone too far. This episode had shaken his mother’s pride: her pride, not her faith. She considered her son’s expulsion unjust, but God had so willed it; after all, even God’s ministers are fallible. “That Bolislau did something wrong,” she muttered. “My son only wanted to prove he’s a man … what’s wrong with that?”

She didn’t want to see her son as the aggressor. In the Vandals’ Cockpit there were no demands made on the pupils; the masters didn’t take roll call; flunking was a real achievement, a privilege attained by very few. Green trousers (any color of green) and a white shirt were the only uniform required. The real scum in the Cockpit were after a diploma, a stamped, signed piece of paper, with a green-and-yellow border around the top corner.

That was what I was going to get: the diploma from the Vandals’ Cockpit, the evidence of my freedom from servitude. Unknown to me, Halim put into my room the schoolbooks that Omar despised, and the many books that Yaqub left behind when he left for São Paulo, in January 1950.

Yaqub’s departure was providential for me. Apart from his used books, he left old clothes that would fit me years later: three pairs of trousers, several vests, two shirts with frayed collars, and two worn-out pairs of shoes. When he left for São Paulo, I was about four but his clothes waited for me to grow up, and gradually fit my body; the trousers were loose and looked like sacks, and the shoes, which would later be a little tight, were pushed onto my feet, partly by sheer determination, and even more out of necessity. Bodies are flexible. Yaqub, however, showed his own inflexibility when he confronted his mother’s resistance and informed them, at Christmas 1949, that he was leaving Manaus. He said this point-blank, finally translating into action an idea he had repeatedly turned over in his mind. Nobody had had wind of his plans; he was evasive in his replies, elusive even in small day-to-day things, and indifferent to the devilments of his brother, still running loose in the Vandals’ Cockpit.