I wasn’t party to what had been going on in the last few weeks, and couldn’t make out the whispering between Zana and Rânia or decipher the gestures and looks they exchanged, but I heard Yaqub’s name, and the hotel he was in. I was surprised he was staying in such a modest place, nothing more than a rundown house in one of the oldest parts of Manaus. It was the same one I’d been to with Domingas, when she had taken me for a walk in the Praça Pedro II, where foreign sailors went with the whores who had their patches on São Vicente Island. The hotel, hidden at the end of a narrow street, seemed far away from the crowds and the buzz of the center, now full of shops open all day and all night. Yaqub was there, in that quiet, winding street, as anonymous as the rest of its inhabitants, afraid of the city’s hubbub. I told Domingas, and asked her if he was going to leave without visiting us. My mother answered nervously: no, she doubted it, he’d come to see her, I could rely on him coming.