Before eleven o’clock Yaqub appeared: he wouldn’t stay long, just a short visit to relive memories and see the house again before he went back to São Paulo. He had ordinary clothes on. His black hair was combed back; his upright body and healthy expression made him look much less aged than Omar. He’d brought math books for me, and clothes for Domingas. He didn’t ask after Zana. He said: “I went to the cemetery, went to see the grave …” He didn’t end the sentence. He hid his feelings, looked at the table laden with fruit and delicacies for breakfast, and asked, with an ironic edge to his voice: “All this for me?” He sat down, opened a briefcase, and spread out sheets of paper with sketches of metal girders, columns, and reinforced concrete. He saw my body, dirty from the digging, and took a long look at my hands. I wasn’t intimidated, but I don’t know if it was a father’s look. He never responded to my gaze. Maybe his ambition made me doubt my connection with him; or that same ambition didn’t allow him to look at me honestly. He said he had done the basic calculations for a huge building to be put up in Manaus: “You can’t spend your life cleaning the garden and writing Rânia’s business letters.”

My mother heard the phrase and looked at me with a proud expression, which lasted for a few short seconds. When she took her eyes off me, her face took on its old look, half mistrustful, half fearful. The two of them went into the garden and, while they were talking, he fingered a breadfruit. His hand went from the round fruit to Domingas’s chin; he laughed contentedly, with a triumphant air, and at that moment I saw his intimacy with my mother. When he put his arm around her, Domingas showed her apprehension: she said he should go. Yaqub frowned: “I’m in my own house, I’m not going to run away …” My mother begged him: they could go out together, have a walk. He sat on the hammock, and asked her to come over, but she wouldn’t. Now she was really anxious, couldn’t keep her eyes off the living room, and the corridor. They said nothing more. The shouts and laments from the slum punctured the stuffy silence of the late morning.