Zana didn’t swallow Domingas’s story. She went into Omar’s room, rummaged around, and found Yaqub’s passport, which he’d stolen. She stopped, looking thoughtfully at the photograph of the engineer: his serious face, thick eyebrows, the stars on the epaulettes of his reserve officer’s uniform. I could see the mother’s vanity, and a gleam of remorse in her eye. It’s the guilt torturing her conscience, I thought. She didn’t know what to do with the passport, wandering aimlessly as if it might lead her somewhere. She sat down on the gray sofa, slipped the passport into her blouse, and when she lifted her head, she was crying, her hands crossed on her chest. The reddened eyes looked at the little altar and turned away towards the veranda, now empty.

Had he had to go in a hurry? Why? Zana repeated the question, as if she would get an answer by sheer repetition. She asked after Yaqub, but she was looking for Omar. She hardly spoke to Rânia, kicked the air for no reason, and sat thinking about Omar’s fate. It was no longer the devil in the shape of a woman: it would have been easier to say to the neighbors: “These madwomen take our children from us, and our money.” Words she’d used at other times, when Dália, the Silver Woman, danced for us all; when the other one, the Pau-Mulato, lived with Omar in an old boat, thinking she was going to spend her life sailing up and down the river, reading the palms of the people on its banks, forecasting bright futures for ruined lives. Both of them, Omar and Pau-Mulato, living it up onboard their boat or on deserted beaches, but watched over by a dense, powerful shadow.

Zana’s dream of seeing her sons together, in an impossible harmony, was gone. She went back over her detailed and ingenious plan. “My sons were going to start a construction firm, Omar was going to have a job, work to do; I was sure …” She called my mother over to her, and said: “Omar lost his head; he was betrayed by his brother. I know all about it, Domingas … Yaqub got together with that Indian, did everything in secret, ignored my Omar, ruined everything …” Domingas listened and went away, leaving Zana alone, cursing Yaqub’s plot.