A few days after the fight, Rochiram went to the shop to talk to Rânia. He looked like a stranger, Rânia said after the encounter. He was short, sharp, never even pronouncing the twins’ names. He said in Spanish: “I’ve brought a proposal to close the matter.” He gave her a sealed envelope and said goodbye. She guessed the tone of the document; even so, when she read the letter in front of me, she went pale. Rochiram demanded a fortune in exchange for what he’d paid Yaqub for drawing up the plans and to Omar for the commission on the land. Apart from that, he’d wasted a lot of time on this business. He threatened her with the law, and wrote that he already knew influential people, “the most powerful in the city.” Rânia asked for a delay, “Some months for us to straighten our lives out.”

She told her mother of Rochiram’s demand. She said she’d do everything to avoid Yaqub taking Omar to court.

“That Indian is a crook,” said Zana. “Bloodsucker! The food I cooked for the ungrateful wretch … I practically spoon-fed the pale-faced parasite! He’s ruined my son’s future!”

She no longer dyed her hair, and the white curls made her look older than her face, still almost unwrinkled. My mother wouldn’t pray with her, or tell her about Omar’s attack. “Yaqub couldn’t react, he hadn’t time,” she said. Zana looked at her askance: her eyes were really strange. But Domingas was not intimidated. She smiled as if she were abreast of everything, and left her mistress perplexed, next to the oratory.

Domingas was worried about Yaqub, and was waiting for news of him, but he only came in a nightmare, one night when my mother heard Omar’s steps and saw his tall body rise up from behind the fence and brutally hit his brother. The image of his disfigured face terrified her. But she seemed to suffer from Omar’s woes. Leaning on the trunk of the rubber tree where he had once climbed so high, she said: “The two of them were born to fail.”

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