I went with the carter and the men to the shop, where Rânia was waiting for us. When I got back home, Zana, immersed in bad memories, had shut herself in her room. It was almost midday, and my mother wasn’t in the kitchen. I found her curled up in Omar’s hammock, which she’d hung in her own little room. The hammock had lost its original color, and the red, its vibrancy gone, was only in the memory of our eyes. I saw her dry lips, her right eye shut, the other covered by a lock of gray hair. I drew it to one side, and saw the other eye was shut. I rocked the hammock; my mother didn’t move. She wasn’t asleep. I saw her body slowly swaying, and began to cry. I sat on the ground beside her and stayed there, stunned, suffocated. While I looked at her, as the hammock swung back and forth, I relived the nights we had slept in each other’s arms in the same little room that stank of cockroaches. Now, another smell, of wood and copaiba resin, was stronger. The little animals carved in brazilwood were arranged on the shelf. There, the polished birds and the snakes shone. My mother’s menagerie: miniatures her hands had molded, night after night, by the light of an oil lamp. The slender wings of a saracuá, the loveliest bird of all, perched on a real branch, fixed into a brass bowl. Its wings wide open, narrow breast, beak pointing upwards: a bird about to take off. All my mother’s strength and energy had gone into serving others. She kept those words to the end, but she didn’t die with the secret that so irked me. I looked at my mother’s face and remembered Omar’s brutality.

Birds were singing outside and through the open window I could see bowed branches and ripe fruit scattered on the soil. I stopped rocking the hammock and stroked my mother’s callused hands. Then came Zana’s voice calling Domingas, three or four shouts coming from the first floor, then a noise on the staircase, the steps coming closer and closer, in the living room, the kitchen, the noise of leaves in the garden, and Zana’s frightened eyes on the face with its eyes shut. She shook the hammock and, on her knees, she embraced Domingas.

I couldn’t tear myself away from Domingas. A boy from the slum went to hand Rânia a note. I wrote: “My mother has just died.”