Now Zana and I were alone, I in the room at the back, she in the upstairs bedroom. I could read and study more at my leisure, because she had given up keeping the house in order. Visitors were few and far between, and didn’t stay long, put off by sudden gestures, or by her silence. When Estelita Reinoso came into the room to crow, Zana didn’t wait for her neighbor to sit down, she immediately started up: “That pushy niece of yours was always prowling around my house after my sons.”

Estelita backed away with a start.

“You know who, Lívia, your sister’s daughter … You know very well who she married … She hooked my son in one of those movie sessions in your basement. When he married, Yaqub was as pure as the driven snow. He married in São Paulo, in secret, far from his family, like a wild animal … Look what the two of them did to Omar.”

Estelita’s bossy voice. I opened the door for her to go, and laughed in her face, a laugh that had been waiting a long time, and as brazen as I could make it, for I knew that the Reinosos were being excluded from high society in the new order of things.

“I don’t want to see anyone else,” Zana said when someone knocked at the door. She only had patience with one visitor: the old matriarch Emilie, who rarely came by. When she came, Emilie listened to everything, all the complaints, and then spoke in Arabic, in a loud but calm, unassertive voice. I heard that voice: its engaging, strangely lilting sound; and I saw that woman, still strong at the end of her life: her attention focused, her words full of feeling, the proverbs that came from centuries back. I remembered Halim, and the considered words he tried to win Zana back with, right to the end, to free her from her younger son.