Little by little, Zana told me things perhaps few people knew: the name she was baptized with in Biblos was Zeina. In Brazil, when she was still a child, she learned Portuguese and changed her name. I found out more about Galib and Halim, and about my mother. Domingas changed a lot after she got pregnant. She spent hours lost in thought. “You had to see it … alone by herself, until Halim gently opened the door of her room and asked, ‘What are you thinking about?’ ‘What? Me?’ Your mother answered like that, startled … She sharpened a little knife and got hold of a piece of wood to make those animals. Halim said to me: ‘That girl … For goodness’ sake, something’s happened to her …’ What a struggle your mother was in the orphanage! She was rebellious; she wanted to go back to that village, on her river … How was she to grow up alone, in the back of beyond? Then Sister Damasceno offered me the little girl, and I accepted. Poor Halim! He didn’t want anyone here, no one at all. Over and over he said: ‘It must be tough, bringing up someone else’s child, nobody’s child.’ When you were born, I asked: ‘Now what? Are we going to put up with another nobody’s child?’ Halim got angry, he said that you were somebody, a son of the house …”

She spoke in fits and starts, and asked her own questions: “On the carpet? Did we make love on the carpet where he prayed? Thousands of times … Didn’t you watch us, my boy?”

I shuddered when she said this. Did they see me, did they realize I was there? Perhaps it didn’t bother them; perhaps they weren’t ashamed. They must have laughed at me. Nobody’s child! Zana forgot the rebellious Domingas and evoked the other one, maid and cook for so many years, who accompanied her at her prayers, my mother the woman.