I didn’t call anyone; Zana didn’t want strangers in the house. She went up, aired her room, got Halim’s trousers and hung them on her sling. I saw her kneeling down, in the middle of Omar’s room, begging God for her son to come back—praying, in a fervent ecstasy, for Omar not to die. I saw the dark edges of her lusterless eyes, lengthening into her eyebrows. Her suffering, missing Halim and Omar so much, dulled the beauty of her face. I never heard her pronounce Yaqub’s name. The distant son, who had embraced a glorious destiny, had been banned from her vocabulary. Then she refused my help to come down, and said she wanted to stay on her own on the veranda, I wasn’t to worry about her. I went into my room, and my attention was taken up reading a book. When I saw Rânia’s face at the window, I realized Zana had disappeared. I searched the whole house, pushed the door of her room open, and finally found her in a forgotten part of the garden: the old hen coop, where Galib had fattened the birds on the menu at the Biblos. Zana was lying down on dead leaves, her body covered by Halim’s clothes; the hand of the arm in the cast was already purple. I asked the neighbors’ help to carry her in my hammock. She kicked, screaming: “I don’t want to leave this place, Rânia … It’s no good; I’m not going to sell my house, you ungrateful wretch … My son will come back.” She never stopped yelling, irritated by her daughter’s silence, furious at the only sentence Rânia uttered, calmly: “You’ll get used to my house, Mother.”

That made it worse. She tried to get away from me, almost fell from the hammock, and there was a real ruckus until we managed to get her into the car. She cried, as if she were feeling terrible pain. She never came back. She lay down in another room, far from the harbor, in a home that hadn’t been built for her.

Then I heard about the internal hemorrhaging, and went to visit her one more time in a clinic near Rânia’s house. She recognized me, and stared at me. Then she whispered names and words in Arabic that I knew: life, Halim, my sons, Omar. On her face, I saw the struggle, the effort to murmur a phrase in Portuguese, as if from that moment on only her maternal language would survive. But when Zana felt for my hands, she managed to stammer out: “Nael … dear boy …”

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