The women of the house rushed eagerly to admire the soldier. They were there from the crack of dawn to get a place near to where the bands and regiments passed by. They took straw hats, pineapple juice, and a bag full of tucuma nuts. They waited for three hours in the hot September sun. They watched the march-past of the Infantry Battalion, with its armored cars, bazookas, and bayonets, and the soldiers with their jaguar mascots in the scorching sun. They heard the drumrolls and the music of the brass in a stirring crescendo; the band, as yet invisible, thundered louder and louder, a cadenced roar echoing out in the middle of Manaus. The crowd turned to look at the top of the avenue. Zana was the first to make out a white figure brandishing a gleaming sword. The figure advanced slowly; the rhythmic steps divided the avenue in two. The swordsman was marching in front of the band and the eight platoons, on his own, in the midst of claps and whistles. They threw white lilies and wildflowers at him; he stepped on them without compunction, concentrating on the rhythm of the march, ignoring the blown kisses and the wisecracks coming from the women watching, and not even winking at Rânia. He looked at no one: he paraded by, looking for all the world like the only son he wasn’t. Yaqub, the man of few words, let appearances speak for him—appearances and the press; the next day a paper published his photograph, with a few well-chosen lines of praise.

For months, Zana showed off this paragraph about the handsome swordsman she had produced. The sword flashed in the newspaper photograph, though time dulled its metallic glint; but the image of the weapon with its pointed end remained. The complimentary words about her son might as well fade away, for all Zana cared; she already had them by heart.

Yaqub all the time had been thinking about moving to São Paulo. It was Father Bolislau who advised him to go. “Get out of Manaus,” the math master had said. “If you stay here, you’ll be ruined by the provinces, and eaten alive by your brother.”

Bolislau was a good master and an excellent preacher. Zana was bewildered at Yaqub’s decision. Halim, on the contrary, encouraged his son to go and live in São Paulo, and even promised him a tiny monthly allowance. Things had improved for him in the postwar years. He sold all kinds of things to the inhabitants of Educandos, one of the most populous areas of Manaus, which had grown a lot with the arrival of the tappers who had gone into the jungle in the wartime boom. At the end of the war, they migrated to Manaus from the farthest reaches of Amazonia, and built shanties on stilts at the edge of the creeks, in gullies, and in any empty space they could find in the city. That was the chaotic way Manaus grew: first come, first served. Halim was a part of it; he sold things before anyone else got in. He didn’t make that much money, but he always had one eye on a possible collapse—one day he told me it was a yawning chasm. He didn’t fall in, but he wasn’t that ambitious. The worst chasm was at home, and there was no way Halim could avoid that.