I had promised to hand in to Rânia a tedious task she’d given me to do. I found the shop shut, and no one could tell me where she was. Lately, she’d been shutting at lunchtime and going out in search of her brother. That April afternoon, it was already spitting rain when Rânia caught sight of him in the Praça das Acacias. She froze. He was thin, his skin yellowish, a week’s growth of beard, and his hair was frizzled, almost like a mane. His arms were full of scratches, his head swollen, full of lumps. His deep, glinting eyes gave the impression of someone adrift, even though he’d not totally lost the will or the energy to get back something he’d lost. Rânia had no time to get close to him. She heard bangs, saw people running, dropping umbrellas that bounced on the paths in the square. There were three policemen, then five, then a lot more. It was a hunt. She saw Omar crouching down behind the trunk of a mulateiro. The police were sniffing around, guns in hand. The shots stopped. Did they want to kill him or just give him a fright? Now it was gusty, with bursts of rain, and the Praça das Acacias was open, like a stage. They knew that Omar might react. And he did, in his own way: he laughed in the cops’ face. The rifle butt he got in the face was the beginning of his entry into hell. He fell back and was pulled, dragged to the van. Rânia ran towards her brother, and saw a thick red streak running down his face, which the water couldn’t erase. She argued with the police, demanded to know where they were taking him, and was brutally repulsed. In the prison, he spent some weeks incommunicado. Rânia and a lawyer tried to speak to Omar, but the violence didn’t stop. She sent carrier bags of presents to the jailers, asked for news of her brother, and begged them not to torture him. Then she found out that her brother had spent some days in the military headquarters, and I guessed that his friendship with Laval was a kind of political damnation.