The morning he came into court, escorted by plainclothes police, Rânia saw she was alone. She couldn’t embrace him in court, but she heard him recount a sudden descent into hell. The days were the same as the nights, and every day a darker prolongation of the night. When it rained a lot, the cells flooded, Omar dozed off on his feet; the dirty water was up to his knees, and the eels, as they rubbed against his legs, didn’t frighten him, but felt loathsome. He was disgusted by the viscous skin of these freshwater fish, brown and covered in mud, wriggling on the floor of the cells when the water drained off. Just as well he couldn’t see anything on dark days. Sometimes, in the small window in the wall, the frond of an assai palm moved, and he imagined the sky and its colors, the river Negro, the vast horizon, freedom, life. He put his hands over his ears; it was unbearable hearing the buzzing of the insects, the prisoners’ screams—everything seemed to have no beginning or end. She couldn’t imagine how her brother lived in a sordid cell of the prison she used to look at, almost without thinking, when she was crossing the metal bridges to sell sandals and clothes to the wholesalers in Manaus’s most populous neighborhoods.

Omar was condemned to two years and seven months imprisonment. He couldn’t leave; he had no right to conditional freedom. “Just skin and bone … My brother doesn’t look human,” Rânia said, in tears. Angrily, she said to me that she was going to write a letter to Yaqub. “He betrayed my mother, planned everything, and tricked us.” She was courageous: in the solitude so essential to her, in her old maid’s permanent seclusion, she wrote to Yaqub what no one had dared to say. She reminded him that vengeance is more contemptible than forgiveness. Hadn’t he already had his revenge when he buried his mother’s dream? He hadn’t seen her die, he didn’t know, he’d never know. Zana had died with her dream buried, in a nightmare of guilt. She wrote that he, Yaqub, rejected and resentful, was also the more brutish and violent of the two, and would be judged for that. She threatened to despise him forever, burn his photographs, and return the jewelry and clothes she’d been given if he didn’t give up his persecution of Omar. She carried out her threats to the letter, because Yaqub calculated that silence would be more effective than a written reply.