In the letters Yaqub sent me, he never mentioned his brother or Rânia; he didn’t even touch on the subject. They were short, infrequent letters, in which he always asked me to cover Halim’s grave and my mother’s with flowers. He asked if I needed anything, and when was I going to visit him in São Paulo? I put the visit off for more than twenty years. I had no urge to see the sea. I had already thrown away the sheets with Yaqub’s architectural plans that Omar had ripped up in his fury. I was never interested in structural designs with their reinforced concrete, or in the math books Yaqub had so proudly given me. I wanted to keep my distance from all those calculations, from the engineering and the progress Yaqub aspired to. In his last letters all he talked about was the future, and even demanded to know my opinion—the future, that never-ending fallacy. I only kept one of the letters. Not even that, in fact: the photograph in which he and my mother are together, laughing, in a canoe moored near the Bar da Margem. She’s nearly adolescent, he almost a child. I cut my mother’s face out, and kept that precious piece of paper, the only image of Domingas’s face left. I can recognize her laughter on the few occasions she laughed, and imagine her large, full eyes, lost in some place in the past.

I remembered—I still remember—the few moments when Yaqub and I were alone, and him being there in my room, when I was ill. But long before he died, five or six years ago, my desire to distance myself from the two brothers was much stronger than those memories.

The madness of Omar’s passion, his excessive hostility to everything and everyone in this world, were no less harmful than Yaqub’s plans: the danger and the sordid underside of his calculating ambition. My feelings of loss are only for the dead: Halim, my mother. Now I think: I am and am not Yaqub’s son, and maybe he shared that doubt with me. What Halim had so fervently wanted, the two sons realized: neither of them had children. Some of our desires are only fulfilled by others, but our nightmares belong to us.

At that time, when Omar came out of prison, I saw him one more time, late one afternoon. It was our last encounter.