The downpour was so intense that the city shut its doors and windows well before nightfall. I remember I was nervous on that afternoon; the sky could hardly be seen. I had taken my first lesson in the school where I had studied, and come back here on foot, in the rain, looking at the waste being dragged down the gutters, the lepers piled on top of one another, hunched up under the oitizeiros. I looked, shocked and sad, at the city which was maiming itself as it grew, distancing itself from the port and the river, refusing to come to terms with its past.

A flash of lightning had caused a short circuit in Rochiram House. The Indian bazaar was pitch-black in the afternoon, darkened by heavy, low clouds. I went into my room, the same one, at the back of the old house. I’d brought with me the menagerie my mother had carved. It was all that was left of her, and of the work that had given her pleasure: the only gestures that at night gave her back the dignity she surrendered in the daytime. That’s what I thought as I looked at and held these little animals and birds made of pau-rainha, which before only seemed to me like miniatures imitated from nature. Now I look at them and see them as strange beings.

I had begun to put Antenor Laval’s writings together, for the first time, and to take notes about my conversations with Halim. I spent part of the afternoon with the words of the unpublished poet, and the voice of Zana’s lover. I went back and forth between them, and alternating in this way—remembering and forgetting, like a game—gave me pleasure.

The deluge covering Manaus, a respite from the equatorial heat, brought me relief. Fruits and leaves floated in the pools surrounding the door of my room. At the back, the grass had grown, and the fence with its rotten wood, full of gaps, no longer separated me from the slum. Since Zana’s departure, I had left the little that remained of the trees and climbers to the fury of the sun and the rain. Looking after all this meant submitting myself to the past, a time that was dying inside me.