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.

The parade in his gala uniform had been Yaqub’s farewell: a little show put on for the family and the city. In the Salesian college they had a ceremony in his honor. He got two medals and ten minutes of speeches: he was also praised by the Latinists and mathematicians. The Brothers knew that their ex-pupil had a glorious future ahead of him; at that time, both Yaqub and Brazil itself seemed to have a promising future. Omar was not so brilliant; he really was unfathomable for priests and laymen, a lunatic, distant and drunk on the licentious atmosphere of the Vandals’ Cockpit and the city itself.