But he was a devil in bed and in the hammock. He recounted their lovemaking as naturally as could be, in a slow, husky voice, with a libidinous look on his face, lined with sweat, damp with the memory of the nights, afternoons, and mornings when the two would roll around in the hammock, their favorite bed for love, and where all Zana’s power collapsed into a continuous melody of laughter and delight.

“The secret language of desire,” Halim said over and again, quoting Abbas. He fanned the smoke from the hookah. It veiled his face and head, and the temporary disappearance of his features was accompanied by a silence, while he recovered a voice or an image, some part of life that time had swallowed up. Little by little, his speech returned; threads of the past interrupted by sudden images.

They didn’t go away on a honeymoon. They spent three nights in the Hotel America, away from the world, luxuriating in their burning passion. Then Halim decided to spend a night in the open air, at the Tarumã waterfalls, near Manaus. When he came back to the Biblos, Zana suggested to her father that he should go to Lebanon, to see his relatives, the country, everything. That was music to Galib’s ears. So he left, on board the Hildebrand, a colossus of a ship that had brought any number of immigrants to Amazonia. Galib, the widower: all that was left of him was a very old photograph, his face with its cheery look against a bluish background that imitated a painting; his mustache ended in slender twirls, and the grizzly mane of his hair grazed the edge of the gilded frame. In his daughter’s face, his big eyes had grown even bigger. Galib’s photo was hung in the drawing room, for everyone to admire.

He cooked and served the last lunch: it was a party for a man going back to his homeland. He was already dreaming of the Mediterranean, of a country with sea and mountains. He dreamt of Cedros, his village. He went back there, found separate parts of his clan, the ones that had stayed behind, never venturing out to find another home. Zana got two letters from her father: he was living in Biblos, in the same house where Zana herself had been born. He celebrated his homecoming by cooking Amazonian delicacies: dried pirarucu with farofa, Brazil-nut cakes, things he had brought with him from the Amazon. Two letters, then silence. In Biblos, asleep in his house near the sea, he died. The news took time to come, and when Zana found out, she shut herself in her father’s room, as if he was still there. Then, softly, she said to her husband: “Now I’m an orphan; I’ve lost my father and mother. I want children, three at least.”