Lying in the hammock, they talked about Galib, about Zana’s early years in Biblos, interrupted when she was six and she and her father left for Brazil. Her father used to take her to swim in the Mediterranean, and then they would walk together around the villages, with a doctor who had studied in Athens, the only graduate in Biblos; they visited friends and acquaintances, Christians who were intimidated and even persecuted by the Ottomans. In every house they visited, the doctor looked after his patient, and Galib cooked a wonderfully tasty dish. The man who made his customers’ mouths water in his restaurant in Manaus had already been an expert cook in his native Biblos. He used whatever was available in the stone houses on Jabal al Qaraquif, Jabal Haous, and Jabal Laqlouq, mountains where the snow shone under the intense blue sky. The mysterious, biblical beauty of the age-old cedars between the white drifts, sometimes golden in the winter sun—she paused, and her eyes, wet with tears, swept over Halim’s face. Whenever he visited a house by the sea, Galib would bring away his favorite fish, the sultan ibrahim, which he seasoned with a mixture of herbs whose secret he never divulged. In the Manaus restaurant he used strong seasonings with cayenne pepper and murupi, mixing them with tucupi and jambu and pouring this sauce over the fish. He might also use other herbs, like mint and zatar.

“Over in that corner was where he grew the Mediterranean herbs,” said Halim, pointing at a square patch of grass next to the rubber tree.

In mourning, Zana avoided her husband’s caresses and went back to the subject, talking about her father’s figure, his face, the gestures of the man who had brought her up after her mother died. It was quite some time before Galib’s name left her lips. She recounted her dreams: father and daughter hugging each other at the edge of the sea, and going into the water that had taken her mother—the two of them there, in the dream together, always near the sea, staring at the dark rock like a beached, rusting hulk. She remembered the day when she read the gazals to her father, and said, point-blank, without a shadow of hesitation: “I’m going to marry that Halim.”

“I spent months that way, my boy,” he said, shaking his head. “Four or five months, I can’t even remember. I thought she didn’t love me any longer, I thought of taking her to Biblos, digging Galib up, and saying to her: ‘Stay here with your father’s remains, either that or let’s take this pile of bones back to Brazil, then you can talk to his ashes for the rest of your life.’”