“Oh Lord, I could never take commerce seriously,” said he, in a tone of false lamentation. “I haven’t the time or the brain for it. I know I was remiss in my business life, but I put too much energy into my love life.”

He didn’t want three children; in fact, had it been up to him, he’d have had none. He said this over and over, irritated, chewing the mouthpiece of his hookah. They could have lived trouble-free, without a care in the world, because a couple in love, with no children, can survive poverty or any other kind of disaster. However, he had to give in to his wife’s silence, and to the imperious tone of the sentence after the silence. She knew how to be insistent, without making a show:

“You mean to say we’re going to spend all our lives alone in this big house? Just us two and the Indian girl in the yard? That’s selfish, Halim.”

“Children are killjoys,” he said, seriously.

“Three, love. Three children, no more, no less,” she insisted slyly as she was putting the hammock up in the bedroom, scattering the pillows on the floor, just as he liked.

“They’ll change our lives, they’ll take the hammock down …” Halim complained.

“If my father was alive, he wouldn’t believe his ears.”

Halim backed down whenever she mentioned her father, and Zana saw that. She didn’t give up: she alternated between silence and perseverance, and gave herself to Halim with the promises of a woman head over heels in love. Did he not see the ambiguity in Zana’s attitude? He let himself be carried away by nights of love, with no shortage of docile phrases—nights that always ended in the happy promise that they would fill the house with children.

Yaqub and Omar were born two years after Domingas appeared in the house. Halim got a shock when he saw the midwife, with her two fingers, announcing the arrival of twins. They were born at home, Omar a few minutes later. He was the younger, the caçula. He was often ill in the first few months of life. Also, he was a little darker, and had more hair. He grew up in the jealous care of his mother, morbidly concerned about him; she saw imminent death in her son’s fragile complexion.

Zana hardly left his side, and the other child was left to the care of Domingas, the shriveled Indian girl, half slave, half nurse, “desperate to be free,” as she said to me once, tired, defeated, caught up in the family’s spell, and not much different from the other maids in the neighborhood, taught to read and write and educated by the nuns in the missions, but all of them living at the back of some house, right next to the fence or the wall, where they slept with their dreams of freedom.