“Desperate to be free”: dead words. No one can free themselves with words alone. She stayed here in the house, dreaming of a freedom that receded into the future. One day, I said to her: “To hell with dreams; if you don’t make a move, you’ll get a dig in the ribs from death, and in death there are no dreams. Our dreams are all here,” and she looked at me, brimful of words she’d stored up, with the urgent desire to say something.

But she didn’t have the courage—or rather, she had and she hadn’t. Hesitant, she preferred to give in, did nothing, and was overtaken by inertia: inertia, and her involvement with the twins, above all with Yaqub as a child, and, four years later, with Rânia. With Yaqub the ties were stronger: it was a substitute mother’s love, incomplete, perhaps simply impossible. Zana luxuriated in Omar’s company, and took him everywhere: tram rides to the Praça da Matriz, the boulevards, the Seringal Mirim neighborhood, the big holiday homes out in the Vila Municipal. She took him to see the jugglers at the Gran Circo Mexicano, or to romp around at the children’s dances at the Rio Negro Club, where at the age of two he was photographed in fancy dress as a pet monkey; Zana kept the costume as a relic.

Domingas stayed with Yaqub and played with him, reduced to his level, going back to the childhood she had spent by a riverbank far from Manaus. She took him to other places: beaches left by the river in the dry season, where they explored the stranded boats, abandoned at the gully’s edge. They went around the city too, going from square to square as far as the island of São Vicente, where Yaqub stared at the fort, climbed on the cannons, and imitated the rigid pose of the sentinels. When it rained, the two of them, so Domingas told me, hid in the bronze ships in the Praça de São Sebastiao, and then went to see the animals and fish in the Praça das Acacias. Zana trusted her, but sometimes the neighbors’ comments gave her a fright. These Indian girls cast a spell on the children: hadn’t there been cases of strangulation, vampirism, poisoning, and even worse? But then Zana remembered that they prayed together, worshipped the same god, the same saints, and to that extent were like sisters. When they prayed, before the altar in the living room, they were together, kneeling, venerating the plaster saint Domingas dusted every morning.