Once, on a Saturday, worn out and fed up with routine, she wanted to get out of the house and the city. She asked Zana if she could have Sunday off. Her mistress was surprised, but let her go, so long as she didn’t come back late. It was the only time I went out of Manaus with my mother. It was still dark when she shook my hammock; she had already prepared breakfast and was singing under her breath. She didn’t want to wake the others, and was keen to get going. We walked to the harbor at Catraia and got into a motorboat taking some musicians to a wedding party on the banks of the Acajatuba, a tributary of the Negro. On the journey, Domingas was almost childishly happy; it was as if she were in charge of her own body and voice. Sitting at the prow, her face to the sun, she seemed free; she said: “Look at the batuíras and jaçanãs,” pointing at the birds skimming over the dark water, or splashing over the matted vegetation. She pointed to the hoatzins nestling in the twisted branches of the aturiás, and jacamins, uttering strange cries as they cut across the magnificent sky, heavy with clouds. My mother had not forgotten these birds: she recognized their sounds and names, and looked eagerly at the vast horizon up the river, recalling the place where she had been born, near the village of São João, on the banks of the Jurubaxi, an arm of the Negro, far away from there. “My place,” Domingas remembered. She didn’t want to leave São João, or her father and brother; she helped the women of the village to grate manioc to make flour, and looked after her younger brother while her father worked on his plot in the jungle. Her mother … Domingas didn’t remember, but her father said: your mother was born in Santa Isabel, she was pretty, with a happy laugh; at the housewarming parties and nights when there were dances she was the prettiest of all. One day, very early, Domingas’s father went out to cut piassava and other Brazil nuts. It was June, the day before St. John’s night, the canoe carrying the saint’s image was being brought down to the river, and the gambeiros were beating drums, singing, and begging for alms for St. John. The village of Jurubaxi was already lively, with prayers and dances, and from the nearby towns and even from Santa Isabel on the river Negro Indians and half-castes were coming for the festival. Then, the sounds of the drums were drowned by grunts, and Domingas saw a wild boar kicking, trembling, suffocating, frothing at the snout with the poisonous juice of the wild manioc. “A man threw boiling water and hit the animal over the head a few times with a cudgel. Then he pulled out the hairs so the meat could be prepared,” Domingas told me. “I ran inside our hut, where my brother was playing. I stayed there, shaking with fear, crying … I waited for my father … He was late … Nobody knew anything.”