On Zana’s birthday, the day dawned with the vases in the living room full of flowers and affectionate notes from Omar, flowers and words that awoke in Rânia a passion that she had never experienced. For a moment, on that single morning of the year, Rânia forgot the mocking, sarcastic good-time boy, and saw the ghost of a fantasy lover in her brother’s noble gesture. She hugged and kissed him, but caressing a ghost is a fleeting affair, and Omar reappeared, flesh and blood, smiling cynically at his sister. He smiled, tickled her around the waist, on her bottom, and one of his hands felt its way up between her legs. Rânia sweated, bristled, and kept clear of her brother; she went to her room in a flash. Before dinner, when the neighbors were already chatting and drinking in the living room, she would reappear. She was the best-dressed woman of the evening, almost more beautiful than her mother, and the neighbors looked at her, wondering why that woman insisted on sleeping alone in a narrow bed. Rânia could have gone to the open-air parties in the city, to St. John’s night, to Carnival balls, to the parties by the lake at the Rio Negro Athletic Club, but she avoided all that. On the few occasions she appeared at the Benemous’ party, she stayed aloof, beautiful and much admired, showered with confetti and streamers by smooth-chinned lads and gray-haired men. Zana, still quite young, kept herself to one side and sulked. Domingas, who had known her since she was born, remembered the afternoon when mother and daughter fell out. The bouquets of flowers with messages for Rânia faded in the living room until they smelled of mourning. My mother didn’t find out what had happened, and I only got to know something years later, during an unexpected, memorable encounter. She had been a happy, vivacious girl, Domingas said, but from that day on Rânia only touched two men: the twins. She no longer went to the dance halls in the city; she stopped promenading around the squares where she met old friends from the Ginásio Amazonense to go to matinees at the Odeon, the Guarany, or the Polytheama; she became a recluse, retiring to the nocturnal solitude of her little room. No one knew what she did within those four walls. Rânia became this cloistered being, and woe betide anyone who disturbed her after eight o’clock, when she withdrew from the world. She left her room on the night of her mother’s birthday and for Christmas dinner. She abandoned the university in the first semester, and asked her father if she could work in the shop. Halim agreed. What he expected from Omar came from Rânia; the result of this unexpected turn of events was a hawk-eyed businesswoman. In a short time, Rânia began to sell, buy, and exchange merchandise. She knew all the most powerful river traders, and without leaving Manaus, without even leaving the Rua dos Bares, she knew who was selling clothes to the most distant villages. She struck a deal with these traders, who at the start despised her; then, they thought or pretended to think that Halim was behind this astute haggler. It wasn’t uncommon to see her display her almost instantaneous smile of false familiarity to the customers. She knew how to attract them, giving them a slow, languid, captivating look, which contrasted with the rapid, efficient gestures of the practiced saleswoman.