We found out that Dália was one of the Silver Women who were on show on Sundays at the Maloca dos Barés. They were Amazonian dancers, but said they were from Rio, thinking this lie would enlarge their audiences. Zana did everything to convince her engineer son to give lodging to the good-time boy. “He wants to get hooked to a hustler from the Maloca, a dancing girl who made a show of herself on the night of my birthday. If he doesn’t spend some time in São Paulo, he’ll let everything go: his studies, his home, his family,” she wrote to him.

Yaqub refused to put his brother up. He wrote to his mother that he could rent a room in a pension for Omar and matriculate him in a private school. He agreed to send news of Omar’s life in São Paulo, but he was not going to have him sleeping under his roof. “Let him find his own road, but away from me, way away from my patch.”

When Omar found out about the plan, he spent several days out of the house. He slept and ate out, and sent an abusive letter, calling his brother a “wimp, a scoundrel, a hypocrite.” He tried in vain to fix a meeting with Dália and his mother. Zana discovered what kind of roof the dancer had over her head: a tumbledown house in Vila Saturnina, to the north, where Manaus came to an end. It was the last little house in the town, in a bit of wasteland full of the remains of carts and rusty bicycle wheels. The red flowers of the jambo trees covered a dirt track that linked the street to the town. Dália lived with two aunts, a seamstress and a confectioner, and the three of them lived on the verge of poverty. The state of the house was pitiful: the beginnings of a slum, with twisted wooden partitions separating a mass of tiny rooms and compartments. I went to visit them on Zana’s orders. Even in daylight, without her makeup and her silvery costume, Dália was beautiful. She was in shorts and a T-shirt, sitting on the ground, with a pile of colored bobbins between her brown thighs. When she saw me, her smile disappeared; she stuck her needle into her frayed sleeve and left the room. I still got a close view of her breasts, which showed through the worn cotton. My mission was contemptible, but Omar’s going to São Paulo, and his absence, even temporary, would benefit me, and bring me a little peace. I offered Dália’s aunts the money Zana had sent. They were reluctant, but orders for sweets and dresses were few and far between at that time. The other end of Brazil was growing at a dizzying rate, as Yaqub wanted. But in stagnant Manaus, any offer of money was manna from heaven. The aunts accepted the offer and maybe changed the broken tiles and rotten beams in the roofing. That way, I spared them some of the discomforts of the rainy season, soothed a mother’s heart, and even got a little money myself as a tip.