Now I recognized the voice I had heard when I was four or five. He said he’d brought books for me. He didn’t seem like a stranger—rather someone who couldn’t feel at ease in the house where he’d been born.

Zana asked him why his wife hadn’t come to Manaus, and he merely looked scornfully at his mother, knowing he could irritate her with his silence.

“You mean I’m not going to meet my daughter-in-law?” Zana insisted. “Is she afraid of the heat, or does she think we’re animals?”

“Your other son’ll give you a daughter-in-law, and then some,” Yaqub said, drily. “Someone ideal, just like himself.”

Zana preferred not to answer.

The day before Yaqub’s arrival she’d dreamed the twins were chatting calmly in her room, but then suddenly she saw the young Yaqub at the quayside, with his back to a white ship, smiling coldly at her. He smiled and fixed his eyes on her, then slowly disappeared.

At breakfast she told Halim her dream. She was tense and flustered; stroking her hands, he said in an ironic tone:

“Zana, I swear, if I’d have had a little part in your dream, I’d have shooed the two out of our room and put up the hammock …”

“Even then, it would be a dream,” she said bitterly. “What can I do? Our sons don’t get on …”

“What can you do? Pay a bit of attention to your other son. It’s years since we’ve seen Yaqub. Look what he’s managed to do, alone in São Paulo. He’s got his own existence, his own wife.”

She feared a meeting between the two, and an explosion of insults in the household. She was on watch during the night until Omar came in; then Domingas helped carry him to his room; he emerged when his brother had already gone out. They did this for three consecutive nights, preventing Yaqub from encountering his brother in the red hammock on the veranda.