From the Rua dos Bares? Our Lady in Heaven … that boy? Well … how you’ve grown! Wait a little.” She brought out a black-and-white photograph: Yaqub and my mother together, in a canoe, in front of the shack, called the Bar da Margem. He looked at the image, quiet and thoughtful, and with his eyes searched for the place on the bank where one day he had been happy. Then he said he lived far away, in São Paulo; it was years since he’d visited the city. The woman wanted to strike up a conversation, but Yaqub hardly spoke; his happiness gradually disappeared, and his face became serious. He briefly said goodbye; the woman offered him the photo, and he thanked her: he might come back to the Bar da Margem with Domingas. In the canoe, rowing to the little harbor, he told me he would never forget the day he left Manaus and was sent to Lebanon. It was horrible.”I was forced apart from everybody, everything … I didn’t want to go.”

His pain seemed stronger than his emotion at returning to his childhood world. He washed his face in river water, and asked the canoeist to go around the Floating City, where the flames of candles and kerosene lamps were already beginning to flicker. The jungle was going dark behind us, and the glow from the city grew as we rowed on through the humid night. In flashes, I saw Yaqub’s unsmiling face, and imagined what must have happened to him during the time when he lived in the village in southern Lebanon. Nothing, perhaps, no wicked or aggressive act could have been as violent as Yaqub’s brusque separation from his world. But, in those days he spent in Manaus, I noticed his mood often changed. His enthusiasm at rediscovering certain people, landscapes, smells, and tastes was soon stifled by the memory of a rift. Now, it’s not so hard to think about these things. I can still see him jumping out of the canoe and going towards the Rua dos Bares; I can hear his voice, criticizing his father’s out-of-date shop and his friends around the backgammon board.

“These people get in the way of the customers; they’re like vultures with carrion, waiting for their afternoon snack to turn up. You’ll not get very far that way.”

Rânia agreed, but Halim, with his arms resting on the counter, asked:

“Why go that far? What about enjoying a game, or a chat?”

“Business doesn’t flourish on chance pleasures like that,” said Yaqub, addressing his sister.

Halim asked me to accompany him to Balma’s shop.

“Tonight Issa and Talib are going to have a game of billiards, and I don’t want to miss that particular game of chance.”

I said goodbye to brother and sister, and only went to see Yaqub on the next day, the eve of his departure for São Paulo.