Yaqub told the truth, then, or his version of it. He only told his father, who let him get things off his chest. The laconic engineer this time really let loose, and vilified his brother: “He’s ungrateful, primitive, irrational, rotten to the core. He insulted me and my wife.”
Halim had listened to his graduate son with a serious, sober look on his face. Now, at the bar table, his face puckered up and he let out a frightening laugh.
What had happened was this: Omar sent the first postcard from Miami; later he sent others, from Tampa, Mobile, and New Orleans, recounting the fun and games he’d had in each city. Yaqub had torn up all his postcards except for one, which he handed to his father: “Dear brother and sister-in-law, Louisiana is America in the raw, really rough, and the Mississippi is the local version of the Amazon. Why not take a little trip here? Savage it may be, but Louisiana is more civilized than the two of you put together. If you come, be sure you dye your hair blond: that way you’ll be one of the elite. Brother: your wife, who’s been pretty in her time, might look really young with toasted-blond hair. And you can make of lot of money here in America. Cheers from your brother, Omar.”
“For a hundred days your son was disciplined in a way he’d never been in almost thirty years, but they were a hundred days of farce,” Yaqub said to his father. “He stole my passport and went to the United States. My passport, a silk tie, and two Irish linen shirts!”
Yaqub found out about this for certain when he got the first postcard. He’d already dismissed the maid, because she’d taken Omar into the apartment when he and his wife were in Santos over the Republic Day holiday, November 15. The maid had confessed almost everything: Omar had taken her out to the Trianon and the Luz Garden; they’d had lunch in the Brás, and in restaurants in the city center. A couple of layabouts! All this with the money you were sending, said Yaqub, furious. Then Yaqub remembered the two dust-covered old volumes of integral and differential calculus, books he’d bought for a song in a secondhand bookshop in the Rua Aurora. He opened the books with foreboding, a sense of having been debased. He gritted his teeth, and his hands were shaking so much they could hardly leaf through the first volume, where several one-dollar bills had been hidden; the twenty-dollar bills had been put in the other volume. He checked the two books, page by page, shook them, and one-dollar bills fell out. The bastard! OK, the swine had taken his passport, the silk tie, the linen shirts, but money … “He left the rubbish behind, and rubbish is what he is. That’s what your son is. A harami, a thief!”