“Do you know what I did after these accusations?” He seemed upset, half drunk, maybe a bit of both. “Do you know what’s the best thing to do when a son, a relative, or anyone else makes a fuss over money? Do you know?”

“No,” I said, hardly understanding.

“Well then … I let Yaqub finish. He was angry; I’d never seen my son that way. After he’d given vent to his feelings, he went quiet, his energy gone, like a plant out of water. Then I said: ‘All right, I’m going to fix this.’ He thought I was going to go after his brother, or tell Zana everything. I got up, went back home, filled all the vases in the bedroom with orchids, put the hammock up, and shouted my wife’s name … Sons, what sons! For heaven’s sake, all I wanted to do was to forget all this garbage, the eight hundred and twenty dollars, the passport, the tie, the shirts, and bloody Louisiana … Zana came into the room and saw me naked in the hammock. She saw me and understood. I recited some of Abbas’s words … It was the signal …”

It was the first time I saw Halim tottering; he was canned, and very nearly fell off the chair. He decided to stay there for a few more minutes, without making a single noise. A small motorboat approached the stakes, the captain threw the ropes, and I helped him tie them down. He moored near the bar, and the boat’s searchlight slowly swung to and fro, lighting up the wooden posts, our table, or Halim’s face. I saw his lower lip was very red, where he’d bitten it, and his face was burning. I asked the captain to point the light at our table, and helped Halim get up. I went back home with him; the two of us together, arms around one another, along the narrow alleys, and across the bowed planks of the Floating City. From time to time someone called out to him, but he didn’t reply, and walked on with me in the darkness. Halim was silent. I already suspected what his greatest fear was. The engineer was getting more important, making money. And the other twin had no need of money to be what he was and do what he did.

And how! Those five or six years: the time between Omar’s flight and Yaqub’s visit to Manaus. Only afterwards we found out that Yaqub had prospered: maybe he aspired to a place at the top. He had moved, and the area of São Paulo where he lived spoke volumes: the area, and the apartment, because the photographs sent nowadays showed imposing interiors that made the human beings look so small they almost disappeared. Rânia complained: “They want to show the decor; they’ve forgotten to show their faces,” she said.