He went under protest, rebellious and angry. There were six months of peace and quiet at home, and of relief for Halim. Omar’s books, the novels and poems he read in the hammock, fell into my hands; his books, notepaper, his pens, everything, except for the room, which was his and his alone. In his chaotic bedroom, the old mattress and the sheets were changed. But before he left, Omar had asked Domingas to leave the objects on the shelves; she put a sheet over the collection of ashtrays, glasses, bottles of sand, panties, bras, red seeds, stubs of lipstick, and stained cigarette butts. Domingas, cleaning out the wardrobe, discovered an Indian oar, dark and polished. On the blade, there were women’s names carved with a knife. Domingas smoothed the dark blade, pronouncing one name after another and sat on Omar’s bed, half in a trance, maybe missing him. Now she could go into his room, live with the things he had left behind, open the window and see the horizon he saw every evening before he left for his nightly entertainment. She went through all the furniture in the room, and kept on finding objects, photographs, toys, the old worn-out uniform from the Vandals’ Cockpit. It was different from Yaqub’s room, empty, with no rubbish: a place to put your body, and nothing more. I don’t know which of the two my mother preferred to clean. The fact is that every day, in good or bad mood, she went into each room and lingered there before she started cleaning. And if the oar and the junk excited her, the severity of Yaqub’s room cooled her head. Perhaps my mother liked the contrast.

Zana gave me her son’s uniform; it was loose on me and made people laugh. I swallowed the laughter, and gave the clothes back before Zana ate me with her eyes—she couldn’t bear seeing the uniform on another body. And thanks to Halim, I went to the Vandals’ Cockpit.

At the school I found traces of Omar: ex-girlfriends, stories of shindigs, heroic scenes, challenges, duels. On the toilet walls was graffiti composed by him. Wherever he went, he left a daring gesture, some act of bravado, an epigram, words of humor and irony. I finished the course he had abandoned in the final year. In fact, Omar never finished anything, he would never go to a university, despised diplomas, and was ignorant of anything that didn’t give him an intense, powerful pleasure, in his endless quest for adventure.