Zana went to the harbor every morning. Several times she saw her son, without being seen. Not at the harbor itself, but in the warehouse where the goods were piled up, to be sidetracked to their final uncertain destination. She found out where it had come from and where it was going. The stuff was carried in the Booth Line’s ships; Omar checked everything in warehouse number nine and went out alone in the convertible, while the small fry took the merchandise to a house in the suburbs: Swiss chocolate, English clothes and toffees, Japanese cameras, pens, American sneakers. Everything that at that time couldn’t be found in any Brazilian city: foreign shape, color, labels, and packaging—foreign smell. Wyckham understood this. He sensed the thirst for novelty, for consumption, the spellbinding power each thing carries with it. What was his part in the business? Was he making money? Halim didn’t know. But what Zana found out was that her little hairy monkey had been attracted by a woman. He was never seen with her in daylight. They hid it, the two of them, deep inside a nocturnal shell, in love; the two of them, and no one else.

“Just as I always wanted.” Halim smiled at last, and said hello to a fishmonger. “This time he did take after his father, but Zana spoiled everything.”

She discovered a guy with a strange name, Zanuri, who came around to the house one night. He really was a strange one, wily, somewhat forward, almost smiling, a guy full of somewhats and almosts, with a twisted nose in a rather gaunt face—a man with no look in his eyes, as if he had no soul. A Panama hat tied with a yellow ribbon, slouched over his head, gave him an almost comic air.

“Almost, because he was an incomplete being from top to toe. That Zanuri didn’t even have a man’s fiber,” Halim muttered. “He was a coward; couldn’t even stroke an animal.”

Halim disliked him from the start, from the moment he saw him whispering with Zana, just once, in the iron kiosk in the Adolpho Lisboa market. His aversion grew, and became unbearable when Zanuri entered the house without knocking, when it was dark, something you might expect of a neighbor of many years’ standing, but not from someone like him. Halim was in the hammock with Zana, both of them dead to the world, quietly drifting among the slow caresses of incipient old age. They were taking advantage of the silence and the cool, damp night air. Rânia had already shut herself in her room. Domingas, overcome with fatigue, was stretched out in the hammock in her room. From my hiding place, I could see the almost-smile on the indistinct figure in the dark. I heard murmuring. Zana’s voice prevailed. She was speaking in a low voice and gesticulating as if reprimanding someone. The shadow of her hands made strange shapes on the veranda wall; a subdued pitter-patter was heard on the stairs, and she went quiet. The shadow disappeared and the figure of Omar appeared in the middle of the room. He combed his hair in front of the mirror, arched his eyebrows, and smiled at his image. He was elegant; the white Irish linen suit smelled of essence of Pará, and a stronger smell came from his body. These assorted scents, essences from here, there, and everywhere, filled the house. Only the slightest whiff reached my hiding place: a smell that faded in the caladiums where I was ensconced.