Was that what she missed? The body and the smells that surrounded him in the nights of a thousand binges? It seemed my mother thirsted after Omar’s body, and no longer hid her longing for him to return. Domingas asked her mistress: “Can I prepare a dolphin’s eye? You hang it around your neck, and Omar will come and kiss you … full of love for you.” Of course Zana knew what to answer. She came close to my mother and turned her head towards the small oratory. The two of them, together, still preserved some of the beauty of their younger days. The Indian and the Levantine woman, side by side: their solemn faces, the fervor that had crossed oceans and rivers to throb there, in that room—all that devotion to bring him back, safe and sound, and above all alone, to the room that would always be his, and only his.
“That was when our lovemaking finally cooled off,” murmured Halim, twisting some tucum fibers with his fingers. “We started to go without our little games; like going without life itself. All because of this business with Pau-Mulato.”
Halim never spoke of death to me, except once, obliquely, skirting around the edges of the topic. He spoke when he already felt close to his end, some years after his son’s affair with Pau-Mulato. He didn’t see the worst, the final calamity. He didn’t see it, but he did take omens seriously—all the prophecies he had heard from his caboclo friends, the offspring of solitude and the jungle. He had a naive belief in these stories, and let himself be carried along by their plots and word magic. Halim was a faux naïf, an idolater of love and its ecstasies, in pursuit of the good life in the trivial world of the provinces. He took life as it came: any sugar, coarse or fine, was good enough for his coffee. But when it came to love, with Zana, he always wanted and always asked for more. In the days and months of Omar’s absence, he began to hide away, begging for crumbs, starved and dizzy with pain. He acted, too. There were no tricks he didn’t try, to see the back of the prayers, novenas, and suchlike mumbo jumbo. He didn’t promise the earth: just one thing, the really tough act. He said: “I’m going to bring Omar back home. Either he comes back or takes that woman with him and finally gets the hell out.”
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