In March, when Zana was smiling and praying less, Halim switched his attention from the fish to Adamor, the fishmonger. We knew him. Old Toad-Leg, as he was called, had started to frequent our street again. He was one of the oldest fishmongers in the neighborhood. Before dawn, we heard his voice, in its amateur baritone, an echoing shout, drawing out the vowels of the words that gave him a living: “Fre-e-e-e-sh fi-ish!” It was the sound that ushered in the morning, a boom resounding through the mass of birds chattering in the tops of the enormous trees. It was Toad-Leg’s signature tune. After the voice came the figure of the man, moving in short steps, little, calculated, symmetrical jumps, coming up to the door of a customer’s house. There, alighting like a bird, Toad-Leg paused. His body, now visible in a world suddenly illuminated by the morning light, waited expectantly. On his spread-out hands was the tray. Stock still, he neither sang nor shouted: now it was dumb show. His left leg was crippled, half dead, and a swelling made it difficult to open his eyes. Little by little, Toad-Leg began to open his eyelids, and two very thin slits appeared in his sweaty face. The early sun, not yet hot, lit up angles, facades, trees, bodies in movement. Up above, the blocks of clouds dissolved with the morning breeze. Here below, on the dirty pavement, the figure of Domingas leaned over the tray, and her hands felt the eyes of a fish. She grumbled: “This matrinxã might have been fresh last week, now it’s cat food.” Adamor was irritated by Domingas’s sallies. He wanted to empty his tray in our street, but my mother was niggling and fussy. She wouldn’t buy smooth, scaleless fish: “They’re no good, bad for the blood, they give you skin disease.” The two of them quarreled, called the mistress of the house, and she backed Domingas. Choosing fish was my mother’s big moment; she always won, and was proud of the fact.

All her cunning came out in the presence of Toad-Leg; all her boldness, suppressed in the house, came into its own on the pavement, for all to see. “Not today, Adamor, those fish decorated with parsley, spring onions, and tomatoes are all right for Dona Estelita … I don’t like that kind of thing, they’re just there to fool people.” He dragged himself off with little jumps, calling my mother all the names he could think of: she was a stuck-up little Indian, keeping in with her mistress … But Domingas was not so hard on the pastry seller, a musical boy who played high-pitched notes on a steel triangle and sang tunes. Nor was she tightfisted with the pitomba and sapoti seller, an old man with a bronzed face whose time on earth was spent selling fruit purloined from waste plots and the gardens of ruined houses.