“Sixty years and more: nothing can hide that woman’s beauty,” he would say.

He said it over and over, until the end, as if she’d stopped aging. It was as if time were an abstraction, with no power over Zana’s body. Right to the last, he was madly in love. Poor Halim! Well, not so poor as all that. He was a gourmet of carnal love: he turned small-time provincial life into a festival of pleasures.

That morning he waited for his son. He knew that Omar would be caught; it was inevitable. He was living in an old motorboat, rented, really cheap. They slept together, in a hammock. They also slept in the open air on deserted beaches, wherever they moored their boat. Could they go through life like this? Maybe. She, Pau-Mulato, set herself up as a palm reader, reading the callused hands of the river dwellers, getting manioc flour and a few coins in return for pipe dreams. They fished in the deserted branches of the Anavilhanas, laying their net near the boat, gathering in the fish before dawn. They lived an amphibious existence, clandestine, both of them in a dignified poverty, with no set time for anything. Unfettered and free, their life had no fixed points.

But Toad-Leg sniffed them out. How did he find the lovers? It was hard enough to find Binford, because the plane had slipped down through some trees and plunged into the Purus. Adamor was astute: he observed every angle, every corner of the forest, and looked upwards, in search of broken branches, treetops broken off, bits of fuselage. Then all he had to do was follow the winding trail of debris till he found a quiet man by the side of the river: bags under his eyes, his face drawn and haggard, his teeth green with chewing so many leaves, and a pistol in his lap. A motionless body, with turtle eggs spread around on the beach. Adamor laughed when he saw the scene. Almost twenty years later, he laughed again when he saw Omar’s boat hidden among heavy barges: a miserable little motorboat, of the kind that crisscross the bay of the river Negro every day; a dangerous boat to be in in a storm, and fragile in the fierce waves of a tidal bore. There it was, right behind the Adolpho Lisboa Market, ensconced and quite innocent, with the love hammock on display, set up under the little bridge, next to the catwalk; at the stern was a little Brazilian flag, limp and faded. There, three hundred yards from Halim’s den—he’d imagined his son on some frontier, or in Iquitos, Santarém, or Belém. He’d thought he was in the south of Brazil, or North America, in the cold climate of the other hemisphere. He might have been anywhere, far away: anywhere but where he was, in the crowded little harbor.

“Even Tannus didn’t believe it,” Halim said. “Who was going to look for the two of them here, in the Escadaria harbor? They were right under my nose …”