Oh, how she missed the lady-killer’s body collapsed in the hammock! The runny sweat from the drinks and cocktails, and the heavy burst of sweating that came later, with its intoxicating aroma of strong, bitter alcohol, the whiff of a jaguar’s skin. Her hands drying his face, his neck, his hairy chest; Omar, almost naked, sprawled out in the red hammock, as a yellow battalion of fire ants surrounded the whisky and rum bottles on the cement floor. The smell of arnica, cocoa butter, and copaiba on the blotches and bruises on his body. These smells mixed with others: that of the large leaves of the breadfruit tree, like green fans; of the heavy, ripe cupuaçu, like a yellow velvet casket protecting its silvery pulp, giving off a strange perfume. The wet leaves with which she covered the bruised parts of his body; the cupuaçu juice with seeds in it to suck that she made for him in the middle of the afternoon when, reinvigorated, he opened his arms to my mother and kissed her familiarly on both cheeks, before drinking in the thick liquid.

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.”