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between two trees, and his time for bar and backgammon. It got even worse at night, when, right after dinner, he would leave to have a little fun. Tearing her hair, screaming, Adma would shout to high heaven. People would cluster in the street listening to her. In the early morning she’d wait for him, clutching four stones in her hands. That’s how it was….
    “I know quite well, Ibrahim. I was a witness. I’ll never forget.”
    Ibrahim felt his capacity for resistance diminishing, his soul weakening. He’d reduced his daily fishing to twice a week, shortened his siestas, worked harder in the store. It was the life of a black slave, a sad affair. But there were worse things, much worse.
    “I have to tell you everything, my friend! It isn’t just my character I’m losing.…” He lowered his voice and his eyes. “My hard-on, too.…”
    “Hard-on, Ibrahim? How can that be possible?”
    “Witchcraft!” In the end he’d become the victim of some fearsome witchcraft. It had happened when he was all tight into a whore and, all of a sudden, during the best part of his goody-gooey, he heard Adma’s evil voice and in the darkness caught sight of her grim face, and he immediately went limp, right then and there. That wasn’t the end of it. The curse persisted for the rest of the night. It was of no avail for the whore to make any effort; there was no trick capable of getting his dick up.
    “She’s gelding me, Raduan, my friend.”
    “It’s more serious than I thought, Ibrahim. We really can’t wait for Jamil Bichara or whoever it’s going to be. You go to Ilhéus right away, tomorrow, while I go have a talk with Adib. The way things stand, in a little while not even marriage will save our Adma.”
    At the very moment when Ibrahim was confiding his miseries to his friend and counselor, an extraordinary coincidence was taking place, one worthy of inclusion in this faithful account of Adma’s nuptials, in which coincidences and magical moments keep running into each other. In that peaceful late afternoon, having dropped off his suitcase in Glorinha Goldass’s room and taken a bath to rid himself of the dust of his trip, Jamil Bichara was all prepared to give his body some nourishment, which was why he’d come to Itabuna. To replenish the stock of the Emporium and to feed his little dovey-doo, to dance at the cabaret, bat the breeze with Raduan Murad, attending to the necessities of both body and spirit.
    None of the characters gathered at the bar, at the whorehouse, on the upper floor of the living quarters could have guessed that all that talking and activity was part of the scheme put together by Shaitan, the Islamic devil. On his chessboard lay the fate of Jamil and, in the bargain, the souls of the other figures.

8
    While Jamil Bichara, in Glorinha Goldass’s room at Afonsina’s happy house, was giving abundant and varied nourishment to his dovey-doo, while Ibrahim Jafet, bent down under the weight of his shame, was deciding to dine at home and confront the wrath of his daughter Adma, Raduan Murad, at a table in Sante’s bar, empty of customers at that hour, was reflecting on the catastrophic situation in which his old friend and companion found himself.
    Man’s fortune is fickle, the saying goes, and Ibrahim’s example proves it twice over. Only a few years ago a prosperous merchant, a respected family man with lots of leisure at his disposal, the husband of the most competent, desirable, and virtuous of women, he had suddenly been transformed into that thing we now see. From being the exclusive favorite of the matriarch Sálua—a pasha he was!—he was on the point of becoming impecunious and impotent. In a toast to Sálua, Raduan Murad sipped his raki, emptying the glass.
    Raduan kept no set schedule for lunch or dinner (except when he was invited), nor for sleeping. That he would do during breaks from his elegant prose, his art, and from the poker table, his main profession, from the books he read