Could this melancholy be a greeting from the spirits, those who care even about a simple baker? A reminder of the mortality that also awaits me?

But on that morning, on that second day when Nelio had already been lying on the filthy mattress for many hours, I had no time to think about the spirits. I usually washed off the steam and sweat from the long night in the bakery at a water pump behind the theatre, where two carpenters would already be at work building the sets for Dona Esmeralda's productions. Then I would walk home through the city, which at that time of morning still smelled fresh, home to the place I shared with my brother Augustinho and his family in a bairro perched along one of the steepest slopes at the mouth of the river. But on that morning I did not leave. That wasn't entirely out of the ordinary, because sometimes I would lie down to sleep in the shade of the tree which years ago had taken root between the theatre and the Indian photographer's studio.

I was also the only one who ever went up to the roof. I had kept secret the existence of the almost invisible extension of the winding staircase and the rusty sheet-metal door. I'm not sure that even Dona Esmeralda knew it was there. I don't think she has ever set foot on the roof If there was one thing in life that didn't interest her, it was a view, no matter how spectacular it might be.

On that morning, when Nelio lay up there on the roof breathing fitfully, I couldn't go home. I had to stay. Hastily I washed up at the pump and then went to see Senhora Muwulene, who lived in a garage behind the courthouse, several blocks from the theatre. Senhora Muwulene had been a famous feticheira back when the white colonisers, clumsily and with increasing resignation, had tried to outlaw what they scornfully regarded as our primitive superstitions. The whites had never understood the importance of the spirits in a person's life. They had never understood the necessity of staying on good terms with the souls of your ancestors; they had never grasped that a person's life involves a constant struggle to keep the spirits in a good mood. No doubt that's why the whites lost the war in the end and were forced to return to their own country. It was the offended spirits who won the war, more than it was the young revolutionaries.