Three times he asked me to finish him off, three times I refused. This was before, before I allowed myself to think anything I want. If I had been then what I’ve become today, I would have killed him the first time he asked, his head turned toward me, his left hand in my right.

God’s truth, if I’d already become then what I am now, I would have slaughtered him like a sacrificial sheep, out of friendship. But I thought of my old father, of my mother, of the inner voice that commands us all, and I couldn’t cut the barbed wire of his suffering. I was not humane with Mademba, my more-than-brother, my childhood friend. I let duty make my choice. I offered him only mistaken thoughts, thoughts commanded by duty, thoughts condoned by a respect for human law, and I was not human.

Like no one would ever know that Mademba had begged me three times to finish him, that I had remained deaf to his three supplications, that I had been inhuman by obeying duty’s voice. But I was now free to listen no longer, to no longer obey the voices that command us not to be human when we must.

Fary was very, very moving. Her voice was soft, like the lapping of the river against fishermen’s canoes on quiet mornings. Fary’s smile was the dawn, her ass round as dunes in the Lompoul desert. Fary had eyes that were both doe and lioness. At times an earth-shattering tornado, at others an ocean of tranquility. God’s truth, I would have lost Mademba’s friendship to win Fary’s love. Luckily, Fary chose me over Mademba. Luckily, my morethan-brother deferred to me. It was because Fary chose me in front of everyone that Mademba stepped aside.

She agreed to marry him out of respect for keeping one’s word, out of respect for Yoro Ba. Penndo had come to love my father because he was her exact opposite. He was as old as an immutable landscape, she was young like the changing sky. He was immobile as a baobab tree, she was the daughter of the wind. Sometimes opposites fascinate each other because of the differences between them. Penndo had come to love my father, the old man, because he contained all of the wisdom of the earth and of the recurring seasons. My father, the old man, idolized Penndo because she was what he was not: movement, joyous instability, novelty.

He would smile, perhaps relieved by my unaffectedness. Sometimes Yasmeen cried. I thought two crying daughters would be too much for him, so I trained myself to wait until I was alone, in my closet or in the bath. My father would wipe Yasmeen’s face, hug us both, ask us if we wanted chocolate milk.

“Good girl,” he’d whisper in my ear. I was good because I was restrained. My father, I believe, carried a lot of hurt from his relationship with my mother. He did not like to see the related pain radiating from his daughters’ eyes.

Those letters taught me about longing. Reading them in front of my father taught me to hide it, often even from myself. I know now what a dangerous kind of denial that is. It leaves you ravenous. It makes your seismometer vibrate when the phone call you are shocked to discover you have been waiting for your whole life offers you precisely what you are terrified to want: Hello, Nadia. This is your mama.