Four hundred and fifty letters, one a month for thirty-eight years, from Elias in Brazil to Teta on the mountain — and how the family found out what was in them.
The story
“We were clearing the house the summer after she died, and under her bed was a biscuit tin, and under that another, and another. Every letter he ever sent, in order, tied in bundles of twelve with the string from the bakery.”
“They start in Arabic. By the eighties there's Portuguese in every line, and by the end he's writing whole sentences in it and translating them underneath for her. She kept a dictionary in the kitchen drawer. We never knew why.”
How it came down to us
Nadia found them in 2016 and told it on the balcony that night. Her nephew Karim wrote it down, and is reading the letters one a month, the way they arrived.
What people disagree about
Georges says some of the letters were written to him and Teta kept them anyway. Nadia says that, having read them, Teta was right to.