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Truth is sometimes the rock upon which a novel founders. In real life, we accept it as it emerges from chance or the implacable logic of events. In fiction, however, we demand that the author invent better or, if copying reality, lie for art's sake. A novel faithful to truth may seem cold and fail even to draw us away from routine. We are like the buckets of a waterwheel: some rise, others fall, driven by the handle of selfishness. If truth is ugly, someone may ask, why offer it to the public on great panels? The human heart has iron threads that bind it to clay and sink it into the mire of original guilt. Such objections come from those who keep their judgement; the narrator lost his while studying truth and takes revenge by painting it ugly. Does misfortune strengthen or weaken love? The narrator leaves the decision to the reader and offers facts, not theses, as a painter portrays eyes without explaining sight.
After nineteen months in prison, Simão longed for a ray of sunlight. He wanted air unfiltered by bars and open sky, for the vault of his cell pressed upon his chest. He now longed to live freely, not for renewed romantic hope, although he still loved Teresa. Six months spent facing the gallows had wounded his heart, which needed the strength of hope and joy in order to love. The gallows had vanished, but his wrists remained in irons and his lungs breathed the prison's deadly air. His spirit grew numb among damp walls, a floor echoing the last steps of condemned men and a ceiling filtering death in drops of water. What remains of an eighteen-year-old heart, free of remorse and eager for glory, after eighteen months of life brought to a standstill? Separation becomes an amputation, and longing for lost happiness burns like red-hot iron, while love offers no comfort.
Freed from the rope of justice, Simão felt an hour's relief and the scaffold breaking in his arms. He then invited the heart of the woman who had lost him to witness his life's second marriage, this time to hope. Hope fled towards the sands of Asia; with no opening for light, love drowned in a heart filled with bitterness. What hope remained for Simão? India, humiliation, misery and poverty. That soul had dreamt of making a name; it had devoted its talent to love and also desired glory and renown. But love's garlands, bleeding from their thorns, poisoned thought, extinguished courage and paralysed the heart. Thus you felt, unhappy Simão: eighteen months in prison had killed the best part of your soul; when you asked about the past, reason rebuked the heart. Teresa's laments came from the convent and wounded Simão, who sought compassion for her and found despair for himself.
The ten years in irons offered as a lesser sentence seemed more terrible to him than the gallows. The narrator believes Simão would have accepted the dungeon if he could still hear Teresa's voice and recognise in it love's last flame. Teresa had asked Simão to accept ten years in prison and wait there for the freedom she would bring him. “In ten years, my father will have died; I shall be your wife and ask the King to pardon you before the sentence ends,” she wrote. “If you go into exile, I shall lose you for ever: you will die or, when you return, you will no longer remember me.” How the poor young woman deceived herself when her feeble strength briefly gathered in her heart! Her breathlessness, pallor and weakness had returned, and Teresa coughed up gushes of blood. Even if Simão accepted, from love or pity, the three thousand six hundred and fifty nights behind bolts, prison would not lift the tombstone crushing Teresa.
The disturbed letter said: “Hope for nothing, martyr. The struggle is useless, our meeting was a mistake and we have nothing in this world.” “Let us walk towards death. There is a secret known only in the grave. Shall we see each other again?” He said he was leaving and hated his homeland and family; he saw Portugal covered in gallows and heard the executioner's curses. In Portugal he no longer wanted either freedom with wealth or the hopes Teresa's love had given him. “Forget me and fall asleep in nothingness. I want to die, but not here: I want to see the sky with my final glance.” He asked Teresa not to insist: she did not know ten years of captive freedom or the torture of his twenty months. He heard only the compassionate woman who brought him bread and the officer who had ironically announced the exchange of the gallows for ten years of agony. “Save yourself if you can, Teresa, and free yourself from a deeply unfortunate man. If your father calls you, go.” If a dawn of peace could rise for her, she should live for the happiness of that day. Otherwise, he told her to die and called death happiness, dust and oblivion. The letter revealed Simão's disturbed state; his words were not the narrator's calm judgement.
Teresa replied: “I shall die, Simão. Forgive my fate. I have lost you, and you know the destiny I wished to give you.” She said that she was dying because she could not and never would be able to free him. “If you can, live; I am not asking you to die, Simão.” “I want you to live so that you may mourn me. My spirit will comfort you. I am calm and see the dawn of peace.” She bade Simão farewell until they met in heaven.
After that letter came many days of terrible silence, during which Simão did not answer Mariana. He seemed absorbed in the painful sensations of his own annihilation. Mariana, placed by God beside that tormented eighteen-year-old, wept. If he saw her tears, Simão emerged from silence in fits and convulsions that exhausted him. Another six months passed. Teresa was still alive and told her frightened companions that she knew the exact day of her death.
Simão had seen two springs through the bars; the third was beginning to bring flowers to the fields and green the forests of Candal. It was March 1807. On the tenth, Simão was ordered to leave on the first ship to weigh anchor in the Douro bound for India. At that time, ships went to Porto to collect convicts and took on others with the same destination in Lisbon.
No obstacle prevented Mariana from boarding when the time came. She presented herself to the criminal magistrate as the convict's servant. The passage was paid by Simão, whom Mariana named as her master. The joking magistrate remarked that Mariana was well worth the cost of the passage.
Simão watched his baggage being packed in a terrible calm, as though unaware of his own fate. He tried many times to write a final letter to Teresa, but could not send even the marks of tears on the paper. “What darkness, my God!” he cried, tearing out handfuls of his hair. “Give me tears, Lord! Let me weep or kill me, for this suffering is unbearable!” Mariana watched in horror these fits of madness and the equally terrible periods of lethargy. Emerging from his stupor, he cried: “And Teresa, the unhappy girl I killed! I shall never see her again!” He spoke out of guilt and despair, not as an admission of murder. No one would carry news of Teresa's death to him once he was in exile. “When I call you to see me die worthy of you, who will tell you that I am dead, O martyr?”