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A few days later, Marta returned with Dona Teresa. Feliciano agreed that his wife should have a water treatment. Feeling sorry for her, Father Osório's sister offered to nurse her. Marta clung to Dona Teresa in confused fear and begged her not to leave her alone. She also begged Teresa to protect her from the missionary.
Dona Teresa was present when Marta's first daughter was born. She hoped that motherhood would bring a good change to the mother's mind. She thought that love for the child might distract Marta from her longing for José Alves. However, medical books of the period said that maternal love could not restore an injured mind. According to those books, such love acted only in people considered healthy. Dona Teresa, however, could not believe that Marta was definitely mad. Even so, Marta rarely took an interest in conversations and said things that made no sense. She claimed that she saw José Alves's soul, as if she were describing an ordinary event.
When they showed her the newborn baby, Marta looked at her for a few seconds. She said no loving word and showed no joy. Dona Teresa spoke tenderly to her about the baby, trying to awaken her affection. She placed the child in Marta's arms and gave her the baby to kiss. Marta obeyed sadly and unwillingly, kissing her daughter as if she were someone else's child. The wet nurse told the servants that the brasileira was 'a savage' and could not bear to see the little angel.
The attacks became less frequent. But during the three days before each attack, Marta became disturbed and delirious. She shut herself in her room and lined up many flowerpots on the floor, as if making a garden path. Once she explained this to Dona Teresa, her daughter's godmother. 'I made this path of roses because my José Alves promised to make me a garden in Vilalva when we married,' Marta said. 'Then we can walk together when he comes at night.' Dona Teresa looked at her with great pity and then became convinced that Marta was beyond recovery.
When Marta shut herself in her room, Feliciano knew that an attack was approaching. He went to sleep in another bed, saying that he needed his rest. He had to rise early to watch the labourers and did not want to lose a night's sleep. He regretted the marriage and avoided the troubles that he could not prevent. The narrator says that Feliciano thought only of his own comfort. At times, he even thought that becoming a widower would not be very unpleasant. After each attack, Marta returned to a calm, passive and quiet state. Then her uncle and husband returned to her bed to satisfy his own physical needs. That was how Marta had five children by Feliciano in seven years. The doctor had explained to Father Osório that Marta's dementia was functional and did not prevent reproduction. With bitter irony, the narrator adds that Providence did not make women with dementia unable to bear children.
During the three days before the attacks, Marta seemed to find her husband repulsive. At those times, José Alves came back to life in her imagination. In her vision, her beloved rose from the grave and carried her on angel's wings to the paradise of Prazins. Dona Teresa pressed her ear to the keyhole and heard Marta speaking as if she were in a dialogue. After a question, Marta remained silent for a long time, as if waiting for an answer. From time to time, she crept to the door to see whether anyone was listening. She spoke confused, quiet words tenderly, as if her lips were touching a beloved face. José's name sounded clear and joyful, with a childlike tenderness. At times, she gave a desperate cry, as if José were escaping from her arms. A spiritualist of Kardec's school might use this madness as evidence for visible apparitions. According to that belief, the spirit body took a partly material form, almost tangible to the medium.
Feliciano knew nothing about these extraordinary scenes. By the sixth year of marriage, he was enclosed in a miser's selfishness. He cut his expenses deeply, although he had a great fortune. Even the medicine of the period considered him a lunatic, perhaps affected by his wife's illness. The narrator asks whether madness may be only an exaggerated character. The local people called Feliciano mad because they saw him crossing his pine woods, gesturing and talking to himself. For the narrator, that was a mistaken idea held by ignorant people. In fact, Feliciano was doing sums aloud. He was like the old poets who recited verse aloud in the open air and moonlight. What is certain is that nobody could cheat him out of even one vintém. One after another, he bought all the estates that had belonged to Vasco Cerveira Lobo of Quadros. He bought some from the widow and others from the children. Dona Honorata Guião had married for a second time, to the overseas magistrate Adolfo da Silveira. When she became a widow, she came to Portugal to claim half the lieutenant-colonel's unentailed property. Her sons, Egas and Heitor, learnt that their mother was at Pombais with her husband and children. They tried to drive her away with threats and insults, and fired shots at the window. The magistrate fled with the family and later attended the legal proceedings with armed men. In the end, Honorata sold her share very cheaply to Feliciano, who had returned from Brazil. Egas and Heitor also sold the property that was no longer entailed. The narrator says that the two brothers, shamefully married, ended up poor and gambling in taverns. The daughters escaped ruin thanks to their dowries. They found husbands easily, and those men used the dowries to clear the debts on their own properties. They also kicked their wives when they remembered the Count of Clarange Lucote's engineers.
In the narrative present, the brasileira of Prazins is fifty-three years old. Her thirty-year-old neighbours have never seen her. Since Dona Teresa's death in 1848, Marta has never left her room. Nobody listens to her now, but she repeats the same words about her love from forty years ago. She asks for flowers and continues to have the same hallucinations. In the intervals between her delusions, she realises in anguish that José Dias is dead, and she still weeps. Father Osório still visits her during those brief periods of lucidity. He speaks to her about his sister, and the two share the bitter sweetness of tears. The priest says that he has never been able to see a clear line between Marta's reason and madness. After the delusion comes a state that the medicine of the period called hypochondriacal monomania. Her soul seems to continue sleeping, now without dreams or hallucinations. During that state of torpor, only Father Osório may enter her room. He waits until Marta gets out of bed or covers the dirty bodice of her dress with a shawl. The narrator sees that gesture as a lasting trace of feminine instinct. He adds a medical and sexist generalisation about other ill women.
Marta has two married daughters who are already mothers. At certain times, they calmly put on their Sunday clothes and go to their parents' house. There they return to the hard field work they did when they were unmarried. Their father had trained them to work barefoot, with a hoe in their hands. They work with great joy and sing lively songs. Their husbands, whom the narrator ironically calls sensible, no longer come to fetch them. When the women return, their husbands receive them without asking questions. If their husbands upset them, they feel faint and cry.
The other children are thin, ill and sad, without a real childhood. The narrator describes them with cruel medical labels of the period about lack of intelligence and moral sense. One of those sons studied for the priesthood and was considered the healthiest. Feliciano thought that he had talent. The boy studied Latin for six years in Braga under very harsh discipline, despite his inability. Feliciano spent a great deal of money on this son, but the teacher eventually gave up on him. His father sent him home after he failed three times. The son carried more than five thousand communion wafers in a tin box for the future Masses he imagined celebrating. Feliciano was fortunate, the narrator says ironically, to sell the wafers at a loss of only ten per cent.
Three months ago, Father Osório pointed Feliciano out to the narrator at Famalicão market. 'There is Feliciano Prazins, who returned from Brazil, if you have never seen him,' said the priest. He was a very thin old man, clean-shaven and upright, with a monocle fixed in his eye. He wore work clothes and a dirty dust coat, torn near the buttons. With a quince switch, he brushed the dust from his rolled-up trousers. 'He is eighty-four,' continued the vicar of Caldelas. 'He walked here from his home, which is a league and a half away.' 'For his meal, he spends one vintém on rice and another on wine.' 'He has five hundred contos and walks home through nearly all fourteen of his estates.' Osório claimed that simple food, exercise and sordid selfishness would keep him alive for many more years. 'Old Alexandre Dumas said that selfish people and parrots lived for one hundred and fifty years,' he concluded.