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The narrator says that he wrote this story with information supplied by the priest of Caldelas. He added some details of doubtful good sense, but does not blame the discreet priest for them. All the old jokes, irony and satire in the book are his. If anyone accuses him of failing to respect vice and folly, he withdraws everything he has said.
He then asks his kind informant for permission to say one more thing. In that way, the two of them may perhaps escape the traps of Portuguese criticism. Marta's dementia is not very original, and the novel is not an unquestionable novelty either. What is truly original, the narrator says, is his doubt about his own originality.
In an old story by Charles Nodier there is a woman called Lídia. Lídia's husband was a ferryman of honourable birth and generous character. He died in a fire while saving three children and their mother.
After his death, Lídia went mad and believed that her husband spent his days in Heaven and visited her at night. From daybreak, she went into the garden to gather flowers for him. She imagined that he came down from the blue sky on wings of golden feathers. She lived for six years in that happy dream. One day, she gathered her favourite flowers for the bouquet of her wedding to the angel who came each night. Then she sat down, fell gently asleep and died.
Lídia and Marta are alike because they both see a kind of return to life of the man they love. But Lídia dreamed for six years, while Marta is now in the thirty-seventh year of her dementia. Lídia lived inside the dream of a perfect union with a man from Heaven who had golden wings. When Marta enters her hallucinatory state, she remains faithful to the beloved man whom she imagines alive on earth and in her heart. In her dream, Lídia spends the nights in the arms of her heavenly husband. Marta, unaware of her physical life, has five children in her marriage to Feliciano. The narrator says harshly that her husband uses Marta's body without her awareness, while her soul remains protected. For that reason, he concludes that there is no stain of plagiarism on his little book. And he calls it something as original as sin.
The reader then asks a question.
'What is the scientific, disciplinary and modern purpose of this novel?' he asks. 'What does it prove and conclude? How can it help to reorganise the individual or the human species?'
I answer: 'Nothing, literally nothing.' My novel does not intend to reorganise anything. In the name of the patriarch Voltaire, the author of this fruitless work declares that we shall leave this foolish, bad world just as we found it.
São Miguel de Seide, December 1882.