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After the collapse of the Calvos fraud, the narrative moves back in time to Marta, José and Zeferino. Zeferino left Cerveira Lobo in Quadros with the three contos de réis and returned to Lamelas at night, so that no one would see him. He had boasted to the neighbours that he had been appointed sergeant major and that his father was a retired colonel. He had also sent threats to José Dias de Vilalva and his father, the parish administrator, saying that they would soon meet their match. He spoke badly of Marta de Prazins because his humiliated passion could find no other outlet. He had still not forgotten the dog exposing one of his buttocks or the girl's uncontrolled laughter, and he carried that shame like an old wound. At home, his father's rebukes awaited him, calling him a fool and telling him to abandon politics and go back to building walls.
Zeferino had also heard that the student José Dias spent a great deal of time in Prazins. José had gone with Marta and Simeão to see the fireworks at the Santiago da Cruz pilgrimage fair. At dawn, the three of them had drunk coffee at a stall while the two young people talked close together and the old man dozed. Joaquim de Vilalva, José's father, was one of the most prosperous farmers in the area. His farm produced forty cartloads of maize and rye, one pipe of olive oil, ten pipes of wine and plenty of chestnuts. He also owned three teams of fine oxen and young horses for breeding. If he did not take holy orders, José, with his half share in the estate, would be one of the best matches in the district.
José loved Marta with the chaste reserve of a first love. She had a gentle, delicate and pleading beauty. To the narrator, she seemed to plead not to be sacrificed to sensual passion. The romantic image went further and showed her crowned with flowers, ready for sacrifice if her beloved demanded it. Marta would gaze in rapture at José's fair hair and pale, sickly face. She let herself be kissed with the serenity of a stone saint, in a picture of paradise without fruit or serpents. José did not need to ask Simeão for Marta's hand, for he told the young woman that she would be his wife. Marta told her father about her beloved's promise. Simeão called his future son-in-law friend Zé and embraced him with the tenderness of a father pleased with his daughter's marriage.
José's parents, however, had already ordered him to change course because Marta was not a match for the family's social standing. Maria de Vilalva swore that, for as long as she lived, Genoveva de Prazins's daughter would never be her daughter-in-law. To justify her refusal, Maria claimed that Marta came from bad stock and accused Genoveva of having made her husband suffer. She also repeated stories that Genoveva had behaved freely at pilgrimage fairs and had been widely linked with a friar from Santo Tirso. She also recalled Genoveva's cries in church, the popular belief that she had the Devil in her body and claimed that she had gone mad before throwing herself into the River Ave. Maria added that Marta's grandfather had not been sensible either, for at sixty he had taken a tonsure, put on a surplice and begun to sing at funerals like a priest. Without knowing it, Aunt Maria shared the modern scientific fear of heredity. Above all, she resisted because she judged Genoveva to be a bad wife and mother and applied to Marta the proverb about bad fruit from a bad tree. The narrator ironically compares this folk philosophy with the physiological psychology of Janet and Maudsley and with determinism.
Pressed by José and Father Osório of Caldelas, Joaquim said that he would do whatever his wife did. In private, however, he told Maria to stand firm and never say yes. Maria replied that he could leave the matter in her hands, for the young couple would not get past her.
Aunt Maria was very devout, rising early for summer Mass and walking the Stations of the Cross in Lent with a nasal chant. She offered the saints produce from the farm, which was auctioned in the churchyard on Sundays. She gave missionaries a good bed and rich food and went to confession every month. At the same time, she took pleasure in declaring that her less devout neighbours would fall fully dressed into Hell. José thought that his mother's religion would force her to consent if Marta committed one of those sins that marriage could repair. Father Osório replied that the intention was honourable but the means was wrong. Without appealing to theologians or divine commandments, he asked José to imagine Maria's stubborn resistance. For the vicar, Maria's faith was chiefly a habit of gestures and words, joined to the hypocrisy and fanaticism he found in village life. He knew his flock well and maintained that Marta's frailty would only give the old woman more reason to hate and despise her. The reflections of the vicar of Caldelas were excellent, but they came too late.
A mason's assistant from Prazins, who worked with Master Zeferino, then told him what he had seen one night. Deceived by the moonlight, he had thought dawn was breaking and had risen to go to work. As he passed Simeão's house, he heard the clock strike two and saw light through the cracks of a window. He hid beneath an oak because he was suspicious of that light at such an unlikely hour. As he hesitated between fleeing and staying, he imagined that it might be witchcraft or a wandering spirit. People in the village said that Genoveva, because she had thrown herself into the river, had not entered Purgatory and had died with the Devil in her body. The light vanished, passed in turn to other windows and reached a low window within reach of an axe handle. Then the light went out and the window opened, its shutters without glass fully exposed to the moonlight. Sheltered by the shadow of the branches, the assistant saw a head appear and then half a man's body over the sill. The man sat astride the window and paused to look and listen in both directions. Without making a sound, he climbed down slowly, hung from the sill and dropped to his feet. The window closed and, when José Dias took the road to Vilalva, the workman recognised him as clearly as if it were midday. He even noticed José's rubber shoes, which shone like a mirror in the moonlight.
The Oratorian Manuel Bernardes had written an edifying book called Armas da Castidade. In two plain words, that mystic had explained the position of another José Dias towards another Marta: he knew her bed. It was the most the narrator could say without scandalising anyone, and so he repeated that José knew her bed.
The revelation struck Zeferino's loving heart like a knife. The assistant saw him sit on a stone lintel he was shaping, hide his face in his hands and burst into tears. Zeferino said that he had loved Marta since he first saw her when she was thirteen. He also said that he had worked and stolen so that he could buy her from her father for one conto and five hundred and a little more. He had entered politics and become a sergeant major to reach a position in which Marta would consider him worthy of her and superior to the student. The arrest of the Calvos impostor had destroyed those hopes, although Zeferino still dreamt of returning to the struggle when the real Dom Miguel arrived. Cerveira assured him that the king would come the following spring, relying on Father Rocha's words, and also consoled him with daily bouts of drinking. Now everything seemed over to him, as if the Eve of his paradise had died. The mason wept like the great betrayed poets, and the narrator ironically places him beside Camões, Tasso and Alfred de Musset. On the workman's sun-browned face, the tears had the bitter taste of those that poetry had crystallised for the martyrs of love. Then he stood up, wiped his face on his sleeve, took up his square again and continued working while he whistled a sad song.
The melody asked the sea to take pity on him. In the account, the whistle became the hiss of the serpent of revenge. Yet Zeferino's resentment was not directed at Marta. When he stopped chiselling the stone, he saw in the emptiness the bright, angelic image of the girl as he remembered her at thirteen. The narrator calls him a great romantic, as if flowering ideas sprang from that mason among the mosses of a rock. His indulgence towards that fallen angel seemed to come from Musset's Confessions of a Child of the Century. From that hour, Zeferino thought of killing José Dias. But, in the narrator's phrenological satire, the bump of homicide was barely developed in his large skull. He had already had chances to prove otherwise, for two students had beaten him in a pinewood because he had reported them to Father Master Roque. He had also thought that, if he were capable of killing, he would have thrown his axe at the hunter's head when Dias's dog tore his trousers. He wanted to trample, cut, bite and devour José's body, but all that violence remained only a fantasy. The narrator compares this safe ferocity to the delight of someone who buys a pig already dead at Ribeira Velha and cuts it up.
Meanwhile, the assistant who had made the report went on secretly telling everyone what he had discovered on that moonlit night. Marta became discredited in the parish because other people's talk went far beyond what the assistant had seen. The women hoeing the maize fields added endless comments to the workman's account. They repeated old stories about Genoveva and claimed that Brígida Galinheira, Marta's grandmother, had already set the same example for her daughter. Aunt Rosa de Carude said that the family contained generations of women without honour while she spat on the ground and crushed the spittle with her clog. They also laughed at Zeferino, comparing him to a snake that had lost its venom. After rejecting two matches with good farming women, he said that he would die a bachelor at Pedras Negras, but only after killing a man. Someone even claimed to have seen him at night beneath the oaks, outside Simeão's house, armed with a blunderbuss. That story about the blunderbuss was a slander. Warned about Zeferino's supposed ambush, Maria made her son sleep in an attic without a window and locked him in from the outside every night. She cursed Marta de Prazins, wishing that lightning would strike her and the Devil would carry her into the abyss. Immediately afterwards, she prayed the rosary with the servants for those at sea, for relatives and for neighbours, in a tearful voice that sounded deeply devout.
José Dias lived in bitterness. Raised with great respect for his parents, he felt unable to resist them. His chest illness was beginning to drain his bodily strength and seemed to accompany the weakness of his spirit. The narrator attributes to him the apathy and indolent selfishness of someone being slowly consumed by illness. José envied the strength of his brother, a robust labourer who slept for ten hours. At daybreak, his brother washed his face at the tank and tended the cattle cheerfully, whistling like the pipes of the chula dances. José spent many hours with his confidant, Father Osório, asking him to find a way for him to marry Marta. He said despondently that he would not live long, but he wanted to repair the harm he had done.
Marta wrote to him in Caldelas. When Maria found a boy carrying a letter for José, she attacked him with a rake and nearly struck his head with its teeth. Marta's letters were full of doubt, fear of abandonment and tears. Simeão did not torment his daughter and even tried to encourage her. He told her that it might be fortunate if José did not marry her, because her uncle might return rich and take a liking to his niece. An emigrant returned from Brazil, with a connection to Rita Chasca, claimed that the uncle possessed four hundred sound contos or more. This was the uncertain hope with which Simeão tried to console his daughter. Marta hid away to cry. At times, she remembered her mother's suicide and merely looked at the Ave and listened to the weir, whose roar seemed to carry the groans of drowned people.
José wrote to her about his illness, the loss of strength that already prevented him from hunting and the sadness consuming him. He complained of his family's coldness, the hatred he was beginning to feel for his mother and his painful longing for Marta. He added that Father Osório was trying to obtain his father's consent. If he failed to obtain that permission, José was resolved to flee with Marta, even without resources beyond the little his friend might lend him. From time to time, José visited Marta during the day, but his mother watched him closely. Maria rebuked him and said that the woman would end up destroying him. The surgeon had told her discreetly that José was breaking the sixth commandment through excess. As she knew the commandments by heart, Maria understood the allusion and began telling everyone that her son's condition was caused by the sixth. The narrator observes that knowing Christian doctrine gave her the modesty to explain the matter through numbers. The neighbours understood her and advised Maria to put a hoe in the young man's hands and make him clear scrub for eight days so that his desire would pass.
Several months passed. With the spring, José's health seemed to recover. It was José himself who attributed the improvement to happiness. Through Father Osório's intervention, the civil governor summoned Joaquim, who was the parish administrator, to Braga, and José's father finally consented to the marriage. Maria, however, continued to refuse. The missionaries were expected to come to Requião and persuade her of what the others regarded as her Catholic duty. The vicar of Caldelas had already informed Frei João de Borba da Montanha, a former Varatojo friar known for the force with which he tackled even more difficult cases. Marta recovered cheerful hopes, although Maria's opposition had not yet ended. Zeferino digested his pain as he returned to whistling the melody that asked the sea for pity.
To ease his mind, he often went to Quadros to ask when Dom Miguel would arrive. Cerveira had connections with the Setembrists, and the two parties opposed to the Cabrais had drawn together after the bloody elections of 1845. The lieutenant colonel was gathering guns in Quadros and providing money to make cartridges in the district of Póvoa de Lanhoso and around Guimarães. Father Rocha passed on to him the news sent from London by Saraiva. Rocha also arranged for Cerveira to go to Porto and receive the rank of Commander of the Order of Saint Michael of the Wing at the home of João de Albuquerque of Ínsua, the representative of the Grand Mastership in the northern provinces. Zeferino felt the joy of a tiger crouching to measure its leap at its prey, ground his teeth as he laughed and imagined that he was chewing José Dias's liver.