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I composed this narrative using the information given to me by the vicar of Caldelas. Along the way, I wandered into incidental matters of doubtful good sense. I place no responsibility for those digressions on that discreet priest. Everything in this book that smells of old jokes, irony and satire is mine. If anyone accuses me of showing too little respect for vice and stupidity, I withdraw it all.
If my indulgent informant permits it, I venture to make an observation. Perhaps in this way we may both escape the traps of Portuguese criticism. Marta's mental illness is not entirely original, nor is my novel an indisputable singularity. What is undoubtedly original is my doubt about my own originality.
In a tale by Charles Nodier, there is a woman called Lídia. The narrator calls Nodier a remote author, lost in the twilight of antiquarian literature. Lídia lost her mind when her husband died in a fire. He was a boatman of good birth and a generous nature. He died while saving three children and their mother from the fire.
Lídia believed that her husband spent his days in Heaven and visited her at night. From the break of dawn, she would go into the garden and gather flowers for him. She hoped to offer them when he descended from the blue sky on wings of golden feathers. After six years of this delightful dream, she was gathering the favourite flowers for her wedding bouquet with the angel who came each night. Then the fortunate madwoman sat down in a very gentle sleep and died.
The similarity between Lídia and Marta lies in the vision that dominates both women's mental illness. For each of them, that vision is a kind of resurrection of the man she loves. But Lídia dreamed for six years, while Marta is already in the thirty-seventh year of her mental illness. Lídia lived absorbed in her ideal union with a blessed celestial being who had wings of gold. When Marta sinks into her hallucinatory sleep, she remains faithful to the man she loves. For her, her beloved remains alive on earth and in her heart. Lídia spends her nights in the arms of her heavenly husband. Marta, with no awareness of her own bodily life, has five children. It is as though she tears the baser part of her body from herself and gives it over to her husband's cruel sensuality. In this way, she protects her soul from that unconscious material existence. It therefore seems to me that my little book bears no stain of plagiarism. It is something as original as sin.
The reader asks:
What is the scientific, disciplinary and modern purpose of this novel? What does it prove, and what conclusion does it offer? What use does it have as an element capable of reorganising the individual or the species?
Nothing, upon my word, nothing. My novel does not intend to reorganise anything at all. In the name of the patriarch Voltaire, the author of this barren work declares that we shall leave this foolish and wicked world just as it was when we entered it.
São Miguel de Seide, December 1882.