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In 1779, Domingos José Correia Botelho de Mesquita e Menezes was a magistrate in Cascais and belonged to an old landed family from Vila Real in Trás-os-Montes. That year he married D. Rita Teresa Margarida Preciosa da Veiga Caldeirão Castelo Branco, a lady of the royal household and a descendant of distinguished officers. He lacked good looks, great wealth and intellectual brilliance, three qualities that would have made the marriage proposal considerably easier.
His former university companions called him Brocas and explained his slow mind by the amount of broa, the maize bread of his region, that he ate. Domingos did, however, possess a genuine talent: he was an excellent flautist and supported himself for two years in Coimbra by playing the flute. His father had stopped his allowance because the household income was being spent on saving another son from prosecution for a killing.
The narrator does not know how Domingos pleased D. Maria I and D. Pedro III, although tradition says that he made the Queen laugh. He attended the royal court and received a generous pension from the sovereign, but royal favour also led him to neglect the duties of his post in Cascais.
He did not court Rita with verses by Camões or Bernardim Ribeiro, but with his provincial prose and the help of the Queen's affection. The court knew him as Doctor Pockmark, and the narrator jokes about the strange conflict between his lack of talent and his persistent good fortune. Rita Preciosa still retained remarkable beauty at the age of fifty, but her dowry consisted chiefly of a long line of ancestors. Among bishops and generals stood out an ancestor who had died burnt in a cauldron in Moorish lands and given his descendants the surname Caldeirão.
The former lady of the royal household was not happy with her husband, for she missed the court, royal luxury and the world she had sacrificed to the Queen's whim. The text first speaks of two sons and four girls, but names only the boys Manoel and Simão and the girls Maria, Ana and young Rita. This young Rita, who received her mother's name and some traces of her beauty, must not be confused with Rita Preciosa. In another local statement, the narrative says that Simão was born in 1784 in Ajuda and was the second youngest child.
Rita raised her large gold lorgnette and asked her husband what spectacle lay before them. Domingos explained that they were friends and relatives who had come to welcome them, but Rita wanted to know which century that mountain belonged to. On hearing that it was also the eighteenth century there, she replied that she had thought time had stopped in the twelfth. Her husband thought it wise to laugh at the joke, although it was hardly a compliment to his home region.
When the bells rang on their arrival, she remarked that this welcome was both the noisiest and the cheapest.
A few days later, she declared that she feared being eaten by rats, that the ceilings would fall in and that no marital duty condemned her to freeze to death. Domingos gave way and began building a mansion, although his resources scarcely covered the foundations. He wrote to the Queen and received enough money to finish the house, including the window balconies given by the royal widow. The narrator mischievously suggests that this gift might be previously unknown evidence of D. Maria I's madness.
Domingos, however, saw his own ugliness in the mirror and saw his wife growing ever more beautiful and ever more tired of married intimacy. The narrator observes that Domingos understood firearms far better than the law written in the Digest and the Ordinances of the Kingdom.
After six years, perhaps more, Domingos secured appointment as chief magistrate of Lamego, leaving as many stories in Vila Real as Rita left memories of her beauty and pride. A farmer gave him a calf and brought the cow as well to calm the young animal, but Domingos kept both because he decided that whoever gave the daughter gave the mother. On another occasion, he received pastries on a fine silver tray, distributed the sweets among the children and ordered the tray to be kept as well. For that reason, when someone kept both a gift and its container, local people said that person was like Doctor Brocas.
In Lamego, Rita remained dissatisfied and threatened to return to Lisbon with the five children if her husband did not leave the place she found unbearable. The proud local nobility answered her vanity by searching for less honourable branches in the Botelho family tree and recalling that Domingos had once lived by playing the flute. In 1801, we find Domingos in Viseu, now holding the post of senior magistrate. The narrative then says that Manoel was twenty-two, Simão was fifteen and the three girls were their mother's entire joy.
Manoel, the eldest son, was studying law in Coimbra and wrote to his father because he feared his brother's violent temper. According to the letter, Simão spent his book money on pistols, mixed with the worst troublemakers at the university and roamed the streets at night looking for fights. Domingos was not horrified by the danger, for he admired Simão's courage and compared him to Paulo Botelho Correia, a great-grandfather renowned for valour. Manoel left Coimbra before the holidays and asked for another path, so his mother proposed a career as a cavalry cadet. Manoel went to Bragança and proved the nobility of all four branches of his family so that he could be admitted as a cadet.
Meanwhile, Simão returned to Viseu having taken and passed his examinations, leaving his father amazed by his intelligence. Domingos excused the wild conduct because of his talent and, when he asked about the conflict with Manoel, was told that his elder son wanted to force Simão to live like a monk. At the age of fifteen stated at this point in the narrative, Simão looked twenty, was strong and had his mother's beauty and physical build. In character, however, he was very different from her, for he chose his friends among the common people of Viseu and despised aristocratic distinctions. When Rita Preciosa criticised such company, Simão mocked genealogies and especially the General Caldeirão who had died burnt.
His mother took against him for this insult to family pride, and Domingos sided with his wife and also turned against his son. His sisters feared Simão, except for young Rita, the youngest, with whom he played and whose affectionate requests he obeyed. It was she who sometimes managed to draw him away from the companions whom the family considered socially beneath them.
At the end of the holidays, one of Domingos's servants took the mules to drink and caused some vessels placed on the fountain wall to be broken. The owners joined forces against the servant and beat him, whether the breakage had happened through carelessness or been deliberate. Simão passed by at that moment, pulled a pole from a cart and rushed to defend the household servant. The defence became excessive violence: he injured many people and ended the spectacle by smashing every pitcher. Those who had not been struck fled in fear of the magistrate's son, while the wounded gathered to demand justice at the official's door.
Domingos flew into a rage and ordered the bailiff to arrest Simão on his own father's authority. Rita Preciosa was angry too, but hers was the anger of a mother who did not want to surrender her son to punishment. By secret means, she sent him money so that he could flee at once to Coimbra and wait there for his father's forgiveness. On discovering the manoeuvre, Domingos pretended to be indignant and promised to have the boy arrested in Coimbra. Rita called him brutal in his revenge and a foolish judge of a youthful brawl, and he dropped his pretended severity, silently admitting that she was right.