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In 1779, Domingos José Correia Botelho de Mesquita e Menezes, a nobleman of an old Vila Real family in Trás-os-Montes, was a crown-appointed magistrate in Cascais. That same year he married Rita Teresa Margarida Preciosa da Veiga Caldeirão Castelo Branco, a lady of Maria I's court. Rita was the daughter and granddaughter of cavalry captains; her grandfather António de Azevedo Castelo Branco Pereira da Silva was distinguished by his rank and by a book on the Art of War.
Before securing that marriage, the provincial graduate had spent ten years in Lisbon on a courtship that met with little favour. To win the beautiful lady's love he lacked, first of all, physical attractions, for Domingos Botelho was exceedingly ugly. He lacked the wealth to appear a good match for a second daughter: he owned property in the Douro worth thirty thousand cruzados. Nor did his mind shine: he was of limited intelligence and had received the university nickname ‘Brocas’, still inherited by his descendants in Vila Real. Whether rightly or wrongly explained, the nickname came from maize bread, because the students attributed their companion's dullness to the excessive amount of it he had digested in his native region.
Domingos must have possessed some vocation, and possess one he did: he was an excellent flautist, the foremost flute player of his day. He supported himself for two years in Coimbra by playing the flute, without an allowance because the household income was paying another son's defence in a case involving a killing. He graduated in 1767 and went to Lisbon to work at the Desembargo do Paço, the customary initiation for anyone aspiring to the magistracy.
Fernão Botelho, the graduate's father, had enjoyed the Duke of Aveiro's favour, a connection that nearly cost him his head in the attempted regicide of 1758. Fernão emerged from the Junqueira dungeons unstained by infamy and even in the good graces of the Count of Oeiras. He owed that goodwill to having taken part in the proof of the count's genealogical superiority over the Pintos Coelhos of Bomjardim in Porto. The dispute, ridiculous yet resounding, had arisen because a Porto nobleman refused his daughter to the son of Sebastião José de Carvalho.
What arts the flute-playing graduate employed to enter the favour of Maria I and Pedro III, I do not know. Tradition says that he made the queen laugh with witty remarks and perhaps with the grimaces from which he drew the best part of his cleverness. What is certain is that he frequented the palace and received a generous pension from the sovereign's private purse. The pension made the aspiring magistrate forget the future and the Minister of Justice, who had entrusted him with Cascais only after much pleading.
It has already been said that he ventured upon a courtly romance, not by composing verse like Camões or Bernardim Ribeiro, but by courting in his provincial prose. He also cultivated the queen's goodwill, so that the royal will might soften the lady's resistance. ‘Doctor Pockmark’, as he was known at court, had to end happily, lest the old contradiction that so often sets talent against fortune be disproved. Domingos Botelho therefore married Rita Preciosa.
Rita was so beautiful that even at fifty she could still take pride in her looks, but she brought no dowry beyond a succession of ancestors. They included bishops and generals, among them one who, according to family glory, was roasted to death in a cauldron in some Moorish land whose name the narrator does not know. It was a decidedly fiery glory, in truth, and of such importance that the roasted general's descendants came to use the name Caldeirões.
Rita was not happy: she missed the court, its royal pomp and the loves suited to her taste, sacrificed to the queen's whim. Marital bitterness did not, however, prevent the couple from having children, and here begin figures that the account itself does not allow us to reconcile. Two sons and four daughters are announced, but only Maria, Ana and the youngest, Rita, who resembled her mother, are named. Of the boys, Manoel was the elder and Simão the second, and no daughter should be invented to fill the contradictory count.
In 1784, while waiting in Lisbon for a higher post and living in the parish of Ajuda, Domingos saw the birth of Simão, whom the account calls the last but one of the children. Fortune, ever kindly disposed towards the magistrate, granted him the transfer he most desired, to Vila Real.
A league outside the town, the local nobility awaited their countryman, each family installed in its litter with the appropriate coat of arms. The Correias de Mesquita litter was the most antiquated in design, and their servants' liveries the most worn and patched in the procession. Rita Preciosa raised her large gold spyglass to her right eye and asked, ‘Menezes, what is that?’ ‘They are our friends and relations, who have come to welcome us,’ her husband explained. ‘What century are we in on this mountain?’ she replied. Domingos assured her that the eighteenth century was the same there as in Lisbon. ‘Oh, indeed?’ Rita replied, ‘I thought time had stopped here in the twelfth century.’ Her husband thought it prudent to laugh at the joke, although he was not the one flattered by it.
Fernão Botelho came forward at the head of the procession to help his daughter-in-law alight and conduct her to the family litter. Before looking at his face, Rita examined through her spyglass her father-in-law's steel buckles and the bag covering his tied-back hair. She would later say that the noblemen of Vila Real were far less clean than Lisbon's charcoal burners. Feigning seriousness, she asked whether it was safe to enter that antique object; Fernão replied that the litter was under a hundred and the mules under thirty.
The haughtiness with which the lady received the courtesies of that old nobility, established in the region since the time of King Dinis, remained in local memory. One participant, still alive twelve years earlier, told the narrator that Rita's pride had led them to take her for the queen herself. When the procession reached Senhora de Almudena, the bells rang out, and Rita observed that this welcome was at once the loudest and the cheapest.
At the Botelho house, Rita silently compared its façade with Mafra, Sintra, Bemposta and Queluz, where she had grown up. Days later, she declared that she feared the rats, called the house a den of wild beasts and insisted that its ceilings and walls would not withstand the winter. She added that the duties of marital harmony did not oblige a delicate wife, accustomed to the cushions of royal palaces, to freeze to death.
Domingos yielded to his cherished consort and began building a mansion, although his resources scarcely covered the foundations. He wrote to the queen and obtained a generous subsidy with which he completed the building. The balconies were the queen's final gift, which the narrator calls unprecedented evidence of Maria I's madness.
Domingos had commissioned a stone carving of the Botelho coat of arms in Lisbon, but Rita demanded that the shield should also bear an emblem of her lineage. It was too late, for the piece had already arrived from the sculptor, and the magistrate could neither pay a second fee nor wound his father's heraldic pride. The result was a house without a coat of arms and Rita victorious.
The magistrate had distinguished relations in the region, and the noblewoman's pride stooped before the great of the province, or, to put it better, deigned to raise them up to her. Rita gathered a court of cousins, but not even the boldest met her gaze when the spyglass examined him with mocking hauteur. Without greatly abusing the figure, one may say that Rita Preciosa's spyglass was the most vigilant sentinel of her virtue.
Domingos doubted his own merits and suffered from jealousy, but concealed it lest Rita consider herself insulted. She would have had reason: she laughed at the cousins who powdered and perfected their wigs or trotted their horses in imitation of the Marquis of Marialva.
The magistrate, however, put more faith in the intriguer that troubled his mind: the mirror. He sincerely considered himself ugly, while Rita seemed to him ever more blooming and ever more bored in private. No example of constant love between a misshapen husband and a beautiful wife occurred to him, except the fabulous marriage of Venus and Vulcan, which only increased his unease. He remembered the nets with which the lame smith had caught the adulterous gods and marvelled at that husband's patience. If the veil of treachery were ever lifted, Domingos thought, he would neither complain to Jupiter nor set traps for the cousins.
Beside Luís Botelho's blunderbuss stood other weapons, which the magistrate understood better than the Digest and the Ordinances of the Realm.
This state of alarm lasted six years, or perhaps longer, until Domingos enlisted his friends and secured an appointment better than the one he desired: that of district administrator in Lamego. Rita left Vila Real missing her and remembering her pride, beauty and wit; Domingos left anecdotes still repeated by the people. I shall tell only two, the narrator promises, so as not to weary the reader.
A farmer once sent the magistrate a calf and sent the cow with it so that the young animal would not stray on the way. Domingos put both animals in his storeroom, declaring that whoever gave the daughter gave the mother as well. On another occasion, he was presented with pastries on a costly silver salver, and he shared the sweets among the children but kept the tray. He claimed that pastries worth ten patacões would be an insult without the silver, although the tray was plainly only a support. For that reason, whenever someone kept both the contents and the container, the people of Vila Real would comment, ‘That one is like Doctor Brocas.’
Of the administrator's life in Lamego, the narrator admits to knowing almost nothing, except that Rita detested the district and threatened to leave for Lisbon with her five children unless her husband abandoned that impossible place. The nobility of Lamego, proud of an antiquity it traced back to the acclamation at Almacave, appears to have answered the lady's vanity by searching for rotten branches in the Botelho family tree. To diminish the sound branches, it was enough to recall that Domingos had lived for two years in Coimbra by playing the flute.
In 1801, we find Domingos José Correia Botelho de Mesquita serving as chief magistrate in Viseu.
The account then assigns the age of twenty-two to Manoel, who was in his second year of Law, and fifteen to Simão, a Humanities student in Coimbra. Those ages do not agree exactly with the year of birth previously given, so they must be retained as local statements in the text, not as arithmetic silently corrected. Here the account also speaks of three daughters, described as the whole delight and life of their mother's heart, a new formulation that confirms the uncertainty of the earlier count without revealing any fourth sister.
Manoel wrote to his father saying that he could not live with his brother, whose bloodthirsty temper made him fear for his own life. He reported that Simão spent his book money on pistols, associated with the most notorious troublemakers at the university and roamed the streets at night, insulting residents and provoking noisy brawls. The chief magistrate admired his son's bravery and told the dismayed mother that the boy reproduced the bearing and temper of his great-grandfather Paulo Botelho Correia, reputed to be the bravest nobleman in Trás-os-Montes.
Increasingly frightened by Simão's attacks, Manoel left Coimbra before the holidays, went to complain in Viseu and asked his father for a different career. Rita Preciosa wanted him to become a cavalry cadet, and Manoel left for Bragança, where he proved the nobility of all four lines of descent in order to obtain the post.
Simão, meanwhile, returned to Viseu having taken and passed his examinations, leaving his father amazed by the talent that served as an excuse for his excesses. Called upon to explain his bad relations with Manoel, he replied only that his brother wished to force him into a monastic existence.
The fifteen years assigned to him by the account looked like twenty: Simão was strong and handsome, with his mother's features and build, but with a wholly opposite temper. He chose his friends among the common people of Viseu and, when Rita Preciosa reproached him for company so unworthy of the family, mocked genealogies, especially that of General Caldeirão who had been roasted to death. That mockery was enough to earn his mother's aversion, and Domingos, accustomed to seeing through his wife's eyes, sided with her and also turned against his son.
His sisters feared him, with the exception of the youngest, Rita, who was distinct from Rita Preciosa, with whom Simão played like a child and whose gentle requests he obeyed. It was she who, with childish endearments, could persuade him not to associate with people of low social condition.
At the end of the holidays, one of the chief magistrate's servants took the mules to drink and, whether carelessly or deliberately, broke several vessels resting on the fountain ledge. The owners of the vessels gathered against the man and beat him. Simão was passing at that moment and, wrenching a wooden stave from a cart, threw himself upon the attackers and split many heads. He ended the tragic spectacle with a destructive farce by smashing all the remaining water jars as well.
Those who had escaped fled in terror, for no one dared confront the chief magistrate's son, but the wounded men regrouped and went to demand justice at the magistrate's door.
Domingos roared against his son and ordered the chief bailiff to arrest him on his authority. Rita Preciosa was equally angry, but angry as a mother, and by a back way had money delivered to Simão so that he might flee at once to Coimbra and wait there for his father's pardon.
On learning of his wife's device, the chief magistrate pretended to be angry and promised to have the boy arrested in Coimbra. Rita called him brutal in his revenge and a stupid judge of boyish misconduct, and the magistrate's assumed severity melted from his brow. Without saying a word, Domingos admitted that, in that affair, he had indeed been a brutal and stupid judge.