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Truth is sometimes the reef on which a novel founders. In real life, we accept it as it comes from chance or the implacable logic of events. In a novel, we resent an author who, if inventing, does not invent better. If he copies reality, we reproach him for not lying in the name of art. A novel founded on truth seems cold and unwelcome. It neither shakes us nor draws us, even briefly, away from the daily wheel. We are buckets of that waterwheel, some rising and others descending, driven by the crank of selfishness. If truth is ugly, the narrator asks, why display it to the public? Why reveal the truth of the human heart if iron filaments bind it to its native clay? Those threads weigh upon it and submerge it in the mire of original guilt. Why raise it, portray it and offer it for sale? Such objections belong to those who retain their judgement. Having lost his while studying truth, the narrator takes revenge by painting it as ugly and repellent. Does misfortune make love burn more fiercely, or does it weaken it? That is the decision he leaves to the intelligent reader. He offers facts, not theses, just as a painter portrays a pair of eyes without explaining how sight works.
After nineteen months in prison, Simão Botelho longed for a ray of sunlight. He wanted air unstrained by bars and the vast floor of the sky. The vault of his cell seemed to weigh upon his chest. He was governed by the desire to live freely, not to pursue romantic hope. That did not mean that he had ceased to love Teresa. Six months of terror before the gallows had overstretched the fibres of his heart. To love, the heart needs strength and a certain firmness of tension. That resilience is born of healthy blood, anxious hope and joys that prepare it for adversity. The gallows had vanished, but Simão's wrists remained in irons. His lungs breathed the deadly air of the prison. His spirit grew numb among damp, salt-stained, icy walls. The floor returned the echo of the last sufferer's final footsteps. From the ceiling, death seemed to filter down in drops of water. What remains of an innocent eighteen-year-old heart, thirsty for glory, after eighteen months of stagnant life? The heart becomes a paralysed organ, the first to succumb to the soul's rebellions. The soul identifies itself with nature, desires it and consumes itself in the longing to regain it. It writhes under amputation while longing for vanished happiness cauterises it like red-hot iron. The love that leads it to the abyss through dreamed-of happiness does not even relieve it.
When the rope of justice was removed from his throat, Simão knew an hour of relief. It was as though the scaffold were splintering between his arms. At that moment, he invited the heart of the woman who had lost him to witness the second marriage of his life to hope. Then hope retreated at the same pace and fled towards the sands of Asia. His heart swelled with gall, and love drowned within it. Without an opening through which hope might light the inner darkness, that death was inevitable. What hope remained for Simão Botelho? India, humiliation, misery and destitution. That soul had aspired to make a name. For happiness in love, Simão had committed his talent. Beyond love, glory, renown and vain immortality had awaited him. Such immortality is madness except in great souls and geniuses who sense that they will live on in future generations. But love's garlands, bloodied by thorns, instil corrosive poison into the mind. They extinguish the spark of noble daring, diminish the thought that once embraced worlds and paralyse the heart's impulses. Thus did you feel, unhappy Simão. Eighteen months in prison, with the scaffold or exile looming in your future, had killed the best part of your soul. You asked yourself what had become of your past. If your heart dared to answer, it immediately withdrew, rebuked by the dictates of reason. From the convent where another life lay dying came moaning complaints that pressed gall into your wound. Unable either to know how or to console her, you asked the angel of compassion for words for Teresa. For yourself, however, you received only the words of the demon of despair.
The ten years in irons intended to lessen his punishment seemed more terrible to him than the scaffold. Might he accept them for love of the same sky beneath which Teresa breathed air that turned to poison in her lungs? The narrator believes that he might: better the dungeon where a friendly voice could still be heard faintly. Better ten years of torment upon damp stones if, at the final hour, the last spark of passion lit his path to heaven. Along that path the angel of unhappy love had risen to answer to God and ask for the soul of the one left behind. Teresa had asked Simão to accept ten years in prison and wait there for the redemption she would bring him. ‘Ten years!’ the cloistered woman of Monchique wrote to him. ‘Within ten years, my father will have died, I shall be your wife and I shall ask the king to pardon you if you have not yet completed your sentence.’ ‘If you go into exile, I shall have lost you for ever, Simão.’ ‘You will die, or you will no longer remember me when you return.’ The poor young woman deceived herself in the hours when the feeble forces of life gathered in her heart. Her breathlessness, pallor and wasting had returned. The blood her body had made anew was already coming from her in gushes when she coughed. Even if, from love or pity, Simão accepted the bolts drawn three thousand six hundred and fifty times across his solitary nights, Teresa would not survive. Even that sacrifice would not hold back the gravestone that bent her lower with every hour.
‘Expect nothing, martyr,’ Simão wrote. ‘The struggle against misfortune is useless, and I can no longer fight.’ ‘Our meeting was a terrible mistake, and we have nothing in this world.’ ‘Let us walk towards death, where there is a secret known only in the grave.’ ‘Shall we see one another again?’ ‘I am going.’ ‘I abhor my homeland and my family, and this whole land seems covered with gallows.’ ‘In every man who speaks my language, I believe I hear the executioner's curses.’ ‘In Portugal, I want neither freedom with wealth nor, now, the fulfilment of the hopes your love once gave me.’ ‘Forget me and fall asleep in the bosom of nothingness.’ ‘I want to die, but not here.’ ‘Let the light of my eyes go out, but I want the light of the sky in my final gaze.’ ‘Do not ask me to accept ten years in prison.’ ‘You do not know what it is to have freedom imprisoned for ten years, nor do you understand the torture of my twenty months.’ ‘The only voices I have heard are those of the compassionate woman who gives me my daily bread and of the court officer.’ ‘The latter came to announce, with sarcasm, the good news of an act of royal clemency.’ ‘It replaces instant death on the gallows with the agonies of ten years in prison.’ ‘Save yourself if you can, Teresa, and renounce the spell of a profoundly unhappy man.’ ‘If your father calls you, go.’ ‘If a dawn of peace can rise for you, live for the happiness of that day.’ ‘Otherwise, die, Teresa, for death is happiness.’ ‘It is the fibres torn by pain dissolving into dust and the coming of oblivion, which protects the memory of sufferers from insult.’
Teresa's reply consisted of only a few words to a letter that revealed the unhappy man's disturbed state. ‘I shall die, Simão, I shall die.’ ‘Forgive my destiny, for I have lost you.’ ‘You know well the destiny I wished to give you, and I die because I cannot and never shall be able to redeem you.’ ‘If you can, live; I do not ask you to die, Simão.’ ‘I want you to live so that you may mourn me, and my spirit will console you.’ ‘I am at peace, and I see the dawn of peace.’ ‘Farewell until we meet in heaven, Simão.’
That letter was followed by many days of terrible silence. Simão Botelho did not answer Mariana's questions. He seemed absorbed in the strangely voluptuous anguish of his own annihilation. Mariana, the creature placed by God beside those tormented eighteen years, wept. If Simão saw her tears, he emerged from his quiet muteness and fell into fits of anguish. The convulsions eventually left him exhausted. Another six months passed. Teresa was still alive and told her distressed companions that she knew the exact day of her death. Simão had already seen two springs through the bars of his prison. The third was beginning to cover the gardens with flowers and the Candal woods with green. It was March 1807.
On the tenth of that month, Simão received notice to leave on the first vessel that weighed anchor in the Douro bound for India. At that time, ships came to Porto to collect convicts sentenced to exile. They then took aboard in Lisbon those bound for the same destination. No obstacle prevented Mariana from embarking. She had presented herself to the criminal magistrate as the convict's servant. Her passage had been paid by Simão, whom Mariana had named as her master. ‘And she is well worth the price of the passage!’ the magistrate joked.
Simão watched his baggage being packed in terrible stillness, as though unaware of the fate awaiting him. Many times he tried to write a final letter to the dying Teresa. He could no longer send her even the marks of tears upon the paper. ‘What darkness, my God!’ he cried, tearing out his hair by the handful. ‘Give me tears, Lord; let me weep or kill me, for this suffering is unbearable!’ Mariana watched in horror these fits of madness and the no less dreadful periods of lethargy. ‘And Teresa!’ he cried, suddenly waking from his stupor. ‘And that unhappy girl whom I killed!’ ‘I shall never see her again, never.’ ‘No one will carry news of her death to me once I am in exile.’ ‘And when I call for her to see me die worthy of her, who will tell you that I have died, O martyr?’