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At eleven o'clock that night, the captain had retired to a passenger berth. Mariana, seated on the floor with her face resting on her knees, seemed overcome by that day's painful hours. Prostrate in the cabin, Simão kept vigil with folded arms, his eyes fixed on the swaying suspended light. Perhaps he heard the gale: its piercing whistle must have reached him like a moan, the only voice in the silence of earth and sky.
At midnight, he stretched out a trembling hand towards the bundle of letters Teresa had sent him. He contemplated her letter on top of the bundle, broke the seal and sought the lamp's dim glow. Teresa had written the letter while still alive, on her last night, anticipating the hour when Simão would read it.
‘It is already my spirit speaking to you, Simão.’ ‘Your beloved friend is dead; your poor Teresa, by the time you read this letter, unless God deceives me, will be at rest.’ ‘I ought to spare you this final torment and not write to you.’ ‘But forgive your bride in heaven for the fault she commits in taking comfort from speaking to you in this final hour of the night of her life.’
‘Who would tell you that I had died, if not I myself?’ she asked. Before long, Simão would lose sight of the convent and travel thousands of leagues. Nowhere would he find a human voice saying that the unhappy woman awaited him in the next world and prayed that God would redeem him.
Teresa asked whether, if he could deceive himself, he would rather imagine her alive and hoping to see him return from exile. Such an illusion might be possible, but at that solemn moment she was ruled by the need to make him understand that she could not live. It seemed to her that even misfortune sometimes took pride in displaying itself whole, until it could grow no further. ‘I want you to say: she is dead, and she died when I took away her last hope.’ ‘It is not a reproach, Simão.’ ‘Perhaps I might last a few more days if you stayed; either way, I would close my eyes when the final thread broke, and I already hear it breaking.’
‘Do not let these words increase your sorrow.’ ‘God forbid that I should add unjust remorse to your grief.’ ‘If I could still see you happy in this world, if God granted my soul that vision!’ Teresa continued. At once she reproached her own love for imagining that the poor condemned man might still be capable of happiness. She foretold that he would die of longing, unless the climate of exile killed him before he succumbed to the anguish of his spirit.
Life would have been beautiful, she wrote, if they could have lived it as Simão had painted it in the letters she had just reread. She saw the little house outside Coimbra, surrounded by trees, flowers and birds. His imagination walked with her along the banks of the Mondego at the contemplative hour of dusk. The stars appeared in the sky and the moon made the water shine. Teresa answered Simão's silence with the silence of her heart and, encouraged by his smile, inclined her face upon his breast as upon her mother's. While her soul lingered over that memory, the rending pain of agony seemed to cease. Another letter spoke to her of Simão's triumphs, glories and immortal name. Teresa had followed that aspiration, or even gone before it, wishing to claim the greater share of his pleasures of the mind. Three years earlier she had still been a child, yet understood Simão's longing for glory and imagined it her own work, for he had said he would be nothing without that love.
‘What a beautiful heaven we have fallen from!’ she exclaimed. At the hour when she wrote, he was preparing to board the convict ship and she to enter the grave. What did death matter, if in this life they could never possess the hope they had cherished for three years? Teresa could not endure hopelessness and life together. Sleep had been the scant comfort granted by God; death now seemed to her more than a necessity, a divine mercy and a blessing.
She asked what Simão would do without his companion in martyrdom, and where he could revive his heart, which misfortune had crushed without erasing the image of the faithful woman who had followed the star of his fatal destiny. ‘You will never love another, will you, my husband?’ ‘Would you not be ashamed of yourself if my image suddenly passed before your dry eyes?’ ‘Allow your beloved friend's heart these final questions, which you will answer on the high seas when you read the letter.’ ‘Morning is breaking; I am going to see my last dawn, the last of my eighteen years.’
‘Blessed be you, Simão!’ ‘May God protect you and spare you a prolonged agony.’ ‘I offer Him my anguish for your sins; if divine justice condemns any impatience in me, offer your sufferings to God so that I may be forgiven.’ ‘Farewell; in the light of eternity, I seem already to see you, Simão.’
Simão rose, looked about him in astonishment and fixed his eyes on Mariana, who raised her head at his slightest movement. ‘What is the matter, Senhor Simão?’ she asked, rising to her feet. Surprised to find her still there, Simão asked whether she was not going to bed. Mariana replied that the captain had given her permission to remain. He begged her not to sacrifice the night, but she asked to remain if she did not disturb him. Simão consented and asked whether he might go up on deck. The captain sprang from his berth and offered to accompany him.
Simão added Teresa's letter to the bundle, staggered up and sat upon a heap of ropes. From there he contemplated the Monchique lookout, a dark mass at the foot of the rocky hill where Rua da Restauração now runs. The captain paced the deck from bow to stern, attentive to the convict's movements. Mariana had made him fear an attempt at suicide. He wished to console him, but wondered what could be said to a man suffering so deeply. He therefore paused beside Simão from time to time, as though he might thereby draw the young man's mind away from that lookout.
‘I shall not kill myself!’ Simão exclaimed abruptly. He assured the captain that, if he cared about Simão's life, he could sleep in peace: Simão would not kill himself. The captain then asked him to agree to go down to the saloon with him. ‘I shall go, but I suffer more down there, sir,’ Simão replied. The captain did not insist and continued pacing the deck beneath the gusts of wind. Mariana was crouching among the packages of cargo, a short distance from Simão; after speaking to her, the captain withdrew.
At three in the morning, Simão clasped his feverishly burning forehead between his hands. Too weak to remain seated, he let half his body fall, and his head came to rest against Mariana's breast. ‘The angel of compassion, always beside me!’ he murmured; ‘Teresa was far more unfortunate...’ Mariana asked whether he wished to go down to the cabin, but he replied that he could not and said, ‘Hold me up, my sister.’ He took a few steps towards the hatch, looked once more at the lookout and descended the steep ladder, clinging to the ropes. He threw himself upon the mattress and drank thirstily of the water he had asked for, without quenching his thirst. Fever, convulsions and retching followed, interrupted by spells of delirium.
In the morning, summoned by the captain, a doctor examined the convict and merely declared the illness ‘malignant’. He added that Simão might well find his grave on the way to India, without giving the illness any more precise diagnosis. Mariana heard the prognosis without weeping. At eleven o'clock, the ship crossed the bar, and the agonies of seasickness were added to those of the illness. At the captain's request, Simão took medicine, but he could not keep it down and immediately vomited it back up.
On the second day of the voyage, Mariana asked what she should do with the letters kept in the chest if her brother died. The narrator pauses over the astonishing composure of that question. ‘If I die at sea, throw all my papers into the sea, every one of them,’ Simão ordered. He ordered the letters beneath his pillow to be cast into the water as well. A spasm choked his voice; when he could continue, he asked Mariana what she intended to do if he died. ‘I shall die, Senhor Simão,’ she replied. ‘You will die?! How many people I have made wretched!...’ Simão lamented.
The fever mounted, and the captain recognised the signs of death, having seen hundreds of feverish convicts die at sea without medicines. On the fourth day, while the ship was making slow progress off Cascais, a sudden storm arose. The vessel was driven many miles out to sea and, having lost its course for Lisbon, wandered southwards without bearings. On the sixth day of that uncertain voyage, amid thick mists off Gibraltar, the rudder broke. After the disaster, the gusts subsided, the waves grew calm and dawn brought a beautiful spring day. It was 27 March, the ninth day of Simão Botelho's illness.
Mariana had grown old. The captain, looking at her, said that she seemed to be returning from India after already having endured ten years of hardships. ‘Already over… certainly…’ Mariana replied.
At dusk that day, Simão fell into delirium for the last time. His words reassembled fragments of Teresa's letter: the little house outside Coimbra, surrounded by trees, flowers and birds. ‘You walked with me along the bank of the Mondego at the contemplative hour of dusk; the stars appeared in the sky and the moon lit the water.’ He repeated the heart's silent reply, the face inclined as upon a mother's breast, and the fall from that beautiful heaven. Then came the phrases: ‘Your beloved friend is dead... Your poor Teresa...’ He asked what he would do with life without his companion in martyrdom and where he might revive the heart crushed by misfortune. He also murmured words about the last dawn of Teresa's eighteen years and her request that he offer his own sufferings to God for the forgiveness of her sins. At last he spoke Mariana's name.
Thinking she had heard it, she pressed her ear to the dying man's purple lips. ‘You will come to us; we shall be your brother and sister in heaven,’ Simão said. He called her the purest angel and repeated, ‘If you belong to this world, sister; if you belong to this world, Mariana...’ The passage from delirium into complete lethargy infallibly announced approaching death.
At daybreak, the lamp had gone out, and Mariana had left to ask for a light when she heard a deathly groan. She returned in the darkness, stretching out her arms to find the dying man's face. She found his hand convulsing; it gripped hers, then suddenly relaxed. The captain entered with a lamp and held its glass at Simão's mouth to test for breath; not the faintest mist clouded it. ‘He is dead!’ he declared.
Only then did Mariana bend over the corpse and kiss his face. It was her first kiss. She then knelt beside the berth with raised hands, neither praying nor weeping.
Several hours later, the captain told Mariana that the time had come to bury their friend. He called Simão fortunate to die beneath such a star and asked Mariana to move into the saloon while they removed the body. Mariana took the bundle of letters from beneath the pillow and fetched the rest of Simão's papers from a chest. She wrapped the roll in the apron stained by the tears she had shed on the day of her madness and tied the bundle around her waist.
The corpse, wrapped in a sheet, was carried to the deck, and Mariana followed it. A stone was brought from the hold, and a sailor fastened it to the dead man's legs with a length of rope. The captain contemplated the scene with tearful eyes. The soldiers guarding the ship, bowed by funeral reverence, uncovered their heads without even realising it. Leaning against the ship's side, Mariana seemed to stare without comprehension at the sailor's efforts to secure the stone around the corpse's waist.
Two men raised the body over the bulwark and swung it so that they might cast it far from the ship. Before the dead man's impact upon the water could be heard, everyone saw Mariana throw herself into the sea, and no one managed to stop her. At the captain's command, they quickly lowered the boat and several men leapt into it, intent on saving her. Save her!... For a moment they saw her move her arms, not to resist death but to embrace Simão's corpse, which a wave had thrown into her reach.
The captain looked towards the place from which Mariana had jumped and saw the apron tangled in the rigging. A roll of papers floated upon the surface of the water, and the sailors recovered it in the boat. They were, as the readers know, the letters exchanged by Teresa and Simão.
Of Simão Botelho's family, Dona Rita Emília da Veiga Castelo Branco, his favourite sister, was then still living in Vila Real de Trás-os-Montes. The last member of that family to die, twenty-six years earlier, had been Manoel Botelho, the author's father.
THE END.