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The narrator begins by confessing that, among the illnesses of old age, his love of old books is the most expensive. That passion consumes the money left over from the pharmacy, where he buys pills and herbal remedies for his other ailments. When he thinks he is curing himself with medicines and educating himself with old words, he ends up damaging his stomach and rusting his brain.
One day, he hears that Mrs Joaquina of Vilalva keeps a basket of old books in her cellar, between two casks resting on other volumes. His informant calls every large book a missal and every small one a primer, a system as simple as it is imprecise.
The narrator asks permission to see the books, and Joaquina allows him to choose and take away any that he wants. He examines them with the happy excitement of a true bibliophile. Although they are greasy, damp and covered in dust, they seem to him as seductive as the made-up face of a beloved woman. He finds Latin sermons, books of rhetoric, works of moral theology, a Euclid and commentaries on Livy and Virgil. He leaves almost everything in its respectable decay and rescues only a Spanish version of Virgil and a rare Portuguese commentary on Horace, printed in 1639.
Joaquina explains that the books have been in the cellar for more than thirty years and had belonged to a brother-in-law who was studying for the priesthood and died of tuberculosis. After the student's death, her husband had the room emptied and threw the dead man's furniture, clothes and books downstairs. Joaquina recounts the death without emotion while tenderly stroking the belly of a pregnant Maltese cat. The narrator immediately wanders from the subject to joke about his love of animals, which takes him back to his days as a gorilla, and about the cat's wink, like those of the girls of his youth.
Joaquina offers him one of the future kittens of her cat Velhaca, and he accepts the gift before it is even born. He leaves with the books wrapped in two religious indulgence bulls from 1816 and 1817. The widow says scornfully that her father-in-law used to buy such bulls so that he could eat meat on fast days. Without any prompting, she adds that priests sold the bull and bought the meat, completing the observation with a rather indecent joke about the sins that enter through the mouth.
Later, the narrator is told that Joaquina had had an illicit relationship with Barroso, a clerk who had taken part in the Mindelo landing and had read Jean Meslier's Common Sense. According to this report, Barroso filled her with bad philosophy, took some of her land and also robbed her of her faith, which the narrator calls the support of the old as they face eternity.
At home, the narrator leafs through the two books, fearing that pages may be missing or eaten by rats which, in his ironic account, help to destroy the fine old language. On page 154 of the commentary on Horace, he finds a yellowed sheet of paper marked by old folds. The ink has faded, but the handwriting remains regular and legible. The paper contains a short letter from Marta to José.
José, when I left church today, where I had gone to ask Our Lady for your life or my death, your brother told me that I would soon be praying for your soul. I can no longer cry or pray. Now I ask God to take me too. If I do not die, I shall go mad. Forgive me, José, and ask God to take me quickly to be with you. The letter ends simply with the name Marta.
The narrator observes that one need not be extraordinarily romantic to want news of the two lives hidden in those lines. He recalls that the former owner of the book died young and reads the name José Dias de Vilalva on its title page. As the letter is addressed to a José, he concludes that Joaquina's brother-in-law was its intended recipient. He hurries back to Joaquina's house, comparing his own eagerness to that of an anthropologist searching for a prehistoric tooth.
He asks whether her brother-in-law was called José Dias and whether he had a sweetheart when he died. Joaquina confirms the name and says that José died around the time of the Maria da Fonte revolt. Taking Maria da Fonte to be a beloved woman, the narrator asks whether José died for love of her and at once imagines a romantic episode for the nation's history. Joaquina explains that she means the time when people rang the bells and burnt the clerks' papers, and adds that José was very fond of a girl called Marta. The narrator receives the name with the satisfaction of seeing the signature on the letter confirmed.
Joaquina identifies Marta as the woman known locally as the brasileira of Prazins, wife of Feliciano of Retorta, who owns fifteen large and small properties. She says that Marta never leaves her room, has been disturbed for many years and suffers fits in which she struggles violently. In Joaquina's popular language, Marta seems to have something evil inside her, but that explanation belongs only to the local witness. Although Feliciano is the richest man in the area, the couple live on broth and maize bread like a poor family. According to Joaquina, Feliciano walks to Porto to collect an enormous sum in gold from Brazil and carries maize bread and apples in his pocket to avoid spending money at an inn.
The narrator asks whether Marta's disturbance began immediately after José's death. She does not remember, for she came to Vilalva after her brother-in-law's death, and recalls only that her husband said José had developed a chest illness because of Marta. She advises him to seek out the rector of Caldelas, an old school companion of José's, because he knows the whole story.
Immediately afterwards, Joaquina cheerfully changes the subject, announces that the kitten has been born and asks whether she should cut off its ears and tail. The narrator asks her not to cut anything off, recalling a criticism of that custom by the English writer Lady Jackson.
At the Santo Tirso fair, he is finally introduced to Father Osório, rector of Caldelas. The priest's face inspires trust, and his spotless cassock seems to match his reputation for an equally spotless life. He is a sad old man, with no memories of a true youth or the ambitions that sometimes replace affection, and he has served one of the poorest parishes in the archbishopric for thirty-two years. For a time, he preached to the applause of educated people and without any effect on sinners. Rhetoric, the narrator remarks, is the art of speaking well, while vice is the art of living well and happily.
As he preached without charging, Osório was invited by many religious brotherhoods to their festivals. When there were no saints left to praise, he was asked for sermons on miraculous cures of fevers or abscesses which Nature and the journal Esculápio could not explain. Osório would reply that God had given the human body reserve vital forces and that Nature, the Creator's great miracle, could often restore itself.
A wealthy abbot with a degree in theology heard these ideas and privately asked whether he denied miracles. For fevers and abscesses, Osório replied, he trusted a lancet and quinine sulphate more. He added that God had created the supreme miracle of science to increase the strength of weakened nature. The theologian accused him of being infected by the modern plague of Voltaire and Alexandre Herculano and told him to purify himself and study harder. Osório withdrew sadly and never returned to the pulpit.
This information gives the narrator enough confidence to show him the letter found in José Dias's book. Osório can still remember the enormous weight of his dying friend's face on his arm, although about thirty-five years have passed. On seeing the signature, he recognises the letter and explains that he himself placed it between the pages of one of José's books. When the paper reached José's bedside, he was already in such a deep stupor that he could not read it. In Osório's interpretation, that indifference was a form of Providence's compassion for someone dying in love and without wishing to die. The priest read the letter, but as José asked nothing, he did not tell him what Marta had written. During the intervals in José's stupor, he read a commentary on Horace to rest his mind and gather strength to endure the final blow.
Osório assumes that his visitor wants to turn Marta into a romantic heroine like Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Virginia. With the mock modesty of someone who expects to make another person immortal, the narrator replies that he knows only of a girl who loved a student, lost him and then married a rich man. Osório replies that he does not yet know Marta and that Virginia, Francesca and Juliet deserve no more pity or romance than she does. In his view, a love that drives someone mad and lets longing shine through in moments of lucidity is more terrible than a love that kills quickly or is forgotten in a fortnight. A sister of Osório's, an enthusiastic reader of novels, had never found a similar case and had thought of writing Marta's story, whose note the priest calls the beginning of an original agony.
Finding the priest's account too heavily decorated with sentiment, the narrator promises to remove the literary flowers and show the scenes as dry and wild as a mountain ridge after a fire. Yet he has only to imagine Dawn weeping to realise, with irony directed at himself, that a sentence always reveals the age of its author.