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In March 1846, the Braga Setembrists stirred up popular riots in the district of Póvoa de Lanhoso. In the British House of Commons, Lord Bentinck explained the origin of the rising in tragic, pompous language. According to him, the Cabrais had built cemeteries without walls, where dogs, cats and wild boars entered and dug up the bodies. A note identifies the source as a letter to Joseph Hume, translated by António Pereira dos Reis in 1847. The narrator then imagines enormous Portuguese cats allied with dogs in a mining operation for dead flesh. Even the wild boars of Gerês were supposed to have come and helped them in the Lanhoso cemeteries. Through this satire, he presents the insurrection as a social battle against dogs, cats and wild boars. German journalists called the Minho revolution the ‘type of legality’, and the narrator ironically extends the animal explanation. Yet whether the people responsible were the Setembrists or the beasts in that story, the rising truly devastated Alto Minho and Trás-os-Montes, destroying official papers and emptying country taverns of wine. According to Finance Minister Franzini, backward in politics but brilliant with numbers, the country lost seventy-seven and a half million cruzados.
When the popular unrest reached the outskirts of Guimarães, Zeferino das Lamelas prepared to act. On hearing the alarm bell ring in Ronfe, he seized the rope and gathered farm labourers and idlers from three parishes in the churchyard. He began shouting, ‘Down with the Cabrais!’ and everyone applauded him. He then confused cadastro, the land register, with canastro, a maize granary. He falsely claimed that the Cabrais were registering properties in order to mortgage Portugal to England. He ordered the printed papers kept in government offices and parish administrators’ homes to be burnt and even spoke of killing the Cabralists. The group invaded the Santo Tirso administrative office, smashed windows and burnt every paper it found in the Campo da Feira. It then set off for Famalicão, drunk on wine from broken-open cellars, with Zeferino as the crowd’s self-appointed commander. Zeferino said that, in the previous year’s election, Joaquim of Vilalva and his men had beaten the people at the Landim polling station. It was a false accusation, but the listeners’ drunkenness turned it into a historical fact. Behind the political cause, Zeferino wanted to create an opportunity for José Dias to be killed or at least imprisoned and exiled as a Cabralist.
Vilalva lay on the crowd’s route to Famalicão. José heard the great uproar and saw people in the distance climbing a hill in disorder. A scarlet cloth swung in the air, a fragment of the old banner from the Santa Maria de Abade processions. José asked his father to flee. The parish administrator refused because he had never harmed anyone or even ordered a deserter’s arrest, and he thought they could do no more than remove him from office. José, however, was afraid of the threats attributed to Zeferino. He had been told that the stonemason had sworn to kill him and that known thieves and murderers had joined the guerrilla band. Maria pushed her son out of the house and told him to flee to Caldelas, while blaming Marta for attracting such danger. José saddled the mare and galloped away. Joaquim, sure of his clear conscience, stayed behind to await the rebels. Zeferino came at their head, brandishing his father’s sword, which had not left its scabbard since the attack on Santo Tirso.
Zeferino seized Joaquim by the lapel and declared that he was under arrest for being a Cabralist. He ordered the crowd to surround the house and arrest everyone it found there. Joaquim replied that his sons had gone out and invited them to search as much as they pleased. He then observed ironically that Zeferino had not come there because of him and that they both knew the real story involving women. Furious, Zeferino ordered him to be quiet and go to prison at once. Joaquim insisted that Zeferino had no authority to arrest him without an order from the administrator or the civil governor. Zeferino declared that there was no longer a civil governor, that other governments now existed and that Dom Miguel I was reigning. Finally, he ordered him to prison ‘with ten million devils’, an outburst of fury rather than a count.
The parish administrator entered Vila Nova de Famalicão amid thousands of men and boys cheering Dom Miguel, the new laws and religion and condemning the Cabralists. While they were burning the papers, Sá Miranda, a returned emigrant from Brazil and a Setembrist, advised the commander not to acclaim Dom Miguel yet. He proposed that they should merely shout against the government and in favour of religion, showing that those cheers followed the tactics of the moment. Meanwhile, half a dozen farm labourers were guarding Joaquim in Folipo’s tavern and arguing about the old and new laws. The innkeeper gave him a sign, and the prisoner escaped through the backyards. Joaquim made his way to Braga, where the general, the Count of Antas, was staying. Fearing that he would be pursued in Caldelas, José also took refuge in Braga. There he enlisted in the Serezinos battalion, commanded by Canon Monte Alverne.
Meanwhile, Feliciano Rodrigues Prazins, Marta’s paternal uncle, returned from America. He remained in Prazins for only a few days, as he feared that the guerrilla bands would rob him. He went to Porto to secure his bills of exchange and returned when the fall of the Cabrais seemed to protect capitalists once more. On returning, he looked more closely at his niece, gave her several gold cords and told his brother that he would not mind marrying her. Simeão immediately replied, with shameless confidence, that Marta liked him, although this was false.
Feliciano was forty-seven and did not have the well-padded figure that the narrator attributed to many emigrants returning from Brazil. He was so thin that he looked like the skeleton of a poet consumed by melancholy, although he claimed to have muscles of steel and never to take medicines from a pharmacy. He was very short-sighted and wore a round monocle in a cheap buffalo-horn frame. In Pernambuco, people joked that he used a single lens to avoid buying two and would sell one eye if he could. After thirty years of work and thrift carried to the point of misery, he had amassed three hundred contos. He had reached the age of forty-seven without having loved and described himself as a chaste man, always busy in his warehouses and sleeping only a few hours. The narrator cites Feliciano’s clerks, overseers and even the enslaved women on his estates as witnesses to this chastity. His more dissolute compatriots had nicknamed him Feliciano Pudicício, or Feliciano Chastity. He said that he had refused wealthy marriages because he did not need a woman in order to become rich and had distrusted the poor young women who showed an interest in him. He said that he had no inclination towards sexo, sex, a word he pronounced like seixo, pebble. Like Hamlet, he could have said that neither men nor women delighted him.
His niece changed that nature, perhaps partly through the disdain with which she treated him. Marta was also very slender and had enough charm to attract that forty-seven-year-old man. The bundle of gold cords he gave her represented, at least for a time, a disturbance in his miserliness. Marta accepted the gift without enthusiasm or joy. She remembered that her father had warned her that she might become her uncle’s wife. She felt nausea and almost hatred when she guessed his intentions and was deeply relieved when Feliciano fled to Porto. For a moment, the narrator imagines that Feliciano’s passion might make him less exacting in matters of honour and virginity. He immediately corrects that idea: Feliciano did not think in this way, and no one had tarnished his image of his niece. Marta’s courtship with José Dias aroused no suspicions in him about her honour. He lacked the worldly suspicion to imagine that a sixteen-year-old girl might open a window at night and help a man climb up. Only Zeferino’s workman knew that he had seen José leave through the window on the night when the moonlight had deceived him.
Marta received the news that her uncle wanted to marry her with terror and anger. Raised without a mother, greatly indulged and strong-willed, she did not respond with humble tears. She said directly that she would not marry her uncle and that if her father did not put him right, she would do so herself. Through Father Osório, she had received a letter written by José in Braga. José encouraged her and promised to marry her as soon as the war ended. That hope gave her the strength to resist when Simeão insisted that her uncle might be the richest man in Portugal after the king. Marta answered with gestures of contempt and threatened to throw herself into the river, like her mother, if they continued to pressure her. Simeão lost his appetite and walked about the house moaning like a calf lost in the hills. To avoid meeting Feliciano, Marta refused to come to the table, took to her bed and pretended to be ill.
José and his father remained in Braga because Miguelist unrest continued in several places and Zeferino had never laid down his weapons. The Serezinos went on expeditions, fought the Royalists and arrested agitators. On a march to Vila Verde, José travelled on foot despite his poor health and developed bronchitis that kept him in bed for a long time. When he got up, he seemed to be recovering, but the tuberculosis was growing worse and already showing clear signs. Father Osório visited him, listened to the doctor and learnt that his friend was doomed. In private, he reminded Joaquim of his promise to consent to the marriage with Marta, whose reputation had been compromised because she trusted José’s promises. Joaquim could not see what Marta would gain from marrying if his son was going to die young and the parents would remain the heirs. Pressed by the promise he had given, he repeated that, for his part, he authorised the marriage only if Maria also authorised it. He explained that the Vilalva estate belonged entirely to his wife and that he had brought almost nothing into the marriage. He concluded that José would marry if he recovered and if his mother consented. He also asked Osório not to speak of Marta to the sick man, since a man in such a condition ought to think about the salvation of his soul. ‘The vicar is being taught the Lord’s Prayer,’ the priest from Caldelas commented ironically. José, however, was cheerful and no longer felt the forebodings of death that had tormented him months earlier. He had grown used to suffering and could scarcely remember the pleasure of being healthy. When he brought up mucus without straining and the syrups and Burgundy pitch eased his breathlessness, he believed he was almost cured. He wrote cheerfully to Osório and Marta, thanking God and the Blessed Virgin, and also placed his trust in cod-liver oil.
A refusal from Marta in Feliciano’s presence would have humiliated the millionaire, but Zeferino’s jealousy intervened first. The guerrilla leader learnt that Feliciano wanted to marry his niece and that José was in Braga very close to death. He then invented a claim that the returned emigrant had requested a regiment from Antas’s division to surround the Royalists’ houses and had offered to support it. The gang decided to attack Feliciano, arrest him as a Cabralist and force him to hand over the money he was supposedly giving the troops. Metro, Feliciano’s neighbour and a man who had invited him to be a child’s godfather, warned him in secret. Feliciano immediately fled to Porto. He wanted to take Marta with him and wrote that he would buy a house in Porto if she joined him there. She replied that she was very ill and could not leave her bed. Simeão insulted her, said that the illness was feigned because of José and repeated Dr Pedrosa’s brutal prediction. According to the doctor, José had tuberculosis and would die within a month or so. Sustained by a suicidal resolve, Marta answered calmly, ‘If I do not marry him in this world, I shall marry him in the next.’ ‘The Devil take you!’ her father muttered, furiously tugging at his side-whiskers. He would then approach in a gentle, cunning voice and say that her uncle was old and thin, would not last long and would leave her extremely rich. He added that she could later marry a nobleman if she wished. Marta looked at the image of Our Lady of Seven Sorrows and murmured that she wished she could die.
With the damp November cold, José’s tuberculosis entered its second stage. His chest pains, difficulty breathing and attacks of fever during the night grew worse. He was extremely thin, rejected food and his breathing revealed the severity of the disease in his lungs. The doctors advised his father to remove him from the Braga inn and take him home, where death would be gentler in his own bed and with his family beside him. They carried him to Vilalva in a litter. On the way, José said that he felt better and was breathing more easily. He imagined that he would already be strong if he had left Braga sooner.
When Maria saw her son so thin and disfigured, she cried out loudly and cursed Marta, accusing her of having killed him. The neighbours agreed with her and wished evil upon the woman who, according to them, had destroyed José. Those accusations were their hostile judgement; José was dying of tuberculosis. José became distressed, cried like a child and asked his father to take him to Caldelas, to his friend’s house. He said that he could not bear to see his mother and demanded that she should not approach his bed if he died. Fever inflamed his thin face and made his gestures furious. When Father Osório arrived, his friend’s calm words soothed him. He lay down with the promise that he would go to Caldelas the next day. He never rose again, and the journey did not take place.
Osório remained with him, leaving only to celebrate Sunday Mass in his church. He returned to Vilalva with Marta’s replies to José’s notes, a few lines in which cheerful hopes still appeared. Not even Osório’s influence persuaded the sick man to receive his mother in the room. José could not forgive her hatred of Marta and declared that she would answer before God for the girl’s dishonour. Maria heard those threats about eternity but told herself that she did not believe them. At last, José could no longer write or lift his head from the pillow. He still asked Osório about Marta and requested that the priest’s brother tell her he was worse and could no longer write. One of those messages led Marta to write the letter copied in the Introduction to this book. Marta’s letter arrived too late: José could no longer read it. Maria forced into the room the vicar with the extreme unction, one man with a bell, another with holy water, two with candles and several devout onlookers. After that forced entry, José fell into a comatose stupor. At long intervals, he suffered mild fits of dry, wheezing cough and opened his eyes to look fixedly at Osório. At times, his eyes wandered fearfully, as though seeking the image of his mother, whom Osório painfully kept out of the bedroom. José died naturally of tuberculosis without reading Marta’s letter.
In Prazins, the Vilalva bell could be heard tolling for the dead, and Marta asked her father who had died. Simeão answered calmly, ‘They say it was Dias, who is now with God.’ He told his daughter to pray for his soul, as that was what he needed now. Marta gave a cry, put her hands to her head and ran away across the fields. She knew where to find the deep, still part of the Ave in which her mother had died by suicide, and she ran in that direction. Simeão ran after her, shouting for help. Outside the village, many farm labourers who were clearing scrub heard him and also ran after Marta. When they were close to catching her, she fell in convulsions before reaching the river. Marta neither entered the water nor died. They carried her home unconscious and placed women beside the bed to watch over her. The news reached Caldelas, and Dona Teresa went with her brother, Father Osório, to Prazins. Together they persuaded Simeão to let his daughter stay with them for a while.
Marta wept bitterly, embracing José Dias’s friend. Impatiently, Simeão told his daughter, ‘That is enough, that is enough.’ Osório answered him sharply, ‘Let her cry, let her cry!’ Then he turned to his sister and concluded, ‘Stupidity is cruel!’