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Some time after Zeferino's death, the marriage that had already been imposed on Marta took place. Marta married her uncle Feliciano in the chapel of the Retorta estate. Father Osório, who was the vicar of Caldelas and Dona Teresa's brother, conducted the ceremony. Dona Teresa was the madrinha, or female wedding sponsor and witness. The padrinho, the male wedding sponsor and witness, came from Porto and was the Baron of Rabaçal. He was a fat, showy man married to Eusébio Macário's daughter, whose fair, velvety skin the narrator emphasises. The Baron addressed the bridegroom in a deliberately distorted manner of speaking: “Forgive me, friend Prazins.” “You are marrying a very thin girl, very narrow at the hips,” he continued. He then declared that he preferred rounded, plump women. According to his “philosophy”, a woman ought to have curves that a man could feel in his arms. The narrator observes ironically that the debauchee made the chaste bridegroom blush. Over dessert, the Baron continued with the coarse jokes that he considered obligatory at vulgar weddings. Marta did not even understand those jokes. Dona Teresa, too aristocratic to tolerate double meanings, felt sick when she heard them. Father Osório, in his role as vicar, was amused by the Baron's salty brutality. To sharpen the satire, the narrator says that not even Cervantes, Rabelais, Swift or the Portuguese writer Luís de Araújo could always provoke such laughter.
Marta left the church with a sadness that did not change. Late that afternoon, she shut herself in her room with Dona Teresa. She opened her trunk and took out a small packet containing José Dias's letters. “You must keep them,” Marta asked her. “When I die, burn them, will you?” Teresa smiled and asked what would happen if she died before Marta. Marta replied that, in that case, Teresa should ask Father Osório to burn the letters. She then clung to Teresa and began to weep and sob. “I shall die or lose my mind,” she said. Marta said that she had come to this misery and did not know how to escape it. She explained that she had married to obey her father. She had given that consent only because she believed that Simeão was dying. Now she could see only two ways out: ending her life or losing her reason. She then recalled that her mother too had lost her reason and that Teresa knew how Genoveva's life had ended.
Dona Teresa comforted her with the commonplace phrases said to girls married to rich, repellent men. She told her that she would eventually get used to it and that time would erase everything. Yet Teresa judged Marta through her own class prejudices. Because she was illegitimate, she considered herself somewhat aristocratic and looked down on Marta's rural origins and Genoveva's irregular life. Teresa thought it commonplace that Marta had fallen in love with José Dias, a handsome village boy. As a reader of novels, she also considered the suicide attempt after his death commonplace and insignificant. What seemed common and low-born to her was Marta obeying her father and marrying her uncle. In her view, the coarse nature inherited from Simeão ultimately overcame his daughter's uncertain delicacy. Father Osório, the same vicar who had conducted the wedding, understood Marta more humanely. He told his sister that Marta was already ill when she had agreed to marry her uncle. In his opinion, that nervous illness would eventually lead her to suicide.
Teresa's judgement, however, had been distorted by the eccentric heroines of Eugène Sue and Alexandre Dumas. She could not place a girl from a Minho village among those Parisian women wrecked by romantic storms. If Marta was under the influence of madness, as her brother said, Teresa saw an illness in her rather than a tragedy. She had read the most select part of the French Romantic library published between 1835 and 1845. The narrator calls those books the falsest and most foolish works in European literature. Teresa wanted to find more drama in Marta's misery. The suicide attempt had still seemed to her worthy of some sorrowful poetry. But imagining her in the marriage bed with that rat-like uncle turned all the poetry into shrill prose.
It was then time for bed. Father Osório, the vicar who had conducted the wedding, had left for Caldelas to say Mass before dawn. At Marta's request, he had left his sister Teresa at Retorta. The Baron opened his mouth in noisy yawns and stretched one leg. Feliciano kept his eyes fixed on the clock face. Marta was pressed close to Teresa and complained of cramps. She said that things were buzzing in her ears and that she saw sparks in the air. She also felt great heat in her head. Teresa told her that she needed to go to bed, as Teresa herself had to retire. Marta begged Teresa to let her sleep beside her. She pleaded by her own mother's soul and by the life of Teresa's brother, Father Osório. Teresa understood Marta's fear and felt sorry for her. She feared another attack because the sparks and cramps usually came before the convulsions. Yet she could not bring herself to ask Marta's husband to sleep alone. Not even in her many novels could she find a situation of that kind.
It was Simeão who intervened at that difficult moment. “It is time for bed; your husband can hardly keep awake,” he ordered his daughter. Marta fixed her green eyes on her father, and they now shone with anger. She threw up her head in a sudden movement while her lips tightened. The narration calls what followed an epileptic neurosis, using the medical language of the period. Convulsions followed, with foam at the mouth and a paroxysm that lasted twenty minutes. Teresa asked for help in moving Marta to her bed. With impatient aristocratic authority, she told Simeão to leave Marta there and forbade anyone to mention her husband. Simeão scratched himself, greatly displeased. Feliciano told the Baron that his niece was prone to similar attacks. He added that the surgeon had assured him that the attacks would cease after marriage. The Baron replied that the remedy was a good one and ought to be applied as soon as possible. He made several more jokes of the same kind and went to bed. Feliciano still went to ask how his wife was, but there was no longer any light in Teresa's room. He therefore retired and spent yet another night alone in his bed.
In that household, Teresa felt uncomfortable and almost ridiculous. Marta would not let go of her. As soon as she heard her uncle's footsteps, she resembled a terrified child clinging to her mother's dress. Feliciano approached her very tenderly, with his monocle in his right eye. He offered her egg sweets called castanhas de ovos and a cake called toucinho do céu. He took her hand and caressed her face, which grew deeply flushed with modesty. At last, Teresa discreetly left them alone. Marta remained staring at the door through which her friend had escaped. She made gestures like someone thinking of running away. Her husband, however, held her delicate hands and kissed them. His sensuality was delicate, a little slobbery but very restrained, and he carried his warm, damp kisses up to her round, pale wrists. Marta remained impassive and did not resist the caresses. She even seemed to incline her face slightly when Feliciano asked her for a kiss with a youthful smile. The kiss lasted longer than might have been expected from her innocence and lack of experience. Both of them were flushed, but Marta's colour was far too intense. There was a distant gleam in her eyes, lost across the great room. Marta saw the shadow of José Dias. Later, she told Teresa that she had seemed to see José in person.
When she recovered her senses, she did not know how she had been taken to her friend's bed. Her memory began with her uncle kissing her face. She also remembered that he had led her by the arm and entered the bedroom with her. Feliciano had pressed her against his chest and lifted her in his arms with great force. He had not allowed her to escape and had smothered her sighs with kisses. After that, Marta remembered nothing more. Teresa could give only an imperfect account of the part of what happened that had come to her knowledge. She said that Feliciano had fetched her from the orange grove, looking somewhat distressed. He had told her that his wife was unconscious in bed. He had also asked her for vinegar to hold near Marta's nose.
Later, Father Osório returned to dine and take his sister home. He noticed a radiance of happiness on the returnee's face. The narrator ironically describes Feliciano as a man who at last felt complete in his mission of loving women. It was then that the priest adjusted his uncertain theories about the advantages of chastity for the benefit of other people's impurity.
That afternoon the surgeon arrived, a man distinct from both Father Osório and Dr Pedrosa. With little respect for marital privacy, Feliciano told him certain circumstances that the narration does not reveal. He called the episode “his wife's fainting fit”. The old, jovial doctor said that he was not surprised. In his opinion, Marta was highly nervous and not yet fully formed. He claimed that new and somewhat violent impressions caused extraordinary disturbances in people of weak constitution. He nevertheless assured Feliciano that it was nothing serious and that habit created a second nature. He prescribed sea bathing. He also recommended grilled steak and port, the older and more stale the better. Above all, he wanted a boy to be born. According to him, nothing strengthened a weak woman as much as having a child. He even said that, on leaving the womb, the child carried away the mother's bad nerves and put an end to her fainting spells. He ended by urging Feliciano to produce a great strapping boy soon.
In Teresa's absence, Marta's melancholy grew more inward day by day. She was entirely indifferent to running the household, as though she were merely a guest. Feliciano did not force her to take an interest in household affairs. Simeão said that she had never cared for those tasks at Prazins either. The Baron of Rabaçal had sent a cook and a governess from Porto. Marta rarely left a small sitting room where she had set up a prayer shrine brought from home. She confessed every month to Frei Roque. The friar was the brother of Marta's former schoolmistress and the teacher of the boy from Vilalva. She remained in the confessional asking troubled questions about José Dias's soul. She told the friar that she often saw José in body and soul. She also claimed that she heard him speak and felt his hands on her body. Frei Roque did not reveal what she had said in confession. He merely told his sister that Marta was going mad like her mother.
During one of the later attacks, Marta laughed at Feliciano with tense, altered eyes. She called him José and then “my dear little José”, leaving her husband terrified. When the attack passed, Marta sank into physical and mental torpor. Feliciano then told her that she had called him Josezinho. Marta struggled to recall the episode but said that she remembered nothing. The surgeon came often and called the condition hysteria. He comforted the husband with the hope of a boy, which he considered well founded on the confidences of Feliciano, the prospective father.
Meanwhile, Father Osório sought the opinion of Dr Pedrosa, a respected clinician. Pedrosa said that Marta did not merely have the historical condition called the falling sickness. In his nineteenth-century medical language, there was epilepsy complicated by delirium and intermittent mental derangement. He spoke of a state of unconsciousness or abnormal consciousness. He admitted that it was impossible to determine with confidence which acts belonged to intervals of lucidity. “She is pregnant,” observed Father Osório, speaking as the vicar of Caldelas. In his opinion, the pregnancy seemed to indicate some normality of consciousness. It also seemed to him to show a rational understanding of a wife's duties. “It indicates nothing,” Pedrosa replied. He told the priest to think of Marta as a sleepwalker. According to Pedrosa, her dementia was functional rather than organic. For that reason, he claimed, no physical disorder prevented her from becoming a mother.
Pedrosa then quoted the report of the colleague who had attended Marta's latest attack. A few minutes before that attack, a highly agitated Marta had told him that she would flee to Vilalva. She had also said that she wanted to see José Dias. Fortunately for her, Pedrosa added, Feliciano had then gone to the pantry for vinegar. The doctor considered Marta lost unless she was given a prompt and complete diversion. Even then, he believed that the relief would be only temporary. In his view, no one could escape for long from an inheritance like Marta's, whose mother and grandmother had suffered mental disturbance. Pedrosa said that he had attended both the first and the final stages of Genoveva's illness. According to the sequence he gave, the attacks recurred and were followed by a gradual loss of reason. He spoke of delirium, confused ideas, difficulty in thinking and other nervous disturbances. Finally, Genoveva had died by suicide in a state that he called epileptic dementia. He added that specialists considered that illness the most incurable of all.
Pedrosa predicted the same course for Marta. In his opinion, marrying her to her uncle was no longer merely an immoral act but a stupid property arrangement made by her father. On the husband's side, he saw nothing but lust. He declared that the girl would end in dementia even without drama or passion. In Pedrosa's view, Marta had a defective brain, just as another person might have a spine deformed by rickets. He explained that sight is lost when the optic nerves become paralysed. In the same way, he said, the loss of the soul's normal sight would be the paralysis of part of the brain. He acknowledged that this explanation troubled theologians and metaphysicians, but left them to settle the problem. Pedrosa ended with his own materialist certainty: “This is the truth.”