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Six years later, in 1845, Zeferino das Lamelas hurried between Barrimão and Quadros, and Vasco Cerveira Lobo had changed his habits little. He was enormously fat and enjoyed iron health, disproving the scribblers who disparaged alcohol's hygienic and nourishing virtues. According to that physiology, his daily vomiting explained the lieutenant-colonel's purified and healthy flesh. He was nearing fifty, martial and arrogant, with untrimmed grey whiskers and glittering eyes set ablaze by the calcination of his brain.
His daughters showed no trace of a gentlewoman's education. Teresinha, the girl whom Rosa de Carude had denounced, had run away to marry the seminarian from Quintãs. The other two, coarse and countrified, had taken as lovers engineers and contractors employed by the Count of Clarange Lucotte, who was building roads between Braga, Porto and Guimarães. No respectable man wanted to marry them, both because of their disrepute and because their father would give them no dowry. Since their mother's flight, Cerveira had also persuaded himself that they were not his daughters.
Heitor and Egas were showy young men, in jackets with silver braid, red sashes, and thick-soled shoes with yellow eyelets. They rode hobbled mares and swept into fairs with such a burst of swagger that everything before them was flattened. They were brave and drunken, stallions of low loves, yet shy of ladies, clumsy and brutish. They stole the household's maize and wine. In the distant woods, they sold timber cuts and patches of scrub cheaply, besides receiving their father's allowances. Despite everything, the house of Quadros was not mortgaged, prospered and remained among the foremost estates in the district. The gentleman's only luxury was his wine cellar. Nothing else.
When they spoke among themselves about their mother, Honorata's daughters gave her a name that the surviving transcription does not preserve. The boys, with a careless detachment that might imitate dignity, did not even remember that they had a mother. Before dinner, their father grew taciturn and surly, as though trying to shake off a nightmare. In the afternoon, he vanished to resume the luminous visions interrupted by momentary intervals of reason. No one knows what he thought of his wife.
Cerveira admitted few people to the house and very few into his presence. Apart from the tenants who paid the large rents from Vila do Conde, Esmoriz, and São Cosme do Vale, he received only the mason from Lamelas. Zeferino had built his granaries and reconstructed several fallen walls. Cerveira had known his father, the ensign, since the battle of Ponte Ferreira. He sent the ensign demijohns of gin and cigars, advising him to drink, for the times were fit for nothing else. With the vanity of a man of taste, the ensign replied, "Of all people, he comes to tell me that!"
Lately, Cerveira and Zeferino had spoken often about the announced arrival of Dom Miguel. When he spoke of it, Cerveira placed his hands upon his chest and raised his eyes to the ceiling. "Let him come, and you shall see me, Zeferino, at the head of my dragoons of Chaves!" he exclaimed. His pupils flashed, and his trembling arm made martial gestures, as though he were brandishing a sword against an enemy square. Mounted upon fantasy, he bowed his legs, bent over an imaginary rearing horse and snorted with ferocious grimaces. It was a spectacle so ridiculous that one could have wept. Zeferino admitted to his father that the gentleman sometimes frightened him when he performed such scenes. The ensign, experienced in such bloodless exploits, pronounced port wine to be the Devil.
On returning from Santa Marta de Bouro, Zeferino told Cerveira what he had learnt at the captain-major's house. The lieutenant-colonel wished to leave for Lanhoso, but had no decent clothes in which to appear before the king he believed was there. His uniforms lay moth-eaten and rotten at the bottom of a chest, smelling of mouldy rags. Only a whitish fabric stained with green remained of the gold braid. The body of the epaulettes, gnawed by rats, crumbled in his hands. Nor did he own a tailcoat. Since Évora Monte, he had woollen cloaks made in Guimarães, like soldiers' greatcoats for winter. In summer, he balanced his inner heat with that of the atmosphere: he went about in drawers and fanned himself with his shirt-tail. For decency's sake, he shut himself in his rooms. He summoned the tailor Cambraia from Rua do Souto in Braga to dress him in both military and civilian clothes.
Discouraged, Zeferino told him that his godfather in Barrimão and the friar did not believe the king was in Calvos. To them, it might be a scheme by Doctor Cândido de Anelhe and the priests to extract fifty contos from Dona Isabel Maria. Dom Miguel's generals, Zeferino added, knew nothing about his supposed presence. Cerveira Lobo cooled at once. He admitted that, if his old friend Dom Miguel were truly there, he would already have sent for him.
Later, however, Bezerra de Bouro declared that he had kissed the king's hand. After that assertion, the mason and the lieutenant-colonel decided that they could no longer doubt. Cerveira agreed with Zeferino that he would leave for Lanhoso and ask the captain-major to take him to Calvos. The abbot was to announce to the supposed king a messenger bearing a letter from Vasco Cerveira Lobo, a former lieutenant-colonel of dragoons. Cerveira ordered, "As soon as the king hears my name, you are to go in at once, without delay." He told Zeferino to kneel, deliver the letter and bring him an answer. He calculated that he would have his new uniform within eight days at the latest. If His Majesty summoned him, he would go; otherwise, he would muster the five or six thousand men on whom he claimed he could rely. To avoid questions that might delay the journey, Zeferino told neither his godfather nor his father. He feared the usual effusions produced by their drinking bouts.
Cerveira summoned Father Rocha, Dona Andresa's chaplain, and told him that he lacked no ideas. He lacked only the ability to remember the name of that thing with which one wrote. "Orthography?" the priest suggested. "That is it exactly, Father Rocha, orthography," Cerveira confirmed. This was the exordium to confiding that his friend and king Dom Miguel was, as he believed, in the district of Póvoa de Lanhoso. He wished to write to him but dared not undertake such an enterprise alone. He observed that thirteen years earlier the king had known as much orthography as he did, although the newspapers now said that he had studied many things. He therefore asked Rocha to compose the letter so that he could copy it out at leisure.
With his hand on the chaplain's shoulder, he invited him to choose his reward: a good abbey, perhaps Santiago de Antas, or instead a canonry. He asked him to think it over, for they were there at his disposal. Father Rocha was the flower of the royalist clergy: sensible, intelligent and honest. When Cerveira disclosed in a low voice the arrival of his friend and king, Rocha first assumed that he was in his customary state of drunkenness. After noticing the firmness of his bearing and the fluency of his speech, he considered that the man might be demented, his brain softened by alcohol. At last, he became convinced only that certain exploiters were deceiving and ridiculing the poor gentleman.
The priest felt great compassion for Cerveira, whose reputation, in his view, his wife and daughters were sordidly besmirching. He had already warned Dona Andresa that, on the day Doctor Adolfo entered Pombais by the front door, he himself would leave by the back door. Andresa took her brother's conduct so badly that she contemplated making a will to prevent his children by Honorata from inheriting her estates. It was reported at the time that Adolfo da Silveira was a judge in the Azores and lived with a beautiful mistress and three boys.
The only idea Cerveira contributed to the letter was an offer without measure. He instructed Rocha to write that, if His Majesty needed money, he should say how much he wanted, for everything would be at his king's disposal up to the limit of Cerveira's means. Rocha did not shrink from collaborating in that imposture, as he later told Dona Andresa. The text breaks off at precisely that point in the reason the priest gave and does not permit it to be completed. The letter emerged so pompous that Cerveira asked for comments and explanations. At last instructed in the obscurities of style, he declared it a profound work.
He then took six pintos from his waistcoat pocket and offered them to the chaplain for snuff, because he had well earned them. Rocha refused the money and asked him to devote it, on his behalf, to the needs of Dom Miguel. Cerveira proclaimed him a true and great royalist, pocketed the six pintos, embraced him effusively and offered him a glass from the 1817 vintage.
The priest said that he very much wished to see His Majesty's reply. Cerveira promised to show it to him as soon as it arrived, because there were no secrets between them. He added that, if the king summoned him, Rocha could accompany him and return at once appointed to an office. With highly comic delight and the aromatic glass beneath his nose, Rocha asked whether he might yet become an archbishop. Cerveira assured him that this was as certain as two and two making four, for everything was about to change. And he pressed the 1817 wine upon him vigorously.
He lamented having been buried in those hills for twelve years, and the devils could take them. He was forty-nine, he said, but that fist could still wield a sword. There would be a thrashing fierce enough to breed vermin. He recalled having reproached his friend Dom Miguel when Sedvém, Mata and Miguel Alcaide clubbed the liberals, because such conduct was not pretty. Now, however, he intended to advise the king to use plenty of force. At last he invoked his comrade Teles Jordão, who, according to him, had understood everything.
Cerveira was already beginning to stammer and stagger. He spilt his glass as Father Rocha took his leave.