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As the narrative moves back in time, Zeferino left Cerveira Lobo at Quadros with the three contos de réis in his possession and returned to Lamelas at night, so that no one would see him. He had boasted to the neighbours that he had been appointed sergeant-major and that his father had retired with the rank of colonel; now he was entering the village in secret. He had sent word to José Dias and to José's father, who was the local administrator, that they would soon meet the man who would answer them. He said everything he could to belittle Marta, because his passion could find no other outlet. Nor could he forget the shame of the dog leaving his buttock exposed beneath the girl's unrestrained laughter. To crown it all, his father's grumbling awaited him: he called Zeferino a blockhead, told him to abandon politics and reminded him that building walls was all he knew.
He had also learnt that José, the student, spent much of his time in Prazins and had gone with Marta and Simeão to see the fireworks at the Santiago da Cruz pilgrimage fair. All three had been seen at dawn drinking coffee in a stall, the two young people sitting close and talking quietly while the old man dozed.
Joaquim de Vilalva, José's father, was a farmer of the first rank. The household produced forty cartloads of maize and rye, one pipe of olive oil, ten of wine and plentiful chestnuts, and kept three fine teams of oxen and breeding foals. José, a share farmer on the estate, would, if he did not enter holy orders, be one of the best matches in the district.
José loved Marta with the chastity and modesty of first love. She had a gentle, delicate and pleading beauty. She seemed to plead not to be sacrificed to sensual passion. In the narrator's sacrificial image, if her beloved required it, the victim would crown herself with flowers and walk, smiling and meek, towards the sacrifice. Marta went into raptures as she contemplated José's fair hair and pale, sickly face. She let him kiss her with the impassiveness of a jasper saint, in a paradise scene without fruit or serpents.
José did not think it necessary to ask Marta's father for her while uncertain of a refusal. He told Marta that she would be his wife, and the young woman repeated her beloved's words to her father. Simeão immediately asked his friend Zé for an embrace and clasped his future son-in-law with the tenderness of a father who sees his daughter settled as he wishes.
The student's parents, however, had already ordered him to change course, because in their view the girl from Prazins was not a match of his standing. Maria above all swore that, while she lived, Genoveva of Prazins's daughter would never be her daughter-in-law, not even if the Devil took her, and asked God to forgive her if she sinned. To justify herself, she said that Marta came from bad stock and piled up against Genoveva stories of pilgrimage fairs, marital grievances and rumours involving a friar from Santo Tirso. She also recalled Genoveva's cries in church and the public voice that attributed them to the Devil within her. Lastly, she invoked Genoveva's death, saying that she had gone mad and thrown herself into the River Ave.
Maria added that Marta's grandfather had not been sound either: at sixty he had ordered a surplice, had a tonsure cut and appeared at funerals singing like the priests. Without knowing it, the old woman already professed the modern scientific horror of heredity. More than anything, she was driven by the conviction that Genoveva had been a bad wife and was Marta's mother. From the maxim 'bad tree, bad fruit' she made an entire philosophy, the same one the narrator later finds diluted through Janet, Maudsley and determinism.
Pressed hard by his son and by Father Osório, the vicar of Caldelas, Joaquim promised to do whatever his wife decided. In private, however, he urged her to stand firm and never say yes. Maria replied that he should leave the matter in her hands. The suitors would find their way barred, and the exclamation 'Heaven preserve us!' set a devout seal upon the refusal.
Aunt Maria was deeply given to prayer and rose early in summer so as not to miss Mass at daybreak. During Lent she followed the Stations of the Cross around the church in a nasal chant. She offered the saints the finest produce of the farm, gave missionaries a bed and a rich table, and went to confession every month. At the same time, she savoured the ineffable pleasure of declaring that her less devout neighbours would fall fully dressed and shod into Hell. José then formed a commonplace idea about his mother's religion. He thought that her religious feelings would make her consent to the marriage if Marta committed one of those sins that matrimony was commonly used to remedy. Father Osório replied that the intention was honourable but the expedient was bad. He cited neither theologians nor divine precepts; he argued from the likelihood that Maria would persist in her refusal. In the vicar's severe reading, Maria's religion was a habit of hand and lip gestures, as mechanical as the responses described in the first missions to the Americas. Village religion added, to the automatic devotion he attributed to the Jesuits' converts, hypocrisy in some and fanaticism in others, when it did not unite both in the same believer. Osório knew his flock through the sieves of the confessional, and he knew Aunt Maria of Vilalva no less well. He therefore maintained that Marta's lapse would merely give the old woman one more reason for hatred and contempt. In Maria's catechism and in the counsel of her spiritual directors, a mother was not required to hide a girl's dishonour by marrying her to the son who had seduced her.
The reflections of the vicar of Caldelas were excellent, but they came too late.
A journeyman mason from Prazins who worked with Master Zeferino told him a moonlit story. One night, deceived by the brightness, he had thought day was breaking and risen to go to work. As he passed Simeão's house, he heard the clock strike two and saw light through the cracks of a window. He kept watch beneath an oak, for light at that hour seemed to him a sign of witchcraft or a wandering spirit. He remembered what people said of Genoveva: because she had died with the Devil within her, she could not enter Purgatory. The light vanished, reappeared at another window and then moved to a third, lower one, within reach of an axe handle. When the light went out, the unglazed shutter opened, washed in a broad sheet of moonlight. Hidden in the dark branches, the workman saw a head appear and then half a man's body, astride the sill and listening on both sides. The man climbed down slowly, hung from the sill and dropped to his feet without making a sound. The window closed, and the journeyman recognised José Dias with the certainty of seeing him at midday. José took the road to Vilalva, wearing rubber shoes that shone like mirrors in the moonlight.
The Oratorian Manuel Bernardes wrote, as is well known, an edifying book entitled Arms of Chastity. The mystical son of Saint Philip Neri explained, in two words of seraphic realism, the position of another José Dias towards another Marta: he knew her bed. It is the most that can be said without scandalising anyone: he knew her bed.
It was Zeferino who took the knife thrust of scandal full in his lover's breast. The journeyman saw him sit on a lintel he had been squaring, bury his face in his hands and dissolve into tears. He said that he had loved the girl since first seeing her when she was thirteen. He had worked and stolen so that he might buy her from her father for one conto and five hundred and something more. He had entered politics and made himself a sergeant-major in order to rise to a height from which Marta might judge him worthy of her and superior to the student. The arrest of the rogue at Calvos had brought those hopes down, yet Zeferino still dreamt of returning to the field when the authentic Dom Miguel arrived. Cerveira assured him that the king would come to Portugal the following spring, for Father Rocha said so, consoling him alongside the daily bouts of drinking. Everything seemed finished and lost to him, as though the Eve of his paradise were dying. And so he wept like the great betrayed poets, like Camões, Tasso and Alfred de Musset. On the workman's weathered face, the tears had the same bitter taste as those poetry had crystallised in the pantheon of love's martyrs.
Then Zeferino rose, wiped his face on his shirtsleeve, picked up his square and went on working. He whistled the sad tune of a song from those days: 'O sea, if you will, take pity on me.' That whistling was the hiss of the serpent of revenge, although his rancour was not aimed at Marta. When he set down his chisel and fixed his gaze on a vast emptiness, he saw the shining image of the little girl, pure and angelic as she had been at thirteen. He was a great Romantic, a flowering of ideas in that mason, like a bed of daisies upon the moss of a crag. There were, after all, such concessions towards fallen angels, as though he had read the torrent of ignoble tears in The Confession of a Child of the Century.
From that fatal hour, Zeferino thought of killing José Dias. Yet among the protuberances of his great skull, the bump of homicide was, in the narrator's phrenological satire, very rudimentary. He had already had opportunities to prove that perfection and had let them pass. Two students had beaten him in a pinewood because of his denunciations to Father Master Roque, without his killing them. When José's dog had torn his trousers in a delicate place, he had likewise suspected that a man capable of killing would have thrown his axe at the hunter's head. He longed to trample, tear apart, bite, grind and devour José Dias's corpse. Yet he wished to do so in the manner of unscathed devourers who buy an already dead pig in Ribeira Velha and butcher it without risk. The great cannibal joy and the hands steeped in fat thus belonged to a fantasy protected by the victim's prior death.
Meanwhile, the mason who had made the discovery went about secretly telling everyone what he had seen on that moonlit night. Marta's reputation was ruined in the parish. The women hoeing the maize fields commented without cease on the mason's story and revived the exploits that older women attributed to Genoveva. The oldest among them said that Brígida Galinheira, Marta's grandmother, had already set the same example for her daughter. Aunt Rosa of Carude summed up the lineage in an insult against those women, spat on the ground and crushed the spittle beneath her clog. They also laughed at Zeferino, who went about agitated like a snake without venom, had refused two good marriages and said that he would die a bachelor at Pedras Negras after killing a man. Someone even claimed to have seen him, late at night, with a blunderbuss beneath the oaks opposite Simeão's house. It was a slander.
Warned of the mason's supposed ambush, José's mother made her son sleep in an attic room with no window through which he could climb and locked him in from outside at night. She cursed the beast of Prazins, wishing that lightning would split her and the Devil drag her to the depths of the abyss. Immediately afterwards, she went to pray the rosary with the servants and prayed to God for those sailing at sea and for the souls of all her relatives and neighbours. Her tearful intonation inspired devotion.
José Dias lived in bitterness. Brought up in profound respect for his parents, he felt incapable of resisting them. The disease in his chest was beginning to drain the strength from his body and joined with the listlessness of his spirit. He felt the indolent selfishness of one being undermined by a slow consumption. He envied the strength of his brother, a sturdy labourer who slept for ten hours and, at dawn, washed his face at the tank and went to tend the cattle while whistling chula melodies. He spent many hours with his confidant, Father Osório, asking him for advice and for a way to marry Marta.
'I shall not last long,' he said despondently, 'but I wanted to put right the harm I have done.'
Marta sent her letters to him at Caldelas, because Maria had once caught a boy carrying a letter to her son and rushed at him with a toothed farm implement, almost striking him on the head. Marta's letters were made of doubts, fear of abandonment and tears. Simeão did not torment her; on the contrary, he often told her that it might be fortunate if José did not marry her. Her uncle might come to favour her and, from one month to the next, burst through that door as rich as a hog. An emigrant recently returned from Brazil and associated with Rita Chasca said that the man had a solid four hundred contos, if not more. Marta hid herself away to weep. At times she remembered her mother's end, the suicide. She would then gaze at the Ave and listen to the hollow roar of a millstream, as though the water carried to her the death groans of many drowning souls.
In his letters, José spoke of his illness, of the weakness that already kept him from hunting and of the sadness consuming him. He lamented the lack of love with which his family watched him suffer, the hatred he was beginning to feel for his mother and his rending longing for his dear Marta. He said that his friend Father Osório was working to obtain his father's consent. If he failed, José was resolved to run away with Marta. They would leave even without resources, with only the little that the priest might lend him.
From time to time, José went to see Marta during the day. His mother, who kept him under close watch, scolded that the 'hussy' would be the death of him. The surgeon had told her, with delicacy, that José was abusing the sixth commandment. Since she knew the commandments backwards and forwards, Maria understood at once and began telling everyone that her Zé had grown weak because of the sixth. It was the modesty of someone who explained Christian doctrine through numbers, and the neighbours understood her without difficulty. They told her that José was full of ardour and that a hoe in his hands would rid him of it. Eight days clearing scrub would be enough.
Several months passed. With the spring, José's health seemed to recover, and he attributed the improvement to happiness. His father, in his capacity as local administrator, had been summoned to Braga by the civil governor, who was acting at Father Osório's request, and now gave his consent. His mother, however, continued to refuse. The missionaries were expected at Requião, where they were to bring her round to what was understood as a Catholic's duty. The vicar of Caldelas had already alerted Frei João de Borba da Montanha, formerly of Varatojo and a man from the lands of Celorico de Basto, famed for the force with which he tackled even harder enterprises.
Marta's joyful hopes returned. Zeferino of Lamelas, for his part, digested his grief by whistling the melody of the melancholy ballad. 'O sea, if you will, take pity on me,' the whistling repeated.
For relief, he often went to Quadros to ask when Dom Miguel would arrive. Cerveira had connections with the Setembrists. The two parties hostile to the Cabrals were drawing together, united by the bloody elections of 1845. The lieutenant-colonel was gathering rifles at Quadros and giving money for cartridges to be made in the district of Póvoa de Lanhoso and around Guimarães. Father Rocha passed on to him the news that Saraiva sent from London. He also arranged for Cerveira to go to Porto and receive the rank of Commander of the Order of Saint Michael of the Wing at the house of João de Albuquerque of Ínsua, the northern representative of the Grand Mastership. Zeferino felt moments of a tiger's joy, crouching as it measures the leap to its prey. His laugh was a grinding of teeth. He imagined that he was already chewing José Dias's liver.