Select a Portuguese sentence to reveal its English support.
Tap a Portuguese sentence to reveal its English support; tap it again or tap outside to close it.
With a keyboard, focus or activate a sentence. Press Escape to dismiss its English support.
In March 1846, the Setembrists of Braga stirred up the popular riots in the municipality of Lanhoso. In the British House of Commons, Lord Bentinck explained the origin of the rising in a tragically pompous tone, while local contempt called it a “rebellion of the rabble”. According to Bentinck, the Cabrais had ordered cemeteries to be built without walls, allowing dogs, cats and wild boar to enter and even dig up corpses. The cited account came from a letter addressed to Joseph Hume, translated by António Pereira dos Reis in 1847.
The narrator then invites nations and naturalists to imagine Portuguese cats of prodigious size, capable of mining the earth of the dead. He also marvels at the dogs' cordial alliance with those cats and the familiarity of the boar that came from Gerês to help excavate rotting flesh. Thus the 1846 insurrection would be inscribed in the annals of revolutionary Europe as a social battle against packs of dogs and cats, confederated with the desecrating snout of the wild boar. Hence, he adds ironically, German journalists, representatives of a serious country, called the Minho revolution a “model of legality”. The nocturnal and unlawful banquets of boar, bristling cats and mastiffs with bloodied fangs were said to have impressed the Germanic peoples because they violated the Constitutional Charter. But whether the agents were Setembrist agitators or the imagined pack of beasts, what is certain is that the insurrection devastated Alto Minho and Trás-os-Montes. Printed papers were burnt and the wine in country taverns was drained. According to the calculation made by Finance Minister Franzini, the war reduced the country's capital by seventy-seven and a half million cruzados. The narrator calls Franzini deeply reactionary, but a genius with figures.
At the first convulsions of the popular volcano around Guimarães, Zeferino das Lamelas prepared to act. When he heard the alarm bell ringing at Ronfe, he seized the bell rope, full of jealousy like the bell-ringer of Notre-Dame. He gathered labourers and idlers from three parishes in the churchyard and, to general applause, set them shouting death to the Cabrais. He then explained the land register, though he confused its name with the word for a grain store. He alleged that the Cabrais and their officials were listing the land so that Portugal could be mortgaged to England. Those lists, he said, were kept in government offices and in the homes of local administrators; they must be burnt and the Cabralists killed.
The crowd invaded the administrative offices at Santo Tirso, smashed the windows of the fleeing supporters of the Portuguese Constitutional Charter and burnt the printed forms and every paper it found in the fairground. It then moved on towards Famalicão. Zeferino had appointed himself leader of those people, already drunk on wine from the Cabralists' broken-open cellars. He proposed that they arrest every local administrator they found. He claimed that Joaquim Dias, the local administrator of Vilalva, had beaten the people with the constables at the Landim polling station during the fiercely contested elections of the previous year. The listeners' drunkenness gave the vengeful mason's treacherous lie the authority of historical fact. Zeferino's private plan was to create an opportunity for José Dias to be murdered or, failing that, to have him imprisoned and transported as a Cabralist.
Vilalva lay conveniently on the crowd's road to Famalicão. José, Marta's lover, heard a great uproar and saw the crowd surging tumultuously over a hill in the distance. A piece of scarlet cloth swayed in the air, a fragment of the old banner used in the processions of Santa Maria de Abade. José urged his father to flee. Joaquim refused: he had never harmed anyone, nor even arrested a draft evader, and the worst they could do was remove him from office.
José feared Zeferino's cowardly threats; reports were circulating that the mason had sworn to kill him and now led a guerrilla band joined by known thieves and murderers from the district. Maria pushed her son out of the door, telling him to flee to Caldelas before the Devil laid some trap for him because of Marta, “that little drunkard” who had scorned the mason. José put the pad saddle on the mare and galloped away to Caldelas. Trusting in his clear conscience, the local administrator waited for the rebels, led by Zeferino brandishing his father's sword, which had not left its scabbard since the attack on Santo Tirso.
“You are under arrest as a Cabralist!” Zeferino declared, seizing Joaquim by the lapel of his jacket. Turning to the crowd, he ordered, “Lads, surround the house; arrest everything you find inside!”
Joaquim replied that his sons had gone out and invited them to enter and search as they pleased. Then he mocked the mason: “Ah, Zeferino, you did not come here to arrest me; this is another story, and you know it. Women are our sins, Master Zeferino.”
“Do not sing that tune to me! You are under arrest, and you will go to gaol at once,” Zeferino shouted, lunging at him furiously.
Joaquim, still speaking as an authority acting within the law, demanded an order from the administrator or the civil governor before admitting that Zeferino could arrest him.
Zeferino retorted that there was no longer a civil governor, that other governments now ruled and that Dom Miguel I was king again. He called him an ass and ordered him off to gaol with “ten million devils”, a number serving his fury rather than any count.
The local administrator entered Vila Nova de Famalicão swept along by a tide of several thousand men and boys. The crowd acclaimed Dom Miguel, the new laws and holy religion while shouting death to the Cabralists. While the papers burnt, Sá Miranda, a Setembrist returned from Brazil, advised the commander not to acclaim Dom Miguel yet, but merely to condemn the government and cheer religion. In that confusion, Joaquim was left in the charge of about half a dozen labourers who were debating the old and new laws in Folipo's tavern. He understood a signal from the innkeeper, escaped through the back gardens and took the road to Braga, where General Count das Antas was stationed. Fearing that he would be pursued in Caldelas, José also took refuge in Braga, beyond Zeferino's immediate reach. There he enlisted in the Serezinos battalion, commanded by Canon Monte Alverne.
Meanwhile, Feliciano Rodrigues Prazins, Marta's paternal uncle, returned from America. He stayed only a few days because he feared the guerrillas would rob him; he went to Porto to secure his bills and returned when the fall of the Cabrais seemed to guarantee the peace of capitalists. Back in Prazins, 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 lied with an effrontery the narrator calls pardonable: “Brother, do not leave without an answer; the girl is fond of you.”
Feliciano was forty-seven and did not resemble most of his countrymen who returned from Brazil cushioned in abundant flesh. He was skeletally thin, a poet's constitution drained by the vampires of spleen. He nevertheless claimed to have sinews of steel and never to have taken an apothecary's medicine. Very short-sighted, he wore a single round monocle set in a cheap buffalo-horn rim. People in Pernambuco said that he used only one lens to avoid buying two and that, if he could, he would sell one of his eyes as useless. Through thirty years of work and thrift carried to the point of miserliness, he had amassed three hundred contos. He had reached the autumn of life without having loved and, according to the satire surrounding him, without sullying himself in the dens of wandering Venus. His chastity was proclaimed by clerks and overseers and, in the narrator's cruellest item in the list, by the enslaved women who lived under his power. His dissolute countrymen had nicknamed him Feliciano Pudicício, Feliciano the Chaste. He explained without embarrassment to the parish priest of Caldelas that he worked hard in his warehouses, slept little and gave neither his body any leisure nor vice any opportunity. He had refused wealthy matches because he did not need a woman in order to become rich, and had distrusted poor girls who might have been courting only his money. He had no inclination towards sex, a word he pronounced like the Portuguese word for a pebble; in short, he remained a virgin. He could paraphrase Hamlet: neither men nor women delighted him.
His niece had transformed the nature that the narrator presents as misshapen. Perhaps the disdain with which Marta treated him at the height of his passion partly nourished Feliciano's love. The young woman's slender figure, so like his own, still possessed charms enough to attract a man of forty-seven, all the more because he was excessively untouched. The coil of gold cords given to Marta betrayed, at least for a time, a disturbance in his miserliness. Marta accepted the gift without enthusiasm or joy. Her father had already warned her that she might become her uncle's wife if she could bring herself to like him. When she received the cords, she felt nausea and something close to hatred because she suspected her uncle's intentions; when he fled to Porto, her relief was beyond comparison. For a moment the narrator imagines that Feliciano's passion might be indulgent in matters of honour and would dispense with duplicated virginity in the marriage bed. He immediately corrects himself: Feliciano did not think in that way. No one had tarnished his niece's reputation in his hearing, and he saw no threat to her respectability in her courtship with José Dias. He lacked the worldly suspicion to imagine that a sixteen-year-old girl, brought up in the supposed natural innocence of a Minho village, might open her window at night and help a man climb up. Only the journeyman mason had seen José leave through the window on that moonlit night.
Marta was appalled to hear that her uncle wanted to marry her and responded angrily. Indulged in childhood, motherless, strong-willed and possessed of imperious airs that her rustic father had never known how to master, she did not weep like the meek daughters of tales of misfortune. She said bluntly that she would not marry her uncle: her father could disabuse him, or she would do so herself. The terrible announcement struck at her heart, full of longing for José, who had written to her from Braga through Father Osório. José gave her courage and promised marriage as soon as the war ended. Sustained by that hope, Marta resisted her father when he pressed the uncle upon her, perhaps, as he claimed, the richest man in Portugal after the king. She answered with gestures of weariness and contempt and, exasperated by his crude insistence, threatened to throw herself into the river as her mother had done if they continued to torment her.
Simeão lost his appetite and wandered about the house in a foolish grief, uttering sighs like the lowing of a calf lost in the hills. Marta stopped coming to the table, took to her bed and pretended to be ill so that she would not meet Uncle Feliciano.
José and his father remained in Braga, for Miguelist disturbances continued in several parts of the province, the new ministry was weak and Zeferino had never laid down his weapons. The Serezinos made sorties, fought the Royalists or arrested agitators. On one of those marches to Vila Verde, undertaken on foot when he was already in poor health, José contracted bronchitis and remained in bed for a long time. When he rose, his convalescence was only apparent: the tuberculosis was worsening and already showed unmistakable signs. Father Osório visited him, heard the doctor's opinion and learnt that his friend was beyond recovery. In private, he told Joaquim the prognosis and reminded him of his promise to consent to the marriage with poor Marta, “ruined”, in Osório's period language, because she had trusted José's commitments. The farmer could not see what Marta would gain by marrying if his son was destined to die young: the widow would inherit nothing, because José's heirs were his parents. He could not view the matter from any other side. Pressed by the word he had given, he repeated that he granted permission on his own part, but only if Maria granted hers as well. He justified his deference to his wife by saying that the entire Vilalva estate belonged to her and that his own contribution to the marriage had not been worth two snails.
“If the boy grows stronger, he may marry if his mother agrees; but while he is like this, please do not speak to him about the girl. A man who is truly ill has enough to do thinking of the salvation of his soul,” Joaquim concluded.
“The vicar is being taught the Lord's Prayer,” remarked the priest of Caldelas, ironically returning the lesson.
The patient, however, was in good spirits and no longer felt the despondency or forebodings of death that had afflicted him months before. He had grown accustomed to suffering and lost the memory of the perfect delights of health. Whenever he brought up phlegm without violence and the breathlessness yielded to syrups and Burgundy pitch, he considered himself almost entirely restored. He wrote cheerfully to Osório and Marta, giving thanks to God and the Blessed Virgin, to whom he had clung fervently since falling ill, and also to cod-liver oil.
Marta's revulsion, displayed in her uncle's presence, would have disabused the millionaire had Zeferino's implacable and ingenious jealousy not intervened. The guerrilla leader, then under a truce, learnt that Feliciano intended to marry his niece and that José was in Braga, greatly weakened and close to death. He gathered the men in his band and invented a story that the returned emigrant from Brazil had requested a regiment of Antas's division for Famalicão to besiege Royalist houses, even offering to maintain it at his own expense. They resolved to attack Feliciano, arrest him as a Cabralist and force him to hand over the money which, according to the lie, he would have given the troops. Metro, a neighbour who had invited Feliciano to be godfather to one of his children, sought him out in secret and warned him to hide. Feliciano fled hastily to Porto and wanted to take his niece with him, promising to buy her a house there. Marta replied that she was very ill and could not leave her bed. Simeão abused her: he said that she was not ill at all and thought only of José, but Doctor Pedrosa, who had seen him in Braga, had said that he was consumptive and would “kick the bucket” within a month or so.
Marta answered with the serenity of a strong spirit, but one sustained by a suicidal resolve. “If I do not marry him in this world, I shall marry him in the next,” she declared.
“The Devil take you!” Simeão would mutter, frantically bristling his side-whiskers. Soon he would return meek and sly to her bedside: “Your uncle is old and shrivelled; he cannot last long. You will be filthy rich and afterwards you can marry a nobleman.”
Gazing at the image of the Mother of Jesus pierced by the seven swords, Marta murmured, “Our Lady help me! If only I could die...”
With the damp cold of November, José's tuberculosis entered its second stage. His chest pains and breathlessness worsened, accompanied by nightly bouts of fever. His sputum had turned greenish, with yellow streaks; he was extremely emaciated and every kind of food repelled him. On auscultation, a gurgling sound could be heard from the cavities in his lungs. The doctors advised his father to remove him from the discomforts of the inn in Braga and take him to Vilalva, where he could die more gently in his own bed and with his family nearby. Carried to Vilalva in a litter, José said that he was breathing more easily and that, if he had left Braga sooner, he would already be strong again.
Seeing him enter so wasted and disfigured, Maria gave a great howl and cursed Marta, accusing her of having killed her beloved son. The neighbouring women agreed and consigned to the Devil the woman who, they claimed, had ruined him.
The sick man grew distressed and wept like a child, asking his father to take him to Caldelas, to his friend's house, because he could not bear to see his mother. If he had to die, he said, he did not want them to allow her near his bed. He made furious gestures, his eyes starting from their hollow sockets and his face burning with fever.
When Father Osório arrived, the calm consolations of his saintly friend soothed him. He lay down with the promise that he would go to Caldelas the next day, but he never rose again or attempted to do so.
Osório did not abandon him: he went to his church to celebrate Sunday Mass and returned to Vilalva with Marta's replies to José's notes. They were only a few lines, in which cheerful hopes still occasionally flickered.
Not even all Osório's influence could persuade José to receive his mother in the room; he could not forgive her hatred of Marta and declared her answerable before God for the girl's dishonour. Maria listened to that terrible summons to eternal judgement and, pious woman that she was, said to herself, “As if I would trust that.”
At last, José could no longer write or lift his head from the pillow. He asked Osório for news of Marta and begged him to send his brother to tell her that he was worse and could not write.
One of those messages prompted the note from Marta copied in the Introduction to this book. The dying man was no longer able to read it. Maria then forced into the room the parish priest bearing extreme unction, followed by a man in a ceremonial robe with a bell, another with holy water, two men with torches and several devout onlookers. After that forced entry, José sank into a comatose stupor and, at long intervals, suffered only brief fits of dry, wheezing cough. At those moments he opened his eyes and fixed them on Osório's face; at times his terrified gaze ranged around the room as though seeking the spectral vision of his mother. With painful embarrassment, the vicar of Caldelas prevented Maria from entering the bedchamber. Tuberculosis completed its fatal course: José Dias died without regaining consciousness and without reading Marta's letter.
In Prazins the bell of Vilalva was 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.” “Pray for his soul, for that is what he needs now,” he added.
Marta gave a great cry, put her hands to her head and ran away across the fields. She knew where to find the deep, still pool in the River Ave where her mother had taken her own life, and she was running towards it. Her father ran after her, shouting for help. Outside the village, many labourers who were clearing scrub left their work and ran after her. They had almost caught her when Marta fell in the fields, thrashing in convulsions, before she reached the river. They carried her home unconscious and left women to watch over her in bed. When the news reached Caldelas, Dona Teresa and her brother, Father Osório, went to Prazins and persuaded Simeão to let his daughter remain in their care for a time.
Marta wept profusely, clinging to José Dias's friend. When Simeão impatiently told her, “That will do, that will do,” Osório rebuked him sharply: “Let her weep, let her weep!” Turning to his sister, he concluded, “Stupidity is cruel!”