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Father Osório, the parish priest of Caldelas, resumed his account in these terms.
“If Simeão's brain resisted the blows dealt by dignity, it was no more sensitive to the commotion caused by cudgels. He was twice fortunate in the matter of his head: neither honour nor the wound had inflamed it. The wound healed, and Simeão returned to his chickens with a cannibal's hunger and a fox's carnivorous delight. Marta had taken the gesture extracted beside her father's bed as tacit consent to marry her uncle. She waited in gloomy dejection for them to marry her off; when my sister spoke of it, she replied, “Do with me as you please; what have I to live for? It is all the same to me.” As for the marriage, I wondered whether its first night might be the eve of scandalous quarrels, regrets, tears, divorce and shame. Yet Feliciano had repeatedly confessed to me that he had left the village at twelve and returned as chaste and pure as when he went away. I then reflected that chastity, besides its intrinsic virtue, brings with it certain anatomical ignorances and certain unconscious concessions to the impurities of others. With that reasoning, I rested and soothed my scrupulous conscience. A false notion of other people's honour sometimes urged me to send the man back from Brazil to speak to the workman whom the moonlight had deceived one night. Honour, however, like conscience, is not a constant quantity in people at large. They are conditions of the soul as variable as matter exposed to changes in the weather. Now, Feliciano Prazins's mental and moral constitution seemed to me the best and safest guarantee of his own happiness. What right had I to spoil so excellent an organism?”
Thus far Father Osório had spoken, with his vast ethnological experience of the manners and customs of the back-country husbands of Minho.
The farmer brother was no more exacting in niceties of honour. Just as he had silently healed the heart wounded by the late Genoveva's disloyalty, he accepted the damage done to his head. The administrator advised him to bring a complaint against Zeferino, for there were witnesses who, he said, supplied sufficient circumstantial evidence. Simeão refused. “Then they really will finish me off,” he would say, with the prophetic gift and admirable prudence of a man without even a primary education.
Meanwhile, Zeferino wrestled with desperate bitterness, growing ever more foul-tongued and crazed by passion until he theorised about smashing half the world to pieces. Within him, his father's vice was beginning to prevail, bringing a burning thirst for port and gin. He got drunk and found ineffable relief and consolation in it; he felt young again, and life showed him a better face. He spent his nights with idlers in taverns where esquineta and monte were played. At the gaming table he changed the two-faced coins he had bought when he was still saving ten thousand cruzados over ten years of work. His companions cheated him. Professional gamblers came by night from Famalicão to Landim, near Lamelas, to set their trap for him with marked cards and a cheating device. After losing, mired in the dungheap of gambling and drunkenness, he got drunk all over again. In those delirious states, he went to Prazins with a gun on his shoulder and Tagarro of Monte Córdova for company. He spoke loudly and insolently so that Marta would hear him. Feliciano and Simeão were afraid of him and no longer opened the windows after sunset.
The news then spread that the man back from Brazil really was going to marry his niece.
Zeferino wrote Feliciano an anonymous letter, a copied and enlarged version of the workman's statement that he had seen José Dias jump from the window. At the end, he threatened him: if he married Marta, he would not enjoy her for long. Feliciano showed the letter to his brother, and both concluded that it came from the mason, driven mad by passion and rage. Feliciano began to brood that the villain might carry his revenge through to the end by beating or killing him. The shots aimed at his honour as Marta's future husband glanced off the armour of his conscience: “I know what I am doing,” he said. The idea of a shot striking his body, by contrast, genuinely disturbed him. With great secrecy, he told his brother, “This rogue must be disposed of.”
He thought of his compadre Joaquim Melro of Pena, a cross-eyed tavern keeper known by the nickname Alma Negra. It was Melro who had warned him when the Patuleia gang meant to seize him. Melro had broken with Zeferino over the division of money taken from the Guimarães mailbag and claimed, with deliberate exaggeration, that the former Patuleia man had been as thieving as a rat.
Melro was a bad lot. He had spent three years in the Relação as an accomplice to a homicide committed in his tavern. He lived in straitened circumstances, supporting his wife and four children, and since giving that warning had never ceased asking his compadre for loans. When Simeão was beaten, Melro whispered to him that Zeferino had been responsible, protected by two toughs from Monte Córdova. And he had added, “He knows very well whom he attacks; let him try it on me, or on someone whose hurt I would feel.”
Feliciano took a walk towards Pena, where his compadre lived. He said he meant to see the Quinta da Comenda, which was for sale, and asked Melro to show it to him. They talked and, on the way back, stopped before a house with three windows and a spacious yard.
“It is here,” Melro said. Feliciano put up his monocle and read the paper fixed to the door with four tacks. The notice declared that on Sunday, at ten in the morning after Mass, the house would be auctioned to whoever offered more than the judicial valuation of 500$000 réis. It added that the house, with a tithe due to God, was being put up for auction as part of a division of property. Feliciano withdrew quickly so as not to be seen and murmured words that the account does not reproduce. Melro answered him, “Your Honour reads very well indeed; if only Heaven were as certain for me as this house already is.”
Feliciano went on to Prazins. Melro told his customers that his compadre meant to buy the Quinta da Comenda and that, after reading the notice for the Casa do Cambado, he had said he might buy it for a godson. “For your boy?” they asked. “Who else could it be for?” Melro replied. “Now there is a thoroughly decent man!” A mason declared that Feliciano did not even know how much he owned and that giving away the house would cost him no more than paying for a measure of brandy. He added that he was working on the palace at Retorta, as rich as a monastery, where Feliciano apparently meant to live as soon as he married Marta. As for Zeferino, people said that he was bursting with rage and lurching like a man possessed. Melro declared that, to tell the truth, Zeferino had right on his side, since Simeão had promised him Marta. “Faithless people, the Devil take them!” he exclaimed, before adding that Simeão was his compadre's brother, that he ought to say no more, and that they could manage as best they might.
At eight in the evening, after the customers had gone, Melro closed the tavern. He peered in to see whether the children were asleep and told his wife, “The Casa do Cambado is ours, but Zeferino must be harvested.” “Heaven preserve us!” she exclaimed, putting her hands to her head. “May Our Lady help us!” “Keep your voice down,” Melro ordered, raising a finger to his nose. “Joaquim, husband of my soul, remember the three years you suffered in prison and look at those four children!” “I have told you not to sing that tune to me,” he replied. He cast his formidable squinting gaze upon her, lit like the flashes of the lamp at which he warmed his wooden pipe. Then he took an old gun hidden between the wooden bed and the wall. He sat by the hearth and told his wife to hold the lamp. He screwed the worm onto the iron ramrod, drew out the moss wadding first, then turned the barrel over and emptied the shot into his palm.
“Joaquim, think what you are about to do!” his wife insisted, wiping her eyes on the coarse cloth of her shift. He whistled the anthem of Maria da Fonte while emptying the priming powder, unscrewing the breech and releasing the two barrel bands. His wife sobbed; in a hoarse undertone he sang, “Forward, Portuguese, forward without fear.” “By the wounds of Our Lord, remember our little ones,” she pleaded. Melro, in a lyrical distraction, continued, “For holy liberty, to triumph or to suffer.” Then he blew down the barrel and covered the touch-hole at the breech with his forefinger, feeling the air press against the powder residue. His breath produced a rough tremor, obstructed by the nitrous deposits. He asked for strands of raw cotton, wound them round a pack-saddle needle and cleaned the barrel's touch-hole.
“It is dirty,” he concluded. “Give me a drop of brandy.” “Joaquim, let us go to bed, for the sake of the souls; do not ruin yourself!” his wife insisted. “Bring the brandy and be quiet, I have told you already, woman, by ten devils!” He began to whistle Luisinha. He wound brandy-soaked cotton around the worm and repeatedly rubbed the inside of the barrel. He stopped only when the last shreds of cotton came out white and dry. He blew again, and the air passed through the touch-hole without obstruction, with an even hiss. He seemed satisfied and hummed under his breath, “Now, now, now, Luisinha, now.” He assembled the gun and screwed the two bands, the breech and the lock back into place, inserting the pin. He repeatedly cocked and released the hammer, following its movement with his thumb. He meant to make certain that the parts called the desarmador, caixeta and fradete worked in harmony. He raised the steel, which answered with the hard sound of its spring, and rubbed it with fine powder. With the edge of a large horn-handled knife, he chipped the flint until it sparked.
“May the Virgin help me!” his wife sobbed. Angered by her lamenting, Melro vented his fury in a sfogato: “Long live our queen, Luisinha, who is a lovely captain.” He sent her to the storeroom to fetch the packet of cartridges from behind the fig basket and, from a corner, the little gourd of priming powder. His wife handed him the things while trembling, invoking the Bom Jesus of Braga and the blessed holy souls. He looked at her sideways and growled, “Enough, enough...” He loaded the gun with the powder from a cartridge. He struck the butt on the floorboards and slapped the chamber several times to make the powder settle by the touch-hole. He made two wads from the cartridge paper and lightly pressed them down with the ramrod, one over the powder and the other over the ball.
And he returned to the refrain, “Now, now, now, Luisinha, now.” He took the gun by the trigger guard and practised aiming at random, one eye closed as the other travelled from the sight to the target. His wife had sat down upstairs beside the pallet of three children who were crying. The youngest kicked and wailed on the bed, seeking her. Alma Negra went inside to drink several draughts of brandy. He returned wrapped in a military cloak, a spoil from the battles of Maria da Fonte. “Now listen,” he said. “Leave the kitchen door and the garden gate open, because I shall return by way of the pinewood.” “Go with Our Lady,” his wife replied. Then she knelt before a print of Bom Jesus and began to say many Our Fathers, one after another.
It was a February night, covered by dense fog. The sky looked like coal ground into damp mist, without a single opening in which a star might glimmer. The air stirred no bare branch, and not a blade of grass moved. It was the black, motionless serenity of the catacombs. At times the soaked leaves on the spongy floor of the oak woods roared beneath fleeing small beasts, polecats and foxes sniffing out the henhouses near the village. At every sound, Joaquim Melro started and put his finger on the trigger. The rustle of a wildcat or the owl's call from the distant bell tower sent shivers down the spine of the man who was going to kill another. The plan was settled: he would call Zeferino to the window and treacherously put a bullet through him.
“What devilish darkness!” he muttered as he blundered into the thorn bushes that pierced him. On nights such as this, the Universe would be the immense void before the Fiat of Genesis, were travellers not to collide with trees and slip among the brambles on the banks. The night wanderer feels through his own corns and his own nose the sweet pantheistic impression of trees and rocks. One is bound to acknowledge that this globe is very well made. Those who violate the rest that God reserved for the hours of darkness eventually learn that perfection. Village rogues who steal a neighbour's ham, ensnare an unwary girl or carry a murderous blunderbuss may never encounter the civic patrols of the great municipalities. They do, however, encounter the hostile, knotted trunks of trees, which are God's patrols. Some, nevertheless, are protected by the Mephisto to whom they sold their souls for the price of their electoral conscience, or for less still. Such men reach their crime unscathed, passing like wolf and boar among pruned oaks, rigid, their twisted arms raised in the agony of a gallows.
Melro, resembling the wild boar and the lynx, had plunged into pine woods and oak groves. From time to time he stopped, finding his bearings by the untimely crowing of cocks and the barking of dogs. At the foot of the slopes, the River Pele roared over the mill weirs and beside the rails of the little bridges. Lamelas lay on the far bank, but the river, roaring from hill to hill, made the small bridges impassable. Melro therefore made for the bridge at Landim, a most well-collared village. Light still shone in the windows of the distinguished families, gathered in splendid soirées of the faubourg Saint-Honoré to play bisca. With Sardanapalian luxury, they abandoned themselves to the excesses of a game of sueca played for beans.
A murmur of angry voices also came from Chasco's tavern. There was money inside: they were playing monte. Melro thought he heard Zeferino's name and crept, step by step, towards the hatch. He became certain that the mason was there. It was Zeferino demanding the return of a quartinho stake he had placed at the edge and which the banker had swept up with the other bets. The banker had done so when turning the opposing card face upwards. Zeferino shouted that he would not tolerate thieving. The offended banker observed that he would tolerate no jests about theft and that every man inside that door was a gentleman. Zeferino replied that he cared nothing for gentlemen. He wanted his quartinho back, or the world would end there and then. And he added that anyone wishing to steal should go to Terra Negra.
The allusion was far too accurate and highly inconvenient. Among the gentlemen around the table were several veterans of Faísca's old gang in Terra Negra, by then greatly reduced by transportation and the forces of law. A fight broke out with fists and sticks; the springs of knives snapped amid flashes of steel. Tagarro of Monte Córdova sent the banker face first across the two parts of the pack with a phenomenal, Herculean punch. The tavern keeper opened the door to let the turmoil pour out. The men tumbled out and, on striking the darkness outside, were left blind as though at the bottom of a cave. One of them, however, did not come out. He remained leaning against the counter, his hands over his lower belly, crying out that they had killed him. His knees folded in an anguished convulsion, and he fell face down while the tavern keeper and Tagarro tried to hold him beneath the arms. It was Zeferino.
At midnight, Alma Negra entered his house through the garden door. He found his wife still kneeling before the print of Bom Jesus do Monte. Beside her, two daughters were praying as well, shivering beneath a threadbare blanket and warming their hands with their breath. Melro sent the girls to bed and took his pale, trembling wife into the storeroom. He told her that Zeferino had died without his having had the slightest hand in it. She raised her hands in rapture and declared that it was a miracle of Bom Jesus, before whose image she had spent three hours on her knees. Her husband objected to the miracle: his compadre would not give him the house, since he had not been the man who harvested Zeferino. His wife replied that the Devil could take the house; they had lived until then in the rented hovel, and Bom Jesus would continue to help them.
The next day, Joaquim Melro came to be convinced of the miracle after all. After hearing his compadre's account of the mason's death, Feliciano told him, “Well, you get the house, compadre, because you would have killed Zeferino if the others had not killed him, eh?”