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Marta and Feliciano were married in the chapel of the Retorta estate. Father Osório, the parish priest of Caldelas, administered the sacrament. Dona Teresa was the female wedding sponsor, and the Baron of Rabaçal came from Porto as the male sponsor. He was a fat man, married to Eusébio Macário's daughter, whose fair flesh was soft as velvet.
Looking very pleased with himself, the Baron addressed Feliciano in his marked speech: “Forgive me, my friend Prazins.” “You are marrying a skinny little girl, with hardly any curves.” “I happen to have a fancy for plump women, eh?” “That is my philosophy: a woman should be well rounded, so that a man can feel her in his arms.”
The debauchee made the still chaste bridegroom blush. Over dessert, Marta did not even understand the obligatory jokes of a vulgar wedding feast. Those double meanings nauseated Dona Teresa, whose aristocratic sensibilities were offended. The parish priest, however, found in the Baron's briny brutality the sort of tickle that makes intelligent people laugh. Even Cervantes, Rabelais and Swift, the narrator adds, do not always achieve the same effect when they seek it. The Portuguese writer Mr Luís de Araújo is included in that mischievous comparison too.
Ever since leaving the church, Marta had remained sunk in unchanging sadness. Late that afternoon, she shut herself in her room with Dona Teresa and opened her trunk. From the bottom she took the small packet of José Dias's letters. “You must keep them,” she told Teresa. “When I die, burn them, will you?” Smiling, Teresa asked what would happen if she died first. Marta then asked her to have Father Osório burn the letters. Then she clung to Teresa, weeping and sobbing. “I shall die or lose my reason,” she managed to say. “This is how I came to such misery: I married to obey my father because I thought he was dying.” “I can see no way out except to end it all or go mad, as my mother did.” “You know very well how she ended.”
Dona Teresa consoled her with the commonplaces addressed to girls married to rich, repellent men. She told her that she would become accustomed to it and that time would make her forget everything. Something of an aristocrat through illegitimate birth, Teresa could not credit delicate feelings to the daughter of a coarse farmer and Genoveva, a woman of disreputable life. A passion for José Dias, a handsome village youth, seemed trivial to her. To a lady versed in novels, even the suicide attempt after his death was ordinary and of little significance. What seemed plebeian to her was Marta yielding to her father's will and marrying her own uncle. Teresa imagined that what she regarded as the base nature of Simeão's daughter had finally mastered a merely artificial delicacy.
Father Osório understood Marta more humanely. He told his sister that Marta had already been ill when she yielded to marriage with her uncle. In his opinion, that nervous illness would eventually drive her to suicide. Teresa's judgement, in turn, had been corrupted by the eccentric heroines of Sue and Dumas. She could not connect that girl from a Minho village to the lineage of Parisian women shipwrecked in romantic storms. If Marta was acting under the influence of madness, her misfortune seemed to Teresa an illness rather than a tragedy. Such was the taste of a reader of the choicest French Romantic fiction published between 1835 and 1845. The narrator calls that literature the falsest and most foolish writing in Europe. Teresa demanded more drama from Marta's unhappiness. In her eyes, the elegiac poetry of the suicide attempt dissolved into thin prose when she pictured Marta in the marriage bed with that great dormouse of an uncle.
Bedtime came. Father Osório had left for Caldelas to say early Mass and had left his sister behind at Marta's request. The Baron opened his mouth in noisy yawns and stretched himself, raising one leg. Feliciano kept his eyes fixed on the face of the clock. Marta pressed close to Dona Teresa and complained of cramps. She said that things were buzzing in her ears, that she saw sparks in the air and felt great heat in her head. Teresa advised her to go to bed, as she too needed to retire. Marta begged to be allowed to sleep beside her. Marta implored Teresa by the soul of her own mother and by the life of Teresa's brother, Father Osório.
Her guest understood and pitied her, and feared the fit that those signs usually announced. Yet she did not know how to ask Marta's husband to sleep alone. In all her novels, Teresa had never encountered an episode of that kind. At that critical moment, Simeão intervened and ordered his daughter: “It is time to go to bed.” “Your husband can barely keep his eyes open.” Marta fixed her emerald eyes on her father, blazing with anger. She jerked her head upright as her lips tightened. The narrator calls what followed an epileptic neurosis. Convulsions followed, with foaming at the mouth and a paroxysm that lasted twenty minutes. Dona Teresa asked for help in carrying Marta to her own bed. With aristocratic imperiousness, she told Simeão to leave Marta with her and not speak to her of her husband. Simeão scratched himself in deep displeasure. Feliciano explained to the Baron that his niece was prone to such fits. He added that the surgeon had promised him the fits would cease after marriage. The Baron declared the remedy excellent and remarked that it should be begun as soon as possible. He made several more coarse jokes and withdrew. Feliciano still went to ask after his wife, but Teresa's room was already dark. He went to bed and spent another night alone, still a virgin.
Dona Teresa felt awkward, almost ridiculous, in those surroundings. Marta would not let her go and seemed like a terrified child clutching her mother's dress whenever she heard her uncle's footsteps. Feliciano approached with great tenderness, his monocle in his right eye. He offered her castanhas de ovos and toucinho do céu, took her hand and stroked her face, which was deeply flushed with modesty. Discreetly, Teresa left them alone. Marta stared at the door through which her friend had escaped and made gestures as though she were thinking of fleeing. Her husband, however, held her delicate hands. He kissed them both with a delicate sensuality, a little slobbery but very restrained. The warm, moist kisses travelled up to Marta's rounded white wrists. Marta, impassive, did not resist the caresses. She even seemed to incline her face slightly when Feliciano, smiling with the love of a fifteen-year-old boy, asked her for a kiss. The kiss lasted longer than might have been expected from Marta's innocence and inexperience of such delights. Both were flushed, but Marta's colour was far too crimson. A vague gleam shone in her eyes, lost across the vast room. She saw José Dias's shadow. Later, when she recovered consciousness, she told Teresa that it had been José himself, there in person. She did not know how she had been carried to her friend's bed. She remembered only that, after kissing her face, her uncle had led her by the arm and entered the bedroom with her. He had clasped her tightly to his chest and lifted her in his arms. He had not allowed her to escape and had smothered her sighs with kisses. She remembered nothing more. Teresa could supply only an imperfect account of what followed. She said that Feliciano had come to fetch her from the orange grove, looking somewhat anxious. He had said that his wife was lying unconscious in bed and had asked for vinegar to hold beneath her nose.
Father Osório came to dine and collect his sister. On the returnee's face he saw the radiant happiness of a man who felt fearlessly complete in the fulfilment of his woman-loving mission. It was then that the priest settled his hitherto wavering theories on the advantages of chastity for the benefit of other people's impurity.
When the surgeon arrived that afternoon, Feliciano showed little regard for marital privacy as he described the circumstances of what he called his wife's 'fainting fit'. The practitioner, a jovial old fellow, declared that he was not surprised. He claimed that Dona Marta was highly nervous and that her constitution was not yet fully formed. According to him, unfamiliar and somewhat violent impressions caused extraordinary disturbances in weak constitutions. He told Feliciano not to be alarmed: it was nothing, and habit could create a second nature. He prescribed sea bathing, grilled steak and port wine, the staler the better. Above all, he wanted a boy to be born. In his theory, nothing strengthened a frail woman better than a child. As it left its mother's womb, he said, the child carried the bad nerves out with it and put an end to her fits of vapours. “Now produce a strapping boy for me!” he concluded.
In Dona Teresa's absence, Marta's melancholy closed in more tightly each day. She was indifferent to the running of the household, as though she were a guest. Feliciano did not compel her to concern herself with those arrangements. Simeão said that she had never taken an interest in such matters at Prazins. The Baron of Rabaçal had sent her a cook and a governess from Porto. Marta rarely left a small sitting room where she kept a household oratory brought from home. Every month she confessed to Frei Roque, the brother of her former schoolmistress and the teacher of the young man from Vilalva. She lingered in the confessional with wild questions about José Dias's soul. She told the friar that she often saw José in body and soul, heard him speak and felt his hands upon her body. Without breaking the seal of confession, Frei Roque told his sister only that Marta was going mad like her mother.
Feliciano was terrified when, during a paroxysm, his wife laughed at him with spasmodic eyes. Marta called him José, her dear little José. After the crisis she sank into a physical and mental stupor. Her husband then told her that she had called him her dear José. Marta strained to remember, but said she could recall nothing. The surgeon came often, called the illness hysteria and consoled Feliciano with the hope of that promised boy. According to confidences from the prospective father, the doctor considered that hope well founded. Father Osório, however, consulted Pedrosa, a distinguished physician. Pedrosa said that Marta was not suffering merely from gota coral, the old name for epilepsy. He saw epilepsy complicated by delirium, intermittent mental alienation and a state of unconsciousness or abnormal consciousness. He admitted, however, that it was impossible to determine securely which of Marta's acts belonged to intervals of lucidity.
“She is pregnant,” observed Father Osório, the parish priest of Caldelas. “That fact seems to indicate some normality of consciousness and a rational understanding of a wife's duties.”
“It indicates nothing of the kind,” Pedrosa retorted. “Think of her as a sleepwalker.” “Because her dementia is functional rather than organic, no physical disorder prevents her from becoming a mother.” The colleague who had attended her last seizure had told him that, a few minutes before the attack, Marta had declared that she wanted to flee to Vilalva and see José Dias. Fortunately, Feliciano was then in the pantry fetching vinegar. Pedrosa considered Marta lost unless she was given a rapid and complete change of mental scene. Even then, he said, the relief would be only temporary for someone who had inherited the misfortune of her mother and grandmother. He claimed to have attended the first and final stages of Genoveva's illness. In his account, the attacks recurred, reason gradually declined, and delirium, confused ideas, difficulty forming thoughts and what he called insane neuroses followed. Finally, Genoveva had killed herself in what he called a state of epileptic dementia, which specialists considered incurable. In his view, the same course awaited Marta. For Pedrosa, marrying her to her uncle had ceased to be merely immoral: it had been a stupid property arrangement by the father and an act of lust by the husband. According to him, the girl would have reached that state and would progress towards dementia even without drama or passion. “Her brain is defective, just as her spine might have been rickety,” he pronounced. He explained that sight was lost through paralysis of the optic nerves. In the same way, he claimed, the loss of the soul's normal vision would be the paralysis of a portion of brain matter. “I know very well that this rather inconveniences the theologian-metaphysicians, but they must settle the matter among themselves,” Pedrosa concluded. “This is the truth.”