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Around that time, the long-awaited missioners arrived in Requião from the lands of Basto. The Maria da Fonte revolt had interrupted their barren apostolate. Marta greeted the news with excitement: she wanted to hear the sermons, for she said she needed to save her soul. Feliciano had returned from Pernambuco with his faith somewhat worn away, although he respected other people's beliefs and did not oppose his niece's devotions. That passive tolerance, however, was not the same as protecting her. Father Roque advised the husband not to let Marta sink too deeply into mysticism and to take her away from that place. In his view, neither sermons nor consecrated hosts would cure those illnesses; he knew Frei João's spiritual pharmacy well and foresaw that its first prescription would be to treat her as possessed.
“They will be the death of her, you will see,” the old schoolmaster-priest kept saying.
There were four missioners who had set up that supposed vestibule of Paradise in Requião.
Father José da Fraga was still young, well turned out and neat in his priestly clothes, with gravity and intelligence in his face. He had taken orders at Brancanes intending to spread Christianity in China. Family interests and entreaties kept him in his homeland without extinguishing his apostolic vocation. He had read and understood Raulica and Lacordaire, and imitated the latter with some skill. Osório advised him to save his pearls for an audience less like swine. Indeed, when they saw him in the pulpit at dawn, the women huddled together so that they might doze more comfortably. The men concluded that God had not called him to that path: as they put it, he had no knack for preachin'.
Father Cosme de Tagilde, a robust middle-aged man, was the author of The Stairway to Heaven by the Cliffs of Golgotha and The Seraphic Way to the Kingdom of the Cherubim. He was a preacher of feeling, although he had once been a sergeant in the Royalist army. He had taken orders in order to inherit the property of a devout female relative who was horrified by military life. While a sergeant, he had read the novels of Prévost and Madame de Genlis; those books had left him with a sugary language full of tragic interjections. He knew how to move mothers with tender images drawn from childhood. He invoked the child whom God had taken to join the angels and made him call from Heaven to his sinful mother. “Mother, do not sin,” he made the child plead, “by the tears you shed for me.” If she fell into temptation and the eternal abyss, she would never again see the little boy calling her. Cosme made his voice childlike, tilted his head languidly and stretched his open hands down from the pulpit. He pushed out his lips like a child and, with voice and arms trembling, repeated, “Mother! Oh, mother!” Then every woman who had lost a child burst into loud wailing.
Father Silvestre da Azenha was an old-fashioned man wrapped in a cassock whose filth seemed worthy of the lives of the saints. He was good-natured and incapable of deliberate lying, but he was an authority on the topography of Hell and on the genealogies, habits and customs of devils. He claimed that the infernal legions were divided into squadrons, each governed by the chief responsible for its particular vice. Lucifer presided over Lust; Asmodeus, Satan, Beelzebub and others likewise held their ministerial portfolios. A commander called Behemoth had the task of turning the faithful into beasts, a duty the narrator regards as wholly superfluous. Leviathan commanded Pride, while Mammon was minister and secretary of state for Avarice. Modern science, the narrator jokes, had killed this last devil, extracted his oil and put castor oil at the service of sinful bowels. Silvestre also explained to the women what the rabble of incubus demons was supposed to be. He told stories of women who, according to him, had become pregnant by those lecherous spirits. He added in Latin that those fertile demons could couple with a woman even against her will: “rem habere cum illa.” Without understanding a word, the listeners sniffed out the sense of the Latin and muttered indignantly, “I renounce you! Away! Crosses! Get behind me, Devil!” Then they crossed themselves and spat towards one another's heels.
Frei João de Borba da Montanha, though he did not enter the pulpit, was the dominant figure of the mission. He had left Varatojo already old, with a weak chest, a chronic clearing of the throat, few teeth and words that whistled from his mouth like blackbirds in July willow groves. For that reason, the confessional was the field of his heavenly harvests, while exorcisms gave him the glory of celebrated victories over all the infernal squadrons known to Silvestre. Hand in hand, the pair were said to be the terror of Hell: one discovered devils across the world and the other drove them out. The vicar of Caldelas had even entrusted the supposed omnipotence of the Varatojo friar with bringing José Dias's mother to heel. That earlier confidence did not, however, erase the distance between the sceptical vicar and the exorcist, who would shortly debate Marta's condition.
Frei João had paid from his own pocket for the third edition of The Sinner Converted to the Path of Truth. The work had been written by his fellow friar Frei Manuel de Deus, not by João himself. He sold each half-bound copy for 720 réis. He called the book the bucket with which he drew souls from the deep well of infernal sulphur. Since every devout woman considered herself more or less mired in the depths, she could climb into Frei João's bucket for 720 réis: a bargain, the narrator concludes.
This was the missioner chosen by Simeão in agreement with his son-in-law Feliciano. Marta remembered José Dias speaking to her of that friar, hoping he might remove the old obstacles to their marriage. She therefore wished to confess to the Varatojo friar. She prepared with a seraphic expectation, anxiously and joyfully resolved, as though her dead beloved were lending supernatural aid. Osório thought he glimpsed the beginnings of madness in that contemplative joy, a judgement that remained the priest's and his period's. From daybreak, Marta waited in contemplation at the church door for the mission to arrive. Behind the priests came hooded women with rheumy eyes, their iron-shod clogs striking the churchyard grating intended to keep out pigs.
Inside the church, once the mission sermon had ended, the consecrated host was laid upon the rough, cracked tongues of the devout women. In the narrator's savage image, they swallowed that wheaten flour like people brutally devouring a God. Meanwhile, in the churchyard, two trays were set upon folding stands beneath blue-cloth parasols. Women of forbidding appearance, dusty from their journeys and with hardened shins, displayed their wares there. At the same time, they traded insults over old jealousies and accusations of stealing customers with whining and patter. In the silence of the church, cries could be heard outside: “Get on with you, drunkard!” and “Shut up, you old fright!”
The display of books included, besides the missioners' own works, the Rule of Saint Benedict, long and abridged versions of the Mission, and various pious meditations. There were also The Christian's Hours, The Month of Mary, The Month of Jesus and The Book of Saint Barbara. They sold novenas and Stations of the Cross illustrated with figures the narrator judges almost sacrilegiously hideous, Christs resembling grotesque idols. Next came scapulars of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Our Lady of Sorrows and the Immaculate Conception, the Most Precious Blood, the Sacred Heart, the Holy Trinity and Saint Francis. The cords of that saint and the belts of Saint Augustine, fastened at the waist with a bone button, sold particularly well. The button supposedly made the belt armour impenetrable to the Devil, for bone possessed virtues almost as remarkable as flesh, though in the opposite direction. Flesh was said to attract the mangy hound; bone, by contrast, drove him away. There were also prayers of Saint Augustine and the Guardian Angel strung on metal or, more cheaply, on plain cord. The medal stall abounded in images of the Heart of Mary, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Guardian Angel and Saint Teresa. The most sought-after medals cost 10 réis.
The chaplets, hung from strings or spread out in coils, varied in size and name. The seraphic chaplets had seven mysteries, each with ten Hail Marys; those of the Immaculate Conception had twelve Hail Marys and three mysteries. The missioners graded those beads according to the penitents' spiritual leprosy, in the narrator's sardonic phrase. Some customers could manage rosaries of fifteen mysteries or chaplets of the nine choirs of Angels, the Most Precious Blood and the Sacred Heart. The greatest demand, however, was for jet beads against the evil eye: if the stone was genuine, people claimed, it would split in two beneath an enemy's stare.
Marta, the devout woman whom the sellers called “the brasileira of Prazins”, bought two of everything. Above all the devotional books, she preferred The Sinner Converted to the Path of Truth, in the edition financed by her confessor Frei João.
The secrets Marta revealed to her spiritual director in the tribunal of penance remain impenetrable. Osório suspected, but did not know, that the missioner's searching questions had led her to confess longing, dreams, visions and sensual memories of José Dias. He inferred this because Frei João had ordered her to read, three times a day, chapter 33 of the book, entitled Resistance to Temptations Against Chastity. Teresa knew only what Marta had told her: José's soul appeared in her dreams and, at times, seemed to be beside her in bed even when she was awake. At such times, she bit the pillow so that her uncle would not hear her weeping. The narrator allows only the possibility that she told her confessor further sensory details which shame had kept her from entrusting to her friend. He calls Frei João a simpleton incapable of distinguishing illness from sin, but that censure likewise belongs to the nineteenth-century narrative voice. One thing, however, is presented as certain: before the oratory, three times a day, Marta recited Resistance to Temptations Against Chastity.
The prayer ran as follows:
“Most loving Lord, do not hide from me or leave me alone, for the lion that would devour me surrounds me. Its roars torment me so that I cannot taste the sweetness of your love. I shall range across the whole world and ascend to Heaven; I shall not rest until I find my love. I charge you, daughters of Jerusalem and creatures of the Earth: if you find my beloved, tell him that I am dying of love. If you need signs by which to recognise him, listen: my beloved is white and ruddy, chosen among thousands. He is white because he is divine and ruddy because he is human; white with innocence and ruddy with his wounds. Ah, sweet love, where have you hidden yourself? Have pity on the one who seeks you. The signs I possess merely quicken my longing and wound me like arrows; if I do not find you, I die and faint away. The hair of his head is like the purest and most precious gold; it rises like palm shoots and is black as the raven. If you do not understand it, daughters of Jerusalem, neither shall I know how to explain it; I tell you only that this hair is a set of strong bonds, able to ensnare the whole world and set it ablaze with love. Beloved of my heart, if what I can only glimpse through riddles already sets my soul alight, what will it be when I see you clearly? His eyes are like doves above flowing waters: gentle, pure, soft, kindly and loving. They are majestic and humble, grave and serene, sweet and tender. O sweetest love, since you close your eyes so tightly that you may not be seen, at least do not close them so that you cease to see me. His cheeks are beds of fragrant flowers, always beautiful and sweet-smelling. Days, months, years and centuries pass, yet my love's cheeks remain flowers: the sun does not wither them, the cold does not cut them, water does not corrupt them and the wind does not strip their petals. They are roses and lilies, white and red. If only I might have one drop of the water that tends them and one grain of the warmth that gives them life! If only the Gardener who arranges them would sow flowers in my garden and take charge of tending them, for my beloved delights so much in flowers! Birds of the air, flowers of the field, fish of the sea and creatures of the Earth, tell me where that gardener dwells. Yet what am I saying, when that very gardener is the beloved I seek and do not deserve to find? O burning longing, O mortal thirst, O piercing arrow, O hidden love! What will you do, Lord, if your desire is to be loved, since my happiness consists in loving you? How can you hide the very thing that would make me fall in love with you? His lips are lilies distilling the finest myrrh, lilies of purity from which issue words able to kindle love of mortification. Oh, if only my soul were blessed enough to receive a little of the myrrh distilled by your lilies! Oh, if only my eyes were fortunate enough to behold the lovely colour of those lips! Where are you hidden, beloved of my heart? Are those not the lips from which come the words that make you call through the streets, strongholds and city walls, “If anyone is little, let him come to me”? Why, then, do you hide from this little, poor and needy woman who seeks you so earnestly? His hands are like gold shaped on the lathe and covered with hyacinths: perfect and precious. Look closely, daughters of Jerusalem: amid the gold and hyacinths, each hand bears a precious ruby that passes through it from side to side. His breast and inward parts are ivory adorned with sapphires. The sapphire's blue and the whiteness and hardness of ivory show that his affections are pure, candid, chaste, virginal, strong, heavenly and divine, sincere, well ordered, solid and constant. O breast of love, inward depths of pity, why do you close yourselves in this way to one who loves you? There must be a mystery here: perhaps you delight in seeing me distressed so as to test whether I am a true lover. You wish me to pay dearly for what is worth so much, for if I gained it without effort I might scorn what is beyond price. But, my beloved, if you do not tell me where you rest at noon, I fear that my wandering search may make me fall into the hands of your enemies. His appearance is like Lebanon and his form like the cedar; as Lebanon is the fairest mountain in Judaea and the cedar its finest tree, so is my beloved among the sons of men. His throat is most sweet, because through it pass the voice and breath of the breast, that storehouse of love and tenderness. In short, everything in him is beautiful, perfect and lovable. Such is my beloved, this is my friend; daughters of Jerusalem and creatures of the Earth, if you find him, tell him that I am dying of love...”
Marta spoke the prayer aloud, with sung modulations and in a rapture of preghiera. The narrator presents those phrases as a Varatojo patchwork of extracts and imitations from the most sensual passages of the Shulamite's dramatic poem, the Song of Songs, without making entirely clear who composed each word. According to that historically situated voice, such fervours supposedly set the tone for ecstasies and hallucinations attributed to Teresa of Ávila, Margaret Mary Alacoque and the Portuguese nun Maria do Céu, the singer of Vilar de Frades's little birds. He calls them a sweet, languid and quivering poison, made of caresses upon the skin of a naked body wrapped in ermine. In his critique, modern French manuals taught adolescent girls to converse with Jesus and imagine him in harmonious, soft bodily forms. Those readers would be led to await and desire him with every pulse, curve and suppleness of the flesh: the narrator's formulation, not a modern diagnosis of Marta.
Between the incomprehensible God and Christ made man, Marta saw a tangible being, the only point of comparison she possessed: José Dias. He was the husband of her soul, the dead man who ruled nerves rekindled by longing. In the apostrophes addressed to Jesus, the lover's distinct contours throbbed before her, as though he heard her from a blue clearing among the clouds. She saw his marble pallor and the ringlets of his fair hair, spread like those upon the heads of cherubim. Thus she conducted her courtship in Heaven whenever she opened the book intended, according to her confessor, to exorcise the voluptuous temptations of her soul and body.