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Frei João could no longer make sense of his penitent. The narrator conjectures that Marta's disclosures must have been so disordered that the Varatojo friar began to suspect possession and an incubus demon behind her visions. Feliciano disagreed with the implacable exorcist when the friar questioned him about details of the bedchamber. The husband merely reported that Marta spent much of the day praying from the book before the oratory. On some days she ate well and on others she ate nothing; she did not speak to the servants or take charge of the household. She spoke little to him as well; as for the obscure phrase “não desatremava”, one can say only that Feliciano reported no other obvious disorder. He also said that she slept well and remained in the same bed as him, facts which proved neither consent nor lucidity. It was true, he added, that at times he woke and found her sitting up, her eyes fixed on the ceiling.
“That is precisely it...” the Varatojo friar would interject.
“What exactly is it, Frei João?” the husband would ask.
The confessor could not explain himself: Brognolo's practical treatise, expanded by the Arrábida master Frei José de Jesus Maria, ordered signs of possession to be hidden from third parties until the properly prepared battle. In this case, the equipment of war would be the stole, holy water and Latin, a language the text considers familiar to the Devil. Besides the rules of the art, the inviolable seal of confession had to be observed. A charity described as decent advised that Feliciano be kept unaware of the alleged adulterous advances of an incubus appearing as José Dias's ghost. With the vicar of Caldelas, however, Frei João was less guarded. He assured Osório that the brasileira of Prazins was possessed and was a gravely afflicted demoniac. Osório let slip an untimely smile, like the involuntary nausea of a seasick traveller; João saw heresy in the grimace and asked whether he had doubts.
“One small doubt: I cannot accept that the Devil, being a child of God, is the wicked being who makes poor Marta suffer...” the vicar replied fearlessly.
“The Devil, a child of God! Father Osório, you have uttered an enormous blasphemy! Holy name of Jesus! Anathema!” Frei João interrupted, raising his clasped hands to his forehead.
“Anathema to logic and therefore to reason!” the other man replied, serene and smiling.
“Logic? The logic of Calvin and Voltaire,” João retorted.
“No, sir: the logic of the teacher who taught it to me at Braga seminary. Is not a creator a father?” Osório asked.
“Yes, he is. What follows?”
“God is the father of all creatures; the Devil is God's creature; therefore God is the Devil's father.”
“Distinguo!” protested the Varatojo friar.
Without heeding the scholastic interruption, the vicar continued.
“If God is good, his creatures cannot be evil; now, the Demon is evil; therefore he cannot be God's creature.” “But if the Devil is not a divine creature, I ask the question that a Black man in Africa once put to a missioner: who is the Devil's father?”
“Distinguo!” João insisted, supported by the old formulas of crushing dialectic. He explained that God had created the angels, some of whom rebelled and were cast down from Heaven, becoming infernal spirits. Others, he said, had not descended to the lower darkness and remained in the murky air to scourge humankind. He quoted Saint Augustine: “Aer caliginosus est quasi carcer daemonibus usque in diem judicii.” God supposedly allowed demons to torment his creatures for the good that might result from that torment, an idea João linked to Saint John's Gospel: “Omnia per ipsum facta sunt.” If God permits evil, he concluded, that evil must be good because God is the Supreme Good, although he immediately conceded that evils are not goods.
Osório was about to answer, but the missioner cut him off, prompt and triumphant.
“But God draws good things from those very evils,” João declared, quoting Saint Thomas: “Bonum invenire potest sine malo, sed malum non potest invenire sine bono.” God therefore supposedly permitted evil as a cause of good, and the Demon as a wholesome exercise for humankind. He invoked Saint Augustine once more: “Melius judicavit Deus de malis bona facere, quam mala nulla esse permittere.” He then translated a maxim of Saint Thomas: “Divine wisdom allows demons to do evil for the sake of the good that results from it.” He repeated it in Latin: “Divina sapientia permittit aliqua mala fieri per malos Angelos propter bona quae ex eis elicit.” According to him, there were twelve reasons why God allowed demons to torment human beings. He began only the first: that a man obstinate in guilt should be tormented in this world and the next. No sooner had he uttered “second...” than Osório interrupted him.
“I am convinced, Frei João; Your Reverence has cleared up my doubt,” the vicar declared with merely apparent agreement. “God permits scourging demons to purify sinners, both groups being creatures of his divine justice.”
“That is precisely it,” Frei João confirmed, missing the irony.
Osório drove the conclusion further: “The sinner's spirit, an inner demon, is purified by the action of another, outer demon, both creatures of divine love.” “I understand. I am convinced... God is like a father who lashes his beloved son to see whether he receives mortifications as caresses.” “What a splendid father!” he concluded. He then added bitterly that superstitions of this kind might yet bring Catholicism down, though the religion owed its existence to truth's victory over the lies of idolatry. “Ego sum veritas,” Osório concluded: “I am the truth.”
Frei João was preparing to strike down the argument once more when the other missioners arrived for the farewell dinner at the brasileira's house.
The mission had ended and the priests were to leave for Barcelos, but Frei João, intent on what he called ridding poor Marta of demons, stayed at Quinta da Revolta. In the estate chapel he celebrated Mass and heard the confessions of his spiritual daughters, insatiable for the bread of angels. The narrator sees them digesting communion in sleepy idleness, sitting in churchyards and sunny doorways while picking over their own fleas and other people's lives.
Frei João had brought every implement considered harmful to the Devil. Resolved to give battle, he armed the woman he called a demoniac with weapons he believed proven in his victories over Hell. He hung around her neck a fragment of the True Cross, a breve da Marca, the image of Saint Benedict and the Creed of Saint Athanasius. He added little crosses from Jerusalem, an image bearing the head of Saint Anastasius and relics of various saints. Among them were splinters of bone stuck to scraps of cloth. He added handwritten prayers of his own composition, kept in little bags worn by the sweat of other women he had considered possessed.
As preparation, Marta was required to fast. It seems, the narrator observes ironically, that the Demon prefers to inhabit stomachs warmed by a bolus of food. The exorcist himself fasted according to his manuals and advised Feliciano to do likewise. He invoked the text attributed to Jesus through Saint Matthew, according to which certain devils would not depart without prayer and fasting. He quoted it in Latin: “Hoc genus daemoniorum in nullo potest exire nisi oratione et jejunio.” Feliciano assured him that he was fasting, but behind the friar's back he ate ham steaks with eggs. He was beginning to display a selfish concern for his own food and rest, accompanied by cynical contempt for the place the Devil had acquired in the family.
Frei João then set out for the vicar of Caldelas the many signs which, in his view, proved that Marta was possessed.
The first was Marta hearing José Dias call her in dreams and while awake. João pointed to the formula in the manual, “quando patiens audit quasdam voces se vocantes.” Another sign was supposedly her aversion to meat and bread and her severe loss of appetite. Osório reminded him that these might be nausea associated with pregnancy, but the Varatojo friar answered in Latin: “Quando quis non potuit gustare panem aut carnem.” Marta digested food with difficulty; for João, the book was enough to attribute that difficulty to the Devil. He pointed to the words, “Quando quis sanus cibum digerere non potest in stomacho.” She wept without saying why; João declared this certain devilry and quoted, “Quando lacrymas plorat et nescit quid ploret.” A thirteenth sign strengthened, for the exorcist, the hypothesis of possession by an incubus. It appears, and only appears, that in confession Marta accused herself of repugnance, concessions wrested from her by force and resistance to her husband's caresses. She may also have said that the image of José Dias intervened in those struggles in the bedchamber. None of this is a transcript of the confession: the narrator infers the possibility from the passage João indicated in Brognolo. The Latin text described a husband unable to approach his wife, or a wife her husband, because an intervening body was seen or seemed to be there. João preserved its authority in a language inaccessible to many: “Quando vir uxori et uxor viro appropinquare non potest, quia videt aliud corpus intermedium, aut sibi videtur esse.”
“This is where the decisive point lies!” Frei João said, hammering his forefinger upon the indiscreet page.
Osório asked whether that vision might instead mark the onset of mental alienation, and recalled the deep sorrow connected with Marta's past. “Do you not see how cast down, how melancholy she is?” he insisted.
João replied that melancholic people were those most tormented by the Demon, and directed Osório to Galen and Avicenna in his Brognolo, whose pages he turned until he found the triumphant passage.
“Here it is; read it and you will see that madness may be the work of the Demon,” he announced.
Osório read, with a curiosity the narrator calls ignorant, that demons supposedly assailed melancholic people above all. First, the treatise said, because the melancholic humour was supposedly difficult to expel and by nature rebellious and disobedient. Second, because that humour was said to be capable of producing various incurable illnesses. If it were too dry, it would harm the membranes of the brain and drive the person mad; if it reached the ventricles, it would cause apoplexy, rages, frenzies and hatreds. And the effects of melancholy, the text concluded, were often supposedly caused by the Demon.
On noticing Osório's smile, Frei João grew angry and asked whether he knew what João had already heard from the abbot of Santiago de Antas. The abbot was said to have remarked that the vicar of Caldelas was unreliable in matters of faith and left a certain smell of heresy in his sermons. He further accused Osório of placing greater trust in quinine than in miracle-working saints for the cure of illness.
“If that smells of heresy, Frei João, I am utterly lost,” Osório replied, leaving the missioner open-mouthed. For Marta, he would prefer shower baths, sedatives and distractions to exorcisms. If those measures failed, he would place her in an asylum for mentally ill women, a historical proposal rather than present-day medical advice. He justified this by saying that Marta was the daughter of a madwoman, the granddaughter of others whom he called mad, and that everyone would soon see her, in the period's language, wholly deranged. “Besides being a heretic, I am a prophet,” he said ironically. For Osório, the supposed demoniac suffered from the demon science rarely defeated: what he called hereditary madness. If water from a shower did not cure her, he added, holy water would not do so either. He advised Frei João to consult doctors before trying exorcisms. Neither theory, demonological or hereditary, is offered here as a modern diagnosis or definitive truth. Both belong to the voices, knowledge and limitations of the nineteenth century.
With contempt for “poor medicine”, João replied that he knew perfectly well what doctors said. Exorcisms, he said, were not his invention but a remedy bequeathed by the Church of Jesus Christ and used by the divine Master himself. He asked whether Osório had not read in the Gospels that Christ cast out demons. And he pressed him with two questions: did he deny the authority of the Gospels, and did he deny Jesus's exorcisms?
“No, sir; I know the story of the legion that entered the swine...” Osório replied.
“And others: the sacred books are full of those facts which you call stories; they are not stories, they are facts,” João corrected him.
“Ah, Frei João! Are Jesus Christ, his life and his miracles not history, do they not belong to history? That would be a serious matter!” the vicar retorted.
The controversy continued with some bitterness, and Osório went on scandalising the former friar's pious ears. Frei João, hands upon his breast and eyes raised to Heaven, exclaimed with Saint Paul that scandals must needs arise. Feliciano interrupted them to say that his niece had suffered a seizure in the garden. João entered the room to which Marta had been carried; Osório remained behind to hear the governess's account.
“The poor creature has lost her reason entirely,” she began, saying that she was rinsing handkerchiefs at the tank when Marta entered the orchard without noticing anyone. Marta began cutting roses and saying that they were for her beloved José Alves, for her husband José Alves. “Would Your Reverence tell me who the devil, God forgive me, this José Alves is?” the woman asked, unaware that the name here differed from the story's José Dias.
“And then?” Osório asked.
The governess said that Marta had sat beneath the vine trellis and wept with the bunch of roses pressed close to her face. Soon afterwards, she fell sideways, flinging her arms and legs about. The governess called the cook, and together they carried Marta unconscious to her room. In the servant's opinion, José Alves must have been some sweetheart from Marta's unmarried days, for she had heard that Marta was married against her will to “that herring of an uncle”. “That is what comes of marriages like these...” she concluded; the inference remained her own.
Father Osório did not enlighten the governess or resolve the discrepancy in the name. When Feliciano told him that the exorcisms were about to be read, the priest withdrew, pleading parish duties. Before leaving, he gave Feliciano a warning.
“Do not let them torment your niece too severely with the exorcisms, Mr Prazins,” Osório urged. “The demon she has is her illness.” He told Feliciano to follow Father Roque's advice, that of an old, learned and virtuous man: travel with Marta and take her to the capital. They should remain there and return only when Marta seemed diverted, contented and restored to a good appetite.
Feliciano replied that he knew perfectly well that the exorcisms were nonsense, but the friar had installed himself in his house and swore not to leave without curing her. He added that he could not leave Minho just then, because he was waiting for Cerveira de Quadros's sons to gamble away in Porto their share of several contos de réis inherited from their father. Only then did he hope to buy Quinta da Ermida, which adjoined his own property. He was in a hurry because another Portuguese returnee from Brazil had his eye on the same estate. Marta's safety was thus made subordinate to her husband's property speculation. As for his niece, he intended to take her for sea bathing later on. He would also buy Raspail's Manual to see what it said about her illness. He claimed that in Pernambuco every kind of illness was cured by Raspail, a satirical boast rather than health advice. And he consigned the friar and the whole wretched business of exorcisms to the Devil. Despite admitting the absurdity, he neither sent João away nor agreed to leave, and no exorcism had yet begun.
“Very well, buy Raspail's Manual,” Father Osório agreed. He meant Frei João and Feliciano: he left utterly exhausted, as he told his sister Teresa, from dealing with the two blockheads.