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Marta was in her room, before her ebony oratory with its gilded borders. Within it, an old ivory carving depicted the human agony of Christ with dignity, flanked by two blessed wax candles. Frei João had entered in surplice and stole; Feliciano followed with a one-pound candle alight, and Simeão with the holy-water vessel. Osório was not present; Marta remained standing against the chest of drawers, trembling with terror written in her eyes. The exorcist sat down and summoned the woman he already regarded as possessed with an imperious motion of his head. She approached hesitantly and knelt down. João composed his features and gave his voice the mournful intonation required by Brognolo's rubric: a grave aspect and a terrible voice, the demonologist prescribed. He began with the probative Precept, intended to establish whether a demon was indeed present. “In nomine Jesu Christi. Ego Joannes est minister Christi...” he thundered, making Marta start. In ordinary language, he was ordering the Devil or unclean spirits to give an evident sign in that creature's body, by tormenting her or stirring her humours as God might permit. Marta froze with sacred horror, although of the priest's Latin she understood only the words demon and unclean spirits. No one had ever told her that they believed her to be possessed. According to the narrator, she then lacked the persuasive force and verbal energy needed to resist her confessor's deception. The same narrator censures her inert will and adds that, even if educated in better conditions, she would still have succumbed, with the same inert will, to the confessor's violence. There are compliant forms of humility, he observes, more shameful still when not even a diagnosis of madness can be offered in excuse. Marta remained on her knees, but, unable to support herself, sank into a sitting position amid gasping sighs until her tears burst forth in a torrent.
Frei João made a satisfied grimace, taking her suffering as an omen of victory. In the lenitive Precept, he ordered the accursed demons to cease at once the torment and all the affliction he attributed to them. He moved at once to the instructive Precept, commanding them to prostrate her before him if she was possessed. Marta was indeed prostrate, her face on the floor and her arms stretched out in the paroxysm. Her neck and trunk remained stiff in a rigidity described, in the medical language of the period, as tetanic.
“There can be no doubt,” the exorcist declared to the husband and father of the woman he called possessed. “Take her away, and we shall continue later.”
When the lethargy had passed, Marta told her uncle that she scarcely remembered what had happened in the oratory with Frei João. She said that she was afraid of him and did not wish to confess to him again.
“It is more firmly proved than ever that she is possessed,” João exclaimed. “It is no longer she who speaks; it is the Devil who fears me!” With holy conceit, the friar thus dismissed Feliciano's somewhat sceptical hesitation. Meanwhile Simeão insisted that his daughter had the Devil in her, for he believed that his late wife had also had it. He added that she had thrown herself into the river because she had never allowed the prayers to be said over her; this explanation was Simeão's belief, not a demonstrated fact.
The next day, after Marta's reluctance had been overcome, the exorcist continued, more scowling than before and with still more dreadful vibrations in his voice. He handed her his Brognolo and made her read aloud the Precepts intended for the afflicted creature. Kneeling before the oratory, Marta read the command by which, as a rational creature of God redeemed by Christ's blood, she ordered the Devil to obey her in the name of Jesus. The text made her ask him to torment her lightly, making her body tremble or casting it to the ground, while leaving her reason intact.
Marta's body was visibly trembling. With an impatient movement, she thrust the book back at the exorcist and murmured through her sobs.
“Leave me alone, leave me alone, by the wounds of Christ!”
Frei João smiled and muttered into Feliciano's ear.
“The accursed one is using Christ's name to drive me away!” “I shall smash you to pieces, Satan!”
He then took up the sword of the Objurgations. These were questions put to the Devil, with a fierce countenance and in Latin, preceded by insults. João asked the accursed serpent whether it knew God, whether it knew it had been created a radiant angel and had lost itself through pride. He wanted to know whether it acknowledged the eternal loss of grace after expulsion from Paradise and whether it acknowledged him as a minister of God. At last he challenged it to reveal itself: “Quomodo igitur poteris contra estimulum calcitrare?”
The Devil had not yet answered, in the narrator's caustic logic, but the friar prepared to press him harder and ordered everyone to kneel. He assumed a seraphic posture, his arms crossed upon his breast and his eyes fixed on Christ.
“Veni, sancte spiritus: reple tuorum corda fidelium, et tui amores in eis ignem accende,” he declaimed. He was asking the Holy Spirit to fill the hearts of the faithful and kindle in them the fire of divine love. Then he intoned: “Dominus vobiscum.”
“É de co espirituo,” replied Simeão, who knew how to serve at Mass.
There followed several Oremus prayers, supplications and the Litany of Our Lady. More prayers followed, together with the long renunciation which the supposed possessed woman was required to address to the Devil. The text began by asking the accursed Devil by what authority he presumed to possess or molest that body. Marta rejected the book again and said that she could neither read nor remain on her knees. She was dizzy and wished to go to bed. The exorcist, stern and formidable in the ministry he was performing, refused: she would not go to bed, she would not escape him, and she must kneel at his feet. Obeying the rubric of his manual, he sat, covered his head and, in a grave and terrible voice, faced the Devil like a judge confronting an already convicted prisoner. He sprinkled Marta with holy water, howling “Asperge me, Domine...”, and ordered those present to extinguish two candles and say not a word. A profound silence fell. Only the flies could be heard as, drawn by the warmth of the single light, they fluttered down from the ceiling and settled on Christ's wounded brow. The spacious room lay almost in darkness, and the curved sides of the oratory concealed the candle. The narrow projection of light reached only Marta, shrinking in terror, her clasped fingers held to her lips as though she wished to stifle her sighs.
After several minutes, the exorcist began to conjure and bind the Devil in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. He called it unclean and showered it with epithets capable, according to the narrator, of offending the most shameless scoundrel. Marta made a distressed movement and seemed to be trying to flee. The priest restrained her with his stole, following Brognolo literally: if she would not keep still, she might be bound with a stole. After fresh and still more terrible conjurations, he rose with dreadful solemnity. “Exurge, Christe! adjuva nos! Rise, Christ, and aid us!”
The former friar was still invoking Christ when Marta fell unconscious.
“Victory!” exclaimed the exorcist. “Victory!”
Showing Feliciano a page of the book, he announced what he considered the surest sign that the Devil had obeyed and departed entirely. Scripture, he said, presented in chapter nine of Saint Mark the sign of leaving the creature upon the ground for a time as though dead. He invoked the deaf and mute possessed man whom Christ had cured and quoted: “Et factus est sicut mortuus.” He wiped away his sweat in jubilation, as though the fall had confirmed a cure.
“You may carry her away and put her to bed; place all the relics beneath her pillow.”
Feliciano and Simeão could not lift her easily. Her rigid body, as though turned to stone, seemed fastened to the floor. Feliciano asked the exorcist to support her by one arm. The friar, an austere artist of his trade, replied that he was forbidden to lay hands upon possessed women. Carlos Baucio's Art of the Exorcist laid down that an exorcist must not touch the creature physically, particularly if she were a woman, propter periculum. The rule concluded that women should not be touched even with the sign of the cross: “Mulieres nec signo crucis sunt tangendae.”
Marta spent the night greatly agitated, feverish and delirious. She gave silvery little laughs, spoke of José Alves and shook the bedclothes frantically. When she emerged from her torpor, she sat up in bed and stared at her uncle with a fixed gaze that repelled him. Feliciano had not gone to bed and, at dawn, told his brother to fetch the doctor, for Marta had a raging fever. He also consigned the friar, the Devil and the exorcisms to the depths of Hell.
Once daylight had come, Feliciano went to rest for a while in Teresa's bed because he feared that his wife's fever might be contagious. At nine o'clock, the governess woke him in great alarm. She told him that Marta had gone out alone at sunrise and that a woman had found her near the vicar of Caldelas's house, running as though distraught. Frei João received news of her flight just as he finished celebrating a thanksgiving Mass for the triumph over the Devil which he claimed for himself. The doctor arrived at the same time and was told about the scenes of the exorcism. He hurled at the Varatojo friar insults which the friar himself had not hurled at the Devil. He called Feliciano and Simeão a pack of fools and left with Feliciano for Caldelas. Insulted by the doctor and by Feliciano's brusque manner, João cited Jesus's command to shake the dust from one's sandals at the threshold of the ungodly. He went away, followed for a long stretch by several devout women wailing loudly. When he vanished round the bend in the road, some tore at their nit-ridden hair, others slapped themselves, and the most overwrought gave piercing shrieks.
Melro, the tavern-keeper and Feliciano's compadre, saw them pass his door, weeping after the missionary. He stepped into the road and, with a rationalism the narrator calls brutal, flung his insult at them.
“Ah, you great coiras!”