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Marta returned with Teresa several days later. Feliciano agreed that his wife should receive the hydropathic treatment then proposed. Moved by compassion, the vicar's sister offered to nurse the poor woman. Marta clung to Teresa in terror and begged her not to leave her and to protect her from the missionary.
Teresa attended the birth of Marta's first daughter. She imagined that a benign change would take place in the mother's mind. She hoped that love for the child would divert Marta from her longing for José Alves. The medicine of the period, however, expected no perceptible change. Alienist treatises took it for granted that a damaged brain could not be restored under the influence of maternal love, which they said acted only upon normal constitutions. Teresa, however, could not believe that Marta was definitively mad. In conversation, though she rarely took an interest in what she heard, Marta said that she saw José Alves's soul with the simplicity of someone recounting an ordinary occurrence.
When the newborn child was shown to her, she looked at her for several seconds but uttered no endearment and showed no delight. Her friend spoke very tenderly to her about the child, trying to awaken her heart. She placed the baby in Marta's arms and gave her the child to kiss. Marta yielded sadly and under constraint, kissing her daughter as though she were someone else's child. The wet nurse would tell the servants that the brasileira was a “cafra” and could not bear to look at the little angel from Heaven. The colonial and maternal censure belonged to the wet nurse; it did not define Marta.
The paroxysms became less frequent, but the clouding of her mind showed itself three days before each attack, amid strange behaviour and delirium. She shut herself in her room with many pots of flowers, arranged across the floor as though she were laying out a garden walk. Once she explained to Teresa, her daughter's godmother, that she had prepared that path of roses because of a promise made by José Alves. He had told her in Prazins that he would make a garden in Vilalva when they married. She had therefore made the garden so that they might walk there together when he came at night. Teresa looked at her with immense pity, then convinced that Marta was lost to ordinary life.
When Marta shut herself in her room, Feliciano already recognised the approach of an attack and went to sleep in another bed. He said that he needed his rest because he had to rise early to supervise the labourers and could not lose his nights. Already tormented by regret at having married, he escaped the inescapable distress in order selfishly to preserve his own comfort. He even reflected that, with a wife so ill, he would not find widowhood altogether unpleasant. After the attack, however, Marta sank back into a serene, meek and impassive torpor. Then her uncle returned to her bed, driven by his own comfort and by the needs he considered imperative in his physiology. Nothing in that passivity proves consent, affection or marital reciprocity. This is how the narrator explains Marta's fertility: she bore her husband five children in seven years. The doctor had already explained to Father Osório, in the terms of the period, that Marta's madness was functional. According to him, the reproductive faculties had nothing to do with the cerebral abnormalities he attributed to the patient. “Providence was not kind enough to make madwomen barren,” the narrator concludes in his cruel satire.
During the three days preceding her seizures, however, her husband appeared to become repulsive to Marta. Then, in the figurative language of the narration, José Alves came back to life for her. Her beloved rose from the grave and bore her upon his angel's wings to the paradise of Prazins. Teresa, with her ear pressed to the keyhole, heard her speaking as though in dialogue. After a question, Marta would remain silent for a long while and then creep to the door to see whether anyone was listening. She uttered confused, muffled and caressing words, as though her lips were touching a beloved face. José's name stood out with joyous clarity and a note of childlike tenderness. At times she gave a cry of desperate effort, as though he were tearing himself from her arms to escape. A spiritualist of Kardec's school, the narrator conjectures, might draw from that experience an argument in favour of visible manifestations. In that system, the fluid or perispirit would appear semi-material, with the body's vague forms and almost tangible to the medium.
Feliciano knew nothing of these scenes, which the narrator calls preternatural. By the sixth year of his marriage, he had armoured himself in an impenetrable miserly selfishness. He cut deeply into every expense, even those economies which, beside his enormous fortune, looked like sheer parsimony. Medicine already considered him a lunatic, as though he had been infected by his wife's alienation; the assertion belongs to the period and its satire. “And what is madness but the exaggeration of character?” asks the narrative voice. Because they saw him crossing his pine woods in a monocle, gesticulating and talking to himself, the neighbours called him mad. The narrator rejects that popular hypothesis: Feliciano was performing arithmetic aloud. He calculated as the inspired poets of old declaimed rhythmic madrigals in the open air and by moonlight. What is certain, the narrator observes, is that no one found a dark interval through which to cheat him of a single vintém. One after another, he bought every estate that had belonged to Vasco Cerveira Lobo de Quadros. He acquired some from the widow and others from the sons. Honorata Guião, married for a second time to the overseas judge Adolfo da Silveira, came to metropolitan Portugal when she was widowed. She intended to establish her right to inherit half of the lieutenant-colonel's unentailed estate. When Egas and Heitor learnt that their mother was at Pombais with her husband and children, they tried to drive her out. They threatened and insulted her and fired shots at the window. The magistrate fled with his family and thereafter attended the legal proceedings with an armed guard. In the end, Honorata sold her share at a ruinous price to the returnee Prazins. The Morgado and his brother, after the unentailed property had been sold and both were, in the narrator's savage judgement, shamefully married, dragged out the rest of their lives at the gaming tables in taverns. The daughters, in the satirical image, escaped the shipwreck by clinging to the planks of their dowries. They readily found husbands who redeemed the property belonging to their respective households. Those men kicked and beat them, unjustly and at untimely moments, whenever they remembered the Count of Clarange Lucote's engineers.
The brasileira of Prazins is now fifty-three years old. Her thirty-year-old neighbours have never seen her, for since Teresa's death in 1848 Marta has never again left her room. No one goes to listen to her now, but she repeats the words of her love of forty years ago and asks for flowers to be brought to her. The same hallucinations persist and, above all, so do the tears when, between bouts of delirium, she enters into the anguished conviction that José Dias is dead. The José Dias of this conclusion and the José Alves of the preceding pages are the same beloved man, under the source's shifting surname. Father Osório still visits her during those periods when her reason flickers. He speaks to her of his sister Teresa so that he may feel the ineffable sweet bitterness of having company in his tears. Yet Osório himself says that he has never seen clearly where, in Marta, the line between reason and madness lay. After the delirium comes what the medical discourse of the time calls hypochondriacal monomania. The soul, in the narrative image, then continues to sleep without dreams or hallucinations. During that second crisis of torpor, Osório alone is admitted to her room. He waits until Marta gets down from the bed or wraps herself in a shawl to conceal the soiled bodice of her dresses. The narrator sees in that shawl a stubborn spark of feminine instinct and generalises it to women then classified as mad. He adds a further stigmatising exception for what the period called hysteria with eroticism; the taxonomy is historical, not a modern diagnosis.
Marta has two daughters who are married and already mothers. From time to time, they calmly put on their Sunday clothes and return to their parents' home, where they resume in the barren fields the work they did as unmarried women. Their father had raised them to farm, barefoot and with hoes in their hands. They work in the fields with great cheerfulness and sing bright country songs. Their husbands, to whom the narrator ironically attributes “good sense”, no longer come looking for them. When the women return, their husbands receive them without questions, for distressing them brings on faintness and tears. Of the other children, the narrator supplies a cruel catalogue, using pathological and ableist terms belonging to his century. He calls them “intanguidos”, scrofulous, sad and without childhood, and attributes to them a supposed predisposition to imbecility and lack of moral sense. He adds that this pathological category had supposedly been little studied by alienists, an assertion retained within its historical frame. One of those sons studied for the priesthood and was considered the soundest of them. Feliciano believed that he had talent. The boy studied Latin for six years in Braga, subjected to the harshest violence against his incapacity. After the teacher disabused his father and after three failures, Feliciano, who had spent lavishly on that son, sent for him. The student returned with a tin box containing more than five thousand communion wafers, laid by for his future consecrations as a priest. And the father had the good fortune, the narrator remarks ironically, to sell the wafers at a loss of only ten per cent.
“There is Feliciano Prazins, the returnee from Brazil, if you have never seen him,” Father Osório told the narrator three months earlier. In Famalicão market, he pointed out a thin, gaunt old man, clean-shaven, upright, with his monocle firmly in place. Feliciano wore cotton drill and a dirty dustcoat, frayed around the buttons. With a quince switch, he flicked the dust from his rolled-up trousers. “He is eighty-four,” continued the vicar of Caldelas. He had walked from his home, which lay a league and a half from the market. At dinner, he spent one vintém on rice and another vintém on wine. He owned five hundred contos and likewise walked home, crossing, or almost crossing, his fourteen estates. With his frugality, exercise and sordid selfishness, Osório predicted, he would live a long while yet. After all, he added, old Alexandre Dumas had said that selfish men and parrots lived for a hundred and fifty years.