Afterwards, we examined Rytmel’s papers with the idea of settling his business affairs. There were the £2,300 in notes. Of the letters, not a single one was from Miss Shorn.
None of us was in a sufficiently calm frame of mind to feel able to return at once to life’s trivialities. We decided to stay at the house for a few days, to allow a little time to elapse after the tragedy to which we had been witness.
The house was subsequently bought by Rytmel’s mother, and it became a repository for all the objects that had belonged to Rytmel. An iron casket inlaid with gold and intended to receive the ashes of the deceased was placed on top of his grave.
The countess’s cousin was on the point of leaving for London when we learned about the publication of the doctor’s letters in this newspaper. The countess vowed that she would hand herself over to the police if we did not refute Z.’s suspicions about the doctor’s probity and if F. did not unreservedly retract the slanderous comments made about us in his inopportune letter to the doctor, delivered through the intermediary of Friedlann. The countess authorised us to make her story public, saying that she had ceased forever to belong to the world, to whom her confession might serve as a useful example.
It was then that we decided to provide you with the full details of these painful events, concealing or altering the names of the people who took part in it, and leaving to society the possibility of unmasking them and the right to condemn or absolve them.
The countess decided to enter a convent, which she herself chose after making careful enquiries. Her cousin escorted her and I went with them to a town in the province of Minho, where there still exists an old convent of Discalced Carmelites, ruled with the full ascetic rigour of the order and inhabited by only five or six nuns. These frail old women hold firm to their vow of poverty, living lives of prayer, meditation, penitence and fasting with the same mystic exaltation, the same Catholic fervour, as when they first became brides of Christ. They go barefoot and wear coarse woollen habits, never linen or cotton. No meat is permitted at their meals. They eat together in the ancient refectory, with the sisters taking it in turn, in accordance with custom, to prostrate themselves at the entrance to the room, so that the others can walk over them as they enter or leave. They have no property of any kind, nor any other income apart from that earned from the work that they do. Removed from all contact with the outside world, they live a strictly cloistered existence and in the utmost poverty. Once those women enter that place, they are never seen again. When they die, they are buried in the cloister by their fellow nuns and covered with a stone that bears neither name nor date. No inscription or other marker distinguishes those who have ceased to exist. Death begins when they cross the convent threshold. Inside, everything is a tomb. Death is simply a change of cell.
This was the place the countess chose as her refuge, to live out the rest of her days. From the outside, the building looked gloomy and mysterious, encircled as it was by a high wall separating it off from the rest of the world and protecting the quarters inhabited by the nuns from prying eyes. The sombre, grey wall, four storeys high, was blotched and stained like a hermit’s cowl or like a winding-sheet fashioned for a deceased building. At one point, this stone barrier shrank in on itself, forming the courtyard where visitors could enter; the heavy studded convent door was located at the far end, just visible behind the thick bars of a metal grille. Like rude, unruly tufts of hair, clumps of nettles sprang up between the uneven flagstones paving the courtyard. In the middle stood the shaft of a well, its bucket dangling from a rope attached to a post. The impoverished women who lived nearby did their washing there, and their ragged clothing lay spread out on the ground to dry, alongside the torn and rotting straw mattresses from their children’s beds. In one corner hung a metal bell pull. When the bell was rung, a wooden cylinder set into the stonework began very slowly to revolve, its convex face rotating inwards to be replaced by a hollow interior. It was like a mute monster turning its head to reveal an eyeless socket. This device was known as the roda or foundling wheel. The countess spoke one word into it and, in response, received what sounded like a kind of groan. Then she went to wait by the dark convent door at the rear of the courtyard.
When the door opened and the countess’s cousin shook hands with her for the last time, the tears which, up until then, he had managed to hold back, started to his eyes.
‘You find it horrifying, don’t you?’ she asked him with a smile filled with the strange light of resignation one sees in paintings of martyred saints. ‘What would you like me to do, my dear friend? Kill myself? Slip back into society life as if nothing had happened, thus prostituting my heart? I cannot. I lack the courage to risk the salvation of my soul for the sake of my present unhappiness and, needless to say, I also lack the necessary audacity to sacrifice my chaste heart for the sake of a life of ease. As you see, I have chosen the gentler solution. Poor man! How my sad fate pains you! Don’t worry. I promise to die very soon, unless I suffer the misfortune feared by St Teresa of Ávila, and the pleasure of feeling myself to be dying only further prolongs my life.
She handed him her cashmere cape and shawl.
‘Farewell, cousin, farewell,’ she said, allowing him to kiss her on the forehead. ‘Pray to God to forgive me and ask the living to forget me.’
As soon as she had taken a few steps inside the door, it closed as it had opened, as if by an invisible hand, having first briefly revealed a dismal hole, as deep and dark as the mouth of an abyss, and thus Rytmel’s lover entered the cloister. The various bolts inside juddered home, with a sound like that of stuttering sobs torn from an iron throat.
The countess’s cousin and I spent part of the night in the town, waiting for the one o’clock mail-coach. As we were climbing on board, we heard two bells ringing what sounded like an alarm. We enquired as to its purpose. The district deputy, who was travelling with us in the coach, tossed the match with which he had lit his cigar out of the window, and explained:
‘It’s the Carmelites. They’re calling for alms, because they have nothing to eat.’
The coachman cracked his whip, and the ancient coach set off at a gallop, drowning out the doleful clamour of the bells with the racket its wheels made on the narrow, winding, cobbled streets.
I have little more to say.
In Brussels, the Count of W. received a letter from his wife containing these lines: ‘I voluntarily divest myself of my position in society. Of all the rights I might possibly demand, I ask that only one remain uncontested: the right to die. I beg you to allow me to disappear, and for that, please accept my sincere and eternal gratitude.’
The doctor, as he said he would be, is working in the field hospitals of the French Army.
Friedrich Friedlann left suddenly on the day he posted F.’s letter, to join the militia in his home country.
For some days now, Carlos Fradique Mendes and F. have been staying at a country house just outside Lisbon, sitting under a shady tree or lounging on the grass, and collaborating on the writing of a book, in which—or so they have promised to burgeoning Mother Nature—they will strike a blow for the inviolable freedom of the mind, which Portugal’s literati have, for far too long now, sought to trammel with convention.
And lastly, if I may be permitted to speak of myself, I now live in a small house in the provinces. Do you remember Teresinha? Well, then, it will come as no surprise to you to learn that we were married a few days ago. My heart was crying out for the peace of a tranquil home. Being witness to such profound emotional turmoil is like witnessing a terrible shipwreck. One feels the consoling need of peaceful things. Then, more than ever, one recognises that our only happiness lies in having done our duty.
A.M.C.