Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary

Chapter 3 takes up the family's low ebb in the 1930s. It opens contrasting the state of the family chapel before and after Francisco's death. He had allowed his French designers to obliterate the traditional Portuguese décor with a sterile, modernist motif that Epifania found not fitting for the "blood and body of Our Saviour, but only birthday cake." The day after Francisco's funeral, the chapel was restored and the household routine purged of "Gandhian simplicity."

Francisco had divided his estate and the Gama Trading Company equally between his two sons, and lawyers were unable to win control for Epifania. Aires, drowning his sorrows in carousing, and Camoens, enamored first of Leninism and later of Nehru's Party Congress, both were deemed useless by Epifania, the "most severe and least forgiving of mothers" (p. 32). She conspired with her daughters-in-law, Belle and...