A few days later—a clear, fresh morning in May 1876—at six o’clock in the morning, Pestana felt a familiar tingling in his fingers. He slipped slowly out of bed so as not to wake Maria, who had been coughing all night and was now sound asleep. He went to the room with the portraits, opened the lid of the piano, and, as quietly as he could, knocked out a polka. He had it published under a pseudonym; in the following two months he composed and published two more. Maria knew nothing about it; she carried on coughing and dying, until one night she passed away in the arms of her distraught and despairing husband.

It was Christmas Eve. Pestana’s suffering was only made worse by the sounds of a dance nearby, where several of his best polkas were being played. The dancing was bad enough; hearing his own compositions gave it all a perverse air of irony. He heard the rhythm of the footsteps and imagined the accidentally salacious movements of the dancers, movements that some of his compositions quite frankly called out for; all this as he sat by her pale corpse, mere skin and bones, laid out on the bed. Every hour of the long night passed like that, fast or slow, moistened by tears and sweat, by eau de cologne and Labarraque’s disinfectant, springing ceaselessly back and forth as if to the sound of a polka written by the great invisible Pestana.

After the burial, the widower had only one goal: to abandon his music forever once he had composed a Requiem, which he would perform on the first anniversary of Maria’s death. Then he would take up some other job: clerk, postman, street peddler, anything that would make him forget his murderous art, so deaf to his aspirations.

He began the great work. He put everything into it: boldness, patience, thought, and even the occasional flight of fancy, as he had done in times gone by, imitating Mozart, whose Requiem he reread and studied. Weeks and months went by. The work, which at first went quickly, slowed its pace. Pestana had his good days and bad. At times he found the music lacking in some way, a sacred soul, ideas, inspiration, or method; at other times his spirits rose and he worked frantically. Eight, nine, ten, eleven months, and the Requiem was still not finished. He redoubled his efforts, neglected his teaching and his friends. He had reworked the piece many times, but now he wanted to finish it, no matter what. Two weeks, one week, five days to go . . . The anniversary dawned and he was still working on it.

He had to make do with a simple spoken mass, for him alone. It is hard to say whether all the tears that came stealthily to his eyes were those of the husband, or if some were the composer’s. In any event, he never looked at the Requiem again.