After the coffee cup scene, Capitu says that the separation is indispensable, and Bentinho accepts it. He takes the wife and son to Europe and leaves them in Switzerland, with a schoolteacher who will teach Ezequiel his mother tongue. He returns to Brazil. Capitu begins to write letters, which the narrator describes as submissive, without hatred, even affectionate, and by the end wistful, and which ask him to come see her. He replies briefly and dryly. On the two following trips, he does not seek her out.
Capitu dies and is buried in Switzerland. Bentinho mentions this in passing, when Ezequiel, now grown, appears at Engenho Novo: "The mother, I believe I have not yet said that she was dead and buried. She was; there she rests in old Switzerland."
In the confrontation in chapter CXXXVIII, Capitu's last words to her husband are the request that he tell everything so that she may defend herself, and the phrase about "the chance of resemblance." The novel never gives her the final word: the last voice is Bentinho's.