Lobo Neves is Virgília's husband and Brás Cubas's rival: within a few weeks he takes from him the fiancée and the candidacy for deputy, and years later he is the man Brás deceives. He is an openly ambitious man, an orator and deputy, who wants public glory.
Brás says that he was no more slender, elegant, well-read or likeable than Brás was, and yet he watches him win. To Virgília, who asks when he will be minister and whether he will make her a baroness, he answers: "Marchioness, because I shall be a marquis." Already married to her, he confesses to Brás, little by little, the lack that consumes him: "he had a sad woodworm in his existence; he lacked public glory".
The book shows him through Brás's eyes, and so it leaves open what he knows. When he knocks at the door of the little house in Gamboa, he is "pale, cold, quiet, without explosion, without rapture", a calm that could be that of someone who has noticed nothing or that of someone who controls himself. Brás recognizes in him "a certain fundamental dignity, a layer of rock". Lobo Neves refuses a provincial presidency because the decree bears the date 13, a number linked to his parents' deaths, although he himself doubts the superstition; later he is appointed by a decree dated 31 and sails with Virgília. The ambition remains intact. He dies just as he was about to become minister.