Bertoleza is the enslaved food-stall keeper who works beside João Romão, serving as his shop clerk, maid and lover, convinced that she is free thanks to a manumission letter he forged. The book keeps her almost entirely in the background and only brings her to the foreground in the last chapter, when she is returned to her former owner and kills herself.
When she first appears, she has the best-attended stall in the neighborhood: in the morning she sells angu, and at night, fried fish and fried liver. She pays the owner, an old blind man who lives in Juiz de Fora, twenty milreis a month and still keeps "almost what is needed for manumission". When her companion, a Portuguese who made deliveries with a handcart, dies, João Romão offers himself as her confidant, begins looking after her money and reads her the letter of freedom he wrote himself.
From then on she works from dawn until night, and the narrator sums her up by what she does: "the triple role of shop clerk, maid and lover". On the Sunday when the tenement changes its clothes, she keeps working at the stove, "always without Sundays or holy days". When the construction begins, "she had completely stopped being the grocer's lover, to become only his slave," and she starts sleeping under the stairs.
In chapter XXI she overhears João Romão and Botelho discussing the marriage, walks into the room and demands to stay by his side and have her share: "Whoever ate my flesh must gnaw my bones!". The ending comes a few pages later, and it is the clarity that arrives in the last moment: she understands that the letter was a lie and that her lover is sending her back to captivity.