Dom Casmurro 1.11 · 1.11

'São muito bonitos' — they're very fine. Three words of praise for a poem the narrator never heard, offered too late, into the poet's sulk, and precisely because it is empty they are the funniest line in the exchange. It is the reflexive compliment of the socially cornered — say something nice, cover the lapse — and the young man surely hears in it exactly what it is: a man praising verses he slept through. Machado leaves the hollowness unmarked; he trusts the reader to feel it. And there is the deeper Machadian point tucked inside the little comedy: praise, in this narrator's world, is a social reflex, unmoored from truth — words deployed to smooth a situation, not to report a judgment. A reader who remembers this small, harmless lie will be better armed for the large, consequential performances of sincerity that fill the rest of the book.

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