Dom Casmurro 1.13 · 1.13

The revenge arrives, and it is the birth of the book. Overnight the sulk curdles into abuse: 'entrou a dizer de mim nomes feios', he set about calling me ugly names, 'e acabou alcunhando-me Dom Casmurro', and ended by dubbing me Dom Casmurro. There is a lovely irony in the shape of it — the poet's real verses vanished into a pocket and are lost to the world, while these two words, flung out in spite, will endure as the title of one of literature's great novels. The offended artist creates his one immortal thing by accident, and against the man he meant to insult. And Machado, telling it, savours the disproportion: a whole identity, a whole book, precipitated out of a stranger's petty resentment over a nap. The name that will follow Bento Santiago through hundreds of pages, that will name his very soul, was minted by a nobody in a fit of pique. Origins, the chapter keeps insisting, are smaller and more absurd than the things they give rise to.

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