Dom Casmurro 1.27 · 1.27

The narrator marvels at his own story: 'Tudo por estar cochilando!' — all because of a doze! The exclamation gathers the whole comic disproportion of the chapter into three words: a lordly title, a lasting nickname, the name of a book, an identity — every bit of it precipitated out of a man nodding off on a train. Machado loves this vein of the absurdly small cause, and here he lets Bento voice the wonder himself. But the line has an undertow. If a whole name can grow from a doze, what else in a life grows from causes just as slight — a glance, a gesture, a moment's inattention? The book to come is the story of exactly this: a colossal ruin — a marriage, a friendship, a man's peace — built on evidence as thin and accidental as a few drooping eyelids. 'Tudo por estar cochilando!' is a joke now; it is also the shape of the tragedy, the principle that immense consequences ride on trivial, misread moments. Bento laughs at it here. He will not be laughing later.

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