Dom Casmurro 10.7 · 10.7

Now he sings his life as a score: 'Cantei um duo ternissimo, depois um trio, depois um quatuor...' I sang a most tender duet, then a trio, then a quartet. The love with Capitú is the tender duo; the trio and the quartet add the voices — Escobar above all — that will crowd and poison it.

The progression is the whole plot in musical shorthand, and the trailing ellipsis is pure Machado: it withholds the ending, leaves the quartet unresolved, hints at more singers than a tender duet can survive. 'Ternissimo,' a superlative, marks the beginning as the sweetest note of the piece; everything after is addition and dissonance. Bento tells the tragedy of his life as a change in the number of voices — a marriage that began as two and could not stay two.

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