Dom Casmurro 11.3 · 11.3

The narrator turns away from his mother's grief with a strange, revealing coldness. 'Não quiz saber' — he did not want to know — is the voice of the old Casmurro, not the boy: an adult refusal dressed as a child's indifference. He already knows enough, or thinks he does, and hurries past the tears to the argument.

Machado lets the phrasing do the diagnosing. A more tender narrator would linger on a weeping mother; this one brushes past her feeling to get at its 'causa', its cause, as if grief were a problem to be solved rather than shared. It is an early flash of the analytical, self-absorbed temperament that will later mistake its own jealousy for evidence. The boy runs to his mother and, in the same breath, refuses her sorrow.

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