Dom Casmurro 11.45 · 11.45

The one scrap of liturgy quoted verbatim is the communicant's prayer, 'Domine, non sum dignus' — Lord, I am not worthy — the words spoken before receiving the host. Machado sets the sacred Latin down bare, trailing into an ellipsis, at the exact center of a children's game about eating candy.

The irony is precise and a little tender. The prayer of unworthiness, meant to precede the holiest moment of the mass, is here rushed through by two children impatient for a sweet. And there is a deeper resonance for the whole book. 'I am not worthy' will become, in a sense, the buried refrain of Bentinho's life — the man who felt unworthy of Capitú, who could not believe such love was truly his, and whose corrosive suspicion grew from that very sense of undeserving. The liturgical formula, mumbled at the toy altar, quietly names the wound the novel will probe: a love the narrator could not trust himself to deserve.

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