Dom Casmurro 12.10 · 12.10

The third and heaviest fragment: 'Se elles pegam de namoro' — if they take to courting. This is the actual charge, and 'namoro' is the word that reframes everything that came before.

Here the denunciation names what the boy had never named. The conditional 'se' pretends caution while planting certainty, the way a rumour disowns itself even as it spreads. Once the word 'namoro' has been spoken over Bento and Capitu, it cannot be withdrawn, and the remainder of the chapter is simply the boy discovering, on the verandah, that the accusation happens to be true.

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