Dom Casmurro 12.23 · 12.23

The loop restarts, but reordered: 'Em segredinhos' now comes first. The reshuffling is the whole point — the phrases have detached from José Dias's argument and become free-floating obsession, no longer bound to the sequence he spoke them in.

Repetition with a change of order is how Machado renders a mind worrying at a wound. The insinuating diminutive returns to needle the boy a second time, and its new position shows that the refrain now follows the rhythm of Bento's own churning thought rather than the shape of any remembered speech. The words have become his, and he cannot set them down.

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