Dom Casmurro 12.24 · 12.24

'Sempre juntos' comes round again, its place in the sequence swapped. The refrain is a closed circuit now, the same words returning in a slightly different arrangement each time.

Always together — the phrase that most nearly describes what Bento wants — recurs like a pulse. Its very repetition performs the fixation: the boy cannot stop hearing it, and each return leaves the accusation and the wish more thoroughly fused. What José Dias offered as a charge the boy has quietly converted into a hope, and the loop is the sound of that conversion happening over and over, faster than he can examine it.

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