Dom Casmurro 12.30 · 12.30

The word 'officio' is the sly heart of the sentence. An ofício is a trade, a calling, a proper piece of work — and the palm assigns it to loitering in corners with girls. The joke elevates flirtation to a vocation, the one legitimate business of the fifteen-year-old. There is no other, the tree insists; nature has given this age a single job.

Machado's irony works on two levels. On the surface it is charming exaggeration, the palm's genial over-statement in a book full of characters who over-state. Underneath runs the retrospective bitterness that shadows every idyll in Dom Casmurro: Bentinho did make Capitú his life's whole occupation, and the making of it — the jealousy, the reading of her eyes — became a full-time labor that consumed him. The tree's cheerful 'no other ofício' will turn out to be truer, and darker, than the boy hearing it could know.

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