Dom Casmurro 12.40 · 12.40

A short hinge-clause that turns the timeline forward. Capitú's leaving school marks the boundary Bento has just drawn; now he steps across it into the murkier recent years. The phrase is plain, almost administrative, and its plainness is deliberate — he is narrating a return to intimacy as if it were a documented fact rather than a feeling.

Machado uses the school throughout the novel as the machine that separates and reshapes the children, and each of Capitú's passages through it changes what they are to each other. By marking the exit so precisely, Bento signals that the closeness which follows is of a different order from the childish mischief before. The clause is a doorway; what stands on the other side is the adolescent intimacy he must now account for, and account for honestly.

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