Dom Casmurro 12.67 · 12.67

The dream-inventory ends in fragments: 'alguma phrase, algum gesto' — a stray phrase, a stray gesture, salvaged from the day and replayed at night. The clipped listing enacts the poverty it names; where Capitú's dreams were narrated as flights, Bento's reduce to two loose scraps.

And the two scraps are, precisely, 'phrase' and 'gesture' — words and motions, the same materials the chapter named earlier as the stuff of his recollection. Machado closes the circle: what Bento dreams is what Bento remembers is what Bento will one day interrogate for guilt. His entire relation to Capitú runs through phrases and gestures, minute signs endlessly reread. In this tender chapter they are the innocent furniture of love; in the jealous years they become exhibits. The dreamer who salvages only a phrase and a gesture from each day is the future Casmurro, hoarding fragments, unable to let the smallest sign of her go uninterpreted.

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