because it was mine, and first
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Naturalmente por ser minha. Naturalmente tambem por ser a primeira.
Naturally because it was mine. Naturally too because it was the first.
Two dry reasons close the chapter's ecstasy into elegy.
The chapter ends not on a cry but on two flat little sentences, each opened by the deflating 'Naturalmente.' Why was the sensation incomparable? For no mystical reason: because it was his, and because it was first. The narrator answers his own rapture with a shrug of common sense, and the twin 'naturally' sets the whole preceding ecstasy inside quotation marks of gentle irony.
This is the mature Bento's method everywhere — to feel intensely, then to explain the feeling away with a worldly reason that half-dissolves it. Ownership and primacy, not the beloved herself, are named as the causes; even here, at love's fountainhead, the accounting mind is at work. The two dry clauses close the verandah scene the way the book will close: a man who cannot leave a feeling un-analyzed, cooling his own most precious memory with the word 'naturally,' twice.
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