The door his mother made
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Havia alli uma porta de communicação mandada rasgar por minha mãe,
There was a connecting door there, ordered cut open by my mother,
A connecting door in the wall, cut open by Dona Glória herself when the children were small.
The wall has a door — a 'porta de communicação' — and the crucial fact is who made it: Dona Glória. The mother who will spend the novel trying to give Bento to the Church is the same one who, years before, ordered the barrier between the houses opened. Machado lets the irony sit unspoken. The very intimacy she later fears was engineered by her own hand, in an age of innocence, for the convenience of two small children.
The verb 'rasgar', to tear or cut open, is stronger than a builder's word; the wall was breached, a mouth made in it. That the opening was 'mandada rasgar' — commanded into being — reminds us how much of Bento and Capitú's closeness was arranged by adults who could not foresee it ripening. The door stands, in retrospect, as the first of José Dias's 'difficuldades', built long before anyone thought to name it one.
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