Dom Casmurro 13.42 · 13.42

Two words and a deflection. Bentinho answers Capitú's real concern with the oldest evasion — 'Eu? Nada.' The startled 'Eu?' buys the same second of time his 'Mamãe!' bought at the chapter's start; the flat 'Nada' shuts the door his face had opened. He will not say what is churning in him.

The reticence is characteristic and, in the long view, ominous. Here it is a boy's shyness before a girl, an unwillingness to admit the disturbance she has plainly seen. But withholding, evasion, the refusal to speak the truth of what he feels — these are the reflexes of the man Bentinho becomes, the Casmurro who will build a whole silent case rather than ask a plain question. The pattern begins as tenderness's shyness and hardens, over a life, into something colder.

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