Out through the mouth
Read the full text in our reader
com certeza, pela bocca fora.
surely, out through my mouth.
The hyperbole completes itself: the heart nearly leaves by his mouth.
The figure lands where such figures land in overheated feeling — at the throat. 'Com certeza, pela bocca fora': the heart will leave, and it will leave by the mouth. The certainty is mock-solemn, a boy swearing to the reality of a sensation everyone has felt and no one has verified.
The placement of the escape at the mouth quietly rhymes with the passage that opened this scene, where he could find no tongue to speak. The same aperture that failed him as an instrument of speech now becomes the imagined exit for his overflowing heart: unable to say what he feels, he feels it trying to say itself through him. Machado keeps the register light, but the reader sees the pattern — with Capitú, Bentinho's inner life is always pressing to get out and never quite finding the words, a mismatch that the rest of the novel turns tragic.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Dom Casmurro 13.46 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Dom Casmurro — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Dom Casmurro 13.46 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/domcasmurro/13.46/