Dom Casmurro 13.47 · 13.47

Now the portrait opens, and it opens with the age. 'Creatura de quatorze annos' — a creature of fourteen — sets Capitú's exact youth in front of everything else, before a single feature is named. Machado dates her the way he dates documents elsewhere in the book, with a scrupulous precision that will matter: this is a girl on the very edge of womanhood, and the narrator wants the number on record.

The stuck gaze — he cannot pull his eyes away — is the physical fact the whole chapter serves. In this edition the printed verb is odd, but the sense is the familiar one: Bentinho cannot take his eyes off her. That helpless fixity is the founding gesture of his love, and, read against the ending, the founding gesture of his suspicion too. From here on Capitú will almost always be someone Bento is watching, and the watching begins as pure absorption in a girl of fourteen.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear 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:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I