Dom Casmurro 14.13 · 14.13

Three gerunds mount toward union: 'pegando-se, apertando-se, fundindo-se' — clasping, pressing, melting. Machado stages the joining of four hands as a slow crescendo, each participle a further degree of fusion, until the separate flesh seems to run together. The reflexive '-se' on each verb keeps the hands mutual, doing to themselves what they do to each other.

The final word, 'fundindo-se,' melting or fusing, is the key. It announces the chapter's governing idea — that the two children momentarily become one being, a fusion the later liturgical passage will call a single seraphic creature. Machado, ever the ironist, lets this rapturous merging stand unmocked, one of the rare unqualified ecstasies in a book run by suspicion. Yet the reader who knows the ending feels the ache: this perfect fusion is the very union the jealous old man will decide was never real, never wholly his.

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