Dom Casmurro 14.23 · 14.23

The hands do not slacken 'de cançadas ou de esquecidas' — from tiredness or from forgetting. Machado has the narrator rule out the two ordinary reasons a grip loosens, and in ruling them out he half-personifies the hands once more, imagining them capable of weariness or absentmindedness and choosing neither. The clinging is neither reflex nor lapse; it is a small, wilful constancy.

The word 'esquecidas,' forgetful, glances at the great theme of the book, which the very first chapters announced: memory, and the impossibility of tying the present to the past. These hands do not forget. The old narrator, whose whole enterprise is a struggle against forgetting, lingers on the detail with something like envy — the young flesh remembered its love without effort, while he must labour a lifetime to reconstruct a bond that his suspicion keeps unravelling. Even the hands, he implies, had a fidelity his mind could not keep.

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