Arranged like this
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e assim dispostos:
and arranged like this:
He gestures toward how the two names were set out.
The passage ends on a colon that points at nothing — or, in the original book, at a small typographic figure showing the two names one above the other. Machado's text gestures at a visual it cannot fully reproduce in words, and the gap becomes part of the joke and the tenderness: the narrator wants to show you the wall, and can only say 'assim,' like this.
'Dispostos,' arranged, treats the two scratched names as a deliberate composition, a little monument Capitú built. The word carries a faint architectural dignity, fitting for a chapter that will soon compare the whole scene to an altar. A child's graffiti is being handled with the ceremony of an inscription on a tomb — which, given how this marriage ends, it half becomes.
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