The father was the father
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mas o pae era o pae,
but the father was the father,
But the father stood in the way — and had to be humored.
'O pae era o pae' — the father was the father. The tautology is doing real work; it is the narrator's shrug at an immovable social fact. Pádua cannot simply be brushed past, because he is Capitú's father, owed the deference a boy pays to an elder and to the man who holds the door to the girl he loves. The circular phrasing enacts the boy's helplessness: there is nothing to be done about it, a father is a father.
Machado is fond of these self-defining formulas — a thing is what it is, and the character bows to it. Here the bow is courteous and comic, but it also marks how thoroughly Bentinho lives inside other people's authority. He cannot run to Capitú because an adult stands pleasantly in the road, and adults, in this boy's world, are simply obeyed. The whole seminary crisis turns on precisely that reflex of submission.
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