Dom Casmurro 16.2 · 16.2

The sentence is a small balance sheet, and it names where the true management lies. Pádua earns; the wife governs the spending. In a chapter titled around an 'acting manager,' the first manager we actually meet is Dona Fortunata, keeping the household solvent by spending little. The clause has the crispness of an account settled.

Machado's economy of phrasing mirrors the economy it describes. Two verbs in the imperfect — ganhava, gastava — set the steady habit of years against each other and let them cancel out to survival. The wife's thrift is not stated as virtue but as fact, the way the narrator prefers to work: character shown through the ledger. It quietly prepares the later revelation that it was she, not Pádua, who decided what to do with the lottery windfall.

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