Twenty-two months of eternity
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Viveu assim vinte e dous mezes na supposição de uma eterna interinidade.
He lived thus twenty-two months in the supposition of an eternal acting tenure.
For nearly two years Pádua lives as if the acting post would never end.
The sentence turns on a beautiful contradiction: 'uma eterna interinidade' — an eternal temporariness. An 'interinidade' is by definition provisional, a stopgap, and Pádua's error is to have lived it as though it were forever. Machado plants the whole pathos of self-deception in that oxymoron, and dates it with cruel exactness: 'vinte e dous mezes,' twenty-two months, a span precise enough to sound like something later regretted and counted.
The man built a permanent life on a temporary word. It is a small comic instance of a very Machadian truth — that we spend our borrowed positions as if we owned them freehold. The narrator, who elsewhere philosophizes about the provisional nature of all human standing, needs no comment here; the noun 'interinidade,' wedded to 'eterna,' does the entire ironic work.
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