What folly, that of seeming
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Que maluquico era aquella de parecer
What folly it was, that of seeming
The narrator glides into Glória's own reproachful reasoning.
The narration slides into free indirect speech, taking on Glória's exasperated voice without quotation marks. 'Que maluquice' — what madness — is her judgment, reported as if it were plain fact, and Machado lets us overhear her scolding logic from the inside. The technique quietly aligns the narrator with Glória's superior, faintly amused view of the neighbour's crisis.
And here the chapter's irony turns fully on. Everything before granted Pádua's suffering its weight; now that suffering is reclassified as folly, and the reason is about to be named. The verb 'parecer,' to seem, is the hinge: the whole catastrophe, Glória implies, is about appearances, about how things look. That accusation — that Pádua would die over mere seeming — cuts close to the novel's deepest nerve, since Bento's own life will be wrecked by exactly this, by seeming, by the appearances he cannot stop reading into Capitu.
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