Dom Casmurro 16.73 · 16.73

Machado personifies the healing as a small procession: 'serenidade' walks back in first, and 'traz della' — behind her — comes joy, following like a companion who would not enter until calm had gone ahead. Feelings arrive in order, in single file, as though Pádua's household were receiving guests.

The sequence matters. Serenity must precede joy; peace clears the room before gladness can sit down. It is a subtly wise ordering of the emotions, and wholly in keeping with this narrator's fondness for arranging inner life like furniture. The semicolon holds the two arrivals a beat apart, and the next passage will give joy a precise costume and hour — 'um domingo,' in the shape of two friends with a deck of cards. The abstraction is about to acquire a face.

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