Dom Casmurro 16.82 · 16.82

Machado hands Pádua's small tenure a grand word: 'hegyra,' the Hegira — Muhammad's flight from Mecca, the event from which the entire Muslim calendar counts its years. To make a few weeks of acting management into an epoch on that scale is comic hyperbole, and the comedy is entirely at the expense of Pádua's inflated self-regard.

Yet the figure is also exactly true to how the man now thinks. The office really has become his year zero, the pivot around which he arranges every other memory. Machado's grandiose metaphor does not merely mock; it describes with precision the way a proud mind reorganizes time around its one moment of importance. The narrator, learned and amused, reaches for world history to size a neighbor's vanity — and the disproportion is the whole joke and the whole insight at once.

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