Dom Casmurro 16.83 · 16.83

The Hegira metaphor is made literal and complete: Pádua counts 'para deante e para traz' — forward and back — from his term in office, exactly as a calendar reckons years before and after its founding event. Every date in his life now bends toward this center. The clause finishes the joke by fully working out its arithmetic.

What began as a wound has become, by the end of the paragraph, an organizing principle. The narrator has traced a small psychological history in a single page: shame, healing, and finally the transformation of loss into the very axis of self-regard. The dialogue that follows will let us hear Pádua doing exactly this, fumbling to place a memory 'antes da minha administração.' Machado has set up the specimen; now he lets it speak, and the speech will prove every word of the analysis.

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