Dom Casmurro 16.91 · 16.91

The part ends as it turned earlier, on a colon that promises more: 'Ou ainda:' — or again. The narrator, having given us two full samples of Pádua's habit, signals that the supply is inexhaustible; there is always another way he phrased his devotion to the epoch of his office. The unfinished gesture is a small joke about excess.

Structurally the phrase hands us over to the next part still mid-catalogue, Bento cataloguing Pádua's boasts as one might list the varieties of a single flower. The narrator's tireless, amused documentation is itself characteristic — this is a book built out of exactly such patient anatomies of vanity. And the fondness underneath matters: Pádua is, after all, the father of Capitú, the household a step from Bento's own, and the affection with which the narrator records his little pride will shadow all the graver things to come.

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