Dom Casmurro 16.92 · 16.92

The line trails off into an ellipsis, and the ellipsis is the point: Pádua cannot finish, because there is nothing to add. Six months of standing in for the real manager is the whole of his public career, and he returns to it as a man returns to a single warm memory in a cold room. Machado catches him mid-savour, the first-person 'eu administrava' swelling with a pride that has no object equal to it. The verb is imperfect, a tense of habit and duration, stretching the little tenure out as long as grammar will allow. This is the same Pádua who elsewhere treasures relics of his interim dignity; here his own voice does the treasuring, and the reader hears vanity mistaking a footnote for a chapter.

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