Dom Casmurro 16.97 · 16.97

The parallel is finally named, and it is a curious one. Eliphaz is the first of Job's three friends, the comforters who come to sit with the afflicted man and then, one by one, tell him his suffering must be deserved. Cabral quotes their counsel as wisdom, apparently without irony; the reader who knows the Book of Job knows that God himself, at the end, rebukes Eliphaz for having spoken wrongly. Machado plants the reference lightly and lets the learned reader catch its double edge. The priest means to console Pádua with the thought that God chastens those he loves; but the source he reaches for is precisely the speech that the divine voice will overturn. It is a small, exact instance of the novel's method — a pious surface with a subversive footnote, offered to whoever cares to open the book behind the quotation.

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