Questioning the worms
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Catei os proprios vermes dos livros, para que me dissessem o que havia nos textos roidos por elles.
I sought out the very worms of the books, so that they might tell me what was in the texts gnawed by them.
He turns to the bookworms themselves for the answer.
Here the chapter tips into fable. Having failed with the texts, Bento turns to the worms that have eaten them, addressing bookworms as if they were witnesses who had digested the wisdom pages contained. The conceit is absurd and deliberate: the reader who could not read the books consults the creatures that consumed them, on the theory that whoever destroys a text must in some sense possess it.
The move belongs to the narrator's deeper method. Dom Casmurro is forever interrogating unreliable sources — memory, gesture, a look across a room — as though they might yield the certainty the plain record withholds. The worms are a comic version of that hunger. He wants testimony from what has fed on meaning, and the joke prepares us for their answer, which will be the flat, devastating disclaimer of everyone he ever cross-examined.
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