Dom Casmurro 18.108 · 18.108

Bento contradicts her at once — 'Dê cá!' — and reaches down for two cocadas. The reversal is charming and revealing: seconds after refusing, Capitú's 'no' is overruled by Bento's appetite, and he buys not one candy but two, one plainly for her. The gesture completes the private tenderness of the hand-squeeze in a public, sweeter form.

Machado ends the passage on this light domestic note, the register fallen all the way from sacred vows to street sweets. Yet the small act carries the chapter's real theme intact: Bento wants to give Capitú things, to close the distance, to share. The two cocadas are a tiny emblem of the shared life the whole plan is meant to secure. It is a happy, ordinary, boyish moment — and, like so much here, one the aged narrator can only look back upon.

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