Dom Casmurro 18.122 · 18.122

The game's charm is completed by its object: 'um doce ausente,' a sweet that isn't there. The children traded an imaginary candy back and forth, buyer and seller of nothing, and the phrase is one of Machado's small perfect strokes — the whole make-believe economy of childhood caught in three words. The paired 'ora... ora,' now this, now that, keeps the exchange rocking pleasantly.

The touch of 'ausente' also rhymes, faintly, with the chapter's real theme. What is present in this scene is a candy Bento actually bought, which Capitú refused; what the children once traded so happily was a candy that did not exist. Absence, imagined and real, hovers over the sweets throughout. And the deepest absence — the future in which these two are torn apart — is the very thing their game, and the whole tender recollection, holds off for one more moment.

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