Dom Casmurro 18.125 · 18.125

Capitú's line leaps far past the candy. Stung by a rhyme about poverty, she conjures its opposite — 'se eu fosse rica' — and instantly turns the fantasy toward loss: if she were rich, Bento would flee her, board the steamer, and be gone to Europe. The logic is pure Capitú, quick and oblique, wealth imagined only as the thing that would carry her love away.

It is a remarkable little speech. She tests him by dressing a fear of abandonment as a hypothetical, and watches to see how he takes it. The 'paquete' bound for Europe is the era's image of final departure, the ocean between them. That she frames the danger as his running off, not her own, shifts the burden onto him and invites reassurance. Beneath the childish syntax lies the adult Capitú the novel will show — reading a companion's heart while seeming only to muse aloud.

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