Dom Casmurro 18.141 · 18.141

The canoe-bridge spans the whole gulf, 'daqui até lá,' from home to the far shore, and the sentence now turns to Bento's role in the contrivance. He is to be the one who crosses it — but crossing without knowing what he crosses. The clause breaks off on 'eu,' leaving him suspended on the water.

The undercurrent is the willing dupe. The whole beauty of Capitú's imagined engineering is that its victim is also its unwitting collaborator, walking the planks laid for him and mistaking the passage for something else. This is the deepest note the fable strikes, and the darkest: in the narrator's conception, Bento is always the man who does exactly what he is steered to do while believing himself free. The playful geography of canoes conceals a bleak self-portrait — the husband as the figure led across, step by step, never seeing the bridge.

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