It doesn't matter — he'll change his tune
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Capitú — — Não importa, continuou Capitú; dirá agora outra cousa.
It doesn't matter, Capitú went on; he'll say something else now.
Capitú brushes the objection aside and lays out the psychology.
Capitú dismisses the whole objection with two words — 'Não importa' — and states her reading of the man flatly: 'dirá agora outra cousa,' he will say something else now. Her confidence rests on a cold appraisal of José Dias's character, that his opinions are not convictions but performances, tuned to whatever will please and secure his place.
The narrator's interjection 'continuou Capitú' frames her as the one holding the floor, calmly overriding Bentinho's doubt. She understands the agregado better than the boy who has lived beside him all his life: a dependent flatters the powerful and shifts with their winds. What looks to Bentinho like a fixed accuser is, to Capitú, a weathervane she can turn. It is a startlingly adult insight in a girl of fourteen, and part of why the older narrator can never quite decide whether her cleverness was innocence or art.
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Dom Casmurro 18.163 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/domcasmurro/18.163/