Dom Casmurro 18.70 · 18.70

The passage closes where the reply began, on the same vow: 'Mas, deixe estar, que elle me paga!' Machado gives Bento's speech a ring composition, the threat against José Dias framing everything in between, so that the boy's dominant note is unmistakably resentment. The exclamation point supplies the heat the future tense cannot deliver.

Repetition exposes the emptiness. Said twice within a single scene, and never made good across the whole novel, 'elle me paga' becomes the signature of Bento's impotent will — a boy who settles scores in language because he cannot settle them in fact. José Dias will not pay; he will thrive, indispensable to the end. What the reader carries away is not a plausible revenge but a temperament: grievance nursed, vengeance rehearsed aloud, and the deep, self-flattering conviction that the day will come when Bento holds the power to make the wrongdoer answer for it. It is the same conviction, grown monstrous, that will one day fall on Capitú.

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