Dom Casmurro 2.20 · 2.20

'Não alcanço a razão de taes personagens' — I can't grasp the reason for such personages. A small, disarming admission, and a rare one from this narrator. Bento is the man who always has an explanation, who supplies the reason and the meaning for everything — his nickname, his solitude, his very house — and here, faced with four Roman heads on his own wall, he shrugs: he cannot make out why they are there. It is charming, and it is a hairline crack in his mastery. There is something in his own house, at the very center of his own reproduced past, that he does not understand and cannot account for. The moment quietly prepares two later effects. First, it makes the busts strange, unassimilated, a little uncanny — the readier, then, to come alive and speak. And second, it plants the idea, so gently we hardly feel it, that this scrupulous explainer does not in fact command the meaning of everything around him — that reasons can sit in plain sight, labelled, and still elude him. A useful thing to remember about a man who will spend three hundred pages confidently reading the meaning of a wife's every glance.

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