Dom Casmurro 2.21 · 2.21

'Quando fomos para a casa de Matacavallos, já ella estava assim decorada' — when we moved to the Matacavallos house, it was already decorated this way. A small clarification with a long reach. The busts, the garlands, the seasons were not his family's choice; the house came pre-adorned, and the classical heads were inherited from whoever lived there before. So the décor Bento so lovingly reproduced was never really his to begin with — it was already a leftover when his childhood found it. And note the first 'we', 'fomos', we went: the family that once filled these rooms, the mother, the household, the boy. That 'we' is the very thing the reproduction cannot bring back; the pronoun stands in the sentence like a small monument to everyone now gone. He can copy the paint the previous owners left; he cannot copy the family that came after and has since vanished into what he will beautifully call the geology of the graveyards.

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