Dom Casmurro 2.30 · 2.30

The confession, delivered with a conversational shrug: 'Pois, senhor, não consegui recompôr o que foi nem o que fui' — well, sir, I could not recompose what was, nor what I was. The direct address, 'senhor', leans the sentence toward us, one old man admitting a defeat to another. And the defeat is total and precisely doubled: 'o que foi', what was — the world, the house, the life outside him — and 'o que fui', what I was — the self who lived it. Both beyond recomposing. Note again the restorer's verb, 'recompôr', to put back together, and its failure. Everything material yielded to reconstruction; the two things that mattered, the past and the person he was in it, did not. The little rhyme of 'foi' and 'fui', was and was, tolls the two losses side by side. It is the honest centre of the chapter, and rare in this narrator: a plain, unironic admission that there is something he set out to do and simply could not. He will not stay this candid for long. But here, for one sentence, the mask of mastery is down, and a genuinely bereaved old man is speaking.

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