Dom Casmurro 2.31 · 2.31

He finds the exact figure for his failure: 'se o rosto é egual, a physionomia é differente' — if the face is the same, the countenance is different. The distinction is subtle and complete. 'Rosto' is the face as a set of features — the reproducible surface, the thing the builder and painter could match. 'Physionomia' is the face as living expression — the animating look, the soul showing through the features — and that cannot be copied. He has rebuilt every feature of his old life and found the expression gone. It is the truest thing in the chapter and one of the truest in the book about the limits of reproduction: you can restore the mask and lose the face; the parts can be identical and the whole be dead. And there is a further chill in it, given who is speaking. This is a narrator peculiarly attentive to faces and their expressions — he will read a whole betrayal in the 'physionomia' of a wife and a friend, in looks and glances and the cast of a countenance. Here he tells us, unawares, that the physionomia is exactly the thing that can differ while everything else stays the same — that expression is unreliable, unrepeatable, not to be trusted as evidence. He means it about his house. It is worth remembering about his jealousy.

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