Dom Casmurro 2.39 · 2.39

The turn lands on a proud little pivot: 'como todos os documentos falsos, mas não a mim' — like all false documents, but not me. The forgery would fool everyone the way every forgery fools people — except its subject. Bento cannot be deceived about his own age; he knows, from the inside, what no false paper can hide from him. It is a clean, confident assertion of self-knowledge, and on its own terms unanswerable: of course a man knows how old he really is. But set it beside the whole book and it acquires a terrible resonance. Here is Bento Santiago declaring that outward documents lie, that appearances deceive strangers, and that he, uniquely, sees through to the inner truth of himself — 'não a mim', not me, I am not fooled. This is the very confidence that will destroy him. The tragedy of Dom Casmurro is a man so sure of his power to read the inner truth beneath deceiving appearances that he condemns a wife and a friend on the strength of it, never once suspecting that the one document he cannot read straight, the one forgery that might fool him, is his own jealous mind. 'But not me' is exactly the last thing a self-deceived man believes.

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