Dom Casmurro 2.41 · 2.41

And then one of Machado's incomparable dark jokes: 'todos os antigos foram estudar a geologia dos campos santos' — all the old friends have gone off to study the geology of the graveyards. He will not say they died; he says they went away to study geology, as if to a course of instruction — lying now in the earth of the 'campos santos', the holy fields, becoming strata themselves, learning the ground from the inside. The euphemism is exquisite and chilling at once: it makes death almost genial, a scholarly retirement, while the buried image — old men turned into geological layers — is as cold as anything in the book. This is the Machadian voice at full strength: grief handled with a wit so light it seems heartless and is in fact a way of bearing the unbearable, of naming the loss of every old friend without once letting the sentence break. Under the joke the paragraph's argument completes itself. The house could be rebuilt; the friends could not. They are geology now. And Bento sits in his faithful copy of a vanished home, dyed and preserved on the surface, hollow within, the last of his generation still above the strata, taking up a pen because there is no one left to talk to.

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