Dom Casmurro 2.42 · 2.42

The tone lifts and warms as he turns to the living: 'Quanto ás amigas, algumas datam de quinze annos, outras de menos' — as for the women friends, some go back fifteen years, others less. After the buried men, the women — still here, and handled with a teasing gallantry that is one of the great pleasures of Machado's voice. Note that he goes on dating them, 'datam', like the documents and friendships before — the compulsive ledger-keeper tallying even his affections by their vintage. But the arithmetic has lost its grief; where the male friends were counted into the graveyards, the women are counted in years of acquaintance, warm and ongoing. The sentence is a hinge in temperature. The paragraph has passed through its coldest reaches — the missing self, the autopsy, the geology of the dead — and here begins to thaw back toward the drawing room, toward comedy, toward the light social irony in which Bento is most charming and most at ease. Machado never lets the sorrow set too hard; he always finds the door back to wit.

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