Dom Casmurro 2.6 · 2.6

'A casa em que moro é propria' — the house I live in is my own. A plain declarative, and the start of the chapter's real subject: this house. It is owned, 'propria', but more than owned — as the next lines reveal, it was made to order, built deliberately to be a particular house. The emphasis on possession sets up the ache to come. He owns the building entirely; what he cannot own, cannot repossess by any deed or construction, is the life once lived in the house it copies. Machado moves with great economy here — a sentence about real estate that is really about the impossibility of owning one's own past. The house will be described lovingly, room by room, precisely so that its completeness can throw into relief the one thing missing from it, which turns out to be the man himself, or the boy he was.

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