Dom Casmurro 2.65 · 2.65

And here, in the open, is the most honest sentence in the chapter about what the book is: 'Talvez a narração me désse a illusão' — perhaps the narration would give me the illusion. Two words carry it: 'talvez', perhaps, and 'illusão', illusion. He does not say the telling will restore his youth, tie the ends of his life, bring back the dead. He says, tentatively, that it might grant him the illusion of these things. Bento knows exactly what he is doing. The whole enterprise of the reproduced house has taught him that the past cannot be recovered, only counterfeited; the dye teaches only the surface takes colour; the busts admit they cannot reconstitute anything. So the book is offered, with full clear-eyed awareness, as illusion — a conjured semblance, sweet and false, of what is gone. This candour cuts two ways for the reader. On one hand it is disarming, even moving: how can we distrust a narrator so frank about the illusoriness of his own project? On the other it is the gravest of warnings, delivered so gently we may miss it. He has told us, in his own word, that what follows is 'illusão'. Everything in Dom Casmurro — the love, the jealousy, the certainty of betrayal — arrives inside a narration its own author has labelled, on the second page, an illusion. We were warned. We will forget we were warned. That forgetting is the book's deepest design.

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