Dom Casmurro 2.66 · 2.66

The illusion is imagined as a procession of ghosts: 'e as sombras viessem perpassar ligeiras' — and the shadows would come drifting lightly past. The 'sombras' are the shades of the dead and the vanished — the mother, the friends now studying geology, the boy he was — summoned by the narration to flit through it. The whole book is here figured as a séance conducted with a pen, a raising of ghosts. And the verbs are exquisitely chosen for insubstantiality: they 'perpassar', drift through and past, and they are 'ligeiras', light, swift, weightless. The shades do not stay, cannot be held; they pass across the page and are gone, as fleeting as the past they stand for. This is the truest image yet of what memory-writing can and cannot do. It can make the shadows walk — the dead move again, briefly, in the sentences. It cannot make them solid, cannot make them stop. Bento will spend the book summoning the shades of Matacavallos, and they will pass before us, light and quick and unreachable, exactly as he foresees here: present enough to grieve for, insubstantial enough that we can never quite catch them, or catch him, or be sure of anything they show.

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