Dom Casmurro 20.21 · 20.21

The circle closes, and the words are unmistakably financial: 'pagar a divida antiga' — to pay off the old debt. Each new prayer was pledged in order to settle the arrears of the last, which is of course a scheme that can never resolve, only grow. Machado names the exact mechanism of a certain moral bankruptcy: borrowing against tomorrow to service yesterday, so that the principal is never touched and the total only swells.

'Divida' is the plainest word in the passage and the most exposing. Bento's relationship to heaven has become indistinguishable from a man's relationship to a creditor he keeps at bay with fresh IOUs. The whole apparatus of vow and counter-vow is revealed as a device for postponing payment indefinitely while feeling perpetually about to pay. This is the deep structure of the man: not a defaulter who denies the debt, but one who acknowledges it endlessly and discharges it never. The book itself, decades later, is his last attempt to pay an old debt — and Machado has quietly warned us how such attempts tend to go.

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