Dom Casmurro 21.33 · 21.33

Bento the narrator catches Bento the boy performing. He furrows his brow 'interrogativamente,' staging puzzlement he does not actually feel, since he already suspected José Dias. The gesture is a small piece of theatre put on for Justina.

This is the memoirist's characteristic honesty about his own dishonesty. Throughout Dom Casmurro the old narrator exposes the boy's little concealments even as he sympathizes with them, and here the heavy adverb 'interrogativamente' does the exposing — a face arranged to ask a question whose answer is already known. Machado's interest is precisely this gap between the countenance shown and the mind behind it, the same gap that will later poison Bento's reading of Capitú's every look.

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