Dom Casmurro 21.40 · 21.40

'Em passando os dias' makes time itself the gentle agent. The construction imagines healing by simple accumulation of ordinary days, the mother's grief-born vow wearing thinner the further it recedes from the fear that made it.

This is a distinctly human theory of forgetting, and Justina states it as common sense. Machado, though, sets it up only to knock it down: the next clause will insist that the days cannot do their softening work because a voice keeps the wound open. The passing of time, the natural cure, is precisely what the agregado's persistence cancels. In a novel obsessed with memory — narrated, after all, by a man trying to reassemble his past — the idea that time heals is offered here just long enough to be denied.

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