Dom Casmurro 21.43 · 21.43

The impersonal 'uma pessoa' is pointed. Justina has already named José Dias, yet she recasts him as an anonymous 'someone,' and the vagueness does two things at once: it universalizes the nuisance and it keeps a thin veil of discretion over an accusation everyone understands.

The adverb 'sempre' is the heart of the clause. The problem is not a single push but relentlessness, a presence that never lets up. Machado captures how the agregado's power lies less in any one argument than in sheer constancy — always at hand, always available, indispensable precisely because he never leaves. The same word could describe his whole position in the household: sempre, forever there, folded so deep into the family that removing him is unthinkable, which is exactly why his whisper cannot be escaped.

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