in her ears, on and on
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nos ouvidos, zás que darás,
in her ears, on and on,
The whisper is figured as ceaseless noise.
The idiom 'zás que darás' is a burst of colloquial noise — an onomatopoeic reduplication meaning relentlessly, whack after whack, without pause. Dropped into Justina's speech, it makes José Dias's counsel audible as a kind of hammering at the ear.
Machado is exact about registers. Justina, the plain-spoken poor relation, talks in exactly this vivid, unliterary way, and the phrase belongs to her tongue and not to the narrator's polished prose. It also converts abstract 'persistence' into physical sensation: the mother's ear worn down by repeated blows of the same suggestion. 'Nos ouvidos, zás que darás' is the sound of the trap being kept shut — not a single argument but an endless drumming that no amount of passing time could ever quiet.
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Dom Casmurro 21.44 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/domcasmurro/21.44/