I said you had already come in
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prima Justina — — Perguntou, mas eu disse que você já tinha vindo.
She did, but I said you had already come in.
Justina reveals she covered for him — a lie.
Justina volunteers a lie she told on the boy's behalf, and volunteers it plainly. She had reported to Dona Glória that Bentinho was already home. The favour is real, but so is the disclosure: she wants him to know she covered for him, which quietly makes him owe her.
Machado is drawing the terms of Justina's usefulness. Her lies are not hidden but declared, currency in the household economy. To confess the fib is to convert a small deception into a bond. Bentinho receives a gift and a complicity at once, and the narrator, who will spend his life reading the loyalties of those around him, marks the moment as the beginning of an alliance he never fully trusts.
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