Dom Casmurro 23.18 · 23.18

The technical vocabulary — 'conforme o sexo dos interlocutores' — is the narrator's, not José Dias's, and its cool precision is part of the comedy. Dom Casmurro describes a parlor performance in the dispassionate register of a manual, as if cataloguing a method. The gap between the flamboyant act and the clinical account is where the irony lives.

This is a signature Machadian move: the driest possible language wrapped around the most theatrical possible subject. The narrator holds José Dias at arm's length, anatomizing him even while enjoying him. And 'interlocutores' — a formal word for the simple business of characters talking — quietly mirrors José Dias's own inflation, the narrator borrowing a bit of grandeur to describe the grandeur-lover. Machado's prose keeps a faint smile throughout, the smile of a man who sees exactly how performance works and declines to be moved by it.

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