Dom Casmurro 24.7 · 24.7

'Alguma vez' — sometimes: the qualifier is honest, softening the earlier grandeur. The boy's plurals were only occasionally short of the 'desinencia exacta,' the exact ending, and José Dias was there to supply it. The vocabulary is technical, almost pedantic, and that pedantry belongs to the corrector, not the child.

The simple 'elle a corrigia' sets up the sentence's real interest, which is not the correction but the manner of it. Machado has laid the mechanism bare: fault, then fix. What follows will show the fix performed with a divided face, half stern and half ingratiating. Here the narrator is still deadpan, letting the plain clause 'he corrected it' stand before he anatomizes the smile behind it. The precision of 'desinencia exacta' also quietly flatters the reader who values getting things exactly right, which is the whole game.

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