Dom Casmurro 25.100 · 25.100

Machado extends the anatomical joke: the eyes had literally grown, and now they shrink back 'ás dimensões ordinarias,' to their ordinary dimensions. The surprise is measured as a physical dilation, and recovery as a return to baseline, as though the man were an instrument settling after a spike. The colon at the end holds the door open for his reply, and the reader waits with Bento to hear what the recovered José Dias will say.

The recovery itself is the character. José Dias is never stunned for long; his gift is composure, the swift re-gathering of the diplomat who lives by his tongue. In the space of a sentence he passes from genuine shock back to control, and what comes out of that control — as the next lines show — is not gratitude for the honor but a fresh performance, the flatterer's reflex reasserting itself the instant his eyes are his own again.

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