Dom Casmurro 25.5 · 25.5

The short sentence repeats 'terraço' one line after naming it, and the repetition is not clumsiness but pace. Machado slows the walk into small, plain steps — enter, describe, proceed — the rhythm of two men strolling without hurry, which is exactly the leisurely cover José Dias needs. Nothing here announces itself as important, and that is the point.

The first-person plural returns: 'Seguimos', we went on. The narrator keeps the two of them yoked together as a single moving unit, the boy and the agregado, one led and one leading. The reader who knows José Dias feels the asymmetry inside the shared verb — the terrace is where he wants Bento, and the boy walks toward it thinking the choice is his own, or no one's.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.

You are reading a page of the Dom Casmurro — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.

The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.

Also on our shelves:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I