No less amazed than he
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não menos pasmado que elle,
no less amazed than he,
The narrator notes his own shock matched José Dias's.
The word 'pasmado' returns, now attached to Bentinho himself: he is 'no less amazed' than José Dias. The parallel is quietly comic and quietly true. The boy is as startled by his own rebellion as his listener is — the sentence had escaped before he fully willed it, and he stands astonished at what his mouth has done.
This doubling of astonishment is characteristic of Machado's irony: no one in the scene is in command, neither the schemer nor the child. Both are overtaken by a frankness that surprised even its speaker, and the narrator, remembering, refuses to grant his younger self any heroic composure.
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