Dom Casmurro 25.79 · 25.79

The offer bottoms out in bathos: he will be anything, 'até cocheiro de omnibus' — even the driver of a horse-drawn city bus, one of the humblest trades in imperial Rio. The boy reaches for the most menial calling he can name, as if to prove the sincerity of his surrender by the depth to which it would stoop.

The touch is pure Machado — tenderness and comedy in one stroke. Bentinho means it earnestly, and precisely for that reason it is faintly absurd. The distance between the priesthood his mother dreamed of and the omnibus box he now volunteers for measures the whole extravagance of a frightened boy trying, all at once, to refuse and to please.

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