That whole speech
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Todo esse discurso não me saiu assim, de vez,
That whole speech did not come out like that, all at once,
The narrator steps back to describe how it was really spoken.
The narrator breaks in to correct the record. What the reader has just heard as a fluent little oration 'não me saiu assim, de vez' — did not come out that way, all in one piece. Machado exposes his own device: the polished paragraph on the page is a reconstruction, not a transcript, and the older Dom Casmurro will not let it pass for the truth.
This is one of the novel's recurring gestures, the narrator confessing the gap between event and telling. He has smoothed the boy's stammer into prose for our sake, and now, scrupulously or slyly, he tells us so. The admission both authenticates and unsettles: if this speech was rearranged, what else in the memoir has been?
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Dom Casmurro 25.82 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/domcasmurro/25.82/