Dom Casmurro 25.85 · 25.85

Now the truth: the speech came 'aos pedaços, mastigado' — in fragments, chewed. The vivid participle turns words into something worked over painfully in the mouth, half-swallowed, ground down before it could be got out. The image restores to the scene all the bodily difficulty the polished paragraph had erased.

'Mastigado' is the exact word for a frightened adolescent forcing out a forbidden refusal. Machado, always attentive to the physical life of speech, lets us feel the labor of it — the throat, the hesitation, the language coming in lumps. Against the smooth 'texto' he sets the chewed reality, and the contrast is the chapter's small, honest engine.

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