Dom Casmurro 25.96 · 25.96

The hyperbole is exact and comic: the surprise is so large that the entire face cannot contain it. 'Toda a cara delle era pouca para a estupefacção' — a whole face rendered insufficient, as if the emotion overflowed the vessel Machado gave it. It is the kind of measured exaggeration the narrator elsewhere ascribes to José Dias himself, the lover of superlatives; here Bento borrows the man's own inflating grammar to describe him.

That borrowing is the quiet point. Bento has just delivered a burst of eloquence that startled even himself, and in narrating it he reaches instinctively for the superlative style José Dias taught the household to speak. The dependent's influence works even in the sentence that catches him off guard. Machado lets the pupil out-talk the master for one moment, using the master's own instrument — the swollen, too-large word — to do it.

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