Dom Casmurro 25.97 · 25.97

Bento is astonished at himself. The content of what he said — his own improvised eloquence in defense of his cause — has disclosed a self he did not know he owned: 'uma alma nova,' a new soul. The shy, managed boy suddenly heard himself speaking with force, and the discovery unsettles the speaker as much as the listener.

This is one of the novel's recurring notes: Bento as a stranger to himself, forever surprised by what surfaces from within. The same man who will later be seized by jealousy he cannot govern here meets, in gentler form, the truth that his own interior is not fully known to him. Machado marks it with the word 'revelára' — a revelation, something uncovered rather than made. The eloquence was always in him; the crisis of the seminary merely drew it out, the way later, darker pressures will draw out things he would rather not have found.

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