Dom Casmurro 26.54 · 26.54

'Estamos aqui, estamos a bordo' — here we are, we are on board. José Dias speaks the voyage into the present tense, as though the ship had already sailed and the two of them stood together at the rail. The trick is temporal: by describing the trip as accomplished, he tries to make it feel inevitable, sliding Bentinho past decision into a fait accompli.

And the first-person plural returns, insistent — 'estamos,' we are — binding the agregado once more into the journey he keeps proposing. There is exuberance in it, the man half-believing his own scene, already smelling the sea. Machado captures how a certain kind of talker persuades: not by argument but by vividness, conjuring the desired reality so warmly that the listener finds himself standing inside it. Whether the ship ever leaves the harbour, for the length of a sentence José Dias has boarded.

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