Dom Casmurro 27.7 · 27.7

The chapter closes on a touch of pure comedy: Bento gives the beggar his name, 'Chamo-me Bento,' as if a prayer, like a letter, needed the right address to be delivered. The boy's literal-mindedness about the machinery of Heaven is complete. He has paid, he has hired an advocate, and now he supplies the credentials so the petition cannot be misfiled.

The verb 'esclarecel-o,' to make it clear to him, is deliciously bureaucratic, as though God kept records by name and might otherwise credit the alms to the wrong soul. Machado lets the young narrator convict himself of a faith run on the logic of paperwork. It is affectionate satire, and it prepares us to distrust, gently, everything this earnest, self-serving boy will later tell us he believed.

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