Dom Casmurro 29.24 · 29.24

'Todo risonho' — all smiles: the sovereign wears the beaming benevolence of a wish-granter, the face a child assigns to any adult he hopes will say yes. Machado sketches the dreamed Emperor as pure amiability, none of the remoteness real majesty would carry.

The smile is doing quiet work. It signals that the verdict is already favorable, that this authority, unlike Dona Glória with her anxious devotion, comes disposed to please. Where the household's decision-making is grave and burdened by a vow, the dream-Emperor arrives light, smiling, ready to lift the burden with a word. The contrast is the whole point: Bento's imagination builds an authority that is everything his mother, in this matter, is not — cheerful, worldly, and inclined to let the boy off. The genial face is the face of the answer he wants.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.

You are reading a page of the Dom Casmurro — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.

The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.

Also on our shelves:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I