Dom Casmurro 3.4 · 3.4

Now the camera pulls back to place the scene. The house on Rua de Matacavalos is the lost original that Chapter II told us Bento has painstakingly reproduced out at Engenho Novo — the very house whose reconstruction is his attempt to 'tie the two ends of life together.' By naming it here he binds the denunciation to that project of memory: this is the room, in the true house, where it all began. The street existed in old central Rio; the specificity is Machado's usual trick of anchoring a fiction in real, checkable geography.

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