Dom Casmurro 3.57 · 3.57

The imagined speech ends where Cosme's real interest lies: 'onde está o gamão?' — where's the backgammon? It is the perfect deflation, the family crisis dismissed in favor of a board game, and it becomes one of the novel's running notes — Tio Cosme forever steering the conversation back to his gammon. The comedy is real and so is the wisdom: he has weighed José Dias's alarm and found it lighter than his evening's amusement. That the whole grave denunciation can be answered by a call for dice tells us how much of it is air.

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