Dom Casmurro 3.78 · 3.78

'Ande, vá buscar o gamão' — go on, fetch the backgammon. Twice now Cosme has ended a solemn passage by calling for his game, and the repetition makes it a leitmotif: whatever the family agonises over, the uncle's answer is to set up the board. There is a whole worldview folded into the gesture — that most of what people fret about is noise, and the wise thing is to enjoy the evening. Machado plainly loves him, and lets his cheerful materialism stand as the sanest voice in a room busy deciding, wrongly, what to do with a boy's life.

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