Dom Casmurro 3.8 · 3.8

Having circled the date, he sets it down: 1857. Bento is fifteen, as the coming dialogue tells us; the year fixes the whole chronology of the novel, the seminary, Capitú, the long life that follows. After all the sidelong hedging about how remote it is, the plain number arrives with a certain finality — he was, after all, going to give it exactly. The scrupulousness is real; it is only everything around the number, the motives and the meanings, that will stay in doubt.

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