Dom Casmurro 3.83 · 3.83

And there it is, the question no one else in the room has dared to ask: 'ha mesmo necessidade de fazel-o padre?' — is there really any need to make him a priest? Blunt, kind, and quietly subversive, it goes past the whole debate about corners and clergy to the promise itself, and asks whether it must be kept at all. For the boy behind the door it must be an astonishment — an ally, from the least likely quarter, saying aloud the very thing he cannot. Machado lets the chapter's one merciful voice pose the decisive question, and leaves it hanging, unanswered, over the mother who will have to reckon with it.

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