Dom Casmurro 4.12 · 4.12

The narrator turns to the 'rodaque de chita' — a house-coat of cheap printed calico, 'veste caseira e leve', a light garment meant for indoors. The emphasis on its humbleness sets up the chapter's finest social observation, coming in the next clause. José Dias owns little and wears cheap cloth, but he carries it with such gravity that the plainness disappears. Machado is drawing the essence of the agregado, the poor dependent who must maintain dignity without means, and who does it by sheer force of manner — turning calico, through ceremony, into something like state dress.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.

You are reading a page of the Dom Casmurro — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.

The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.

Also on our shelves:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I