Dom Casmurro 5.10 · 5.10

The word 'aggregado' names José Dias's exact and precarious social station: the agregado, a live-in dependent attached to a well-off Brazilian family, neither servant nor guest nor kin, kept on out of habit, charity, and usefulness. Everything odd about his manner — the deference, the performances, the need to please — flows from this in-between status.

With 'desde muitos annos' the narrator anchors him in the household's long past, making him a fixture rather than a hired man. Machado is beginning the biography that explains the creature he has just described. The agregado must continually justify his keep, and so develops precisely the repertoire of walks and laughs and grave faces we have watched. The system produces the man. It is worth remembering that this dependence gives José Dias a stake in the family's affairs and a motive to shape them — the very meddling that opens the novel's central action springs from his fragile place at the Santiagos' table.

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