Dom Casmurro 5.13 · 5.13

The reflexive verb is damning and delicious: 'vendendo-se por medico homeopatha' — selling himself as a homeopathic doctor. Not being one; selling himself as one. In a single participle Machado tells us José Dias arrived under a false qualification, and the whole later portrait of the performer is retroactively confirmed by his very entrance.

Homeopathy in the mid-nineteenth century was a fashionable, contested practice, and a wandering man could plausibly claim its mantle with a book and a kit. The word 'appareceu' — he simply appeared — gives the arrival a rootless, opportunistic air. This origin scene is the key to everything: the man who will spend the novel dispensing confident counsel first entered the house dispensing confident medicine he was not licensed to give. Bento, telling it decades on, lets the irony stand plainly. The persuader has always traded on a credential he did not truly hold.

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