Dom Casmurro 5.14 · 5.14

Machado spells out the slender equipment of the impostor: 'um Manual e uma botica' — a handbook and a portable medicine chest. That is the whole of his science. The capitalized 'Manual' is faintly comic, a single book standing in for a training; the 'botica' is a travelling apothecary in a box. With these two props a man could set up as a healer among the credulous.

The detail is affectionate and merciless at once. It does not paint José Dias as a villain — homeopathy asked little more than confidence and a formulary — but it fixes forever the pattern of his authority: it rests on props and manner, not on knowledge. Throughout the novel his pronouncements will carry the same borrowed weight, sounding learned while resting on nothing but a book consulted and a tone assumed. Here Machado shows us the starter kit of the man's lifelong bluff.

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