Dom Casmurro 5.36 · 5.36

Bento's father cuts through the whole performance with plain common sense: title or no title, 'você curou das outras vezes' — the man has healed people before. The practical mind confronts the moral flourish, and the objection is unanswerable on its own terms: results are results.

Machado stages a small collision of temperaments. The father cares about outcomes; José Dias cares about how things are framed. It is a gentle mismatch, and it forces José Dias into the finest passage of the exchange, where he must reconcile his real cures with his newly announced scruple. The father's blunt sentence, so short beside José Dias's elaborations, is the straight line that draws out the dependent's most ingenious curve.

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