Dom Casmurro 5.39 · 5.39

The rhythm turns almost liturgical. 'Elles, sim, elles, abaixo de Deus' — the remedies, yes, the remedies, second only to God. The repeated pronoun and the ascending appeal give the little speech the cadence of a creed, José Dias placing homeopathy just beneath the Almighty in the order of healing.

It is flattery of the doctrine dressed as reverence, and the piety is doing the same work his other flourishes do: it removes him from the center. If credit runs from God down to the remedies, then the man who administered them is safely out of the account, neither charlatan nor healer, merely present. Machado catches the way devout language can be pressed into the service of self-effacement, the sacred invoked to settle a very worldly question of blame and praise.

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