Dom Casmurro 5.43 · 5.43

The speech ends on a note of high resolve: 'é tempo de restabelecer tudo' — it is time to set everything right. Having confessed, excused, and even ennobled his deception, José Dias closes by casting his retirement from medicine as a moral turning point, a restoration of proper order rather than a simple abandonment of a pose he can no longer maintain.

The grand 'tudo' — everything — is the last of his inflations, swelling a personal decision into a sweeping act of rectitude. What he is really doing is declining to treat the slaves; what he says he is doing is repairing the world. Machado ends the exchange exactly where he began the chapter, with a man whose smallest choices arrive draped in the largest words, and leaves us to admire, and mistrust, the seamless costume.

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