Dom Casmurro 5.47 · 5.47

The idiom 'dava-se por falta delle' means his lack registered, his absence was noticed — and Machado extends it with the telling comparison 'como de pessoa de familia.' The agregado, legally and socially an outsider, is missed exactly as a relative would be. The line completes the earlier point: not merely necessary, but folded into the very idea of kin.

Yet the phrasing keeps a faint distance. He is missed 'como de' — as if of — a family member; the simile marks the seam it seems to erase. That ambiguous belonging is José Dias's permanent condition and the quiet tragedy of his type: always at the family's table, never quite of its blood, dependent on a nearness that can never harden into right. The whole novel turns on such thresholds between inside and outside, most of all the wall between the Santiago house and the Pádua house next door.

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