Dom Casmurro 5.7 · 5.7

Machado now itemizes the face part by part — cheeks, teeth, eyes — in a rising list that lets the laughter spread across the man like a wave. The syntax enacts the contagion it describes: each comma adds another feature caught up in the performance until nothing of the face is held back.

The accumulation is deliberately excessive, a small rhetorical crescendo, and there is warmth as well as irony in it. Bento is remembering a face he knew from childhood and rendering it with a novelist's relish. Yet the piling-on also quietly reminds us that this total commitment of the features costs José Dias nothing true — the laugh, we were just told, was 'sem vontade.' The whole apparatus of the face performs a feeling the man does not have. It is a marvel of technique, and Machado wants us to admire and mistrust it in the same breath.

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