Explaining a phenomenon
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ou explicar algum phenonieno, falar dos effeitos
or to explain some phenomenon, to speak of the effects
Samples of his table-talk repertoire begin to accumulate.
The catalogue of José Dias's party pieces opens: he could 'explicar algum phenonieno,' explain some natural marvel, and hold forth on the effects of things. The vagueness of 'algum' is the joke — any phenomenon would do, whatever the evening happened to require. His knowledge is a stock of ready topics, deployed as the occasion asks, never pursued for its own sake.
Machado is building toward a deliberately absurd list, and the accumulation is the comedy. The dependent's mind is a miscellany, a drawer of unrelated facts about heat and cold and the poles and revolutionary France, all equally available for after-dinner display. In showing José Dias explaining 'some phenomenon,' the narrator gently mocks the whole figure of the parlor savant — the man whose learning is wide enough to touch everything and deep enough to hold nothing, and who is loved, precisely, for that.
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