At last, into the saddle
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Emfim, após alguns instantes largos, tio Cosme enfeixava todas as forças physicas e moraes, dava o ultimo surto da terra, e desta vez caía em cima do selim.
At last, after some long moments, Uncle Cosme gathered all his physical and moral forces, gave the last leap from the ground, and this time fell on top of the saddle.
Gathering all his forces, Cosme finally lands atop the mule.
The mock-epic reaches its climax. To mount a mule, Cosme must marshal 'todas as forças physicas e moraes' — physical and moral forces both, as though the ascent were a labor of the soul as well as the body. Machado borrows the grand vocabulary of heroic effort and spends it on a stout lawyer heaving himself into a saddle, and the disproportion is the whole joke. The 'ultimo surto da terra' sounds like a leap of aspiration; it lands as a graceless drop.
The last verb undercuts everything: he does not rise into the saddle, he 'caía em cima do selim' — falls onto it. Even success arrives as a kind of collapse. Machado's tenderness never curdles into contempt; the uncle is ridiculous and beloved at once, and the passage's gentle irony is exactly the affection of a nephew who found the whole spectacle funny and has never forgotten it.
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Dom Casmurro 6.21 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/domcasmurro/6.21/