Dom Casmurro 7.11 · 7.11

The genealogy takes one more step back and finally supplies a surname: 'descendente de outra paulista, a familia Fernandes.' The mineira mother was herself descended from a woman of São Paulo, and the line is given its name, the Fernandes. Machado closes the chapter by fixing Dona Glória in a small, respectable map of the Brazilian interior, Minas behind São Paulo behind Rio.

There is a faint comedy in the care. Two 'senhoras' and a family name are marshaled to establish the pedigree of a woman whose fortune, we have just been told in plain words, was built on selling and hiring out slaves. The novel places genteel descent and the slave ledger on the same page without a seam. And the naming itself matters to this narrator: he who cannot finally name the true father of his own son is scrupulous about naming his mother's grandmothers' province and his family's line, as though ancestry could be pinned down with the certainty that paternity, in his tormented telling, never can.

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