Dom Casmurro 7.12 · 7.12

The chapter turns from the house to its mistress, and Machado dates the turn with an almost liturgical formula: 'naquelle anno da graça de 1857.' The phrase 'year of grace' is the old ecclesiastical way of counting time, Anno Domini, and it suits a woman whose whole life is bent toward God. It also quietly reminds us that Bento is looking back from decades away, reconstructing a fixed point in a lost world.

The fussy little 'Ora, pois' is the narrator clearing his throat, the storyteller settling in to describe someone he loves and cannot quite judge. Nothing has happened yet; he is only naming a year. But the care he takes with the frame tells us the portrait to come matters to him more than most, because this is the mother whose vow will decide everything.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.

You are reading a page of the Dom Casmurro — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.

The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.

Also on our shelves:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I