Dom Casmurro 7.16 · 7.16

The clause finishes on a near-scientific phrase, 'a acção do tempo' — the action of time, as one might speak of the action of water on stone. Nature, in this small allegory, is the force trying to shelter her from that erosion, and it half succeeds; the woman at forty-two is still 'bonita e moça.' Machado lets the abstraction do the aging that the sentence itself refuses to show.

The verb carries a clitic, 'preserval-a,' the old spelling clinging to the pronoun like the youth clinging to her face. It is the kind of quiet, almost invisible sentence Machado excels at: a portrait that seems merely descriptive while smuggling in the book's largest theme. Everything in Dom Casmurro is finally about the action of time — on faces, on marriages, on memory itself, which is the only instrument the old narrator has left to preserve anything.

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