Dom Casmurro 7.20 · 7.20

The portrait moves up to the head, and the style is deliberately dated: 'bandós,' bandeaux, the hair parted and smoothed in flat bands at the temples, then drawn back low. It was already an old woman's fashion by 1857, and by the time Bento writes it belongs to a vanished era. The detail places Dona Glória in a past that the narrator can only reconstruct, never re-enter.

'Apanhados sobre a nuca' — gathered at the nape — completes the impression of a woman who binds everything, hair and grief and self alike, into severe order. There is nothing loose or flowing about her. Machado, building his mother figure, keeps every stroke consistent: the plain gown, the folded shawl, the bound hair all say the same word, containment. This is the person whose one uncontained act, a promise blurted to God in fear, will govern her son's life.

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