Dom Casmurro 7.21 · 7.21

The hair is held by 'um velho pente de tartaruga,' an old tortoiseshell comb — old, again, like the dress that is eternal and the fashion that is passing. Nothing on this woman is new; her possessions have aged with her, kept rather than replaced. The comb is humble, useful, worn, exactly the sort of object a frugal pious widow would carry for decades.

Brazilian readers catch a small private echo here: 'Tartaruga' is also the neighbourhood nickname of Pádua, Capitú's father, the 'filha do Tartaruga.' The material comb and the mocking sobriquet share a word, so the plainest household item quietly brushes against the family next door whose daughter will become the center of Bento's life. Machado almost surely intends nothing by it but the resonance, faint as it is, is the kind his prose is full of — the everyday object that, in a book about jealousy, turns out to touch everything.

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