Dom Casmurro 7.26 · 7.26

The chapter turns from Dona Glória's biography to the two portraits Bento keeps in the Engenho Novo house, and the first thing he reports is that they still hang there, carried over from the old home. The reproduction of that house is the whole project of Dom Casmurro in miniature: to fasten to a wall what time has carried off.

Machado lets the little possessive do quiet work. 'O retrato delia' — her portrait — arrives before any feature is named, so the objects come to us as relics before they come as likenesses. Bento the narrator is an archivist of his own beginnings, and here he opens his private gallery, cataloguing the dead before he describes them.

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