Dom Casmurro 7.27 · 7.27

The two portraits are hung side by side, husband and wife, and Bento insists the arrangement copies the old house exactly — 'taes quaes na outra casa.' The pairing is a small marital tableau, the parents kept forever adjacent on the plaster; and the phrase 'taes quaes' is the reconstructor's oath, the promise of fidelity to a vanished original that governs the whole book.

Yet the reader who knows where the novel is going hears the irony gathering. Bento is a man obsessed with a marriage's fidelity, and he begins by curating his own parents' marriage into a perfect, motionless pair. What he cannot do to Capitú and himself he does effortlessly to the dead: fix them, forever faithful, on a wall.

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