Dom Casmurro 7.48 · 7.48

Two epithets, laid down like a small litany: 'os bem-amados, os bem-aventurados.' The repeated 'bem-' turns the sentence into a soft chant, and the words shade from the earthly to the religious — the well-loved become the blessed, the couple half-canonized in their son's memory.

There is real tenderness here, but also the narrator's telltale habit of idealizing what he cannot check. He never knew this happiness; he was a child or unborn. The saints he makes of his parents are figures of longing, not report. Machado, always alert to how affection inflates its objects, lets Bento beatify the dead in the same breath he uses to price them against lottery tickets. The reverence is genuine and the evidence is nil — the pattern that governs every love in the book.

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