Dom Casmurro 7.49 · 7.49

The euphemism is gentle and complete: they 'se foram desta para a outra vida' — went from this life to the other. Death is named without its harsh word, softened into a passage between two dwellings, the very idiom of the pious household Dona Glória kept. Bento inherits the phrasing along with the faith.

The movement 'from this to the other' also rhymes with the chapter's larger geometry: the narrator forever standing in one room and gesturing toward another he cannot enter — the past, the truth, the inner life of the woman he married. His parents crossed a threshold he can only describe. The tenderness of the euphemism holds a lifelong ache, the sense that everyone who mattered has stepped into a room where he cannot follow, leaving their portraits behind on the wall.

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