Dom Casmurro 7.50 · 7.50

The afterlife is imagined not as reward but as a dream resumed: they went on 'continuar um sonho.' Bento supposes their happiness was already a kind of sleep and that death merely lets it run on. It is a beautiful thought and a faintly skeptical one, and the hedging 'provavelmente' is where the real Bento shows.

That single 'probably' is a small masterpiece of the narrator's temperament. He cannot let even a consoling image stand without a qualification, cannot grant certainty even to the dead's peace. The word admits that he is guessing, that all of this — the happiness, the blessedness, the dream — is inference from two painted faces. Machado tucks the book's central doubt into an adverb: everything Bento tells us about the hearts of others is, at bottom, a probably.

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