Dom Casmurro 8.17 · 8.17

'É só um capitulo' — it is only a chapter — is Machado turning the novel's own architecture into a joke and a promise. Bento reassures the reader that the coming digression will cost only a few pages, which is both true, since the next chapter is short, and self-aware, since the whole book advances by exactly this kind of brief, swerving aside.

The line closes a chapter titled 'É tempo!' by cheerfully postponing the very story it announced was time to begin. That is the essential Machadian rhythm: the promise to get on with it, immediately followed by one more detour. The reader learns here to expect a narrator who will always find room for one small chapter more before the curtain he keeps swearing is about to rise.

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