Dom Casmurro 9.21 · 9.21

The tenor is scrupulous about his own system: 'quando não são o soprano e o contralto que lutam pelo tenor'—unless it is the soprano and the contralto who fight for the tenor. The rivalry can invert; two women may contend for the man. Machado gives the theory a pedantic evenhandedness, the completeness of a man who has thought his single idea all the way through.

The symmetry is faintly comic—the old singer covering every casting permutation—but it also universalizes the claim. Whichever way desire runs, it runs as competition, two voices straining for a third. The shape holds regardless of who wants whom. For a novel obsessed with a single suspected rivalry, the tenor's insistence that rivalry is simply the form love takes, in every arrangement, lands with more weight than his tipsy delivery would suggest.

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