Dom Casmurro 9.25 · 9.25

The narrator breaks in, and in breaking in he gives the old tenor a name: 'Mas, meu caro Marcolini...'—But, my dear Marcolini. Until now the singer has been a type, 'the tenor'; the objection humanizes him with an address at once affectionate and skeptical. Bento is fond of the man and unpersuaded by him, and the courteous 'meu caro' softens the coming dissent.

Machado cuts the line off at the ellipsis, leaving the objection unspoken here—the frame closes on the verge of argument. The naming matters: Marcolini becomes a person the reader can hold, the source to whom the book's governing metaphor is owed. Whatever Bento is about to say, the effect is already achieved. The theory of life as opera has been placed in the mouth of a named, fallible, wine-warmed old singer, and the narrator has begun, gently, to resist the very idea his novel cannot stop believing.

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