Dom Casmurro 9.3 · 9.3

The narration shifts from the man's self-image to his habits, and the habit is grievance. 'Sempre que'—whenever—marks a recurring ceremony: each new opera company off the boat from Europe becomes the occasion for the same performance. Machado's imperfect tenses ('chegava,' and the verbs to come) hold the tenor in a loop, a man whose life has become the repetition of a complaint.

That the companies come 'da Europa' quietly places the scene in Rio's operatic culture of the century, where the real singers arrived by ship and a stranded old tenor could only watch them land. The sentence sets up the comedy of the next: he will go to the impresario, not to be hired, but to catalogue the injustices of earth and heaven.

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