Which he had relinquished
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do qual abrira mão,
which he had relinquished,
God had given up the libretto, thinking such amusement beneath him.
The idiom 'abrir mão' — to open the hand, to let go — carries the whole turn. God wrote the libretto and then released it, dropped it, walked away. The verb is one of renunciation, and it makes the divine author careless: he did not lose the text or have it stolen, he simply relaxed his grip.
That carelessness is where the fable locates the deepest cause of the world's pain. Not malice, not even the rebellion, but a moment of divine indifference — an author who abandoned his own work and left it lying about for anyone to seize. Machado, endlessly attentive to how consequences outrun intentions, gives us a God whose sin is negligence. The tragedy of existence begins in a shrug. The next lines will explain the reasoning behind the shrug, and it is exactly the reasoning of a great artist who thinks a certain kind of pleasure beneath his dignity.
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Dom Casmurro 9.42 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/domcasmurro/9.42/