Dom Casmurro 9.66 · 9.66

God closes the negotiation like a contract, not a commandment: 'estou prompto a dividir condigo os direitos de autor.' He offers Satan a co-author's share of the royalties. The sacred and the diabolical become business partners, splitting the take on a joint production. Heaven and hell, it turns out, are on the same bill.

The modern, commercial idiom — 'direitos de autor', authors' rights — is Machado's final deflation. Creation is intellectual property; good and evil are billed together and paid together. For a chapter that will be quoted to Bento as the key to existence, this is the true lesson buried in the whimsy: there is no clean party to appeal to. The management that wrote your suffering also cut the devil in on the profits.

Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.

You are reading a page of the Dom Casmurro — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.

The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.

Also on our shelves:

• Plato's Phaedrus — complete, ancient Greek
• Heraclitus, the Fragments — complete
• Dante's Inferno — Italian, canto I