What follows are some of the most brutal pages in world literature: bam, bam, bam. Even though you know exactly where this is going – and for over a century every Brazilian reader has known exactly where this is going – the end comes as a blow.
Was it, so to speak, worth it?
Did Capitu betray Bentinho with Escobar?
At first glance, “Dom Casmurro” seems like a conventional romance. Boy meets girl. Obstacles arise and are overcome. Machado takes his time to roll out his scenes. The first part, the November afternoon when Bentinho realizes he is about to be sent to seminary and understands that he loves Capitu, takes up almost half of the book. Everything is explained. Each character is introduced in microscopic detail. Everything seems clear and sharp, and we have all the time in the world – until, at the very end, the author blurs everything. We realize there were clues everywhere. But what do they mean? We have to comb through those pages, and when we do, we see why such a seemingly simple question – did she? Didn’t she? – become such a rich one.
This is one of the reasons that even if the translation I originally read had been better, I might not have understood this book. More than maybe any other book I know, “Dom Casmurro” must be read more than once. It teaches us to read in much the same way that Vermeer teaches us to see: by looking and then looking again. A pretty young lady stands at the window talking to a servant or staring at a letter: a theme for both Vermeer and Machado. Nothing happens, but the longer we look, the more we become aware of everything we see, and everything we don’t see. We’ll look again. Everything is there. There is nothing. Like Vermeer, Machado withholds an answer. Or does he?
“You can’t easily correct a confusing book, but you can add almost anything to a book full of omissions,” Machado writes, giving us his infamous side-eye. “If I read one of the latter kind, I don’t mind at all. What I do when I reach the end is close my eyes and imagine all the things I didn’t find in it. What a lot of beautiful ideas come to my mind! What deep thoughts! The rivers, mountains, churches that I did not find in the pages all appear to me with their flowing waters, their trees, their altars.
