One frequently meets among intellectuals a sort of Brazilian Hamlet-type, incapable of serious work or action, who seems to be covering up a deep anxiety with words, words, words, a pretended madness, a deliberately fanciful humor that is not frivolity although it resembles it.
—Elizabeth Bishop, Brazil (1963)
Aquela hora—triste se viveu se nunca foi—foi a única que eu vivi, e eu hoje sou apenas a saudade encarnada dela, o seu eco confuso e consciente.
[That hour—sad if it ever happened—was the only one I ever lived; and today I am no more than its incarnate melancholy, its confused and conscious echo.]
—Fernando Pessoa, “A perversão do longe”
MACHADO’S MOST COMPLEX failed narrator-author, a master of dissimulation who writes to disguise the depth and damage of his obsessions, is Bento Santiago, in his own words the “subterranean man” who carried “death on his own retina” (134). His drama is enacted within the allegory of life as an opera between God and Satan; Faust, Macbeth, and Othello are literary and operatic role models for Bento’s struggle with ghosts of the past, remorse, guilt, revenge, and the ravaging and destruction of his life.1 The time and circumstances of his writing in a narrative present tense, explained in a few early chapters, provide essential clues for reading the memoir to follow, which is the retrospective and chronological account of his life occupying all but a few chapters of the novel. Bento speaks as if he were a lawyer for his own defense, although with an increasingly uneasy, confessional volubility.2 Dom Casmurro is a novel that documents Bento Santiago’s psychological degeneration, “the shipwreck of my entire existence” (20), in his own words put down in his defense. Writing as an old man now in the final phase of his life and living in the suburb of Engenho Novo in a house he had built as an exact replica of his childhood home in the city, he occupies himself by constructing a subtle defense of the acts that have led to his present empty condition, under the pretext that he has nothing better to do than write a few inconsequential lines. Bento is first of all a failed character because in his old age he is isolated, morose, reclusive, and lonely; furthermore, he has brought this condition on himself yet avoids admitting so, or else does not wish to remember exactly why, or pretends not to know. He cannot admit either his guilt or his complicity; he pairs victimization with claims of innocence and normalcy. He writes his memoirs at an unspecified present moment of narration after an interval of forty years from the primary events, at a time when he pronounces himself “ancient and, needless to say, in the worse sense: that is—old and done for” (117). While composing the memoir and reliving selected significant moments of his early life, he often comments on events from his position as author, at the same time that he recounts them from the fresh point of view of a young Bentinho.
The first chapter, set in Engenho Novo and describing his experience on a suburban train, is a lesson on the essential nature of his psychology and narrative strategies. It is indicative of Machado’s highly synthetic and reflexive method. On the train Bento meets a young poet with whom he had only a passing acquaintance. The poet offers to read some of his verses to pass the time during their trip. Because Bento nods off while listening, the poet cuts off his reading; moreover, as Bento relates, the displeased poet later invents the nickname “Dom Casmurro” for the nodding Bento, a sobriquet taken up in jest by Bento’s acquaintances when they hear the story, although it seems to fit him quite well. As Bento himself explains, “Casmurro” fits his reclusive, morose behavior, while the royal appellative “Dom” was added for irony, an allusion to his supposed aristocratic airs. He was given the nickname by the casual acquaintance he offended on the suburban train, yet the story he tells reveals perhaps more than he intended and establishes a pattern for his thinking that is repeated throughout his memoir. Even though the poet’s reaction was in response to Bento’s affront and not without a clever touch of humor, it is Bento the narrator who finally resolves to hold no grudge against the poet. By the end of chapter 1 Bento has made himself the victim rather than the perpetrator; in the magnanimity he shows by pardoning the poet for giving him the name, Bento has reversed the situation to exonerate himself and blame the other. At the end of his memoir Bento repeats a similar pardon, accusation, and shift of blame: he pardons his deceased wife, Capitu, and his best friend, Escobar, for betraying him, although he knows that his accusation derives from his own misperception, a delusion tied to one of his hallucinations and to his fits of uncontrollable jealousy.
The pardon is, once again, necessary to support an image presented to the reader of his capacity to reach compassionate and just judgments. Yet Bento is relentless in both cases: in the first instance he defuses the irritating name Dom Casmurro by making it a joke among his acquaintances; he turns the poet into the guilty party through his pardon; and he suggests that the poet is a delusional madman who will claim authorship of Bento’s memoirs because he unwittingly contributed the title to the book. By saying that the young poet will probably think he is the author of the text, Bento classifies him with the mad appropriators of the Mennipean satirical tradition and goes on to imply that perhaps the poet on the train did not actually write those verses that put him to sleep, since “there are books which owe no more to their authors; some, not so much” (1). Bento’s response in both cases is total, devastating, and unrelenting. At the conclusion of the memoir, after granting his pardon, he again accuses Capitu, the coup de grâce: that she had done no more than nurture the seeds of her unfaithful, flawed character present since her earliest youth. His is a prosecuting attorney’s summation: “If you remember Capitu the child, you will have to recognize that one was within the other, like the fruit within its rind” (148). Via this syllogism he confirms her treasonous inner nature without admitting additional culpability and without involving himself. He further implies a class distinction, since Capitu’s poorer origins may have been responsible for the moral defect.
In the earlier case of the poet on the train, in addition to his sense of victimization, Bento takes advantage of his sardonic humor to raise the theme of his own sexuality and fertility. A close acquaintance in town invites him to stay overnight and offers him “everything except a girl” (1). Having used a pretext to broach a topic of obvious importance to him, Bento lets his readers know there has been a daily parade of women through his mansion for years. Even in the memoir he reminds readers that ladies’ eyes sought him out: “I shall say nothing about them, since I confessed at the start that I was to have future adventures—but they were as yet still in the future” (113). Here is a disarming retort to the more than two years during which he and Capitu tried unsuccessfully to conceive, to his obsession with purity and chastity in the seminary, and to the moments in the memoir when he confessed to feeling less than manly. Being an issue raised so casually, it returns frequently in the memoir. On meeting Capitu for the first time, Bento contrasts his education in letters with his lack of education in the world: “I had had orgies of Latin, and was a virgin in women” (14); he describes himself as the son of the seminary and of his mother, a boy whom the girls would not let alone “whether in the streets or at their windows” (97). After entering the seminary, he sees a lady fall in the street, and his reaction is elliptical and diffuse: “The lady’s hose and garters gleamed white and spiraled before me, walked and fell, got up and marched off” (58). Bento confuses the cassocks at the seminary with the skirts, and he mixes their erotic dimensions: the female visions become evils to be conquered by reciting paternosters, Ave Marias, and credos. In his dreams female devils attack him: “A multitude of abominable creatures walked about me ticki-ticki. . . . They were fair, some slender, others stout, all agile as the devil” (58). In those days he kept a photograph of Escobar, his friend from the seminary who had “entered his soul” (56), alongside one of his mother and emphasized his purity when studying in the seminary.
It is for the assertion of his manliness at all costs, ironically, that Bento maintains his accusation against Capitu and the then-deceased Escobar concerning the paternity of their son; in his stubbornness he unwittingly substitutes Escobar for himself, yet he gains strength from making the accusation: “Could it be that there was a new man within me, the creation of new and strong pressures?” (140). At the onset of the memoir, then, before taking pen in hand and in the guise of humor, Bento deflects the complex web of guilt and remorse that led him to re-create his childhood home with a list of unjust offenses made against him: his authorship had been usurped, his name had been changed in an undeserved parody of his self-imposed reclusion, he had been unfairly criticized; yet his isolation was not so bad as it might have seemed (“I eat well and I don’t sleep poorly”), and he goes on to tell us that his city friends and many women still seek him out. He is about to write a long, carefully crafted memoir of justification, consolation, and self-defense.
On beginning his memoirs, Bento Santiago is an elite, elderly, wealthy lawyer, and his narrative resembles a summation to the jury, his readership. Although he is careful to present his defects, those of which he is aware, in order to make himself seem normal and sane, he makes use of them as a counterweight to deflect attention from much more serious and perverse acts of passion or even of criminal intent that he has committed. While living in Engenho Novo, for example, one night Bento has a bad headache, an excuse he gives for his perverse wish that one of the trains of the Central line would blow up, “far from my hearing, and the line interrupted for many hours, even though someone should die” (68). As narrator, he excuses himself on the grounds that everyone is born with a certain number of vices and virtues, and he was simply born with these. He claims to counterbalance his wish for death in the train explosion by a beneficent counteraction, which was to offer his cane the next morning to a blind man at the station who didn’t have one, as if this small gesture were a counterweight to a fatal act of terrorism. His authority is Montaigne, whom he quotes both as a sign of his enlightened and literate culture in support of his defense by alleging that good always accompanies the bad and as proof that he was acting out of an inescapable inner nature: “Ce ne sont mes gestes que j’escris, c’est moy, c’est mon essence” (I do not write my own acts, but myself and my essence) (“De l’exercitation,” Essais).
Bento makes ample use of lawyers’ tricks: he collapses time in his retrospective presentation, devoting two-thirds of his narrative to his childhood development while reducing several voyages to Europe and decades of his current lonely existence to a few lines or pages. Inexperience is the excuse Bento gives his readers for the very long exposition of his early life, and it leads to omissions and brevity in the rest: “I arrive almost at the end of my supply of paper, with the best of the story yet to tell. Now there is nothing to do but pull it along with great strides . . . everything cut short” (97). He skirts the subject of his repressed attraction to Escobar, a strong father figure who dominates him, while warning that phantom horsemen whom he thinks are courting Capitu are sounding the “trumpet of doom” (73). He gives his story a casual, even trivial, air, as if it were a pastime, yet he reveals key details of a much more dramatic and darker content for the reader who is looking for them—and here is a point where Machado has an obvious hand in the narrative. Almost all of the narration is done from the perspective of the adolescent Bentinho, up to the point where he faces a crisis after the death of Escobar, his special friend from the seminary; he uses the terms “catastrophe” and “abyss” to mark the dramatic change, and he warns his readers. From early on in the lawyer’s summation, the confessional side of his story has threatened to escape his control: he acknowledges that he himself is missing, and his life and narrative are an attempt to begin anew in the childhood home and recover what is missing: “A man consoles himself more or less for those he has lost, but I myself am missing, and this lack is essential” (2). His is a story, finally, of all that can never be recovered; it is profoundly melancholic rather than tragic.
Bento refuses to say why he is writing this book, and he resorts to more than one dissimulation: it is because he has nothing else to do; it is in place of the “History of the Suburbs” that he first thought of writing and promises to have the same low level of content and drama; or it is simply to relive moments from the past which, he comments neutrally, are neither so painful nor so pleasant as when they first occurred. Bento cannot reveal the terrible reason that motivates his book: he hopes to feel the pleasure and legal satisfaction of convincing readers of his innocence and take solace in their solidarity. It is one path to restoring the past destroyed by his passions, parallel to the rebuilding of his childhood home in the suburbs. He even confesses that he feels a certain pleasure in retelling a story so full of both pain and joy. Yet he knows that for the sake of consistency and credence he must carefully tie the ends of his life together, a task that as a lawyer he carries out with consummate skill. In a narrative he insists is pure, he will attempt to convince readers, who act as his jury, but he cannot unload the burden of his guilt and remorse over the obstinacy, rage, and jealousy that possessed him, turned him into a madman, and led him to ruin his life. In the memoir he will confess that his memory is not good and that he remembers only scattered details of his life by virtue of “continuity and repetition” (59).
Bento will also philosophize that “lying is, many a time, as involuntary as transpiring” and “one of the contradictions of this world” (41). The only procedure likely to convince the jury would be to characterize his behavior as a part of the process of aging, as balanced between good and bad, and to connect it to familiar literary and biblical antecedents. For these reasons Bento is an author absent from his own story, living with allegories and parables of prior realities, shaping the history of a past that haunts him in search of both a self and a consolation; his narrative is the story of absence and loss, as would be his unwritten “History of the Suburbs,” since at that time in Rio de Janeiro suburbs as yet had no history. To explain his own story he takes advantage of age-old archetypes found in Macbeth, Othello, Faust, and Dante’s Commedia in order to situate the hidden depths of his own thoughts and actions within certain well-known and acceptable parameters. Dom Casmurro writes to expiate his dark acts through a pretense of innocence, a history of victimization, and the rehearsal of archetypes familiar to his audience.
The reason he gives for writing his memoirs is that while living in the model of his childhood home the busts painted on the walls (Nero, Augustus, Caesar, Massinissa) spoke to him: “[They] said that since they had failed to bring back the days gone by, I should take my pen and tell over those times” (2). Veiled by this strange vision is the confession that on his return visit to the actual house, after the death of all the principals in the novel, “the whole house disowned me. Outside—the great aroeira and the pitanga trees, the well pool, the old bucket and the washing place—nothing knew me”; at the same time, he thought he heard leaves and branches “begin to hum something” and the grunting of pigs became “a chorus of philosophical scoffing” (144). Feeling the rejection of place in these odd imaginings, Bento authorized destruction of his childhood house; this is the same pattern he would apply to the rejection and forced exile of his wife and son.
The model of the childhood home at Engenho Novo is the first of the novel’s many substitutions and represents the pervasive destabilizing role played by the mechanism throughout the novel. The substituted childhood house, meant to restore a lost time, “to link together the two ends of my life” (64), is symbolically a resurrection and restoration of Escobar, whose soul Bento had compared to a house: “Escobar went on opening up his whole soul, from the street door to the back fence. A person’s soul, as you know, is arranged like a house. . . . Escobar pushed and came in. I found him here inside, and here he remained until . . .” (56). Here, Bento as narrator both intimates his intimacy with Escobar and foreshadows his death, which is prepared by a reference to Escobar’s sister’s death in the same chapter; she was a “devoted creature” (boa criatura) whom Bento would have wished to marry had it not been for Capitu. During the years of their respective marriages, the couples were inseparable, and the two lived between each other’s houses, literarily and metaphorically: “While he lived, since we were so close, we had, so to speak, a single house. I lived in his and he in mine.” Bento confesses that Escobar’s house substitutes for Capitu’s in his memory of their childhood houses: “It made me think of the two houses of Matacavallos, with their wall between” (117). The different houses and times symbolize a conflict that Bento will not allow into his conscious mind: he refuses to give the reader the house number “since I don’t want you to go there and ferret out the story.”3 Bento is a failed character-author whose life roles are unstable because at every turn his will defers to and is determined by the decisions and actions of others, a pattern set by his mother and José Dias. He is Machado’s character in search of an author.
In his Engenho Novo house Bento keeps portraits of his father and mother as youths, from before he was born, an ideal of conjugal felicity in this world and the next: “The loving ones, the lucky ones, who went from this to the other world to continue a dream, most likely” (7). They are the substitutes for the missing parents—his father died when he was a child—and he is the ritual victim of his mother’s promise to make him a priest: “My mother took her son . . . she brought the wood for the burnt offering, the fire and the knife. And she bound Isaac and laid him upon the bundle of wood, took the knife and raised it high. Just as she was about to strike she heard the voice of the angel call to her. . . . This must have been the secret hope of my mother” (80). Bento is a substitute for his older brother, who was born dead; hence Dona Glória, his mother, promised that if her second born lived he would be given to the Church, a substitution that would deprive Bento of marriage and an heir: he notices that his mother often looks at him as a lost soul. His childhood toys were always church things. Bento’s first objective in adolescence is to nullify his mother’s promise, played out curiously in another act of substitution in a Mass that the youth “performs” with the girl next door, his sweetheart Capitu: she is sacristan, and they divide the host, which is a sweet, between them. From the beginning Bento and Capitu plot to bring about their marriage, a substitution for the priesthood, although authenticated by the false, metonymic Mass: “One side of her face was the Epistle and the other the Gospel. Her mouth the chalice, her lips the paten” (14). In the confused copy of a sacred ritual, Machado inscribes one of the leitmotifs of Bento’s exposition: Dominus non sum dignus. Even Bento’s emotions are the result of a substitution: he is unaware of his love for Capitu until he overhears José Dias warn his mother that the children might “fall in love”: “Then I was in love with Capitu, and Capitu with me?” (12). Dias, a fraudulent traveling salesman who became attached to the family through Bento’s father, an agregado common in Brazilian society, now acts as substitute father and mentor for the family. Bento leaves the seminary when his place is occupied by an approved substitute, and Escobar, who had the idea of the substitution, becomes his symbolic second substitute father when he comes to dinner and courts Bento’s mother, D. Glória. Both Capitu and Escobar vie to establish connections with Bento’s deceased father. Capitu demonstrates her artistic talent in a pencil sketch based on a portrait, which Bento finds imperfect but in which he sees potential; Escobar, on his visit for dinner, shows a fascination with the portrait, going more directly to the heart of the matter: “It is obvious that this was a pure heart.” Recounting the comment from the distance of forty years, Bento paints a living portrait of Escobar impressive for its detail: “Escobar’s shaven face showed a fair, smooth skin. His forehead perhaps was a trifle low . . . but it was still high enough not to swallow up the rest of his features and lessen their grace. Actually it was an interesting face: a fine mouth with a salty lift to it, a curved, slender nose” (71). After the dinner with Escobar and D. Glória, Capitu asked Bento who was that great friend who meant so much to him. She had been waiting in the window and observing their affectionate farewell, to the point that Bento waited for Escobar to look back from a distance as he departed. Contrary to his characterization of Capitu’s eyes as being “like the tide” (olhos de ressaca), he described Escobar’s as clear and very sweet. Escobar will compare Bento’s eyes to his mother’s: “You had to take after someone with those eyes God gave you; they are exactly like hers” (93). The reader is given two immediate warnings about Bento’s fascination with Escobar: the first is from Cousin Justina, who accepted his visit with the unexplained reservation “in spite of . . .” (71); and Bento himself follows with two chapters warning of “reversals of fortune,” “destiny,” and “the final catastrophe.” He decides to act on his jealousy of the horsemen who rode past Capitu’s window, a decision reflecting Machado’s subtle reciprocity, as he replaces the window scene in which Capitu observes his great affection for the departing Escobar with another in which she is at her window being courted, in a sublimated substitution.
After the marriages of the two ex-seminarians, Escobar and his wife, Sancha, become crossed with their shadow couple, Bento and Capitu, in a web of substitutions. Escobar had delivered Bento’s love notes to Capitu before their marriage, and when Escobar married her friend Sancha he called Capitu “his little sister-in-law” (98). Sancha names her daughter Capituzinha, just as Capitu will name her son Ezequiel, Escobar’s middle name. Sancha and Capitu have family resemblances, and Ezequiel as a child plays by imitating Escobar. The two children are said to resemble each other, a fondness that might have led to marriage, although Bento lets readers know bluntly that it did not, a foreshadowing of dark turns of events of which he is already aware as narrator. The four adults are also crossed by psychosexual substitutions: Bento attempts to seduce Sancha and assume the role of Escobar. In his lawyer’s office Bento had placed a photograph of Escobar alongside his mother’s, and in the moment of crisis with Sancha he heard it speak to him “as if it were he in propria persona.”4 When Sancha squeezes Bento’s hand, she leaves an indelible impression: “I still felt Sancha’s fingers pressing mine, and mine hers” (118). Bento is substituting Sancha, perhaps unconsciously, for a previous encounter with Escobar, when they decide to become even closer friends: “Escobar furtively gripped my hand so hard that my fingers still tingle. This tingling is an illusion, surely” (94). Perhaps to divert suspicion, Bento accuses Capitu, who might have had a motive for beginning an affair with Escobar, if only to share the intimacy he enjoyed with her husband or to produce the son desired by a possibly impotent or chaste Bento. The only rumored affair seems to be Escobar’s with an actress, which because it is reported by Bento may be fulfilling ulterior motives: it both absolves Sancha of her overture to Bento and prepares Bento’s accusation of Escobar and Capitu. The couples are thoroughly intertwined by a series of substitutions before the dramatic dénouement.
Bento’s hallucinations, fantasies, and daydreams began at an early age; he once described their effects as “disconnected and patched, badly patched, like a botched and crooked design, a confusion, a whirlwind which blinded me and made me deaf” (62). He confesses, “I was not quite conscious of all my acts” (37). Dreams of victimization often took over his mind: “I was persecuted by dreams, even when awake” (63). The deep conflict in Bento between his mother and Capitu emerges when he alternately sobs and laughs during a solemn religious procession: “I went out into the hall and I heard someone say to me: ‘Don’t cry like that!’ The image of Capitu went with me. . . . I saw her write on the wall, speak to me, turn with her arms in the air; I distinctly heard my name in a tone so sweet it made me drunk. . . . José Dias came up and whispered in my ear: ‘Don’t grin like that!’” (30). While in the seminary, Bento, during one of José Dias’s visits, inquires after Capitu and pales when he hears she is happily romancing young bucks from the neighborhood, failing to discount Dias’s known disapproval of their relationship. Bento loses control in his fantasy: “An impulse to dash headlong through the great gate, race down the steps, run, get to Pádua’s house, seize Capitu and command her, force her to confess” (62). Bento admits to his enormous and universal jealousy: the slightest social contact of any dance partner or neighbor with Capitu tormented him to the point of terror and mistrust. Capitu had been his Mass, his religion, and his only purpose. The intensity and imaginative dimension of his jealousy provoke successively perverse and sadistic visions of punishment and cruelty. Thinking what might have happened between Capitu and the young bucks, Bento feels persecuted and weeps in his room, preceding a dream of revenge:
I saw myself already ordained, standing before her. She wept repentantly and begged my forgiveness, but I, cold and serene, had nothing but scorn, scorn and contempt. I turned my back on her. I called her perverse. Twice I found myself gnashing my teeth, as if she were between them.
As I lay on the bed, I heard her voice. She had come to spend the rest of the afternoon with my mother, and probably with me, as she had other times; but no matter how much her coming moved me, it did not make me leave my room. Capitu was laughing loudly, talking loudly, as if she let me know she was there. I continued deaf, alone with myself and my scorn. And I was filled with a desire to drive my nails into her throat, bury them deep, and watch the life drain out of her with her blood. . . . Capitu was laughing less now and spoke in a lower tone; probably she was hurt at my shutting myself away, but not even this moved me. I ate no supper and slept badly.5
This wish to punish Capitu notwithstanding, when he is suddenly called home to see his sick mother, Bento unconsciously channels his opposition to the seminary into a wish for D. Glória’s demise: “With Mama dead, that would be the end of the seminary.” When he becomes conscious of his idea, he confesses with deep shock and remorse: “Reader, it was a lightning flash; no sooner had it illuminated the night than it fled away, leaving the dark more intense from the remorse that it left behind with me. It was the prompting of lust and selfishness” (67). This is Bento’s unchangeable pattern: “My fits of jealousy were intense, but brief: in an instant I would tear down everything, but in the same instant I would reconstruct the sky, the earth, and the stars” (107).
There is little ambiguity in this novel, contrary to the critical commonplace; rather, Dom Casmurro is an open text that demands the reader’s participation and close attention. It traces and catalogues Bento’s doubts, dependence, psychological instability, and degeneration within the language he chooses to portray himself. A testimonial to Machado’s genius in constructing Bento’s monologue is that for almost a century he managed to divert readers’ attention away from Bento’s own psychological deviations toward the irrelevant or substitute question of Capitu’s guilt or innocence. The accusation became firmly grounded in the novel’s reception as the key problem; later, a variation of this reading proposed Capitu’s guilt or innocence to be an intentional ambiguity to be resolved by the juror-reader, an equally unacceptable reading. Machado, through Bento, succeeded in disguising the psychological portrayal of the narrator’s instability, fantasy, and perversion in the literary tradition of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Chekhov.
Machado read Russian authors of his day; in a chronicle about the suicide of the ballerina Labushka, a mistress of the regent, he writes, “Great mystery that only the Slavic world can give. Was it a telegram I read? Was it some page of Dostoevsky?” (December 16, 1894). And in a chronicle addressed to the czarina, he suggests that she have his message translated: “I had it translated into the language of Gogol that they say is so rich and sonorous” (October 11, 1896). In the story “The Secret Cause,” Machado rehearses a case of perversion and cruelty dramatized in the heroine’s death, including a visit to the opera.
From the earliest pages of Dom Casmurro there is a counterpoint to the courtship theme to be found in descriptions of Capitu—mainly her eyes, her curiosity, and her skill at dissimulation—that will add up in Bento’s mind to conflict with the nature of his friend Escobar, feed his jealous hallucinations, and corroborate her guilt in Escobar’s death by drowning in the tide. From their earliest acquaintance her eyes had the power to draw Bento into them: “Our eyes met, then looked away, and after wandering nearby returned to sink into the depths of each other” (14). Bento had heard José Dias describe them as “gypsy’s eyes, oblique and sly.” The crucial comparison Bento makes is between Capitu’s eyes and the force of the tide: “Eyes like the tide? Yes, like the tide. That’s what they were. They had some mysterious and force-giving fluid that drew everything up into them, like a wave that moves back from the shore when the undertow is heavy” (32). Enchanted with the young Capitu and preparing to comb her hair, Bento is overwhelmed at the idea of touching the head of a nymph, and he writes the name of the mythological figure Thetis before crossing out the word. Readers of Camões’s Lusiads will recognize Thetis as a sea nymph, one of the fifty Nereids who was the passion of the giant Adamastor; when he reached out to embrace her, she transformed him forever into the giant rock that stands at the Cape of Africa and further taunted him by lapping at his shores. The foreboding of this name applied to Capitu at this erotic moment is itself one of the significant undercurrents in her characterization as femme fatale.
She was endlessly curious in ways that Bento found both explainable and unexplainable, and especially so in wanting to know about subjects deemed improper for girls, like Latin. She read novels, she learned music, she was more than special to the point that Bento thought her “more woman than I was man” (31), a confession he was loathe to make. After their first kiss, Bento’s inner voices warn his heart against his weakness: “Here is one who will make no great mark in the world, if his slightest emotions rule him.” Yet he compares his discovery of Eros to that of Columbus and exclaims three times, “I am a man!” (34). Capitu’s self-possession surprises Bento, who is always terrified by his situation; she disguises their deepening relationship by talking and acting with an aplomb that Bento envies, even as he sees it as false. In diverting the family’s suspicion from their plans to marry, Bento notes that they were required to dissemble: when Capitu insisted in front of the family that only a Padre Bentinho would marry her after his ordination, Bento is almost surprised by her “masterpiece of deceit” (65).
It is only when Capitu looks down at the dead body of Escobar, however, that Bento makes the leap connecting “eyes like the tide,” Capitu’s seemingly excessive expression of affection when giving her last respects, and her responsibility for his drowning. Capitu glances “fixedly” and “furtively,” just as the widow Sancha does, but her eyes were “great and wide like the swollen wave of the sea beyond, as if she too wished to swallow up the swimmer of that morning” (123). It is the death of Escobar, not the accusation of infidelity against Capitu, that is the catalyst for the “catastrophe,” the dramatic turning point and climax of the memoir and novel. The drowning has been carefully prepared in the text ever since the moment Bento, in a fit brought on by his desire that Capitu pay more attention to him, confessed being jealous of the sea. During his dalliance with Sancha, “the sea pounded forcibly along the shore; and there was the suck of the undertow” (118). The couples often looked pensively toward the sea. His accusation of Capitu is a diversion that substitutes a conscious theatrics in the reenactment of Othello for the “secret cause” of Bento’s paranoia and hallucinations.
Bento accuses Capitu of infidelity with Escobar, whereas he would like to find her guilty of his death. Capitu’s possible infidelity, her guilt or innocence, is a question secondary to the main issues in the memoir, one that does not resolve the loss of Escobar, although the accusation does succeed in polarizing a trial and placing her in the dock; it is the narrator’s most brilliant and successful diversion, since the accusation establishes and fixates doubt in the mind of the reader-jurors over an extraneous issue. Helen Caldwell observed that the title of the novel is Dom Casmurro, not Capitu, and that the psychological drama lies entirely within Bento. That Capitu’s inconclusive guilt or innocence of infidelity is irrelevant to the situation lies in the fact that either verdict would fail to justify Bento’s extreme and irrevocable acts. The genius of his accusation against his wife and son is that for the readers, his jury, it changes the terms of discourse by occupying their deliberations with a problem introduced in the final pages, after the dénouement, a problem reviving the age-old dilemma of Othello. In an earlier chapter Bento himself explains the abstract advantage to be gained by any accusation: “A person can be guilty, half guilty, a third, a fifth, a tenth guilty, since in the matter of guilt the gradation is infinite. The simple recollection of a pair of eyes is enough to fix other eyes that remember them and delight in imagining them. There is no need of an actual, mortal sin, or exchange of letter, simple word, nod, sigh or signal still more light and trifling. An anonymous man or anonymous woman who passes by at the corner of the street can make us put Sirius inside Mars” (107). Bento’s accusation is a peripheral consideration that will deflect attention from his fragile emotional and psychological state after the drowning of his best friend; it has no definitive solution, yet it is not in the least ambiguous. The accusation involves the jurors in a wider question between the sexes, one which could be aimed at almost any elite male in the capital. That there is not enough evidence presented to prove guilt or innocence simply assures that the question will continue to occupy and divert readers’ attention. For more than a century, as I noted, readers of the novel have reduced it to a question of Capitu’s guilt or innocence, having been distracted from seeing its great abyss. The evidence that this is a secondary question lies in the fact that no verdict could justify Bento’s unrelenting revenge, whose ultimate and intentional effect destroys what he had spent all his years constructing.
Would Capitu’s possible infidelity have constituted an acceptable moral justification for Bento’s abandoning her to die in Europe, for pretending to visit her on two voyages, for trying to poison his innocent son, for wishing that he would contract leprosy, or for having a feeling of satisfaction on receiving the news of his son’s death at a young age? His resolve to exile Capitu in Europe is yet another illustration of the reciprocity and tenacity of his revenge, as it is the inverse of Capitu’s childish wish to send him to Europe on a steamship as a means of avoiding the seminary, and the adverse of the European voyage planned by Escobar for the two couples. Furthermore, Bento himself is aware that the resemblance between Ezequiel and Escobar is hallucinatory. When Ezequiel returns from Europe a young man, Bento admits that the deceased José Dias “would have found him the spit and image of me.” Cousin Justina asks to see him, but Bento intercepts the threat to his illusion and delays the visit until she dies a few days later: “I believe her desire to see Ezekiel was with a view to verifying in the young man the sketch she had found, perhaps, in the child” (145).
Bento’s emotional accusation of Capitu covers and is preceded by the major trauma he suffers after the drowning of Escobar, the friend who “inhabited his soul.” The great issue at hand has everything to do with the story of Escobar’s death. The reader has ample evidence of Bento’s hallucinations and his fantasies of victimization and revenge; it is this accumulated evidence that Bento is able to disguise through his denunciation, even though it is tinged with the usual victimization and self-pity, although now reinforced by a declaration of manliness. When Escobar drowns in the sea tide, in spite of his perfect physical condition, a dramatic fatal substitution takes place in Bento’s mind: he hallucinates that the child Ezequiel takes the place of the dead Escobar, whom the child, as noted, had the habit of imitating playfully and may resemble. Escobar thus returns from the grave in Bento’s eyes; however, it is a painful, false, and incomplete return, an impossible substitution that embitters Bento to the point of no return. At Escobar’s wake, when he observes Capitu glancing down at the dead man fixedly, he takes her composure and caresses in support of the widow to be signs of a furtive passion. Her eyes are the final proof of his condemnation. From this point on, no redemption is possible for Capitu.
On the day of the drowning Bento is admiring Escobar’s photograph in his law office, while feeling the guilt of his “caprice” with Sancha the previous day and “wandering without reason.” That night he had hallucinations, and he imagined that the photograph spoke to him: “Only once did I glance at the picture of Escobar. It was a handsome photograph, taken the previous year. He was standing frock coat buttoned, left hand on the back of a chair, right hand on his chest, gaze far away to the left of the spectator. It had elegance and naturalness. The frame I had had made to order did not cover the inscription that was written below, not on the back: ‘To my dear Bentinho his devoted Escobar. 20–4-70’” (120). Bento decided to hold a pompous funeral yet describes his speech as being only a couple of words long, written out because he could not admit his emotion. His driver is worried about his spiritual state. At the funeral, when he closes the casket with José Dias, Bento is overcome with revulsion: “I had one of these impulses of mine . . . to throw the box, corpse and all, into the street” (124). He decides to throw his life instead, through a tempestuous and irrevocable act of rage and revenge. He read his speech in a trance, he called it a mad outpouring, and in leaving he tore it up and threw the pieces out the carriage window, damning it as worthless.
The following day he bitterly regretted destroying the speech yet could not reconstruct it. Bento as narrator then writes an apocalyptic note addressed to Sancha, who has left for good to live in Paraná; he promises her his love and suggests that they will meet again at the gates of Heaven transformed into green plants in spring. He warns her not to read any further in his memoirs, since he is about to inflict pain for which he will not be responsible, and “what is to come now cannot be erased” (129). It is a note of desperation and warning by someone about to commit a violent act. Bento quotes a verse from Dante’s Purgatorio, “Come piante novella, Rinovellate de novella fronde” (New trees renewed with a new foliage) (33), as a symbol of the rebirth of the deceased husband. Bento’s intention had been to replace Escobar by courting Sancha; he is at this moment completely unprepared to find the rebirth in his son, since he has implicitly already rejected his wife, Capitu. At home Bento determinedly ignores Capitu’s cheerful consolation; when she suggests that they live quietly until they forget and rise to the surface again, he is unresponsive: “The tenderness with which she said this would have moved a stone. But I was not moved” (130).
Bento’s hallucinations return with a vengeance. After Capitu comments on the similarity between Ezequiel’s eyes and those of her father and of Escobar, Bento begins to draw a sketch that comes to life: little Ezequiel becomes the “picture on the wall in memory of what was and can no longer be” (132), like the portraits in his childhood home. Bento invents a theatrical “letter” whose message is one of resurrection, as his quote from Dante had been: “Escobar emerged from the grave, from the seminary and from Flamengo to sit at table with me, welcome me on the stairs, kiss me each morning in my study or ask for the customary blessing at night. All this repelled me; I endured it so as not to be revealed to myself and to the world. But what I could conceal from the world I could not conceal from myself” (32). Bento has been to the theater to attend Othello—he says for the first time—which seals his resolve to murder both mother and child. Bento envisions their deaths as substitutions for “all the moments of my dulled, agonized life.” He is aware of his deteriorating mental condition: “I grew steadily worse” (132), and he tries to shake the fixed idea from his brain, yet he finds himself “with death in my pocket” and feels happy (134). He leaves a suicide note for Capitu and plans to poison himself with the morning coffee. He grandly envisions himself imitating Cato and stretches out with a volume of Plutarch but replaces it in the bookshelf so his intention would not be discovered. This second theatrical pose confirms the confusion in Bento’s suicidal and murderous mind: when Ezequiel enters the breakfast room, Bento offers him the poisoned coffee, recoils, then verbally denies his fatherhood to a child too young to understand him. The following chapter, “Enter Capitu,” captures his sense of staging and theatrics: her indignant, analytical response to his statement and accusation unmasks his theatrics for a moment. Bento is on the point of confessing his “grand illusion, a madman’s phantasmagoria,” when the stage entrance of Ezequiel alongside a photograph of Escobar restores the hallucination, which Bento confuses with reality. He oscillates between reason and fantasy, just as Rubião had when overcome by his passion for Sofia in Quincas Borba; Rubião’s fantasy was an extension of Napoleon, however, whereas Bento’s was taken naïvely and impressionably from Othello. From here to the end, Bento substitutes his suicidal solution with the theatrical revenge he has learned from Othello, and he asks himself, “And why did I not strangle them that day?” (140).
In his final statements in the novel, which are meant to absolve his guilt for ruining his life in his rage over the death of Escobar, throwing the corpse onto the street, Bento repeats the pattern of Félix in Resurrection, who has been duped to believe that Lívia was unfaithful or would be unfaithful at some future time. Although Félix at first recognizes that the note to that effect was a ruse by his rival and enemy, with time and the solitary life he leads, heading into infinity, he returns to the doubting that was his nature and once again affirms the validity of the false note. In Bento’s case, he feigns forgiveness, “May the earth be light on them” (A terra lhes seja leve!) in the style of the priest he never became, a self-serving comment to the point of being malicious and perverse, as it hides his posthumous jealousy of Escobar, on the one hand, and his criminal invention of Ezequiel’s illegitimacy and exile of Capitu, on the other.
When Capitu shows her emotion while looking at Escobar’s body, one may imagine that Bento was jealous of her grief: if Sancha was the widow, he in a way was the widower. When he felt Escobar’s strong arms the day before the drowning, they were the synecdoche for his own transformation into husband and suitor in substitution. Escobar had entered into his soul previously, and Bento tried to take on his identity when he attempted to seduce Sancha. After Escobar’s death by drowning, Bento witnessed Capitu’s tears when she peered into the casket, and he was jealous not so much of Capitu but that Escobar might have betrayed their brotherhood. The jealousy intensifies through the connection already well established in the narrative between the sea and Capitu’s eyes: eyes like the tide, untrustworthy gypsy eyes. Her guilt is affirmed because she is identified with the sea and the tide that carried Escobar away. That in itself might not be sufficient to provoke Bento’s intractable reaction were it not for the funeral speech he wrote and delivered half-unconsciously in the cemetery. His rage against his loss led him, as noted, to rip the speech into pieces and toss it out the window of his carriage, even as others asked to publish it. When he was unable to reconstruct the speech and realized a double loss, the loss of his personal grief in words, he flew into a rage against the world and obstinately resolved never to relent. He likewise tore up and threw into the wind his marriage and his son.
Capitu perceived two principal flaws in Bento’s character of which he was unaware. The first is his almost existential fear: “[She] fixed me with her eyes that were like the tide, and asked me if I was afraid.” Bentinho does not understand her intention; he can only see her eyes grow larger and larger. When Capitu sees the impasse, she lets it go as a joke or her “craziness”; the old narrator, who is now aware of her deep insight, corrects her leniency: “It was Capitu’s mistake not to let them go on growing infinitely instead of diminishing them to their normal dimensions” (43). She asks him openly about his fear of the conflict between her and his mother or that between his own fate and the promise. Bento has relied on fantasy in projections of his conversation with his mother in the chapter “The Private Audience.” He is filled with terror at a possible confession: “I will tell Mamma that I do not feel the call. I will confess our love-making.” After their inconclusive conversation he again fantasizes that “I almost saw her throw her arms around my neck and tell me that I did not have to become a padre,” although he has already betrayed his inner intentions with the phrase, “I love only you, Mamma” (41). The conflict between the two women, when exposed, leads to revenge motifs. When interrogated by Capitu whether, if she were about to kill herself for love if he didn’t return right away, he would leave the seminary against his mother’s order, Bento answers, “Yes,” leading the incredulous Capitu to repeat the question. In response to his answer, she writes one word on the ground: “liar” (mentiroso). The confrontation elicits a hallucination of revenge: “The name written by Capitu not only leered up at me from the ground but even seemed to tremble in the air. Then I had an abominable idea: I told her that, after all, the life of a padre was not so bad, and that I could accept it without great sorrow. It was a childish way of lashing back at her; but I nursed a secret hope that she would fling herself into my arms, bathed in tears” (44). Her response, however, started a verbal duel and drawing room theater: Bento, imagining himself to be a priest, asks Capitu for two promises: that she confess only to him and that she allow him to be the priest who marries her. Not to be outdone, Capitu rejects the second request and alters it to allowing him to baptize her first child. While shocking Bento with her clever retort, Capitu also injects into the narrative, and leaves planted in Bento’s memory, a foreshadowing of his doubt on the question of the paternity of her son.
Capitu’s second perception is Bento’s lack of faith, an inability to believe in the religious principles that would normally be part of his upbringing and seminary experience. When Bento declines to recant his accusation of infidelity, Capitu reacts analytically, although she is livid and denies Bento’s accusation with outrage. She asks what could have given him such a conviction, since he had never showed even a shadow of distrust before, and she understands that the cause is the chance resemblance. It is a case, for her, of God’s will versus natural yet unexplainable events; she accepts chance in the scheme of things on faith and wonders how Bento can act with such certainty: “In spite of the seminary, you do not believe in God” (138). Bento is determined to throw everything over, as he had after Escobar’s funeral and as he had already confessed to the reader; he is about to admit his “madman’s phantasmagoria” when he is again disturbed by another juxtaposition of Ezequiel and a portrait of Escobar. At this point, however, Bento is approaching madness, seeing the return of Escobar in multiple hallucinations in the person of Ezequiel. The fresh expectation of a romance with Sancha, a symbolic identity with Escobar, has gone far beyond any form of rational discussion or conclusion. Bento lashes out for revenge in his usual manner, under the legal term of reparation (“reparação”), which he claims to be justice, whereas his actions in exiling his wife and son repeat syndromes of the past, inverting even the phantom voyages to Europe that he plotted with José Dias to save him from the seminary.
Machado constructs a consciously open work in which the reader is obliged to participate, one full of omissions, as he both states and illustrates in the text: “I will not tell everything, for it would be too much” (94). He includes truncated and obsolete texts as lost or unfinished possible works that affect the reading of what he describes as a “book with omissions,” composed by a sly narrator. The reader must fill in lacunae and can draw on all the possibilities that can be imagined outside the book: “What I do, on arriving at the end, is to shut my eyes and evoke all the things which I did not find in it. How many fine ideas come to me then! What profound reflections! The rivers, mountains, churches, which I did not find on the written page, all now appear to me with their waters, their trees, their altars, and the generals draw swords that never left their scabbards, and the clarion releases notes that slept in the metal, and everything marches with sudden soul” (59).
Via the story of the Panegyric of Saint Monica, Bento creates a narrative parallel to the memoir even as he ridicules both its author and text; the Panegyric has been written to serve a purpose identical to that of Bento’s memoir, in the words of its nameless, proud author: “How it takes me back over the years to my youth! I have never forgotten the seminary, believe me. The years pass, events come crowding one upon the other, new sensations, and there come new friendships, which disappear in their turn: such is the law of life.” Bento’s similarity to the author who had forgotten everything except a twenty-nine-page pamphlet that was his only claim to an accomplishment in life is disguised and distanced by satire: “People have liked it, this Panegyric of mine!” (54). On a symbolic level the topic of Saint Monica speaks directly to issues faced by Bento, including infidelity, heresy and disbelief, and a mother’s vigilance and prayer for her son, Saint Augustine of Hippo, who will become a noted author of confessions.
Bento calls further attention to missing or truncated texts with the story of the sonnet he never wrote. The first line occurs to him spontaneously in the seminar: “O flower of heaven! O flower bright and pure!” (155). His pondering of the metaphorical meaning of the phrase parodies the form and its effect: would the flower be Capitu, justice, or liberty? He finds triumph of both thought and form in the perfection of his verse. After enormous effort, Bento comes up with a final line, “Life is lost, the battle still is won,” which he again ponders and finds to be sublime, although he is not sure of its actual meaning. He notes that celebrated sonnets flow so easily that one cannot tell whether the idea had fashioned the verses or the verses had called up the idea: does the author write the work or the work write the author? Bento shows even more vanity and obscurity than the author of the Panegyric, as he comes to praise the unfinished sonnet he never wrote as if it were a celebrated work. He contemplates reversing the last line, “Life is won, the battle still is lost!” in another unwitting satire of changing meanings in the reciprocity of events, just as he expresses the belief that an author has only to set the atmosphere and a sonnet will emerge. Authorship is reduced to filling in the missing middle, which in Machado’s shorthand becomes a clue for reading his oblique book. For the second time he satirizes the author who claims possession of a work, rather than the open form the reader helps to complete.
The degree of rhetorical understatement can be seen in Bento’s casual comment about the death of Capitu, which the reader learns through a simple addendum to Ezequiel’s return visit: “His mother—I believe I have not yet mentioned she was dead and buried. She was: she reposes there, in the old country, in Switzerland” (145). Note that Bento does not mention her name, the woman who was his great love and purpose in life. His contrasting reaction to the return of Ezequiel shows the degree of his hyperbole: “I’d rather have given him leprosy” and “I would have paid triple never to have seen him again” (146). At Ezequiel’s birth, Bento expressed quite different sentiments: “As for my joy when he was born . . . I do not know how to tell it. I have never felt its equal, nor do I believe there can be any joy comparable to it, nor one that distantly or closely resembles it. It was a dizziness and a madness” (108). Bento, the inauthentic first son, transfers a similar status to Ezequiel and exaggerates his sacrifice of the son, perhaps a reflex of his own sacrifice as a Carioca Isaac, with a deliberateness he himself describes as cruel and perverse. When Ezequiel returns for his last visit, Bento can hardly look at him because he sees only Escobar; thus when Ezequiel speaks enthusiastically about his plans to conduct archaeological research with friends, Bento makes a very telling spontaneous comment: “‘Of what sex,’ I asked laughing?” (145). Bento’s offhand remark to the very image of Escobar all but confesses the strong subconscious forces and desire that led him to substitute Escobar, whose photo sat alongside that of his mother, for Capitu.
From the perspective of old age, Bento tells his story within the parameters of allegory, even if the ancient dreams no longer endure. He asks Night why dreams break and shred, and he invokes two Utopian islands, Lucian’s Isle of the Blest, where a group of philosophers unite, and Camões’s Isle of Love, where Vasco da Gama and Venus celebrate his voyage to India with erotic encounters. Modern dreams, he writes, try to imitate the classical models but are unable to equal them. Throughout his memoir, references to such lost classical antecedents create a parallel, displaced narrative that both explains and provides an alternative outcome for his banal, empty, modern account.