What follows are some of the most pitiless pages in world literature: bam, bam, bam. Even though you know exactly where this is going — and for more than 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 blush, “Dom Casmurro” seems like a conventional romance. Boy meets girl. Obstacles ensue and are overcome. Machado takes his time unrolling his scenes. The first section, the November afternoon when Bentinho realizes he is about to be sent to the seminary and understands that he loves Capitu, takes up nearly half the book. Everything is explained. Every character is introduced in microscopic detail. Everything seems bright and sharp, and we have all the time in the world — until, right at the end, the author muddies everything. We realize that there were clues scattered everywhere. But what do they mean? We have to comb those pages, and, when we do, we see why such an apparently simple question — Did she? Didn’t she? — becomes such a rich one.
This is one reason that, even if the translation I originally read had been better, I might not have understood this book. More than perhaps any book I know, “Dom Casmurro” has to 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 is standing at the window, talking to a servant or gazing at a letter: a theme for both Vermeer and Machado. Nothing is happening, but the longer we look, the more we grow aware of everything that we’re seeing, and everything we’re not. We look again. Everything is there. Nothing is there. Like Vermeer, Machado withholds an answer. Or does he?
“You cannot easily correct a confusing book, but you can add almost anything to a book full of omissions,” Machado writes, giving us his notorious side-eye. “Whenever I read one of the latter sort, I don’t mind in the least. 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 host of fine ideas come to me then! What profound thoughts! The rivers, mountains, churches I did not find in its pages all appear to me with their flowing waters, their trees, their altars.”
