BOO KS
585
Thinking of his life, his attitude is not: by making the reader laugh,
I will be able to forget how sad it all was. No, he wants to see how
sad it was, to place himself securely within this sadness, to take up
his abode there, and he is enabled to do so by making us watch him–
and enjoy him-as he goes about this. He is quite the opposite of the
barber he describes in
Dom Casmurro
who deserted his customers to
play the fiddle for him, and of whom Machado remarks that if he,
"this passerby, instead of going on, had stayed at the door to hear him
and make love to his wife, then no doubt, all bow, all fiddle, he would
have played desperately. Divine art." Divine or no, it is not the art
of Machado.
Dom Casmurro
recounts the tragedy of the teller of the tale, of his
love for the little Capitu, and of how she, more woman than he was
man, destroyed his life. He was lost from the moment he loved her–
typically, his emotion was revealed to him by the spying of another, who
havin2' watched him with the girl, in informing on him also informed
him of what his real feelings were. Yet the final revelation did not
come until late in life. What is really striking is that the fatality which
Capitu represents for Dom Casmurro is expressed right at the start,
in the form of a pun. Dom Casmurro's mother was set on sending him
to the seminary and making of him a padre, that is to say, not inter–
preting this word too much, a
fath er.
Now Capitu's first act in connec–
tion with Dom Casmurro is to scheme, oh how cleverly, how realistically,
with what an eye to the main chance, with what disdain for ruses likely
not to work, to prevent her young playmate (whom she has gotten to
vow, not as he would have liked, that he would not marry anyone else
but, as she desired, that he would marry her) from being sent to the
seminary, and from becoming a
padre.
Her decisive act toward him
after their marriage is again to prevent him from being a father, this
time in a quite different sense. Capitu betrays Dom Casmurro with his
dearest friend, Escobar, and bears the latter's son. Moreover the boy,
Ezekiel, has so striking a resemblance to Escobar, that it is impossible
for Dom Casmurro to avoid knowledge of the truth. In the world of
the flesh, as in that of the spirit, he is denied the state of fatherhood,
thanks to Capitu.
The tale is told not in a rush, but quietly, bit by bit, in little seg–
ments of time, each carefully separated from the next, finished in itself,
with a value of perception or incident that is all its own, so that the
whole is like a string of beads, each one of which is able in turn to
call attention to itself, and then sends your eyes along to the bead next
it; you see each bead in isolation, and only when you have seen them
