![]() ![]() Both break free, and Bentinho and Capitu marry. Bentinho enters the seminary all the same and befriends Escobar, a young man who wants to be a merchant, not a priest. Tensions face him as his now-widowed mother wheedles him to honor a pledge she’s made to God that her firstborn son will become a priest, while Capitu tries to dissuade him. ![]() There, at 15, he falls in love with 14-year-old neighbor Capitu. Bentinho, whom we meet as an aging, moderately prosperous attorney, is part of a minor noble rural family that moved to Rio de Janeiro and settled in a well-to-do neighborhood (Machado makes much, subtly, of Rio’s rich-and-poor geography). But, at the beginning of Machado de Assis’ 1899 novel, he has earned the sobriquet Dom Casmurro, meaning something like “Sir Stubbornly Self-Absorbed,” for falling asleep when a budding poet assailed him with verse on a train ride. A beguilingly slippery tale by Brazil’s greatest proto-modernist writer.īento Santiago is known to his friends as Bentinho. ![]()
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