Bentinho

Who He Is

Bento Santiago, Bentinho, is at once the one who tells the book and the one the book judges: the only son of Pedro de Albuquerque Santiago and of Dona Glória, raised under the promise that he would become a priest (chapter XI), in love since the age of fifteen with his neighbor Capitu (chapter XII), a seminarian (chapter L), later a bachelor of law (chapter XCVIII), a husband (chapter CI), the father of Ezequiel (chapter CVIII) and, decades later, a lonely old man in Engenho Novo writing, alone with a servant, the book the reader holds in his hands (chapter II). He is not the observer of the story of Capitu and Escobar, he is its interested party, and the text itself warns of this before any suspicion is born.

In chapter II he declares the purpose of the house he had built, and undoes his own project two sentences later, confessing that he himself is missing from the reconstruction.

Trajectory

José Dias's denunciation, overheard behind a door (chapter III), and the love discovered on the veranda (chapter XII) open the book with a narrator who already presents himself as editing what he tells. In chapter X, before any love scene has even happened, he names his own method: he accepts the old tenor Marcolini's theory that life is opera (chapter IX), and writes Cantei um duo terníssimo, depois um trio, depois um quatuor..., I sang a most tender duet, then a trio, then a quartet...

The kiss of chapter XXXIII makes him run to his room repeating (chapter XXXIV): Sou homem!, I am a man!

This is the choice that he himself reads, decades later, as the moment when the category of man defeated the category of priest. At the seminary, on hearing from José Dias that Capitu is going about cheerful and that all that is missing is some rascal from the neighborhood to win her (chapter LXII), he gives the chapter the title "A Touch of Iago" and writes: um sentimento cruel e desconhecido, o puro ciúme, leitor das minhas entranhas., a cruel and unknown feeling, pure jealousy, reader of my entrails.

It is not the adolescent at the seminary who chooses this title, it is Bento Santiago writing in old age, and it is the first time he suggests, through the title, the play he has in mind. After the marriage (chapter CI), the ever closer friendship with the couple Escobar and Sancha (chapter CXVII) and Escobar's drowning (chapter CXXI), Bentinho reads at the wake, in his own wife's eyes, fixed on the dead man, an image he had used before, between fascination and threat (chapter XXXII), now applied to her gaze upon the dead man (chapter CXXIII). The doubt grows over months, with Ezequiel's resemblance (chapter CXXXI, chapter CXXXII), until the night he sees Othello at the theater for the first time (chapter CXXXV), and leaves the theater with the sentence already formed.

He goes home with poison bought (chapter CXXXIV), writes a farewell letter to Capitu (chapter CXXXV) and, on the verge of drinking it, offers the cup to his own son in an impulse that he himself calls criminal (chapter CXXXVI, chapter CXXXVII). He draws back, and instead of killing himself, turns to the boy and says: Não, não, eu não sou teu pai!, No, no, I am not your father!

Facing Capitu, he accuses, she asks him to say everything so that she can defend herself, and he refuses to tell the rest, accepting the separation that she herself proposes (chapter CXXXVIII, chapter CXL). He takes wife and son to Europe and leaves them there, does not look for Capitu on the next two trips (chapter CXLI), and she dies in Switzerland; he receives Ezequiel as an adult, with Escobar's very face, according to him, except for the coloring, a little shorter and less full-bodied, hosts him for six months (chapter CXLV) and pays for the trip on which he dies of typhoid fever, near Jerusalem (chapter CXLVI). The book closes with Bentinho old, having tied nothing together (chapter CXLVIII): quis o destino que acabassem juntando-se e enganando-me..., destiny willed that they end up joining together and deceiving me...

Themes Embodied

The themes that run through him are Memory and the Past, Jealousy and Language and Narration.

The question this novel asks is not "did Capitu cheat," it is "what does a man who believes himself betrayed do with his own memory when he is the one writing the story." Bentinho is not the transparent narrator who watches another person's drama, he is the only character with access to the pen, and the book builds this condition on purpose: every suspicion about Capitu, every praise of Escobar, every reading of someone else's gesture passes through a man who has already decided, in writing, which play he is telling. The two allusions to Shakespeare that order the story, the Iago who plants the suspicion in chapter LXII and the Othello who carries it out in chapter CXXXV, are not learned ornaments: they are the narrator confessing to the reader, in public, the mold he is applying to his own life before having any proof.

The scene of the coffee cup (chapter CXXXVI, chapter CXXXVII) is the point at which the structure of the book shows itself in full: Bentinho goes so far as to offer his son the poisoned coffee, draws back, and resolves his own impasse not with an investigation, but with a sentence of rejection that proves nothing about Ezequiel, it only decides what Bentinho will do with him. The same logic governs the rest of the book: he never produces a proof, he produces a decision, and he writes the whole book so that the reader will accept it as if it were the same thing.

It is worth comparing him with Simão Bacamarte: both are men of method who never doubt their own instrument, only the object it examines. The difference is that Bacamarte applies the doctrine to others in broad daylight and ends up committing himself out of consistency; Bentinho applies the doctrine to Capitu in secret, decides alone, and never submits to his own criterion.

Divergent Readings

Criticism of Dom Casmurro has been divided, for more than a century, between reading the book as an indirect confession of a real adultery and reading Bentinho as a narrator who fabricates a crime without proof to justify his own jealousy, a reading that gained strength above all from the second half of the twentieth century, when it began to be noticed that the entire case against Capitu is built by adjective and comparison, never by a fact observed by another witness. The two readings agree on what the text shows (the gaze at the wake, chapter CXXIII; the son's resemblance, chapter CXXXI; the end Capitu puts to the conversation after asking him to say everything, chapter CXXXVIII) and diverge entirely in the weight they give to each gesture, which is, precisely, the mechanism the book itself describes in itself. Neither reading settles the question, because the book does not settle it.

Relationships

• Capitu: the woman he accuses and never lets defend herself fully, although she asks for it several times after the scene of the cup (chapter CXXXVIII).
• Escobar: the friend whose death shifts the axis of the book (chapter CXXI), and whose memory Bentinho pursues in the face of his own son (chapter CXXXII).
• José Dias: plants the first suspicion about Capitu while she is still a child, out of self-interest, more than ten years before there is any reason (chapter XXV).
• Ezequiel: the son to whom he almost gives the poisoned coffee and then rejects with a sentence (chapter CXXXVII), without ever producing proof of the paternity he denies.
• Dona Glória: the mother whose promise defines him before he is born (chapter XI), and who, in Bentinho's view, grows colder toward Capitu and toward Ezequiel (chapter CXV).