Capitu

Who She Is

Capitu, Capitolina Pádua, is the neighbor and childhood love of Bentinho, the daughter of a civil servant nicknamed Tartaruga and of Dona Fortunata (chapter XV, chapter XVI), dark-skinned and curious about everything (chapter XXXI), and the woman whom Bentinho, decades later, accuses in writing of having betrayed him with Escobar (chapter CXLVIII). No one in this novel describes Capitu without an interest in the description: what matters here is what the text shows her doing and saying, separated from what the narrator, a man who has already decided she deceived him, chooses to read into those gestures.

Trajectory

At fourteen she is presented through gesture and physical portrait: she scratches the inscription BENTOCAPITOLINA into the backyard wall with a nail, tries to hide it from Bentinho, and is defeated by his curiosity (chapter XIII, chapter XIV).

It is Bentinho who names her eyes "undertow" in chapter XXXII, after José Dias had already called them "of an oblique and dissimulating gypsy" (chapter XXV) days after he himself had denounced her courtship with Bentinho; the text shows Capitu only letting herself be looked at. Aware of the seminary plan, she is the one who plans for Bentinho to ask José Dias to intercede (chapter XVIII), who writes mentiroso (liar) on the ground when Bentinho answers that he would go against his mother's order (chapter XLIV), and who corrects the oath formula at the edge of the well, trading his vague promise for one that leaves no way out (chapter XLVIII).

At the seminary, when Bentinho questions her cheerfulness, Capitu explains that she shows herself cheerful before Dona Glória and Dona Justina so as not to confirm José Dias's denunciation, and that the oath at the well is enough for her (chapter LXV). At the same time she is winning over her future mother-in-law, sewing and visiting the house (chapter L, chapter LXVI).

Married, she keeps money in secret with Escobar's help as broker (chapter CVI), which earns Bentinho his jealousy of the sea (chapter CVII); she has Ezequiel (chapter CVIII), and it is she who calls her son's gaze strange and compares it, at the table, to Escobar's (chapter CXXXI).

At Escobar's wake, the text shows Capitu weeping little, hiding her tears, comforting the widow, and staring fixedly at the body (chapter CXXIII); what the narrator writes over this, that those eyes seemed like the wave wanting to swallow the swimmer too, is his figure of speech, not a fact reported by anyone but him. Accused months later (chapter CXXXVIII), she asks Bentinho several times to say everything so she can defend herself; he refuses to tell the rest, and she answers with the only explanation the book records from her own mouth: Sei a razão disto; é a casualidade da semelhança... A vontade de Deus explicará tudo..., I know the reason for this; it is the chance of a resemblance... God's will will explain everything...

She accepts the separation (chapter CXL), goes to Europe with her son, writes longing letters that Bentinho answers coldly (chapter CXLI), and dies in Switzerland without him seeking her out on the trips he takes afterward; the only description of her death comes from her son, secondhand (chapter CXLV): Morreu bonita, She died beautiful

Themes Embodied

The themes that pass through her are Appearance and Reality, Loyalty and Betrayal, and Language and Narration.

Capitu is the only main character of the book who lacks access to her own voice in the form in which the reader receives the text: everything known about her comes filtered through a narrator who writes after having already reached his verdict, and yet she is not mute within the scene, she refuses, corrects, writes on the ground, and asks several times to defend herself. The character's tension lies not between innocence and guilt, but between what she does on stage and the vocabulary with which Bentinho, decades later, reports what she did.

It is remarkable that Capitu herself is the one who points out aloud the resemblance of Ezequiel's eyes to Escobar's, without any embarrassment, at the dinner table (chapter CXXXI), in a remark that sounds like a mother's ordinary observation. If she were as dissimulating as Bentinho's text accuses her of being, this would be the worst possible moment to raise the subject on her own; the book does not resolve this contradiction, it only leaves it on record.

The point at which she ends the conversation during the accusation scene, saying that it does not befit them to say anything more (chapter CXXXVIII), also admits two opposite readings: it may be the silence of someone with no defense, or the silence of someone who understood, before Bentinho, that no word of hers would convince a man who had written the sentence before asking the question.

Divergent Readings

Criticism of Machado has long divided between reading Capitu as guilty, a dissimulating adulteress from childhood, whose strategic lucidity at the well (chapter XLVIII) and in the dissimulation she taught Bentinho would be proof of character, and reading the whole novel as the fabrication of a jealous man without proof, a reading that gained weight from studies noting that not one scene of the book shows Capitu and Escobar alone, exchanging a word or gesture that does not pass through the suspicion of others. The first reading takes Capitu's competent conduct as a girl (the plan of "small means" in chapter XVIII, the instruction to dissimulate in chapter LXV) as a foreshadowing of character; the second takes the same conduct as the survival skill of a poor adolescent secretly in love, with no necessary connection to what would happen some fifteen years later.

The two readings agree entirely on the facts narrated (the gaze at the wake, chapter CXXIII; the refusal to explain further, chapter CXXXVIII; the son's resemblance, chapter CXXXI) and differ only on the weight of each, which confirms that the dispute is not about what Capitu did, but about how much one trusts the man who is telling the story.

Relationships

• Bentinho: husband and narrator, the one who accuses her, who never lets her tell the rest of her own defense, and to whom she asks several times, without success, to say everything before judging her (chapter CXXXVIII).
• Escobar: the husband's friend, the informal broker of her secret savings (chapter CVI), and the man whose death sets off the suspicion that separates her from her husband (chapter CXXIII).
• Ezequiel: the son whose resemblance to Escobar she herself points out at the table (chapter CXXXI), without its being known whether from innocence or dissimulation, which the text does not resolve.
• Dona Glória: the mother-in-law to whom she grows close while still a teenager, sewing and visiting the house, before her illness brings Bentinho back from the seminary (chapter LXVI, chapter LXVII).
• José Dias: the first to describe her eyes as dissimulating, as a girl, at a time when he was criticizing Pádua (chapter XXV).