Escobar

Who He Is

Ezequiel de Sousa Escobar enters the seminary of S. José as a classmate of Bentinho (chapter LVI), becomes his best friend (chapter LXV, chapter LXXVIII), marries Sancha, Capitu's school friend (chapter XCVIII), prospers in trade (chapter CXVII), and drowns while swimming in a rough sea, farther out than usual (chapter CXXI). He is the second pillar of the novel: the friend whose death shifts the axis of the book, and whose name Bentinho's son receives (chapter CVIII). Like Capitu, he exists in the text only through the account of a narrator who, decades later, already suspects him; unlike her, Escobar never hears the accusation.

Trajectory

His introduction at the seminary already marks the character by movement, not by firmness (chapter LVI): Era um rapaz esbelto, olhos claros, um pouco fugitivos, como as mãos, como os pés, como a fala, como tudo., He was a slender young man, with light eyes, a little evasive, like his hands, like his feet, like his speech, like everything.

He visits Bentinho's home during Dona Glória's illness and is approved by the whole family (chapter LXXI); the narrator reaffirms a praise from youth, keeping his word despite the forty years that the praise "carries on itself": Os olhos de Escobar, claros como já disse, eram dulcíssimos [...] e mantenho esta palavra, apesar dos quarenta anos que traz em cima de si., Escobar's eyes, light as I have said, were most sweet [...] and I maintain this word, despite the forty years it carries on its back.

At the seminary, when Bentinho tells him about the courtship, he answers with a secret of his own, that he does not want to finish his studies and prefers business (chapter LXXVIII).

Cousin Justina makes one of the few unfavorable judgments of him before the final suspicion, calling him "meddlesome" with "police eyes that let nothing escape" (chapter XCIII), a remark the narrator records and passes over without weight, the same treatment he denies to equivalent suspicions about Capitu when they come from third parties.

In the seminary courtyard, he shows his arithmetic talent, calculating from memory the exact sum of the rents of nine houses belonging to Dona Glória (chapter XCIV).

It is Escobar who proposes the solution to Dona Glória's vow, not José Dias, not Bentinho (chapter XCVI).

He becomes the informal letter carrier between Bentinho and Capitu, before and after marrying Sancha (chapter XCVIII), and later the trusted neighbor of the married couple (chapter CIV, chapter CXVII); he helps Capitu keep money in secret, without Bentinho, at the time, seeing any problem in this (chapter CVI).

On the night before his own death, Sancha presses Bentinho's hand, and he cannot explain what he feels (chapter CXVIII); the next day he drowns (chapter CXXI); at the wake, it is Capitu's gaze on the body, not any gesture of Escobar's own, that plants the retroactive suspicion (chapter CXXIII). Dead, he grows again in the narrative (chapter CXXXII): Escobar vinha assim surgindo da sepultura, do seminário e do Flamengo para se sentar comigo à mesa, receber-me na escada, beijar-me no gabinete de manhã [...], Escobar came rising in this way from the grave, from the seminary and from Flamengo to sit with me at table, to receive me on the stairs, to kiss me in the study in the morning [...]

This happens as Bentinho and Capitu's son begins to repeat his gestures (chapter CXVI, chapter CXXXII).

Themes Embodied

The themes that pass through him are Loyalty and Betrayal, Appearance and Reality, and Jealousy.

Escobar is the only one of the three vertices of the suspected triangle who never speaks for himself in the accusation scene, because he is already dead when it happens (chapter CXXXVIII); all the guilt that falls on him is fabricated entirely behind his back, and the book holds not one scene in which he and Capitu exchange a word alone. The proof against Escobar, as much as the proof against Capitu, is made of coincidence read after the fact: the clear eyes of the son (chapter CIX), the mental calculation Bentinho recalls (chapter XCIV); none of these facts requires the reading Bentinho gives them, and none excludes it.

It is Escobar, and not José Dias or Bentinho, who resolves in one sentence the impasse of the vow that occupied entire chapters of anguish (chapter XCVI); the text does not mark this moment as a turning point, it passes in two lines of dialogue, which reveals how much the architecture of the novel depends on outside men resolving, through acts rather than declared feeling, what Bentinho's family never resolves on its own.

Divergent Readings

The reading that condemns Capitu tends to condemn Escobar in the same stroke: the closeness of the two houses (chapter CXVII), his skill with numbers (chapter XCIV) and with Sancha, the name given to the son (chapter CVIII), all become cohesive evidence of an affair. The reading that absolves Capitu tends to note that no gesture of Escobar's own, on stage, is ambiguous: he is described almost always as generous, practical and loyal, with the reservations of his restless eyes, of the meddling noted by Cousin Justina, and of a rumor about an actress or dancer, including naming his own secret (not wanting to be a priest) to Bentinho in exchange for trust (chapter LXXVIII).

It is worth noting an asymmetry that criticism tends to treat in passing: the narrator applies to Capitu a skeptical scrutiny that he never applies to Escobar's face and conduct, whose physical and moral praise runs through the book with few reservations, until the moment when the same beauty that had been praise turns, with no new fact, into a reason for retroactive distrust.

Relationships

• Bentinho: seminary classmate (chapter LVI) and best friend as an adult, who receives his confidence and, dead, is credited with the paternity of Ezequiel without any proof beyond resemblance.
• Capitu: with his help she keeps the secret savings of the marriage (chapter CVI), and it is her gaze on his body, at the wake (chapter CXXIII), that sets off the posthumous suspicion against the two of them.
• Ezequiel: receives his first name (chapter CVIII) and, growing up, begins to repeat his gestures (chapter CXVI) and later his physical traits (chapter CXLV), without anyone in the scene treating this, at first, as more than ordinary resemblance.
• Sancha, his wife, whose handshake with Bentinho on the eve of his death (chapter CXVIII) is the episode in which the narrator confesses desire and guilt before the wife of his best friend.