José Dias

Who He Is

José Dias has been the hanger-on of Bentinho's household since the boy was just born: he arrived in Itaguaí passing himself off as a homeopathic doctor, later confessed to being a charlatan (chapter V), and stayed with the family through a calculated mixture of affection and convenience that the narrator himself never fails to point out. He is the one who opens the book by denouncing Bentinho's courtship of Capitu (chapter III), the one who first describes her eyes as suspect (chapter XXV), and one of the characters whose self-interest the text exposes repeatedly before giving weight to anything he says.

Trajectory

The denunciation that opens the novel is his: in chapter III, hidden from the two, Bentinho hears José Dias warn Dona Glória that the courtship with "Pádua's people" may become too late to break up. Soon after, the narrator describes the hanger-on's very gait as rhetoric (chapter IV): um vagar calculado e deduzido, um silogismo completo, a premissa antes da consequência, a consequência antes da conclusão., a calculated and deduced slowness, a complete syllogism, the premise before the consequence, the consequence before the conclusion.

A former charlatan who confessed the sham and refused to go on practicing, José Dias has lived in the house for decades without any other fixed stipend, and the narrator notes that his courtesies came "from calculation rather than from nature" (chapter V). At the Passeio Público, Bentinho asks him for help to escape the seminary (chapter XXV); José Dias hesitates until he hears the proposal to study law in São Paulo, which he himself extends to a university abroad and which rekindles his old dream of returning to Europe (chapter XXVI), but the description of Capitu had already come earlier, at the beginning of the conversation (chapter XXV).

It is the same mouth that, shortly before, had opened the book by denouncing her courtship with Bentinho (chapter III), and the speech changes position the instant a self-interest, the trip, comes into play (chapter XXVI). At the seminary, he visits Bentinho and promises Europe again (chapter LXI); provoked, he remarks that Capitu is going about cheerful and all that is lacking is a suitor in the neighborhood, a remark that plants in Bentinho the first pure jealousy of the book (chapter LXII). Months later, he proposes the costliest and showiest way out for his mother's promise, a trip to Rome to ask the pope for a dispensation (chapter XCV), an idea that loses out to Escobar's, cheaper and more practical (chapter XCVI). He confirms, without anyone asking, that Dona Glória already approves the marriage to Capitu (chapter C), and accompanies the family into old age: he stays with Uncle Cosme and with Bentinho's mother when Bentinho travels (chapter CXLII), goes to live with him after Dona Glória's death and asks Capitu by letter, already in Europe, for a portrait of Ezequiel, he who called himself "destined by heaven to love the same blood" (chapter CXLIII). He dies at home, before Ezequiel's return, asking them to open the window so he could see the sky, and the last word he utters in the book is: Lindíssimo!, Beautiful!

Themes Embodied

The themes that run through him are Language and Narration, Loyalty and Betrayal and Appearance and Reality.

José Dias is the engine of the whole intrigue without ever being its protagonist: he is the one who separates Bentinho from Capitu with the initial denunciation (chapter III), the one who first reads her eyes as dissembling (chapter XXV), the one who plants the jealousy of chapter LXII, and each of these moves coincides with an interest of his own, the calculated loyalty to the family that supports him, the promise of a trip to Europe (chapter XXVI, chapter LXI). The text rarely accuses José Dias of lying; it shows only that he speaks when speaking suits him, and that his sentences, uttered in passing, become the foundations on which Bentinho, decades later, builds his own accusation against Capitu.

The phrase "eyes of an oblique and dissembling gypsy" is the most quoted fact in the book about Capitu (chapter XXV), and it is important always to remember whose it is: not the narrator's, and not a disinterested observation, but that of a hanger-on who, in the same breath, changes position on the seminary because of a promise of a trip. Bentinho does not contest it at the moment he hears it, he puts it to the test days later (chapter XXXII), denies it in chapter L and, even so, takes it up again on the last page (chapter CXLVIII); it is the narrator himself, who tested it and denied it but returns it at the end without recalling the interested source, who makes the phrase weigh as much as it does in the rest of the book.

Divergent Readings

Some readers treat José Dias as comic relief, the fawning hanger-on of easy superlatives, whose initial denunciation is the vanity of someone who likes to intrigue, without greater moral weight. Others read him as the true operator of the tragedy, the Iago of the first half of the book (chapter LXII), whose phrase about Capitu's eyes is the trigger that, replicated decades later by Bentinho's memory, decides her fate.

The two readings are not mutually exclusive: it is precisely because he is comic, humble, dependent and never threatening that José Dias manages to plant suspicions almost without being questioned, and it is this mixture of apparent harmlessness and real interest that makes him, in the end, more dangerous than a declared villain would be.

Relationships

• Bentinho: raises and serves him since he was just born, denounces the courtship with Capitu while he is still a boy, and plants the adolescent's first pure jealousy at the seminary (chapter III, chapter LXII).
• Dona Glória: receives from him the denunciation that opens the book and the insistence, over years, on the promise and the seminary (chapter III, chapter XXI).
• Capitu: he is the first to call her eyes dissembling, at a moment when he was criticizing Pádua, shortly before Europe enters the conversation (chapter XXV, chapter XXVI).
• Ezequiel: he asks for his portrait when already old (chapter CXLIII), and projects onto him the continuity of his own tie to the family, without living to see the boy grow up.