The Frame: an Old Man in Engenho Novo
The narrator is Bento Santiago, who as a young man is called Bentinho. Old and alone, he lives with a servant in a house in Engenho Novo that he had built as a copy of the Matacavalos house where he was raised, with the same medallion parlor and the same little farm yard (chapter II). The neighbors call him Dom Casmurro, a nickname that was born on a train, when a young man recited verses to him and he dozed off (chapter I). The house was meant to "tie the two ends of life" and restore adolescence in old age, and he warns in the next sentence that he failed; the book is born afterward, to break the monotony (chapter II). What moves the book, in the end, is a question the narrator takes as already answered: whether Capitu, the childhood neighbor he married, betrayed him with his best friend, Escobar (chapter CXLVIII). Everything the reader knows comes from this single narrator, who chooses what to tell and cuts what he prefers to spare (chapter XIV).
The Denunciation and the Plan
In November 1857, at the house on Matacavalos Street, Bentinho, fifteen years old, hears from behind the door as the dependent José Dias tells his mother, Dona Glória, that the boy is "hanging around the corners" with Capitu, the fourteen-year-old neighbor, daughter of Pádua (chapter III). Dona Glória reacts by sending him to the seminary, and the reason is an old promise: after the first son was born dead, she vowed to God that the second, if a boy, would be a priest (chapter XI). On the veranda, Bentinho discovers that he loves Capitu (chapter XII); in the backyard, he reads on the wall the two names together, which she had scratched there with a nail, and which she then erases (chapter XIV).
On learning of the seminary, Capitu is angry with Dona Glória, reflects, and devises a plan: to use José Dias, the same man who made the denunciation, because he likes to be praised, and by serving the future master of the house he will speak with more warmth (chapter XVIII). At the Passeio Público, Bentinho asks the dependent to save him, and José Dias, who had just spoken badly of Pádua and of Capitu's eyes, "of an oblique and dissimulating gypsy," changes his position when he sees a way out (chapter XXV): he proposes that the boy study abroad, in Europe, and that they travel together, which fulfills an old ambition of the dependent himself (chapter XXVI). Some days later, when Bentinho sees Capitu combing her hair, he gazes at her for a long time and finds her eyes "of undertow" (chapter XXXII); while braiding her hair, the two kiss for the first time (chapter XXXIII).
The Seminary and the Oath
In a private conversation, Bentinho tries to convince his mother that he has no vocation, but Dona Glória replies that the vocation comes with habit and that she will keep the promise (chapter XLI). At the well in the backyard, he and Capitu swear that they will marry "whatever happens" (chapter XLVIII). Months later he enters the seminary of S. José; Father Cabral, who had been the house's Latin teacher, proposes a middle way: two years to test the vocation and, if it does not come, another career (chapter L). On the eve, the two say goodbye with a kiss (chapter LI).
At the seminary, Bentinho makes friends with Escobar, a classmate three years older, the son of a lawyer from Curitiba (chapter LVI). José Dias visits him and proposes that he feign a cough, so that his mother thinks he needs a change of air (chapter LXI); speaking of Capitu, he says she is cheerful and only lacks some neighborhood dandy, and Bentinho feels his first jealousy (chapter LXII). On Saturdays, at home, Capitu explains that she shows herself cheerful before Dona Glória and Cousin Justina so as not to confirm the denunciation (chapter LXV).
The Exchange of the Promise
Dona Glória falls ill and sends for him from the seminary; on the way, Bentinho has the thought "Mamma dead, the seminary ends," which he later confesses as a sin (chapter LXVII). Shortly afterward he sees a horseman pass under Capitu's window who looks at her, feels his second jealousy (chapter LXXIII), and hears from her that she does not know him and that the young man is going to marry someone else (chapter LXXVI). He confesses to Escobar that he cannot be a priest, and the friend confides that he too does not intend to finish the course; only afterward does Bentinho tell him, in outline, about the courtship (chapter LXXVIII). The mother begins to send him to visit Capitu, and the narrator tells, as something he later came to suspect, that she hoped the courtship would undo the vow without any fault of hers (chapter LXXX); it is his word, with no other proof. On the way back from one of the visits, Bentinho is called to see the body of Manduca, a neighbor sick with leprosy with whom he had exchanged letters about the Crimean War (chapter LXXXIV, chapter XC).
The way out appears from two sides. José Dias proposes taking Bentinho to Rome, so that the pope will release Dona Glória from the vow (chapter XCV). Escobar suggests another: she would fulfill the vow by giving the Church an orphan, ordained at her expense, and the son would be free (chapter XCVI). Dona Glória gives way after Father Cabral, having consulted the bishop, says the exchange is valid, and Bentinho leaves the seminary at seventeen (chapter XCVII). He studies law and graduates as a bachelor at twenty-two; Escobar, who had also left the seminary, becomes a coffee merchant and marries Sancha, Capitu's friend (chapter XCVIII). On his return, Bentinho hears from José Dias that Dona Glória approves of the courtship (chapter C).
The Marriage and Escobar's Death
They marry in March 1865 and spend their honeymoon at the top of Tijuca (chapter CI). After years without children, Ezequiel is born: Bentinho wanted Escobar as godfather, but Uncle Cosme gets there first, and Bentinho, to make up for it to his friend, gives the boy his name (chapter CVIII). The two couples come to live almost as a single household (chapter CXVII), and the boy imitates the gestures of others, among them those of Escobar (chapter CXII, chapter CXVI). Bentinho is jealous of everything, as he had once been of the sea into which Capitu gazed and was lost (chapter CVII).
One night in Flamengo, Sancha presses his hand and lingers, and Bentinho feels "vertigo and sin" (chapter CXVIII). The next morning, Escobar, who had boasted of swimming in rough seas, drowns (chapter CXXI). At the wake, Capitu gazes fixedly at the dead man, weeps little, and wipes her tears while stealthily looking around the room (chapter CXXIII). It is only when writing, years later, that Bentinho compares this look to the wave that wanted to swallow the swimmer, and calls it undertow eyes.
The Accusation and the Last Image
In 1872, Capitu remarks at the table that Ezequiel has an odd expression in his eyes, which she has seen only in a friend of her father's and in the late Escobar (chapter CXXXI). Bentinho begins to see Escobar in the boy, places his son in a boarding school (chapter CXXXII), and, one night when he goes to the theater to see Othello, concludes that it was Capitu who had to die (chapter CXXXV). The next morning, with the poison bought the day before, he prepares his death in the coffee, but Ezequiel comes in, and Bentinho even holds out the cup to him before drawing back (chapter CXXXVI, chapter CXXXVII). Capitu demands an explanation, and he repeats that the boy is not his son and alludes to Escobar's love affairs without saying the name; she answers that not even the dead escape his jealousy, and speaks of the "accident of the resemblance" (chapter CXXXVIII). When the two look at the same moment at Escobar's photograph, Bentinho reads in her confusion a confession, though she confesses nothing (chapter CXXXIX).
The separation comes without scandal. Bentinho takes wife and son to Europe and leaves them in Switzerland; he returns to Brazil and, on the two trips that follow, does not seek her out, only pretends a married life to deceive public opinion (chapter CXLI). Dona Glória and José Dias die in Brazil (chapter CXLII, chapter CXLIII). Capitu dies and is buried in Switzerland; Ezequiel, now grown, appears at Engenho Novo, and Bentinho sees in him "the very, the exact, the true Escobar" (chapter CXLV). Eleven months later the young man dies of typhoid fever, near Jerusalem (chapter CXLVI).
The book shows no scene of betrayal: what it shows is a resemblance, gestures copied by a child, and a confused woman before a photograph. The accusation is Bentinho's reading, made from back to front: after deciding that Capitu betrayed him, he rereads the past and gathers as evidence everything that had once seemed to him nothing (chapter CXL). The book ends with the question he himself formulates, whether the Capitu of the Glória shore was already inside the one of Matacavalos, and with the answer he gives: the girl and the young woman were one, "like the fruit inside the peel." He concludes that the first friend and the greatest friend ended up joining together and deceiving him, wishes that the earth lie lightly on them, and turns to the History of the Suburbs, the project he had set aside at the start (chapter CXLVIII, chapter II).