José Dias is the dependent of Dona Glória's household, that is, a free and poor man who lives on favor in a family. He appeared at the Itaguaí farm just as Bentinho was being born, presenting himself as a homeopathic doctor. When Bentinho's father asked him, already in Rio, to go see the sick enslaved people of Itaguaí, he confessed that he was not a doctor, and even so he was not dismissed.
The narrator describes him as a man of calculated slowness, who "loved superlatives." It is he who sets the plot in motion: in chapter III, Bentinho hears him tell Dona Glória that the boy is "hanging around in corners" with Capitu, and the denunciation leads to the decision to send him to the seminary. It is also José Dias who first describes Capitu's eyes as "those of an oblique and dissembling gypsy." Later, when Bentinho asks him for help, he changes position and proposes a trip to Europe, which fulfills an old wish of Bentinho's.
He grows old in the house and ends up living with Bentinho. He dies serenely, and the last word he says, looking out the window at the blue sky, is "Most lovely!" Bentinho writes that he does not deny having wept for him.