What It Is
Two houses that the book treats as one. The first is the house in Matacavalos, where Bentinho grew up with Dona Glória, Uncle Cosme, and Cousin Justina, with an orchard that bordered the Pádua backyard. The second is the one the elderly Bento Santiago had built in Engenho Novo as a copy of the first, with the same room of medallions of Caesar, Augustus, Nero, and Masinissa and the same little orchard, in order to tie the two ends of life together. The book is born from the failure of this copy.
Where It Appears
In Chapter II, the old narrator says he lives alone, with a servant, in the house at Engenho Novo, and that the painted busts in the parlor gave him the idea of telling the past. He wanted to tie the two ends of life together and cannot, because he himself is missing.
O meu fim evidente era atar as duas pontas da vida, e restaurar na velhice a adolescência., My evident purpose was to tie the two ends of life together, and to restore adolescence in old age.
The image of the forged document serves the house too: the appearance of equality fools strangers, not the one who built it.
Uma certidão que me desse vinte anos de idade poderia enganar os estranhos, como todos os documentos falsos, mas não a mim., A certificate that gave me twenty years of age could fool strangers, like any forged document, but not me.
In Chapter III, the original house is also the place of the book's first scene. In November 1857, Bentinho hides behind the door of the parlor at Matacavalos and hears José Dias denounce his courtship with Capitu. The house he tries to recover holds the afternoon when he learned what others thought of him.
In Chapter XIII, his legs carry Bentinho from the orchard to the neighboring yard through the connecting door that Dona Glória had opened when the children were small. The Matacavalos house is never only a house: it is a pair of houses with a door and a wall between them.
In Chapter LXIV, Bento rereads his account of the dream he tried to continue in the seminary and admits that the house at Engenho Novo did not tie the two ends of life together, and that the same holds for the dream.
ligar as duas pontas da vida, o que aliás não alcancei, to tie the two ends of life together, which, as it happens, I did not achieve
In Chapter CXVII, while telling how he and Escobar shared a single house, Bentinho says this made him think of the two houses at Matacavalos, with their wall between them.
In Chapter CXLIV, he explains late why he let the old house be demolished. After his mother's death, he made an inspection visit, and the yard, with its aroeira tree, the pitanga tree, the well, and the crooked-trunked casuarina, did not know him.
toda a casa me desconheceu, the whole house did not recognize me
In Chapter CXLVIII, the book ends by sending itself to the History of the Suburbs, one of the subjects that Chapter II had set aside when it chose to tell the past.
Vamos à História dos Subúrbios., Let Us Turn to the History of the Suburbs.
What It Means
The house is the book's design in the form of a building. Bentinho copies the plan, the painting of the busts, and the layout of the yard, and the flaw lies in the occupant, which he himself declares in the paragraph where he announces the project. The copy deceives strangers as the forged certificate does, and does not deceive the one who built it. The written text is therefore a second attempt, after the house, the one left over when the house does not give back what was expected of it.
Chapter CXLIV settles the accounts. The new house recalls the old only by comparison and reflection, not by feeling, and the old house, visited after his mother's death, did not know its visitor. The original disappears and the copy remains, so that the only house left is the one he built to pretend to be the other.
The symbol shows the limit of memory as restoration. The text supports two readings: the confession of limits by a man who knows that memory does not give back the boy, or a preliminary caveat from a narrator who wants to be read with indulgence. In the end, the book returns to the subject it set aside in Chapter II, the History of the Suburbs. It can be read as the weariness of someone who gives up tying the ends together, or as the close of someone who, after telling the story, returns to the starting point without having closed the circle.
Relationships
- Work: Dom Casmurro.
- Default themes: Memory and the Past.
- Characters: Bentinho, who copies it, Dona Glória, who has the door to the neighboring yard opened, and Capitu, whose yard lies on the other side of the wall.
- See also: the inscription on the wall and Memory and the Past.