Dom Casmurro

by Machado de Assis


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XIV - The Inscription


Everything I said at the end of the other chapter was the work of an instant. What followed was even faster. I jumped, and before she scraped the wall, I read these two names, open to the nail, so arranged:

Benedict

CAPITOLINE

I turned to her; Capitú had his eyes on the ground. He lifted them up, slowly, and we looked at one another ... Confession of children, you were well worth two or three pages, but I want to be spared. Verily, we have not spoken; the wall spoke for us. We do not move, the hands are stretched out little by little, all four, catching themselves, squeezing, merging. I did not mark the exact time of that gesture. I should have dialed it; I miss the writing on that night, and I would put it here with the errors of orthography that I brought, but I would not have any, such was the difference between the student and the teenager. He knew the rules of writing without suspecting those of love; she had orgies of Latin and was a virgin of women.

We did not let go of their hands, nor did they let themselves fall from canker or forgotten. The eyes were looking and disemboweled, and after wandering about, they met again for each other ... A future priest, he was like that of an altar, one side of which is Epistola and the other the face. Gospel. The mouth could be the calix, the lips paten. It was not necessary to say the new Mass, for a Latin that no one understands, and it is the Catholic language of men. Do not think me sacrilegious, my devout reader; the cleansing of the intention washes whatever may be less curious in the stalk. We were there with the sky in us. The hands, joining the nerves, made the two creatures one, but one seraphic creature. The eyes continued to say infinite things, the words of bocca was that they did not even try to leave, they made the heart as silent as they came ...

 

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