Dom Casmurro

Bento Santiago, nicknamed Bentinho as a boy, grows up on Matacavalos Street with his widowed mother, Dona Glória, the live-in dependent José Dias, and the neighbor girl Capitolina, known as Capitu. The two families are close, and the two kids grow up together, almost engaged since childhood.

Before Bentinho was born, Dona Glória had promised that if she had a son, he would become a priest. To keep the promise against her own son's will, she sends him to the seminary. Bentinho and Capitu, already in love, hatch a plan to escape that promise, getting José Dias to help Bentinho leave.

The plan works: Bentinho leaves the seminary, studies law, becomes a law graduate, and soon after he and Capitu marry and have a son, Ezequiel. Escobar, Bentinho's friend from the seminary and later his neighbor and business partner, drowns. At the wake, Bentinho notices an exchange of glances between Escobar's widow and Capitu that he reads as proof the two had an affair, and that Ezequiel is Escobar's son, not his.

From then on, Bentinho lives obsessed with the idea of betrayal, pushes away his wife and son, sends them both abroad, and never sees either of them again. Ezequiel dies years later, far from his father. The book ends with Bentinho old and alone, writing these memoirs decades after the events.

Everything you just read came from a single narrator, Bentinho himself, decades later, already old, telling his own life. That detail changes everything: Bento is not a neutral observer reporting what happened, he is the person with the biggest stake in justifying the gravest decision of his life.

A narrator writing about his own life tends, even without realizing it, to arrange memory in a way that spares him from guilt. Bento selects details, dramatizes scenes, insists on small signs that confirm his suspicion, and plays down any detail that would speak in favor of Capitu's innocence.

Calling Bentinho an unreliable narrator does not mean he lies all the time. It means his version carries the bias of someone who needs to convince himself, and the reader, that he was right. Anyone who forgets this detail accepts Bento's accusation as if it were proven fact.

The most repeated question about this book, whether Capitu cheated on Bentinho with Escobar, is also the question the book is built never to answer. Machado does not hide an answer in some secret chapter. He builds the story so that the answer depends entirely on whether you trust the narrator or not.

If you accept Bentinho's reading without questioning it, the book seems to confirm the betrayal. If you read with suspicion of the narrator, the same book becomes the portrait of a man consumed by his own jealousy, who destroys his family based on no proof other than his own insecurity.

Falling into the trap of trying to decide, with evidence from outside the book, whether Capitu cheated or not, means missing the main point. The book is not about what Capitu did. It is about how Bento builds, word by word, an accusation that looks solid and is not.