MACHADO DE ASSIS, Joaquim Maria

Dom Casmurro

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“Lovers' language, give me an exact and poetic comparison to say what those eyes of Capitu were like. No image comes to mind that doesn't offend against the rules of good style, to say what they were and what they did to me. Undertow eyes? Why not? Undertow. That's the notion that the new expression put in my head. They held some kind of mysterious, active fluid, a force that dragged one in, like the undertow of a wave retreating from the shore on stormy days. So as not to be dragged in, I held onto anything around them, her ears, her arms, her hair spread about her shoulders; but as soon as I returned to the pupils of her eyes again, the wave emerging from them grew towards me, deep and dark, threatening to envelop me, draw me in and swallow me up.

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Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas

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“Then I said to myself, "If the centuries are going by, mine will come too, and will pass, and after a time the last century of all will come, and then I shall understand." And I fixed my eyes on the ages that were coming and passing on; now I was calm and resolute, maybe even happy. Each age brought its share of light and shade, of apathy and struggle, of truth and error, and its parade of systems, of new ideas, of new illusions; in each of them the verdure of spring burst forth, grew yellow with age, and then, young once more, burst forth again. While life thus moved with the regularity of a calendar, history and civilization developed; and man, at first naked and unarmed, clothed and armed himself, built hut and palace, villages and hundred-gated Thebes, created science that scrutinizes and art that elevates, made himself an orator, a mechanic, a philosopher, ran all over the face of the globe, went down into the earth and up to the clouds, performing the mysterious work through which he satisfied the necessities of life and tried to forget his loneliness. My tired eyes finally saw the present age go by end, after it, future ages. The present age, as it approached, was agile, skillful, vibrant, proud, a little verbose, audacious, learned, but in the end it was as miserable as the earlier ones. And so it passed, and so passed the others, with the same speed and monotony.

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Guincas Borba

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Rubiao sighed, crossed his legs and tapped the tassels of his robe against his knees. He felt that he wasn't entirely happy, but he also felt that complete happiness wasn't far off. He reconstructed in his head some mannerisms, some looks, some unexplained swaying of the body which had to mean that she loved him and that she loved him a great deal. He wasn't old. He was going on forty-one and, quite frankly, he looked younger. That observation was accompanied by a gesture. He ran his hand over his chin, shaved every day, something he hadn't done before out of frugality and because there was no need. A simple teacher! He wore sideburns (later on he let his full beard grow)--so soft that it was a pleasure to run his fingers through them ... And in that way he was remembering the first meeting, at the Vassouras station, where Sofia and her husband were getting on the train, into the same car on which he was coming from Minas. It was there that he discovered that set of luxuriant eyes that seemed to be repeating the exhortation of the prophet: Come unto the waters all ye who thirst. He didn't have any ideas in response to that invitation, it's true. He had the inheritance on his mind, the will, the inventory, things that must be explained first in order to understand the present and the future. Let's leave Rubiao in his parlor in Botafogo, tapping the tassels of his robe against his knees and thinking about the beautiful Sofia. Come with me, reader. Let's have a look at him months earlier by the bed of Quincas Borba.

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