Dom Casmurro

by Machado de Assis

CI - In the Sky

For let us be happy at one time, before the reader is caught up in it, dead of waiting, and go and let the other party go; let us marry. It was in 1865, one afternoon in March, by a rainy signal. When we reached the top of Tijuca, where our bride and groom nestled, the sky collected the rain and added the stars, not only those already known, but still those that will only be discovered in many centuries. It was great finesse and was not unique. St. Peter, who holds the keys of heaven, opened the gates to him, brought us in, and after touching us with the baculo, recited some verses from his first epistle: "Let women be subject to their husbands. ... Let not the adornment of them be the ornament of curly hair or the lace of gold, but the man who is hidden in the heart .... Likewise, ye husbands, cohabit with them, treating them with honor, like heavier vessels, and heirs with you of the grace of life... "Then he made a signal to the angels, and they sang an excerpt from the Canticle, so in concert, that they would deny the hypothese of the Italian tenor, if execution were in the Earth; but it was in the sky. The music went with the text, as if they had been born together, in the manner of a Wagner opera. Then we visited a part of that infinite place. It descends that I will not make any description, nor does the human language have suitable forms for it.

After all, it might have been a dream; nothing more natural to an ex-seminarian than to hear throughout Latin and Escriptura. It is true that Capitú, who did not know Escriptura or Latin, decorated some words, such as these, for example: "I sat in the shadow of the one I had longed for." As for Saint Peter, he told me the next day that he was for all that I was the only income and the only ornament I would ever put into it. To which I replied that my wife would always have the finer incomes of this world.