Quo usque tandem abutere, Capitu, patientia nostra?

Abstract

Although the most regular reading of the novel “Dom Casmurro” is associated with the discussion about Capitu’s possible betrayal, we intend to look at other possible readings, indicated by the plot itself, in which Capitu’s behaviour is of little importance. Starting from the fact that Capitu is dead and Casmurro, who is writing, is a very different person from Bentinho, his real name and the one that appears in the narrative, we propose a rereading of the work lighten up by the Latin texts In Catilinam I, from Cicero, and the poems from Catullus. We seek to understand the work as a judgment of an absent person who goes from being loved to being hated. Capitu is not the novel’s centre, in which she is a unique cause for the narrative’s guiding line: Bentinho’s transformation into Casmurro.