Dom Casmurro

The embittered old Bento Santiago, nicknamed Dom Casmurro, looks back on his boyhood love and marriage to the enigmatic Capitu, and on the jealousy, perhaps groundless, that convinced him she betrayed him with his best friend. Machado sets it in the real Rio of the Second Empire: the childhood house on Matacavalos and the wall between it and Capitu's, the seminary he is promised to, the church at Glória where his life turns, and the Flamengo shore where the sea takes his friend Escobar.

Bento (Dom Casmurro)

The Matacavalos house

The boyhood

In the comfortable, pious house on Matacavalos, the boy Bentinho is destined by his widowed mother's vow for the priesthood, a fate he dreads because he is already in love next door. The house, with its dependents and devotions, is the world the older, jealous Dom Casmurro tries to rebuild and re-read for signs of the betrayal he believes in.

The boyhood chapters

inferred Bento grows up in a house on the Rua de Matacavalos, a real street of imperial Rio de Janeiro (now the Rua do Riachuelo); the specific house is invented and sited on that street.

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