Nunca pude entender a conversação que tive com uma senhora, há muitos anos, contava eu dezessete, ela trinta.Machado de Assis, “Missa do Galo”.
The first sentence does not promise to clarify a conversation. It begins with the impossibility of understanding it completely.
The narrator looks back on an old episode knowing more than he knew at seventeen, yet distance does not become certainty. Memory supplies details without automatically resolving their meaning.
The opening is a useful reminder that ambiguity is not the same thing as missing information. A text can offer many elements while preserving more than one possible relationship between them.
Reading the sentence again changes the weight of simple words: “never”, “understand”, “many years ago”. The time of memory enters the story before we even know what was said that night.
This is the kind of return Repertório Fóscolo tries to practise: choose a concrete detail, return to it, contextualise what can be said and keep visible the point at which interpretation remains open.