A lovely fazenda
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No fertil e opulento municipio de Campos de Goitacases, á margem do Parahyba, a pouca distancia da villa de Campos, havia uma linda e magnifica fazenda.
In the fertile and opulent district of Campos dos Goytacazes, on the bank of the Paraíba, a little way from the town of Campos, there was a lovely and magnificent plantation.
The place: the rich sugar county of Campos, on the Paraíba, where a beautiful plantation stands. Guimarães paints an earthly paradise — the more beautiful, the sharper the cruelty it houses will cut.
Every adjective here is doing double duty. 'Fertile', 'opulent', 'lovely', 'magnificent' — Guimarães lays on the beauty of the fazenda without a shadow, and that is the trap. In 1875 his readers knew that this fertility and opulence had a source: the enslaved men and women whose labour made the sugar and built the mansion. The word <em>fazenda</em> itself carries it. By making the estate a paradise, the novelist sets the ground for the shock to come — that the loveliest place in the county is also a prison. Isaura, the slave the title names, lives here.
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