She slipped away like a butterfly
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Sorprehendeo-me sua maravilhosa belleza. Como vio que eu a contemplava com demasiada curiosidade, esgueirou-se como uma borboleta entre os arbustos floridos e desappareceo.
Her marvellous beauty astonished me. Seeing that I was contemplating her with too much curiosity, she slipped away like a butterfly among the flowering shrubs and vanished.
Isaura's instinct is flight, and Álvaro reads as coyness what is really the reflex of the hunted: the moment a stranger's gaze lingers, 'esgueirou-se... e desappareceo', she slips away and disappears. The verb 'desappareceo' is the same that ended her escape in Cap IX — 'desappareceo' through the garden gate — and here it recurs as her habitual defence, vanishing from any watching eye. Álvaro's butterfly simile makes her elusiveness enchanting; for Isaura it is survival. Every admirer is, potentially, a hunter, and she cannot know which. The beauty that draws the look is exactly what she most needs to hide, and the chapter keeps turning on that cruel bind: to be seen is to be endangered, and she can no more stop being seen than the violet can stop being a flower.
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