A magnetic force
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O certo é que custei a arrancar meos pés daquelle lugar, onde uma força magnetica me retinha, e que parecia rescender um mysterioso effluvio de amor, de pureza e de ventura...
The truth is that I could hardly tear my feet from that place, where a magnetic force held me, and which seemed to give off a mysterious effluvium of love, of purity, and of bliss...
Álvaro's rapture takes the fashionable scientific-mystical vocabulary of the age — 'força magnetica', magnetic force, 'effluvio', effluvium — the pseudo-science of mesmerism and animal magnetism then in vogue, used here for the pull of love. But the three nouns he ends on are the true ones: 'amor, pureza, ventura', love, purity, bliss. He senses, without any facts, exactly what Isaura is: pure. The comedy is that he dresses a real perception in borrowed occult jargon; the poignancy is that the 'purity' he feels radiating from her is precisely the quality her persecutor tried to destroy and she nearly died to keep. Álvaro's instinct reads her soul correctly through all the fog of his romantic idiom.
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