'Hurry to the climax'
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E ficaste nisso, Alvaro! perguntava outro cavalheiro; o teo romance está-nos interessando; vamos por diante, que estou afflicto por ver a peripecia...
And you left it at that, Álvaro! asked another gentleman; your romance is fascinating us; go on, for I am anxious to see the climax...
The friends treat Álvaro's love story as entertainment — 'o teo romance está-nos interessando', your romance is fascinating us — and clamour for the 'peripecia', the turning-point or climax, in the technical vocabulary of drama. It is a knowing wink from Guimarães: the listeners crave a plot twist exactly as the novel's own readers do, and the word 'romance' hovers between 'love affair' and 'novel', the story Álvaro is living and the book we are reading folding into one. The men want a peripeteia for their amusement; the reader knows a real and terrible one is coming, not for Álvaro's diversion but for Isaura's survival. Their appetite for drama is the light shadow of the reader's dread.
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