A Escrava Isaura 10.4 · 10.4

The camera moves in from the city to a single lit house, and the vocabulary tells us at once whose world we have entered: 'as mais distinctas e opulentas classes' — the most distinguished and opulent classes. This is the mirror-world of the senzala: the same society whose wealth rests on the plantations now gathers, perfumed and jewelled, in a glowing ballroom. Guimarães does not moralize the point here — he lets the glitter speak — but the reader carries the plantation into the room. Isaura, who was to be shackled among the spinning-women, will move through these opulent classes as one of them, and the irony of that passage between two worlds, both built on the same slavery, is the quiet engine under the chapter's brightness.

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