A Escrava Isaura 10.48 · 10.48

The guess lands terribly close: they are indeed 'procurão subtrahir-se ás pesquizas da policia' — seeking to escape the searches of the police. The gentleman means it as a scandalous hypothesis; it is the literal truth, except for the word 'criminosos'. Isaura and Miguel are hunted by the police, but they are not criminals — the crime, in the novel's moral universe, belongs to the law that hunts them. Guimarães sets the accurate fact and the false label side by side to sharpen his indictment: the machinery of the state is turned against an innocent woman, and to the comfortable men of the ballroom, being pursued by that machinery is itself proof of guilt. The reader alone holds both halves — that they are fugitives, and that they are innocent — and feels the injustice the diners cannot.

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