A Escrava Isaura 10.51 · 10.51

Geraldo's slur reaches for the era's ready scapegoat: 'algum cigano', some gypsy — the Roma being, in nineteenth-century European and Brazilian imagination, the stock figure of the wandering swindler and trafficker, invoked here as shorthand for a rootless man who might sell his own daughter's beauty. The prejudice is the speaker's, not the narrator's, and Guimarães lets it expose the comfortable classes' habit of pinning imagined vice on outsiders and the poor. The bitter irony cuts deep: Miguel is precisely the opposite of a father who 'especula com a formosura de sua filha' — his whole action has been to save his daughter from exactly such trafficking, from Leôncio, who did mean to trade on her body. The doctor accuses the rescuer of the persecutor's crime, and in doing so shows how the same ugly suspicion that hunts Isaura also slanders the man who loves her most. The historical prejudice against 'ciganos' is preserved here as the period's own voice, and it condemns the speaker.

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