Not a jealous lover
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pois sou o contrario desses amantes ciumentos e atrabiliarios, que desejarião ter suas amadas escondidas no amago da terra.
for I am the opposite of those jealous and splenetic lovers who would want their beloveds hidden in the bowels of the earth.
Álvaro defines himself against a type — the jealous, 'atrabiliario' (black-biled, splenetic) lover who would keep his beloved buried away from all eyes. It is, unmistakably, a portrait of Leôncio, though Álvaro has never heard of him: the possessive man who wanted Isaura shut up in his house, a goddess in a temple no one else might enter. Álvaro proclaims the opposite creed, that love should display and share its object's beauty. The irony is exquisite and doubled. Álvaro is morally right about love and yet practically wrong for Isaura, whose safety depends on the very hiddenness he scorns; and his contrast unknowingly sketches the villain the whole plot turns on. Between the jealous man who would bury her and the generous man who would show her off, Isaura needs a third thing neither offers: simply to be left unseen.
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